BLT: a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation

- Racism in Translation

- an announcement of The Jewish Annotated New Testament coming soon from Oxford University Press

That's just a foretaste of what you're to find at BLTnotjustasandwich.com, a new blog on the Bible, Literature, and Translation.

The most informed and informative literary blogger, Theophrastus, is the one starting the blog.  (He's also the best biblioblogger with a pseudonym, although the Biblioblogger Library has yet to include him or his blog.  Likewise, he has more insight on translation theory and translation practice with respect to the Bible and other literature than many of us.)  He announces the formation of the blog, here and also here, where you are welcomed! 

Welcome to the blog named BLT. It is not just a sandwich.  It stands for a set of topics that we hope to discuss:  Bible, Literature, and Translation.  We’ll talk about the Bible as literature and the literature of translation and the translation of Bibles and the translation of literature and literature of translation and Bible as a translation and literary translations of Bibles and so on.  And we are certain to throw in the arts, the sciences, philosophy, mysticism, religion, and pretty much everything else.

The initial crew of bloggers represents a diverse set of viewpoints but one that is unified in our openness to new ideas and a fundamental belief in the dignity of all humans.  This blog is open to all: Jews, Catholics, Mainliners, Evangelicals, Eastern Christians, Atheists, Theists outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, etc.  For me a strong underlying theme of this blog is that  everyone has a voice — especially people that have been traditionally marginalized.

I’ll let my co-bloggers (currently J. K. Gayle, Suzanne McCarthy, and Craig Smith) introduce themselves, but I’ll simply mention that I am a professor at a US university with strong interests in applied issues in linguistics.

There won’t be any bacon or other treif meat in my posts, but there will be lots of substance.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Notice that Suzanne McCarthy, whom Theophrastus mentions, is the most current top and #1 Biblioblogger in the Top 10 Biblioblogs by the most recent vote among all bibliobloggers in the world, the most democratic measure of the Top.  Her blog, Suzanne's Bookshelf, is also #37, in the most current top 40 of the Top 50.

Notice that Craig Smith, whom Theophrastus mentions, blogs at Notes from the Dreamtime and is the only biblioblogger to have produced an entire translation of all the Hebrew and the Greek of the whole Bible, actually The First Egalitarian Translation ever, although he also is yet to be included in the Biblioblogger Library.

And Theophrastus mentions me.  But you already know me.  More importantly, you are invited to BLT!  Feel free to get the word out.

Part 2, Dynamic Unequivalence: Nida v. Seidman and Zogbo

This is part 2 of a series now. Part 1 is here.

This part will be heavier, without photos of people. That's on purpose. The focus this time is neither on the reductive binary by which Eugene Nida constructs his theory of dynamic equivalence nor on Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice that deconstructs his not-“symbols”-but-“communication-code” notion. This part of the series will have no (A) pictures or would-be-male-only-whistle-talk or cloth-put-against-which-is-rubber or signs or fluff or structures or mis-leading formal forms but is rather, in Functional Style, (B) only on meaning behind those dangerous shadows of the wall, on that other-wise rhetorical effect on you now, here and now, in your own language and your own culture and your own history, and principally on the message now uncoded for you and put naturally -- as you might say it were I field tested your sense -- so that you don't have to ask questions or to remember somebody else or even to engage the Other. This message is Eugene Nida's. This is the focus of this part. Please be reassured that you need not be distracted by the actual literal words he said and wrote or even how he wrote it or its original context since this blog post has translated them dynamically functionally for you in your very own heart language. Call this the Good News Blog-post-part in the same tribe and family with the Good News Bible.

This second part steps back from Nida’s essential distinction between forms and communication to find him essentializing, putting the Other in a box, and engaging in Western Christian ethnocentricism.

This second part continues the discussion of Bible translator Eugene Nida as his reductive Bible translation theory opposed others'.

Two others we will discuss are Naomi Seidman and Lynell Marchese Zogbo. I am particularly interested in how Seidman sees that "translation," by Nida's approach, "becomes the very erasure of time and difference from the scene of writing," and by "erasure" Seidman means the elimination of what is Jewish in the writing of the Bible. Likewise, I'm curious about the way Zogbo writes differently about Bible translation than Nida has, she seeming to go out of the way almost not to make his mistake of disregard for the Bible of the Jews. Seidman is Jewish. Zogbo is Christian, like Nida, and she herself even theorizes and practices translation of the Bible by Nida's dynamic equivalence translation theory. In other words, if we look at this discussion from an-other's perspective, then Nida has committed that ethnocentric error of his in the name of his Western science. What’s more, Seidman has been offended by that error, and Zogbo has sought to recover from it.

Naomi Seidman writes the following in her book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Afterlives of the Bible). It should be fairly clear how Nida comes across to her:

In Western translation discourse, narrative -- as history or as literature -- has taken a secondary role to theory. There may be reasons for this that inhere in the conceptualization of translation in Western thought. Because translation is conceived as the production of a linguistic equivalent that will substitute for the "original" text, and because the dominant method for rendering such apparent equivalents has been the production of a text that "reads like the original," the very figure of the translator, as a historical figure exercising creative agency, has been an encumbrance. As Lawrence Venuti argues in The Translator's Invisibility, the figure of the translator has been elided by the normative logic of translation. And it is not only the translator who has been forgotten in Western translation. History, too, as the temporal horizon within which translations emerge and acquire their meaning, is collapsed and neutralized in a discourse that imagines translation as the "recovery" of an original meaning, or, in Eugene Nida's influential approach, as a technique that aims at restaging the effect of the source text on its first readers. Translation, in these discourses, becomes the very erasure of time and difference from the scene of writing. Translation narrative, read not as transparent truth but rather as ideologically marked "emplotment," is the privileged means by which I will attempt to read the movement of history on the stage of Jewish-Christian translation; my father's story is the first of the narratives I will discuss. (pages 2-3)

Hopefully you can see that, although Nida is not the central character in Seidman’s narrative, he is nonetheless at the center of what she posits as forgetful Western translation. And so whom is forgotten? Isn’t it the Jews?

And ironically Nida’s theory, constructed to bring the message of the Bible to all, actually neglects that the Bible is culturally Jewish. The Nida message you should be able to read in your own heart language is this: “[D]ifferences between cultures cause many more severe complications for the [Dynamic Equivalence] translator than do differences in language structure.” So let me translate this for you. Let me tell you what this means without your getting distracted by the direct quotation marks or the original context or the original cultural pattern here. What Nida means is that, by his theory, it’s much easier to dispose of linguistic symbols that get in the way of the communication code than it is to erase dissimilarities between your own culture and that of the Other. If you are Christian, or potentially Christian, the language symbols of Hebrew or Hebraic Hellene or Judaic Aramaic can be more easily discounted than can the Jewish history or the Culture, perhaps, cultures of the Jews be disregarded. But, nonetheless, and however, one must try, for the sake of the message of the Bible, which is Christian, not Jewish.

Seidman notices how Nida wrote the entry called "Bible translation" for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. She notes in particular what he says, in part, and how contrastive it is to the Jewish cultural patterns for the translator, the history, the literature, and the very discourse of the Bible. She pays attention to his message but also to how he encodes his message. His communiqué and also his symbols are important to her. She notes that this way:

... Eugene Nida, the premier linguist and translation consultant of both the American and United Bible Societies, boldly begins his entry with the sentence "The Bible is the holy book of Christianity" and continues by celebrating Bible translating as “arguably the greatest undertaking in interlingual communication in the history of the world.” By contrast, Michael Alpert's entry for Torah translation suggests that translation among Jewish communities historically had a different function than in non-Jewish communities: “Generally speaking, translations of the Torah have traditionally been read not as texts in their own right but rather as aides to comprehension. . . . Jewish scriptural study is informed less by translation than by the running commentaries of the mediaeval scholars.”

Nevertheless, Jews could not and did not avoid translation; nor did they always see it as merely adjunct to the Hebrew text. Alpert himself writes that “the first historical report of translation is in the Bible itself,” in the phrase in Nehemiah 8:8 that says that the Jewish exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth century BCE “read from the book of the law of God clearly, made its sense plain and gave instruction in what was read (NEB); he continues by citing the midrashic reading of this verse, “That is to say, they read the Torah with translation and commentary.” Whether or not we date Jewish translation as early as Alpert and the midrash do, Frederick Greenspahn points out that Jewish biblical translation certainly began even before the Bible had been completed and canonized – the Greek Septuagint, the first extant Bible translation (originally only the Pentateuch), is dated to the third century BCE. (pages 14-15)

Seidman has much more to say about Nida pe se. Let us just notice here, nonetheless, how she’s interested in highlighting the record of the histories of Jewish translation of the Bible as a Jewish canon. In contrast, Nida is not. And she notices.

