Shame, Philomela, you unbiblical liberal bird

"When we say 'built on common ground,' we mean that the Common English Bible is the result of collaboration between opposites: scholars working with average readers; conservatives working with liberals; teens working with retirees; men working with women; many denominations and many ethnicities coming together around the common goal of creating a vibrant and clear translation for 21st century readers, with the ultimate objective of mutually accomplishing God's overall work in the world."
-- Paul Franklyn, PhD, associate publisher for the Common English Bible

"All these are unpersuasive for the reasons given.  Yet Gorgias' exclamation to the swallow when she flew down and let go her droppings on him is in the best tragic manner:  he said, 'Shame on you, Philomela'; for if a bird did it there was no shame, but [it would have been] shameful for a maiden.  He thus rebuked the bird well by calling it what it once had been rather than what it now was."
-- Aristotle

If you know the story of Philomela in Greek mythology, then you know how she was raped and how her rapist cut her tongue out because she yelled out exclamations of protest and how tragically in the end the gods translated her into a swallow.  If you know the Greek language of Aristotle here in his Rhetoric (Bekker page 1406b line 18), then you know how he's calling Philomela a παρθενον /parthenon/ but how he's praising Gorgias for calling her a bird, or rather for calling this swallow a shameful Philomela, because she's pooped on him.  That's right. Aristotle himself is saying that Philomela is still a "parthenon" who [read between the lines here] pooped on the man who desired her ['Shame on you, Philomela, because you did this to a man before you were a bird and while you were still a virgin, conservatively speaking, before he transformed you into something else, you maiden.  How inappropriate of you.  How shameful of you'].  Yes, this can be subtle stuff.  And in our status quo world, so conservative and so man first, we should not read too much into these things.  And if you do, then shame on you for your protests.

If you know how male English translators care about this word, parthenon, especially when it's sacred, then you know that "conservatives" translate it "virgin" while their opposites, the "liberals," translate it "maiden."  If you pay attention to how the man Paul Franklyn divides the world, then you see his polar opposite binaries as follows:

"scholars" / "average readers"
"conservatives" / "liberals"
"teens" / "retirees"
"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities"

Opposites, in this way of thinking, are distinct even if there can be something in common between them, some common ground below them.

"a bird pooping" / "a maiden dropping protests of No! No! No! No!"

In these binaries, very subtly, not all is equal between the opposites.  Notice, if you will, how the men ordering the opposites put the better one on the left of / the lesser one. 

"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities"
"virgin as translation of παρθενος" / "maiden or young lady or young woman or (unmarried) girl as translation of παρθενος"

Now listen to the language, the ordering of pairs, from BBB blogger Wayne Leman in his recent post on the question of whether Franklyn's Common English Bible translation is "liberal" or not.  Leman is attempting to deconstruct the "conservative" / "liberal" binary.  Ironically, however, he re-constructs his own binary, with "liberal" as the still-botched category:

"Some conservatives consider translation of Hebrew almah in this verse [i.e., Isaiah 7:14] as 'young woman' instead of 'virgin' to be liberal. But is it, or does it actually reflect accurate biblical scholarship?"

"What you think might be a liberal translation of some verse may be shown to be an accurate translation, especially when you find other verses in the translation which continue to support whatever is your own theological viewpoint."

Did you see it?  Here it is:

"accurate biblical scholarship" / "liberal"

"an accurate translation" / "a liberal translation"

Of course, Leman is arguing that "young woman" (as the best English for "almah" in Isaiah 7:14) is an actual reflection of biblical scholarship that is accurate.  In opposition to that, for Leman, is the very same translation that is motivated by what would be liberal.

Commenter Joel Hoffman says something similar, quoting and with some nuance correcting Leman:

"I think everyone agrees that changing 'virgin' to 'young woman' for alma in Isaiah 7:14 is 'accurate biblical scholarship,' but the decision to prefer that scholarship over tradition is liberal."

Here, as a variation, Hoffman's binary pits what is good against what is (not "liberal" exactly but what is, rather, instead) botched "tradition":

"accurate biblical scholarship" / "tradition"

The point for both Leman and Hoffman is that which opposes "accurate biblical scholarship" is botched, is lesser, is "in-accurate" and "un-biblical" and "not scholarly."