For the wide, not-just-missionary-Bible-translator audience of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida states that the significance of Bible translation has little to do with the Jews. Just before he writes his short “History of Bible translation” as part of his encyclopedia entry, he says, “The significance of Bible translating can be readily sensed when we consider that at least one book of the Scriptures has been translated and published in 2009 languages and dialects, spoken by a minimum of 97 per cent of the world’s population” (page 23). Then Nida sketches the history:

The history of Bible translation may be divided into three principal periods: the Greco-Roman (200 BC to AD 700), the Reformation (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and the modern period which covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or what are often spoken of as ‘the missionary centuries’.

Nida takes each of his principal periods in turn, and writes a paragraph on each (two paragraphs on the missionary centuries in which he mentions his own organization’s work), but in each, his history elides the Jews and hints that if ever one constructs a history of Bible translation that includes the Jews, then it should progress away from them to everyone else. The closest Nida gets to acknowledging Jewishness in this particularly history he’s written for a wider audience is when he starts his history. “The first translation,” he begins with his paragraph on the Greco-Roman period, “was the Greek Septuagint Version of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, made primarily in the second century BC. This translation had an enormous influence on matters of canon, translation principles, and vocabulary employed in Christian Scriptures” (page 23, my emphasis).

Notice how Nida fails to mention Jews at all, though he does acknowledge that it was “the Hebrew Bible” translation that, as a first translation, became an influence on “Christian Scriptures.” Nida mentions none of the Jewish controversy surrounding the legend of the Septuagint. Nor does he discuss (as Seidman and Alpert do) the story, the Hebrew Bible’s own textual and midrashic histories of “the Jewish exiles who returned from Babylon in the sixth century BCE” and who produced a translation long before “the Greek Septuagint Version of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.”

Now we turn to Lynell Zogbo. When the editors of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies decided it was time for a new edition, they invited Zogbo to write the entry on Bible translation. Zogbo entitles her entry “Bible, Jewish and Christian.” She starts in this way:

“The Bible, from the Greek biblia, meaning ‘books’, is the sacred text of both Jews and Christians.”

Her section on “History of Bible translation” within her entry begins this way:

The beginnings of Bible translation can be traced back to an incident recounted in the book of Nehemiah (8:5-8) many centuries before the birth of Christ. After living for several decades in exile in Babylon, many Jews no longer spoke or even understood Hebrew. Thus, when the exiles returned to Jerusalem, and Ezra called the people together to listen to the reading of the Law of Moses, the Levite priests had to translate the meaning of the sacred texts into Aramaic so that people could understand. Since that time, Jews and Christians have continued to emphasize the importance of the Scriptures being understood by all believers.

The earliest known written translation of the Bible is the Septuagint, a translation from Hebrew into Greek of the Old Testament texts, carried out primarily for Greek-speaking Jews living in the Graeco-Roman diaspora. . . . Although this translation and its interpretations of the Hebrew text have been criticized since its inception, . . . the Septuagint retains considerable influence on questions of interpretation and textual matters, and its study continues to shed light on the principles of translation used in the ancient world. However, in the second century CD, Jewish scholars – Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus – produced new translations and/ or revised versions of the Septuagint, . . . . The Targum, literally ‘translation’, is a kind of running paraphrase of and commentary on the Hebrew text in Aramaic, originating from before the time of Christ but still read publicly in synagogues around the world today.

Notice the Jewish centrality in the Bible and in the translation of the Bible and in its history that Zogbo highlights in her entry for the second edition Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. This in contrast to Nida’s entry. It’s almost as if Zogbo talked with Seidman, and listened.

A Bible Translator Uses Bad Words ("Ass, Fart, Whore, Piss, Shit")

Well, you're going to protest again maybe.  Here I go quoting a Bible translator's translation that makes you read bad words.  To be exact, ass, fart, whore, piss, and shit.

So would it make any difference to you if I told you that the published translation helped win this particular translator the "PEN American Center / Book of the Month Club Translation Award"?  Would you give the translator a break if one notable critic said that this is the translator's "most remarkable translation thus far" and that "it is, in fact, more an act of wizardry than of translation"?  What if you knew that the translator was also a poet, who was "[t]wice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry"?

What else might matter to you?  That the translator is not a woman, but a man?  Does he need to be a theologian?  A linguist?  If he's translated the New Testament, does he need to be a Greek scholar?  A Christian?  Part of a team of men scholars of theology and of Greek language and of translation science?  Would those things then make it okay for him to use ass, fart, whore, piss, and shit in his translation?

What I'm trying to get at is what counts for you.

Yesterday, I started in on a post by quoting a feminist, a woman feminist saying "pissed off."  But I said that this was Jesus speaking.  Immediately, you began to protest.  "Gloria Steinem is no Jesus."  And some of you were thinking, "Cuss words are not the Word of God."

What I'm trying to get at is how the Bible can immediately make seemingly unequal things equal.

What I'm trying to get at is how translation, likewise, makes things that don't at first seem to count as the same really, nonetheless, the same.

What I'm trying to get at is how literature, even a poem, a sonnet for instance, makes seemingly unequal things equal. 

"Now, just wait a minute," some of you are saying.  "The Bible in the original language(s) is not translation.  And a translation is not the original by any stretch.  Don't you know much gets lost in translation?  And, since you're bringing up literature, and poetry, don't you even remember how Poet Robert Frost wisely noted that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'?"

What I'm trying to get at is how you can make things you think are unequal equal.  Men and women?  Yes, equal.  Jesus and a feminist?  Yes, equal again.  The original spoken word of Jesus and it's written translation by someone claiming to be his student named John?  Right, equal.  A bit of history and a possibly fictional, late-added episode of narrative complexity?  Of course.  Equals.

What I'm trying to get at is how the Western mode of thinking that is binary really is what scholars Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede rightly refer to as the "logic-chopping automaton."


But none of us has to be that much of a scholar to see this.  Let me just turn things around and come at it from another direction.  What if you yourself are not really making unequal things -- say, males and females -- equal?  What if they really are equal but it's just your use of Western, Aristotelian logic that makes them un-equal?  What if the Bible, translation, and literature in general really free you to reconsider difference?


Okay.  I suppose you're dying to know.  Who is this Bible translator mentioned at the beginning of the post?  It's Willis Barnstone.  "What?!" some of you are exclaiming.  "He's not a real translator of the Bible.  He's only translated the New Testament and not anything else.  Well, okay.  He's translated the New Testament, but not the one I grew up with.  He's not gotten to any of the Hebrew books, or any of what may be called the Old Testament.  And he's thrown in a whole bunch of Greek books that are not canonical.  The best and top-most-ranked Bible bloggers didn't know much about him until you started mentioning him here.  Yes, we know you mentioned him yesterday in a post.  Yes, we saw how you quoted from his translation.  But where did he use the bad words, the unbiblical English, that you quote in this post today?"


Please let me answer.  What I'm trying to get at is that Barnstone is the equal of any other Bible translator, dead or alive.  He's a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation.  Here's his complete, to date, bibliography.  If that's not impressive enough, then do know that he does have his critics.  Even literary types are good critics, somewhat severely critical critics, of his New Testament translation.  And those who know some of the original languages better than Barnstone does perhaps, even though these might still be students, can be good critics, somewhat severely critical critics.  


Now if you've stayed with me this far, anticipating Willis Barnstone's translation that uses those words I mentioned earlier, then do know you're going to get to read it (and them).  I'm not going to say a thing really about the passage that Barnstone has translated other than this:  it really is an award winning translation, but it really isn't from the Bible.  It really is a sonnet, perhaps equal to the Spanish sonnet Barnstone is rendering.  Thus, if you believe me that Barnstone is equal to a translator of the Bible, then here's a translation of something else by "a Bible translator who uses these "bad words":

from Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet

The Canon as You Read It

Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not.
   -  Dallas Willard

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library. 
   -  bell hooks

And he said to him,
   What is written in the law of the Torah?
   How do you read it?
   -  Jesus (as translated by Luke, as translated by Willis Barnstone)

Lynn Z. Bloom is pretty smart.  And so are bloggers Henry Neufeld and Brian LePort.  They are particularly intelligent when it comes to what makes a real canon.  They understand the goodness of subjectivity.  And therefore, they resist the sort of teachers who - and that type of teaching that - would force on you the following: "What you must read" and "Which works you should read."  It's all very aptly personal.  Lynn is interested in the essay canon; Henry in the best Bible version; and Brian in the canon of the Bible.