The binary (i.e., that "either / or" division) is what allows men who know things to know them op-positionally.  And what comes first (i.e., on the left side of the pair in a left-to-right listing) is determined, actually pre-determined by them, to be naturally what's best.

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So let's now look at how this works out in Bible translation.   Franklyn lists these binaries as opposites that must find common ground for his Common English Bible translation:

"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities" 

When you look at the CEB team of translators (i.e., individuals on either side of his oppositions), what's interesting is how somebody like Adele Berlin on the team can neither be one of the men nor is actually able to be person of a Christian denomination.  Must Berlin, a woman, be the opposite of the men?  Is she, as not a member of a denomination, a person of some specific marked ethnicity?  Which one?  Is this a Christian / Jewish binary?

It's no secret that the problem in Bible translation with the words almah (עלמה) and pathenos (παρθενος) is the problem over whether the girl Mary (the mother of Jesus) was a virgin, or not, when these words are used.

How this seems to mirror Gorgias' and Aristotle's own tragic problem of whether Philomela is an ὄρνιθι /ornithi/ or a παρθένος /parthenos/.  One is appropriate and not shameful; the other is inappropriate, and shameful.


The Hebrew alma is in Isaiah 7:14.  So is the Greek pathenos in the earliest translation of Isaiah 7:14.  Whoever the maiden is that this scripture and that these words refer to might have been a virgin.  And the "young woman," as the common denominator CEB translation team has translated the Hebrew, might she be the prophesied Mary, the mother of Immanuel as Jesus, or not? 

The binary way of knowing the answer will not tolerate ambiguity.  Either she is, or not.  Either this is accurate, or not.  Either it is respectable, or it's shameful.

When we get to the New Testament, then we leave the Hebrew and have only the Greek.  Moreover, both in the gospel of Matthew and in the gospel of Luke, we have the story of the pregnant Mary not being "known" or "impregnated" by her man, her fiancé, her husband, Joseph.  In both stories, she is a virgin with child by the Holy Spirit.  So now, in these contexts, is the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) any less ambiguous than the Hebrew almah (עלמה) and its Greek translation the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) in Isaiah 7:14?  Do the stories of the virgin Mary require the Greek word to be translated unambiguously in Matthew 1:23 and in Luke 1:27?

Is one translation accurate, biblical, scholarly, respectable, and the other not?

I'll let you answer.  And to help, it may be interesting to see how various translators have translated the words:

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "young woman" in Isaiah 7:14 - JPS, JPCT, RSV, NET, NEB, NABRE 2011, NAB 2011, The Inclusive Bible

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "the young woman is with child" and "a young woman who is pregnant" and "A girl who is presently a virgin" and "a young woman is now with child" and "young woman is pregnant" in Isaiah 7:14 - NRSV and Good News Translation and The Message and The Bible in Basic English and the Common English Bible

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in LXX Isaiah 7:14 - Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, NETS by Moisés Silva

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "maiden" in Matthew 1:23 - Weymouth, Richmond Lattimore

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "the unmarried girl" in Matthew 1:23 - Ann Nyland

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young woman" in Matthew 1:23 - Willis Barnstone

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Matthew 1:23 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young woman" in Luke 1:27 - The Inclusive Bible

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "the unmarried girl" in Luke 1:27 - Ann Nyland

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Luke 1:27 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "girl" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - W. Rhys Roberts

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young lady" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - J. H. Freese

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "maiden" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - George A. Kennedy

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - anon, 1683

Is one translation accurate, biblical, scholarly, respectable, and the other not?

Getting Ambiguities

And he said to them, 

“You don't get this parable?”