I first met Bloom by email after reading something she'd written that I decided to read while doing early research in my Ph.D. program.  She was kind to me, enthusiastic about her own research, and excited at the prospect of the possibility of my expanding some on what she'd started.  Bloom had noticed "how the essay, a belletristic genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, became critically undermined in the 20th century as a consequence of pedagogy that emphasized its utilitarian rather than aesthetic and intellectual functions."  She noted:  

"Canon-makers make pronouncements and lists.  Although I am not now and never have been related to any other Bloom of canonical persuasion, neither Harold ('Read my list!') nor Allan ('Read Great books!'), I make the following claims.  This article [of mine] is the first to define this -- or any -- contemporary essay canon, the first to define that canon empirically rather than critically, and the first to discuss its formation, significance, status, and implications.  Whether or not critics pay attention to essays, teachers [like me] do, and consequently so do their students.  Thus this contemporary essay canon has profound implications -- intellectual, aesthetic, pedagogical, and political -- not only for what but also for how our [American] nation's 2.2 first-year college students read, and think, and write -- and for how they'll think about reading and writing for the rest of their lives.  The teaching essay canon may, indeed, constitute the core of a liberal arts education for many of these students."

I've just now quoted her own essays, or articles, entitled respectively, "Once More to the Essay: The Essay Canon and Textbook Anthologies" and "The Essay Canon."  In her anthology co-edited with Louise Z. Smith, Bloom builds her own essay canon for her own students.  As The Arlington Reader: Canons and Contexts, their publisher Bedford/ St. Martin's makes this available to any of us and all of us teaching.  In the Introduction, they write:  "A canon is a list or other compilation of the most important members of a particular group or category, developed through agreement -- either implied or explicit -- by people who know the subject."  And they go on to give examples:  "the biblical canon," and "the canon of rock musicians" and other "canons that reflect taste, influence, and popularity -- those applying to music, books, art, or cars...."

Neufeld is interested in the canon of Bible versions.  And personally he notes:

"[S]omething is always present in translation as well. The question is just what you’re looking for. For example, I prefer the more formal style of the Revised English Bible. I even like its Anglicisms. I spent much of my teens in a former British colony (Guyana), and I was born in Canada. Those things are comfortable for me and they give me a familiar feel.

Should I therefore recommend that everyone read the REB? Hardly! For others, features that make it work for me may be a hindrance to understanding. Then there’s the question of just what it is that I want to understand, or more importantly that you want to understand.

What seems to escape so many people who prescribe what a translation must and must not do is that it matters not what is there if the reader doesn’t understand. Admonitions to 'get a dictionary' are both pointless, and in my opinion, arrogant. This kind of talk suggests to people that if they would just put in enough work, they’d be able to understand–well–what the talker believes they should want to understand."

Do you see what he's done?  Neufeld has let you decide just has he has decided, rather subjectively and individually, what is best in a version, an English translation, of the Bible.

LePort acknowledges canons of the Bible of all sorts of people of all sorts of faiths.  Then he does something starting.  He suggests that it's okay to fess up to the fact that, even in your own community, you have a different canon, or, as he puts it, a canon-within-the-canon.  He recalls and advises, practicing what he preaches:

"A couple of years ago I shared a chart that compares the biblical canon according to the following forms: Samaritan, Hebrew/Jewish, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Protestant (see here). If you are part of one of these groups you likely adhere to the canon as understood in that tradition. Yet practice is often a more trustworthy sign of what you believe than mere confession, so even though I am an evangelical it would be a bit disingenuous for me to act as if the canon influences me equally."

He then goes on to say what he reads and what he does not read so much of in his evangelical [Christian] Bible.  What about you, he asks.  

If I had more time, maybe when I do have a little time to spare, I might share my canons, my essay canon, my Bible version canon, and my canon within the biblical canon.  I might share in comments below.  If you have the time and inclination to share, then I think that'd be just fine.  It would certainly be as smart and as encouraging as Lynn Z. Bloom and bloggers Henry Neufeld and Brian LePort.

easy question?

Should I start this blogpost with a question?  Ha.  What's blogging for?

Recently, I read a 547-page dissertation that is a commentary on Aristotle's Book III of his Rhetoric.  The author of the thesis asked me to be the main Greek reader of his dissertation committee, which I was.  So, for that, I also re-read all of Aristotle's Rhetoric (and much of his Poetics) in Greek, and the former in two different English translations.  I also read feminist rhetoric translation stuff, and whether the writer liked it or not, had to pay attention to how much feminists must pay attention to Aristotle and his rhetoric and even Book III of his female-denigrating treatise.  Whew.  We the committee members suggested changes, the doctoral candidate made them, and we read the whopping paper all over again.  Then, I'm happy to say that the dissertation writer not only passed his defense but did so with distinction as determined by the consensus of the committee.  He has a doctor of philosophy in rhetoric and is the world's expert on the Greek in Book III of Aristotle's Bible on Rhetoric.  Whew again.

So now the writer emails me today with an "easy" question:

"BTW, just a question: do you think that πνευματικῇ (as at Colossians 1:9) is formed or functions as a noun in a similar manner as rhêtorikê?"

So what would you say?  How much else would you read to give your answer?

Letting God Out of Hell

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect.

--the publisher's description on the dust jacket

Yesterday, I started a blogpost with a quote from Dr. Elgin, one of the world's pre-eminent philosophers.  Today, I'm doing the same in order to look with you at the problem of pre-dominant and dominating tendencies in male logic. 

The tendencies are to insist on avoiding ambiguities and to demand that what is observed by the observer by boxed up into categories and classifications on the hierarchical map of knowledge.  Many Bible readers get stuck in this mode.  Many bloggers and tweeters have tended to worry with whether Rob Bell's book's hell is a universalist's hell or whether universalist doctrine is heresy.  "It's either a universalist book or it's not."  "It's either heresy or it's not."  "There are either absolute and sensible answers to be insisted on here or all we're left with is random, nonsensical, and arbitrary wishful thinking."

Male logic?, you might ask.  Why qualify it this way?  Why not just "the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic"?  Are you saying Anglo-Americans are male dominant?

Well, you don't even have to know that Aristotle coined the word and formalized the system of logic, by which he, a male, boxed up females as naturally inferior, even as botched males, as NOT males.  If you yourself are not male or if you're abused by another male who uses the binary on you, then you "know" the answer without even having to take a college class in logic.  Maybe for you like for me, it was your father, who gave you the experience of male logic.  Then reading how Nancy Mairs writes of the binary, then you get it:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world.

--Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer (page 41)

Let's come back to Mairs in a moment.  If God is like the patriarchy with this fundamental structuring of his world in splitting binary fashion, then -- follow the logic -- we on the other side may have hell to pay.


Suzanne has been writing a series, Blogging heaven and hell (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – and another I'll link to below).  She invited some of us to join in as she continued; she'd mentioned Sheol, then מְצוּלָה, and so I brought up Gei Hinnom as New Testament translator Willis Barnstone has had to deal with that hell.  The male binary logic, we might have noted right at that point, has a problem.  It has a decision to make.  If heaven is not hell and if not hell is heaven, then is Sheol NOT Gei Hinnom?  Well, it's not much of a problem if you read the reviewers protesting Rob Bell's book, because he does mention (they say) the various words for "hell" in the Bible.  (I've only tried to read one of Rob Bell's books, and didn't like it enough to continue, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this most recent one).  His book's critics are saying it doesn't matter that there are not-the-same words for hell since there's just one absolute hell, which is a place in opposition to the one absolute heaven (and never mind what Jesus said about many rooms or mansions in his father's house, which really must be the one heaven, and NOT the one hell.)  The whole line of argument here is Western logic, inherited from Aristotle. 

I get that because, when I was an undergraduate student, going to the same university where my father had graduated from, I took the same logic course from the exact same logic professor that my dad had had.  Dad was real interested, when he learned, to see whether I could achieve the same grade he'd made.  He made my taking the same course into a competition.  Either I would be as good as he was academically, or I would not.  And I've continued to be quite familiar with Aristotle, and with his logic, even academically, even to the point of defending a dissertation on the subject successfully.  My own point here is that we try to keep things abstract, in the realm of Truth, sort of impersonal, as if being in heaven and out of hell is something that depends on logic.  (If you're still reading but protesting, "Hey, stop rambling; get on with your point."  Then I'll just say, "I'm sorry."  And add this, "What if our ears are so attuned to western logic that we sometimes miss what's in the personal, what's in the narrative, what's in the stories of life, which the binary will lop out as "not much of a point" and, therefore, as "less than important"?)

Suzanne's most recent post (the 8th so far in her series) shows what Robin Parry's book The Evangelical Universalist does.  (This post, it's interesting to note, comes after Peter's dis-agreement "with Suzanne’s tentative universalist position." He nonetheless feels compelled to add:  "But I strongly agree with her that it is wrong to use threats of hell as a way to impose one’s will on others, in the church or in the home.")  Suzanne brings out the fact that Perry shows "that scripture passages disagree - we have scriptures on both sides of this debate."  In other words, even the statements of the Bible, taken as a canonical whole, present the reader with ambiguity.  The Bible teaches exclusivism; the Bible also teaches universalism.  Ambiguities.  (Avoid ambiguities, is what Aristotle taught his male only, elite only, Greek only, students.  Following him and his logic, Aristotle's students would not have liked the Bar-Bar-ous Bible.  And for the historical record, Aristotle said little that would make his students or any of us believe that he believed in hell.  Here, he departs from his teachers.  Maybe he saw the logical difficulties with abolute claims about the afterlife, which he could not box up so easily on his hierachical map of knowledge.)


Suzanne got me looking at and reading other books by Robin Parry.  One is Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge.  At amazon.com, reviewer  makes this astute observation:

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball, said former President of Yale, Kingman Brewster, Jr. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge's book, Universal Salvation? gives us a well matched game of back and forth with the theological hot potato that is at the heart of the book's "debate." While the writers in this volume are articulate and responsible in handling this (again) current hot topic among evangelicals, if there is one null theme the critical reader may pick up is that the debate is fueled, in part, by the inherent ambiguity of the concept in the biblical text that all sides claim for their points of view. Biblical ambiguity is the one reality few seem ready to confess when conceding an opponent's point on the issue.

Well, I'm not so sure "inherent" is a useful modifier of "ambiguity," but we can understand what this reviewer is saying.  We readers of the Bible do well to see the ambiguities in it as the writers of the Bible have written it.  Maybe the writers of the Bible, maybe its translators, intended to avoid ambiguities in their writings.  And yet, stories will often have unintended ambiguities.  It's pretty much Western or male-dominant logic that insists on ridding a text of its writer's ambiguities.  And Nancy Mairs has already suggested why men (and women using male logic) will so insist on the binary. 

So Catherine Elgin says there's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  And Nancy Mairs does too.  Mairs says we can get beyond the either / or fix.  We can do this, she shows, with "woman's language," a delightful alternative to boxed-up male logic, to binary patriarchal structuring of language.  She calls it "women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it."  (And I've blogged elsewhere to call this the ironic but useful "feminist binary.")
In thinking about the Bible, then.  In thinking about God in the Bible. In talking about the hell of the God of the Bible.  There's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  There's more than just a need for logic to really know, to really understand, to get it and then to live my real life.  There's thinking that meets the emotions, the head and the heart connected in such awareness.  And Nancy Mairs, if we'll listen to her and can read some of her writing, is most helpful. 

In her book, A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith, Mairs discusses her own "meta-noia," and for that reason alone the book is worth reading.  (I'd recommend reading it after reading some of her earlier books just to get the direction of some of the changes in her, in her thinking.)  This Lent, then, it may be worth our listening and thinking about giving up some of our binary thinking.  Maybe even some of our binary thinking about Hell.  Maybe we can let go and let God out of an absolute hell concept.

Maybe Nancy Mairs can help.  Here's a page from her book:


     Some people, troubled by ambiguity, collapse the world into just two categories, "good" and "eveil" (which too often means "everybody whose beliefs differ from my own"), and claim to know who or what belongs in each, a certitude that smacks of the sin of pride, of pretending to be "like God."  The trouble with this view of morality lies in its inflexibility.  Every group, defining its own beliefs and behaviors as good, righteous, even stamped with God's personal approval, has only the idea of an opposite with which to identify all who believe and behave differently.  They share the vision fo the Puritan Jonathan Edwards predicting Judgment Day:  "When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it!"  It is a closed system in which everybody, regardless of creed or practice, thinks in the same way.  When Muslim extremists point at America and scream, "You're the Great Satan and we have to blow you up," we shout back, "No, you're the Great Satan and we have to bomb your countries," for all the world like the fractious children who made God wish to have stopped with the elephants, only grown large and deadly.  No one dares step outside the good/evil paradigm and invent some altogether different structure for human interaction.  We could have helped to overturn any number of dictators if, instead of squandering billions of dollars on ordnance, we had bombarded their countries with butter, medications, and wireless devices; a healthy, well-fed, and well-informed populace is much less vulnerable to oppression.  If battles there must be, they can fight their own. 
     To our peril throughout the ages, dualism has been humanity's most prevalent mode of constructing the world, however.  Is it because we have two of everything?  If we grew three hands or three feet, would we think outside the binary box?  Fortunately, it is possible, without drastic evolutionary modification but with vigorous practice in discernment, to conceive the world otherwise:  not in terms of dyads--good opposed to evil, right opposed to wrong, you opposed to me--but more realistically and fluidly.  Those who can do so--and this includes not only Christians but practitioners of all faiths--make no judgments on God's behalf but pray for guidance in their own decisions and actions and then for mercy for all the times these fall short. 
     Any number of times when I've attended an Ash Wednesday service, the priest has observed, looking out across the overflowing chapel, that more people go to church on this day than on any other.  Neither the great festivals, Christmas and Easter, draw as many worshipers.  Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the second great penitential season in the liturgical year, and such high attendance attests to a fundamental human characteristic:  our preoccupation with wrongdoing and atonement.  Knowing ourselves to be sinners, we aren't satisfied simply to acknowledge our transgressions.  We want to do something about them.   People who envision God as a remote and fearsome judge may be motivated by the fear that they will be thrown into hell in punishment for breaking divine decrees too numerous to mention (there are more than six hundred such laws in the first five books of the Bible alone).  Those of us for whom God is a beloved presence manifest in everyone we meet, because we believe that God grieves our faults, seek to make amends to anyone we have injured.  Regardless of impetus, believers wolcome Lent as a period of contrition.

The Gender of the Biblioblogger Count

This quick post is just an update of "The Gender of Blogger Clout."

3 things:

1. A comparison of woman : male ratios in the top OpEd journals with the woman : male ratios in the top Biblioblogs.

theopedproject.org VS, biblioblogtop50.wordpress.com

2.  A couple of related posts and comments.

There's a new comment at the post where, as Rod puts it, "April DeConick was labelled a man-hating angry feminist as some of us just dismissed all too easy her request to even change how the stats take place (another day, another time)."  The commenter self-identifies as a woman by name and says:

I don't know about the Alexa ratings, but for those lists that exist because someone nominates a blog or requests that their own blog be listed-- if this is being perceived as a "boys club" (whether accurately or otherwise), some women may simply not be trying, or may not be interested in trying, to get in. Why try if the deck is already stacked against you? (Even if that's just a perception, it could be affecting the ratings.)

There's a new post at The Biblioblog Top 50 blog.  We can imagine, from the "us"-vs.-"them" and the "we"-vs.-"you" language, that the writer of the post is a man (and not one of those women bloggers of the Bible).  He is ostensibly speaking on behalf of the top men blogging the Bible.  He's taking a stab at humor, is saying "Now accepting women!" and is playing on "April" DeConick's name.  His final sentences are as follows:

We will also oppose those forces of systemic gender inequality that exist to marginalize (but not in a victimy way, ok, April) women in academia and in academic biblical studies. In solidarity with all those who are othered by the hegemonic centre, we call on all bibliobloggers to discontinue blogging about those institutions which defend the status quo, such as the Bible, the political system, the churches, biblical studies, and the Biblical Archaeology Review - until such time as the system crumbles and falls! Ok?