“Then how are you going to get all the parables?”
--Jesus to the disciples
(translated into Greek
by Mark
translated into English
by me) 

In English, the word “ambiguities” gets a bad (w)rap.  The “good” grammar teacher or “good” grammar book told us long ago:  “Using ambiguities is bad.”  And we believe this.  We want one and only one meaning for every one word.  We want to wrap up our phrases into a singular package.  We desire no slippery slope.  And this is why I also say too that, “in English, the word 'ambiguities' gets a bum rap.”  We forget that we humans are the ones who assign meaningS to our wordS, whether we're the ones saying them or writing them or listening to them or are reading them.  We may really want to avoid ambiguities, but even if we were successful in such avoidances, then would we really be getting success in communication?

Here's a true story.  You might think of it also as a parable of ambiguities:

Once upon a time, I wrote a blogpost.  In the blogpost, I quoted Aristotle teaching his male only, Greek only, disciples to use “only good Greek.”  One of his commandments, which all of these boys believed, was “avoid ambiguities.”  Then a professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley commented at my post to correct me to say this:  

“Linguists have long distinguished between between vagueness and ambiguity. Vagueness is when you give too little information....  Ambiguity is when there are two distinct interpretations....  [T]here's a small middle ground between vagueness and ambiguity, but the distinction is clear most of the time, and is quite useful.  Aristotle [in this quotation of him that you give] rails against vagueness, not ambiguity.”

So we looked together at the actual Greek word that Aristotle used for “ambiguities” or “vaguenesses,” and we had to agree.  Aristotle's word was both vague and ambiguous.  To be very sure and absolutely sure, Aristotle's Greek word, then, was ambiguous.  Oh, and it was also a tad vague.  Therefore, if you've followed the syllogism here, or the enthymeme presumed here, to it's necessary and logical and singular conclusion, then you get this:  Aristotle had inadvertently, hypocritically, failed to avoid using vagueness and ambiguity.  “Do what I say, fellas, not as I do,” he surely whispered to himself.  (Here's that post where you can almost hear Aristotle whispering and can almost see his face, pink from private professorial embarrassment.)

Now, let's go back to Jesus.  Or are we going forward to him?  When he was talking to his fellows, he'd say and do what Aristotle said to avoid in good language.  That is, Jesus spoke in many parables that few could understand.  His words, his phrases, his sentences, and even his stories were ambiguous, and vague.  Sometimes they were vaguely ambiguous.  Other times they were ambiguously vague.  So his disciples got to question him.  He was all about the Socratic dialectic.  So his rhetoric and his hyperbole and his hyperphysia and his poetry and his feminisms and his parables just weren't all that dangerous, because he let people ask questions and form, and re-form, and trans-form.

(This is a parenthetical paragraph.  It's an aside.  It may make one of the main points of the blogpost.  You be the judge, won't you?  Do get this:  Aristotle belittled Socrates's dialectic, calling it an anti-strophe of rhetoric, which he warned was exaggeration.  Aristotle was about Nature, which he called physics, or if you had to then meta-physics, out of which he invented his log-ike to shut down ambiguous logos and all manner of pluralistic dissoi logoi.  Sappho was a poet, he acknowledged, but the Mytilenean men, he conceded, honored her “although she was a woman.”  Then Aristotle said such men were like the fable-telling parabowling Aesop and those bar-bar-barian fellows of Libya before Muammar Gaddafi came in like he was Alexander the Great.  Aristotle would warn his disciples of such:  “Get this, fellas.  There are dark, woman-like, pluralistic, ambiguous slippery-slope stories [λόγοι logoi] thrown violently alongside your own:  the fables of Aesop and the parables of the Libyans.”)

At first, the disciples of Jesus were sort of like the disciples of Aristotle.  And they were all exactly like we want to be, sometimes.  They wanted to avoid ambiguities.  Fables of the sort Jesus told in public, and so many of them too, were all too vague far too often.  “Please say what you mean, teacher.  Please give us the one and only meaning of what you mean, Rabbi.”  And then Mark comes along, and he translates the words of Jesus into Greek.  All of the metaphors go flying in all these different semantic directions, even when Jesus gives his clear explanation.  All of the metaphors go flying in all these different semantic directions, especially when Jesus gives his clear explanation, in Mark's Greek.  Which makes us think also that translation too can be ambiguous.  It's now a parable of translation.  But that's another story all together.