So is the deck stacked against women who are bibliobloggers?  Who is really interested in joining this Top Club now?  Are "we" men now joining "women in academia and in academic biblical studies" in opposing "systemic gender inequality"?  Is our equal strategy really "to discontinue blogging about" any given or particular topic?  Is that what this man thinks women want?  Yes, I know.  Get serious now.  This guy (who doesn't need to identify his sex or even to use his name) is just funny and really only just wants a laugh.  So lighten up.  Ok?


3.  A comment on the title of this post.

The title of my posts can also be humorous.  I'm following Anne Carson's lead here; she writes that insightful and funny essay, "The Gender of Sound."  She has not, it seems, done anything to discontinue writing "about those institutions which defend the status quo."  She does, in fact, write about the bible, the political system, and translator bias, and gender bias, and Aristotle, and so on and so forth.

Reviving Mary Magdalene: Emergency Rescue Work

You may imagine why my life partner, my spouse, has been reading aloud to me pages of Dr. Mary Pipher's wonderfully helpful (anthropology / psychology / sociology / spiritual) book.  She's asked me to read some of the pages for myself too.  As we read together, as I study alone further, we're not doing academic exercises.  We're involved in our own emergency rescue work.  It's work together as parents, equals, a mother and father.  We're raising a son and daughters in a misogynistic culture, much like yours I'm guessing.  But I'm not writing as an alarmist or to alarm you.  You know.  You know where you live, what your own children must negotiate, and how set against women (y)our society can be.  Read the books, the glossy magazines.  Read Dan Brown's view of Mary Magdalene in his pop book that has "only two female characters in his lengthy novel -- the love interest of his alter ego symbologist and an elderly nun who survives for all of two pages" (as David Lose points out; HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry).  Read the traditional Christian view of Mary Magdalene, even as Dan Brown would use fiction to challenge it; Stefan Lovgren, reviewing Brown's novel for National Geographic, says the historical obvious:  "Depicted by the Church as a prostitute, Mary Magdalene was an intimate disciple of Christ."  Why the focus here on Mary Magdalene?  Well, of course why!  Why has she been so mischaracterized?  What's that say about your culture?

So, in this post, I'd love for us to look at how gynophobic and misogynistic views affect us all in profound ways.  Can we think about and make some change?  The subtitle of the post really could have been, "Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," or "Saving Ourselves," or "Saving the Self of Mary Magdalene," or "Saving the Bible from Misogynists." 

But enough of what I have to say.  Below are 5 important statements for us all (all related):

1.

The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about. For the record Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute either.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2.

Mary Magdalene has always been the subject of both popular and scholarly intrigue. Was she the wife of Jesus, his complete initiate, a Goddess or a priestess? Did the Church dramatically alter her image to deny her importance? These questions have inspired representations of her in art, film and literature, from "Caravaggio" to "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "The Da Vinci Code". The "Mary Magdalene Cover-Up" is the first book to bring the original sources that have informed our current day view of Mary to a wider audience. Esther de Boer has brought together an impressive array of texts from the first century, when Mary Magdalene was alive, to the sixth century, when her image as a penitent sinner was invented. Each text is accompanied by an informed and lively commentary by the author placing it in its historical context. This combination of original texts and commentary enables the reader to draw their own conclusions about this most enigmatic of first-century women.

-- from Esther de Boer, HT April DeConick

3.

It is extremely important to note that the Bible NEVER associates Mary Magdalene with prostitution or sexual immorality of any kind. Most people don’t realize this and, in fact, think that that is her primary memorable feature. Why is it so important to get it straight? Here are just a few reasons:

1. It’s wrong; as such, it misrepresents the contents of the biblical texts.
2. It misrepresents our earliest evidence of the nature of Christianity.
3. It perpetuates the notion that many women in the Bible were sexually immoral or suspect.
4. It belittles the bold, central role that women have always played in Christian history, including our own era.
5. It continues the historical and ongoing tendency to reduce the importance of females in general and restrict them to the limited categories of wife, virgin, mother, or whore.

Each of those categories is tied to male control of female sexuality.

--Jaime Clark-Soles, "Introducing the Real Mary Magdalene:" and Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian Believer

4.

It has traditionally been assumed that the Bible promotes a special feminine role for women.  Yet we are immediately faced with the problem:  what model shall women emulate?  Eve?  Mary?  Sarah?  Mary Magdalene?
      In the New Testament, Jesus is held up as the one model for both men and women.  This central biblical teaching can in one stroke expose as a purely human invention the idea of special "feminine" roles for women.  To take Eve as a model of "true feminism," for example, would be like taking Adam as the example of "a real man."  [and who would we take as the masculine, male counterpart of Mary Magdalene?]

--Philip Cary, "One Role Model for All:  The Biblical Meaning of Submission," in Reta Halteman Finger's The Wisdom of Daughters: Two Decades of the Voice of Christian Feminism

5.

     We need to change society if we are to produce healthy young women. But I can't single-handedly change the culture, and neither can the families I see [in counseling].  I try to help families understand some of their daughters' behavior as a reaction to a misogynistic culture and its manifestations at home, with friends, in school and in the larger community. We work together to assess the impact of the culture on the life of each family and to develop plans for damage control. It's emergency rescue work.

--Mary Bray Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

The Actually Good Samaritan, A Woman

Here are 4 related posts on the Good Samaritan as a Woman or the Samaritan Woman as not so bad.  They're also posts on how the human (female) perspective gets lost (or tarnished) in interpretation too often:

1.

For years I’ve been saying that jumping to the conclusion that the Samaritan Woman Jesus meets at the well of Jacob is a prostitute is nothing but male fantasy (which is why it’s been wrong for 2,000 years. The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2. 

He [Jesus] eventually invites her [the Samaritan Woman] to call her husband, and when she replies that she has no husband, he agrees: "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband" (4:18).  And that's it. That's the sentence that has branded her a prostitute. Conservative preacher John Piper's treatment is characteristic. In a sermon on this passage, he describes her as "a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria," and at another point in the sermon calls her a "whore."

--  David Lose, "Misogyny, Moralism and the Woman at the Well" (HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry)

3. 

In her response to Jesus, the Samaritan woman introduces the idea that theirs is both a gender and an ethnic difference. Here, however, she is safe and intimacy with Jesus is based on the sharing of truths.

Our ideas about intimacy often have sexual connotations and it is interesting that in her disclosure about having five husbands, we regard her immoral, aware as we are of her unusual noon-day visit to the well (so she might avoid day-break or evening crowds). Reader-response theories wonder if the text seeks to undo us for the judgements we impose on the text. She might have outlived her husbands in a culture where levirate marriage was the norm, or more convincingly Schneiders (1997, 249) argues that 'the entire dialogue … has nothing to do with the woman's private moral life.' Schneiders (1997, 247) and Moore (2003, 282) believe there is an allegorical significance to the woman's five husbands being representative of Samaria's colonial past, with the present man representing 'the Samaritans' false worship of the true God,' (Barrett, 1965, 225).

--  Rachel, "The Samaritan woman's encouragement to us to engage in theological discourse"

4.

Give it until the very end, until you have nothing left.  And then your reward will come.

     How readily women hear that message!  How easily we believe these words.  Give all.  Don't question.  Don't be angry.  Don't doubt that your reward will be on some distant horizon....

     The parable of the Good Samaritan came to my mind, but with a new lesson, one particularly for women.

     ...a Samaritan, as she journeyed, came to where he was, and when she saw him, she had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring oil and win, then she set him on her own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And the next day she took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, "Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come back." (adapted from Luke 10:33-35 KJV)

      She left.  She left!  The woman tended to his wounds, brought him to a safe place, took care of him, and paid his way.  And then she left.
--  Peggy Weaver,  "The Good Samaritan Woman"

cheering or groaning? laughing or laboring towards liberty?

There are lots of ways to look at the Earth and earthquakes.  In an earlier post today, I looked at how the Bible (at least I Maccabees in Greek and in English translation) shows mother Earth as sympathetic and empathetic.

Then, similarly, there's what Paul writes to Romans (in Greek, for which I'll also supply some great English translations below).  Paul, we all know, was an earthquake survivor, was actually literally liberated by this act of God.  More on that in a moment.

But first, here's what an American radio talk-show host says to his audience.  Notice how he's assuming that "the quake and subsequent tsunami" are to be viewed as a vengeful act.  Notice how he's saying that "Gaia" (i.e., Mother Earth) mocks and "just wipes out" the Japanese, to spite them:

"On his Friday [March 11, 2011] show, Rush Limbaugh wondered if environmentalists will 'cheer' the earthquake in Japan, since the quake and subsequent tsunami hit the region of the country that thrives on car manufacturing."

"Rush Limbaugh laughed about Japanese refugees recycling after the earthquake that struck the country on his Tuesday [March 15] show.... 'They've given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are recycling their garbage.' Here, he began to laugh, continuing, 'and yet, Gaia levels them! Just wipes them out!'"

Now here's the contrast to Rush Limbaugh.  It's Bible, and not just the turn-or-pay preacher's Bible either.

Here's the Bible showing Mother Earth to be our mother, showing her quakes to be labors toward our liberty.

Here's the Jewish Paul writing to men and women living in the capital city of the Jew-mocking Roman empire.  I'm giving you a few English translations because the translators, without some committee weakening the force, were able to render the Greek in some powerful ways, fitting for the noted events:

... ἐφ’ ἑλπίδι ὅτι καὶ αὐτὴ ἡ κτίσις ἐλευθερωθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς εἰς τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τῆς δόξης τῶν τέκνων τοῦ θεοῦ. Οἴδαμεν γὰρ ὅτι πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν. Οὐ μόνον δέ, ἀλλὰ καὶ αὐτοὶ τὴν ἀπαρχὴν τοῦ πνεύματος ἔχοντες, ἡμεῖς καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς στενάζομεν, υἱοθεσίαν ἀπεκδεχόμενοι, τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν τοῦ σώματος ἡμῶν.
....--Paul

We know that all creation groans. Till now
It suffers labor pains, and not only creation
Aches but we too, the first fruits of the spirit,
Groan and in eagerness wait for adoption
And for the redemption of our bodies.
....--Willis Barnstone (translating Paul)

Yet there was the hope that creation itself also would be set free from slavery to decay, and have the glorious freedom of God's children. We know that all creation keeps sighing deeply together and is in birthing pains together up to the present time. Not only that, but also we ourselves who have the Spirit given to us as the first offering, we also keep sighing deeply within ourselves looking forward to our adoption, that is, the setting free of our body.
....--Ann Nyland (translating Paul)

... but there is hope, because this world will be set free from slavery to decay into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole world groans and is in labor together, until now; not only that, but even we who have some foretaste of the Spirit also groan within ourselves as we await adoption and the redemption of the body.
....--Richmond Lattimore (translating Paul)

... in hope, That also the creation itself be freed from servitude of corruption to the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that all creation groans together and travails together until now. And not only, but also they having the first fruits of the Spirit, and we ourselves groan in ourselves, waiting for adoption as a son, the redemption of our body.
....--Julia Evelina Smith (translating Paul)

And here's the Jewish physician Luke, for his friend, Theo-Philus, making a record of how an act of God actually freed Paul's body, how an earthquake liberated not only Paul but also other prisoners and even one of the imperial prison wardens:

ἄφνω δὲ σεισμὸς ἐγένετο μέγας, ὥστε σαλευθῆναι τὰ θεμέλια τοῦ δεσμωτηρίου· ἠνεῴχθησαν δὲ παραχρῆμα αἱ θύραι πᾶσαι, καὶ πάντων τὰ δεσμὰ ἀνέθη.
....--Luke, at the onset of this act of God, this liberating earthquake

Suddenly there was an earthquake so great that it shook the foundations of the prison, and all the doors came open and everyone's chains came loose.
....--Willis Barnstone (translating Luke)

Suddenly there was such a major earthquake, that the foundations of the prison were rendered unstable! Immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains became loose.
....--Ann Nyland (translating Luke)

and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and all the doors came open, and the chains fell off all of them.
....--Richmond Lattimore (translating Luke)

And suddenly was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and the bonds of all were let loose.
....--Julia Evelina Smith (translating Luke)

How she (a biblical disaster) responds

Rachel Evans Held has a piece up today entitled,

"How (not) to respond to a natural disaster:"

which points out how John Piper and Skye Jethani respectively tell Christians the meaning of the earthquake for Christians. "One presumes to know the mind of God," she observes; "the other simply imitates the actions of Jesus." You'll find which is which and her response to both men when you read her post, which I'll link to below.

And you'll read how helpfully agnostic Held Evans can be, how helpfully open.  She says, "We cannot know for sure why these things happen. But we can weep.... The Japanese people don't need our lectures; they need our love."  Now that's quite a response.  And some of us are weeping; I know a Japanese mother is crying here in the USA, where she studies English, although she was to board an airplane for home, where her daughter was to have wed her own bridegroom in Sendai later this month.  Sadness.  Profound sorrow.

This, then reminds of a really biblical response.

It's very similar to Rachel Held Evans's response of empathy.

It's also the Jewish, pre-Jesus response of an earthquake or of the Earth herself.

Well, hmm, only some Christians might agree it is a biblical response.  And most Jews would agree, that if biblical, it makes no mention of G-d whatsoever. And then many Christians and Jews would question whether it was really ever canonical, although entirely historical, in the first place. It's the stuff of translation and of gendered translation and such.  Pathetic really.

Without further ado, here it is (in four - or five - translations - if you'll work with me on a fifth):

25 Great sorrow came upon Israel,
.....wherever they lived.
26 Nobles and elders broke out wailing,
.....maidens and young men lost their vigor,
.....and the women's beauty was marred.
27 Every bridegroom took up the dirge
.....while his bride sitting in the bedchamber turned to mourn.
28 Indeed, the earth had quaked against its inhabitants,
.....and the entire house of Jacob was clothed in shame.
..........--Jonathan A. Goldstein, for the Anchor Bible series

 25 Israel mourned deeply in every community, 26 rulers and elders groaned, maidens and young men became faint, the beauty of women faded. 27 Every bridegroom took up the lament; she who sat in the bridal chamber was mourning. 28 Even the land shook for its inhabitants, and all the house of Jacob was clothed with shame.
..........--the Revised Standard Version translation team 

25 And there was great mourning in Israel, in
...............every place of theirs.
26 .....And rulers and elders groaned,
virgins and young men weakened,
..........and the beauty of the women was
...................deformed.
27 Every bridegroom took up lamentation;
..........she who sat in the bridal chamber was in
...................mourning.
28 And the land quaked for those dwelling in it,
..........and all the house of Iakob was clothed
...................with shame.
..........--George Themelis Zervos, of the NETS translation team

25 καὶ ἐγένετο πένθος μέγα ἐπὶ Ισραηλ
..........ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ αὐτῶν.
26 καὶ ἐστέναξαν ἄρχοντες καὶ πρεσβύτεροι,
..........παρθένοι καὶ νεανίσκοι ἠσθένησαν,
.....καὶ τὸ κάλλος τῶν γυναικῶν ἠλλοιώθη.
27 πᾶς νυμφίος ἀνέλαβεν θρῆνον,
.....καὶ καθημένη ἐν παστῷ ἐπένθει.
28 καὶ ἐσείσθη ἡ γῆ ἐπὶ τοὺς κατοικοῦντας αὐτήν,
.....καὶ πᾶς ὁ οἶκος Ιακωβ ἐνεδύσατο αἰσχύνην.
..........---some anonymous Jewish translator rendering
................some anonymous Jewish writer's Hebrew into Hellene
....................in, of all places, Alexander the Great's Alexandria, Egypt

To be sure, Goldstein and the RSV team and Zervos are only working from the Hellene, bringing the Greek language into their English.  The real struggle for them is to know how to render the preposition epi (ἐπὶ).  It might have been written, and certainly can be read, as a bookend preposition, appearing at the start of the poetic stanza of the initial verse (25) and then at some point of the ending verse (28), which concludes the sad song.

Notice in verse 25, Goldstein chooses "upon" for the English, while the RSV team and Zervos make it "in."  What's better "upon Israel" or "in Israel" or does it make a difference?   But then in verse 28, to round out the poetic stanza, Goldstein has "against."  In contrast, the RSV team and Zervos have the opposite of "against":  "for."

I think all these men translating have missed the fact that the phrase for "the earth" or "the land" is in the feminine form in Greek:  Hē Gē (ἡ γῆ).  That's not so important until you're trying to translate the feminine pronoun:  autēn αὐτήν.  She's such a troublesome little pronoun for English bible translators these days!  Should she be he or she or it?

Couldn't we all just as easily note the Pathos, specifically the Penthos, of the Earthquake here?  Everybody is sad and is weeping.  Old people, young people, brides and bridegrooms.  Even the Earth is.  If great sorrow has come upon Israel (men and women), as Goldstein shows it has, then listen again to that Greek of verses 25 and 28 of I Maccabees 1:

25 And It birthed - Sadness did - a tremendous pain upon Isra-El,
..........in each of Its places - His places, Her places.

28 And She quaked - Earth did - a shaking upon those of
..........Her household,
.....And everybody of Jacob's house dressed with Her in shame.

(If that's not enough Bible for you, then go here for some real "New Testament."   And then do notice what Held Evans says that Jethani says that Jesus says -- and what he does not say, while he's weeping, while he's helping, when it all seems way too late.)


Now, if you're really ready, then please go read Rachel Held Evans's post.

How Sophia Auld Taught You to Read the Bible

In the Second Testament, 1 Peter 2:18-25 does something very similar to Ephesians 5:21-33 in that it holds up the unjust suffering of slaves as a mirror of the suffering of Christ, and enjoins slaves therefore to submit even to cruel masters. We have long ago rejected that comparison as illegitimate. It is time to acknowledge the same dangers in the wedding of the bride of Christ.

--Carolyn Osiek, 2002

I am, as it is obvious, both black and a woman....  It is a disadvantage because America as a nation is both racist and anti-feminist....  In 1966, the median earnings of women who worked full time for the whole year was less than the median income for males who worked full time for the whole year.  In fact, white women workers made less than black male workers, and of course, black women workers made the least of all.  Whether it is intentional or not, women are paid less than men for the same work, no matter what their chosen field of work.  Whether it is intentional or not, employment for women is regulated more in terms of the jobs that are available to them....  Whether it is intentional or not, when it becomes time for a high school girl to think about preparing for her career, her counselors, whether they be male or female, will think first of her so-called natural career -- housewife and mother -- and begin to program her for a field with which children and marriage will not unduly interfere.  That's exactly the same as the situation of the young black students who the racist counselor advises to prepare for service-oriented occupations, because he does not even think of them entering the professions....  We must replace the old, negative thoughts about our feminity with positive thoughts and positive actions affirming it, and more.  But we must also remember that we will be breaking with tradition, and so we must prepare ourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that we will be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose on us.

--Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm, 1970

Mr. and Mrs. Auld [my new Master and Mistress] were both at home [in March 1826], and met me at the door with their little son Thomas, to take care of whom I had been given [as my service-oriented occupation without wages].  And here I saw what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld.  I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld it.  It was a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my pathway with the light of happiness.  Little Thomas was told, there was his Freddy, -- and I was told to take care of little Thomas; and thus I entered upon the duties of my new home with the most cheering prospect ahead.

--Frederick Douglass, 1845

God said:

Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness!

So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God did he create it,

male and female he created them.

--the ancient beginnings of the Hebrew Bible, translated by Fox

Sometimes, it's good to remember our history.  It can help us re-form our present and our future for ourselves and for our children and for their children.  History may be extremely important as we read the Bible.  Won't we read it?  How?

Today, I want to post on how Sophia Auld taught you and me to read the Bible.  I want to show how Bible reading has changed us, because of her, and how it might help us more.  The traces of this stream go from the Hebrew Bible to Aristotle to the Greek Bible to Jesus.  The traces of the stream continue to Paul.  They go to Sophia Auld to Frederick Douglass to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  They go to Julia Evelina Smith to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln to Victoria Clafin Woodhull to Shirley Chisolm to Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton to John Glenn to Sarah Palin to Barack Obama.  They go to Carolyn Osiek, and then to you and me.

Yesterday, Rod posted on how Shirley Chisolm entered American politics and helped us acknowledge the dangers of "the old, negative thoughts about ... feminity."  That's not an unimportant trace here in the stream of our history.  And Rod goes deeper into history to quote Frederick Douglass also; more on that in a moment.

A couple of days ago, I posted on how Carolyn Osiek has given us a very important call to read as illegitimate any uses of Jesus -- in Aristotelian ways -- to prop up slavery or hierarchical "complementarian" marriage.  Commenter John Radcliffe encouraged me to give her conclusion, which is now reposted here as the first epigraph above.

I'm re-membering, outlining, re-calling but not in chronological order so much.  Jacqueline Jones Royster would re-mind us how our past is a stream in which there are traces.  Royster finds herself in the stream, as a woman, as an African American, as one literate, as she writes history (her Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African-American Women). Likewise, Michelle Baliff helps us remember that we're in the history that we would write, translate, and read; in her "Re/Dressing Histories; Or, On Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze," (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, v22 n1 p91-98), Baliff recalls with some justified protest the following:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle.... Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves.... But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What... if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? .... What if Truth were a Woman... what then? Cixous replies, Then all stories would have to be told differently....

So now let's pretend we're starting our story differently.  Let's start again with Sophia Auld.

Historian Henry Luis Gates starts us in 1827.  Says this of Frederick Douglass:  "Asks Sophia Auld to teach him to read, and learns the alphabet and words of up to four letters.  Lessons are stopped by Hugh Auld [Frederick's Master and Sophia's Husband], who believes that learning makes slaves discontented and rebellious."

Historian Sandra Thomas keeps us there.  She notes:

Upon Frederick's arrival at the Auld Home, his only duties were to run errands and care for the Auld's infant son, Tommy. Frederick enjoyed the work and grew to love the child. Sophia Auld was a religious woman and frequently read aloud from the Bible. Frederick asked his mistress to teach him to read and she readily consented. He soon learned the alphabet and a few simple words. Sophia Auld was very excited about Fredericks progress and told her husband what she had done. Hugh Auld became furious at this because it was unlawful to teach a slave to read. Hugh Auld believed that if a slave knew how to read and write that it would make him unfit for a slave. A slave that could read and write would no longer obey his master without question or thought, or even worse could forge papers that said he was free and thus escape to a northern state where slavery was outlawed. Hugh Auld then instructed Sophia to stop the lessons at once!

Frederick learned from Hugh Auld's outburst that if learning how to read and write was his pathway to freedom, then gaining this knowledge was to become his goal. Frederick gained command of the alphabet on his own and made friends with poor white children he met on errands and used them as teachers. He paid for his reading lessons with pieces of bread. At home Frederick read parts of books and newspapers when he could, but he had to constantly be on guard against his mistress. Sophia Auld screamed whenever she caught Frederick reading. Sophia Auld's attitude toward Frederick had changed, she no longer regarded him as any other child, but as a piece of property. However, Frederick gradually learned to read and write. With a little money he had earned doing errands, he bought a copy of The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches and essays dealing with liberty, democracy, and courage.

A couple of things, or more to note in re-reading these accounts.  First, Frederick Douglass wrote his own biographies,  which Gates also has edited and expanded with the timelines.  Second, Douglass actually had no ill will against his Master or his Mistress or their Son, whom he was to serve.  Third, Douglass had the idea to learn to read.  Fourth, Sophia Auld was, at first, happy to help him.  Fifth, it was illegal for her to help him read, illegal in the real sense that the laws of the United States of America prohibited her from teaching him.  Sixth, she would disobey her husband, who was over her, if she did not stop.  Seventh, although she would not or could not rebel, she opened up the Bible to Douglass, and he learned how to become free.  Eighth, official American freedom did not come until abolitionists in England paid for Douglass's freedom.

So, was the Bible just a little blip for Frederick Douglass as Sophia Auld read it aloud to him as she taught him to read it for himself?  The answer is No.  The Bible played a huge part of Douglass's freedom, his own, his abolition work, and his feminist work.  More on that in a moment.  It's worth our hearing Douglass in his own voice.  Be thankful you, like him, can read!

... I frankly asked her to teach me to read; and, without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters.  My mistress seemed almost as proud of my progress, as if I had been her own child; and, supposing that her husband would be as well pleased, she made no secret of what she was doing for me.  Indeed, she exultingly told him of the aptness of her pupil, of her intention to persevere in teaching me, and of the duty which she felt it could teach me, at least to read the bible.  Here arose the first cloud over my Baltimore prospects, the precursor of drenching rains and chilling blasts.

Master Hugh [Auld] was amazed at the simplicity of his spouse, and, probably for the first time, he unfolded to her the true philosophy of slavery, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed by masters and mistresses, in the management of human chattels.  Mr. Auld promptly forbade the continuance of her instruction; telling her, in the first place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief.  To use his own words, further, he said, "if you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell;"  "he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it."  "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world;"  "if you teach that nigger -- speaking of myself -- how to read the bible, there will be no keeping him;"  "it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave;"  and "as to himself, learning would do him no good, but probably, a great deal of harm -- making him disconsolate and unhappy."  "If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself."  Such was the tenor of Master Hugh's oracular exposition of the true philosophy of training a human chattel; and it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and the requirements of the relation of master and slave.  His discourse was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.  Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband.

So we see how the Bible - reading it and writing subsequently from it - began to shape Frederick Douglass, thanks to Sophia Auld.

Douglass found himself working with feminists at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with several of her colleagues, wrote (and she read aloud) the Declaration of Sentiments, a more inclusive Declaration than was Thomas Jefferson's and his colleagues.  They went on to write the two volume Women's Bible, a commentary on male readings of the Bible.  There they acknowledged Julia E. Smith, a woman, for her work in translating the Bible from the Hebrew and from the Greek into English in such a helpful way, for now they could read how women, such as Eve, can bring Life, which is how Smith translated Eve's name from the Hebrew.

But let's backtrack a bit. Have we missed anything? In 1830, when it was illegal for Frederick Douglass to be taught to read because he was a black slave, a white woman, Sophia Auld, broke the law and taught Douglass how to read before he was a teenager. And then, by age sixteen, he was breaking the law by teaching other slaves to read parts of the Bible and other works that he considered abolitionist. Some years later, he married a freed slave Anna Murray -- who gained her freedom as a black person before he could; they worked together side by side.  His and Anna's marriage was not only free as the Auld's marriage was; but Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray enjoyed an egalitarian marriage as well, one in which both partners were created in God's image, female and male.

In 1846, Douglass became the publisher of several abolitionist newspapers, including the North Star, which had as it's motto: “Right is of no sex--Truth is of no color--God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Note the inclusivity of persons with respect to both gender "and" race.  Anna was not just his mere complement, his completer.  They were equals in sex and in race.

In 1848, Douglass participated in the first women's conference in the United States of America in Seneca Falls, New York, where he himself signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

By 1863, Douglass had been engaging President Abraham Lincoln in conversation about abolitionism and, that year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This is the same Lincoln of whom historian Philip Magness said this month:  "He never had a chance to complete his vision. Lincoln's racial views were evolving at the time of his death."  Here's exactly what Frederick Douglass, as historian, wrote:

It is true that we have the proclamation of Jan. 1863.  It was a vast and glorious step.  But, unhappily, excellent as that paper is, it settles nothing permanently....  

President Lincoln introduced his administration to the country as one which would faithfully catch, hold and return runaway slaves to their masters. He avowed his determination to protect and defend the slaveholder’s right to plunder the black laborer of his hard earnings. Europe was assured by Mr. Seward that no slave should gain his freedom by this war. Both the President and the Secretary of State have made progress since then.

Our generals, at the beginning of the war, were horribly proslavery. They took to slave catching and slave killing like ducks to water. They are now very generally and very earnestly in favor of putting an end to slavery. Some of them, like Hunter and Butler, because they hate slavery on its own account, and others, because slavery is in arms against the government.

The rebellion has been a rapid educator. Congress was the first to respond to the instinctive judgment of the people, and fixed the broad brand of its reprobation upon slave hunting in shoulder straps. Then came very temperate talk about co...nfiscation, which soon came to be pretty radical talk. Then came propositions for Border State, gradual, compensated, colonized emancipation. Then came the threat of a proclamation, and then came the Proclamation. Meanwhile the Negro had passed along from a loyal spade and pickax to a Springfield rifle.

Haiti and Liberia are recognized. Slavery is humbled in Maryland, threatened in Tennessee, stunned nearly to death in western Kentucky, and gradually melting away before our arms in the rebellious states.

The hour is one of hope as well as danger. 

In 1870, Frederick Douglass saw that the fifteenth amendment was passed, giving blacks but not women the right to vote.

In 1872, Douglass ran as the U.S. Vice President candidate of a woman.  That woman was Victoria Clafin Woodhull, a candidate for President. Woodhull could not vote although Douglass could.

In 1882, Douglass's wife Anna Murray passed away and, a couple of years later, Douglass remarried and wed Helen Pitts.  She, with him, caused controversy because they were a mixed-race couple. Douglass, of mixed race himself, said: "This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father."  Again, in marriage there was equality, of sex, and of race, though the two were different.

Douglass worked side by side with Helen Pitts, for eleven years as husband and wife, until the day he took his last breath (February 20, 1890, when he died of a heart attack in the evening at home).  It was a day when Douglass, still fighting against the subjugation of women, had taken the platform at the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.  Douglass saw the subjugation of people because of race as the same sort of problem as the subjugation of people because of gender.

In 1920 (just to keep the timeline going), some thirty years after Douglass passed away, women in the USA were granted the right to vote.  That year, Charlotte Woodward, who was with Douglass at the 1848 first national woman's rights convention, cast her vote.  At 81 years of age, Woodward was the only female participant in that convention who ever legally got to vote.

As Rod pointed out yesterday, in 1972, Shirley Chisolm entered our stream and helped us trace the dangers of "the old, negative thoughts about ... feminity."  So after Hillary Clinton, John Glenn, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama also entered with us, have the dangers gone?  As Carolyn Osiek advised use nearly a decade ago, "It is time to acknowledge the same dangers."  But how will we?  Is it just by reading the Bible?

Or isn't it by learning to read the Bible the way Sophia Auld taught Frederick Douglass to read it, when she was a subservient "complementary" wife and he an obedient "content" slave?  Teaching and learning and reading and breaking the law and "rejecting as illegitimate" the male Master's reading of the Bible?

As you read now a final bit from Douglass, remember his justified grievances with his Master Auld, with the anti-abolitionists and the anti-feminists in the U.S. government.  And remember how Sophia Auld so taught him to read the Bible and might teach us.  Hasn't Sophia Auld taught us, and -- as Carolyn Osiek says -- isn't it about time?  The italics are Frederick Douglass's, having learned illegally to read the Bible from Sophia Auld; the exclamation points are his too:

The Bible is peculiarly the companion of liberty.  It belongs to a new order of things -- Slavery is of the old -- and will only be made worse by an attempt to mend it with the Bible.  The Bible is only useful to those who can read and practise its contents.  It was given to Freemen, and any attempt to give it to the Slave must result only in hollow mockery.

Give Bibles to the poor Slaves!  It sounds well.  It looks well.  It wears a religious aspect.  It is a Protestant rebuke to the Pope, and seems in harmony with the purely evangelical movement in England to give Bibles to our Slaves, -- and this is very desireable!  Now admitting (however difficult it may be to do so) the entire honesty of all engaged in this movement, -- the immediate and only effect of their efforts must be to turn off attention from the main and only momentous question connected with the Slave, and absorb energies and money in giving to him the Bible that ought to be used in giving him to himself.  The Slave is property.  He cannot hold property.  He cannot own a Bible.  To give him a Bible is but to give his master a Bible.  The Slave is a thing, -- and it is the all commanding duty of the American people to make him a man.  To demand this in the name of humanity, and of God, is the solemn duty of every living soul.  To demand less than this, or anything else than this, is to deceive the fettered bondman, and to soothe the conscience of the Slaveholder on the very point where he should be most stung with remorse and shame.

Away with all tampering with such a question!  Away with all trifling with the man in fetters!  Give a hungry man a stone, and tell what beautiful houses are made of it, -- give ice to a freezing man, and tell him of its good properties in hot weather, -- throw a drowning man a dollar, as a mark of your good will, -- but do not mock the bondman in his misery, by giving him a Bible when he cannot read it.