(In his Greek translation, his own version of this story, Mark makes the parable of Jesus that would unlock all of the parables sound like Gorgias Praising a Woman, the woman of all women, Helen.  I mean, really.  Did you ever read what Gorgias wrote next to what Mark translated, and how?  Notice how they both depend on the reader to get the meaning.  Not just one meaning either.  At least four.  But then there's their twists at the end.  In both accounts.  Oh, this is another parenthetical, fairly unimportant paragraph, depending on how you read it.)

I've been silly here.  But now I want also to be more serious.  I want to talk a little now about how we people want to contain the meaning of our words.  I want to talk some about trying to contain, to dis-ambiguate.  We might look at Chinese (as Victor Mair does here, showing how letters for sound can restrict meanings of 便 ).  But we might as well just look at our English.

Here are some words and phrases:

fellow

feminist

gender neutral

Here now are some posts that get to the ambiguities of those words.  Or they're posts that sometimes would dis-ambiguate these words of ours as we might use them.

Doesn't fellow avoid ambiguities?  Isn't it male only, and not female at all?

Suzanne has written on fellow as also feminine in “Broadly Evangelical?” and in “The death of the masculine generic.”  Look, ladies and gentlemen, she did not make this stuff up.  It's in Shakespeare and in the English Bible and in all sorts of places before men who wanted the word all to themselves said different.

Doesn't feminist avoid ambiguities?  Isn't it only bad female and not good male at all?

Notice how one of the commenters (“roguephysicist”) at the second post linked above says this:  “The blowback from 'gender-neutral' translations sponsored by feminists and homosexuals has hardly started.”

It sounds a little like “feminists” are real bad women here.  They can't be good, can they?  And they wouldn't be men either, would feminists?  

And then there's the statement by the COMMITTEE ON BIBLE TRANSLATION:

“Second, we object to the 'guilt-by-association' labeling of some of our translations. The review [by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] notes some renderings in the updated NIV that are adopted also by 'feminist' interpreters. Yet they fail to note that many of these same renderings are also adopted by complementarian interpreters. (For instance, 'assume authority' in 1 Tim. 2:12 is Calvin's rendering.) The fact that egalitarians and complementarians alike adopt many of these translations suggests that, in fact, there is broad scholarly support in favor of these conclusions. It is the scholarship that has influenced the decisions of CBT in these texts – not a modern agenda of any kind.”

Notice how the COMMITTEE does not dispute or correct the Council, at least not on the would-be un-ambiguous view that “feminist” is a position not desirable.  Again, real bad women (and not real good men) are those who would hold that “feminist” position.

Jesus would not be one of those, nor would he listen to them either.  This is the thinking that would be “not a modern agenda of any kind.”

Well then.  Would Jesus listen to Mollie?  She's a feminist, a young modern one, perhaps with a bad reputation as one, she says.  And she also asks:

“Where are the religious people that are accepting, loving, and kind? They are probably the ones who are humble, quiet, and non judgmental. It’s a shame that a few extreme feminists can make a bad name for all. Is it the same deal religious people, with some groups and religions representing everyone? Certainly, they are not interchangeable, but I cannot help but wonder.”

But weren't some of the first feminists ever Christians?  Weren't some religious, good people with good names too?  Come to think of it, I think so.  Here are some of those fellows, men and women.  So who has the “a modern agenda”? 

Doesn't gender neutral avoid ambiguities?  

Doesn't that phrase mean that  

“The male-oriented meaning has been neutralized” 

and that 

“The emphasis on Jesus as a male has been neutralized” 

and that 

“'Man,' 'father,' 'brother,' 'son,' and 'he/him/his' are ... are removed or neutralized”?

Yes, if you believe Wayne Grudem.  This is how Wayne for the Council (the CBMW) has avoided ambiguities.  With the above sentences, he makes “gender neutral” mean one thing and one thing only:  males are getting hurt!  Notice that “gender neutral” cannot now mean anything nice.  It's hurting males, even Jesus as a male, and it's hurting a whole bunch of male nouns and pronouns in English too.  Wayne writes these sentences in his essay, “The 'Gender-Neutral' NIV: What Is The Controversy About?”  

Wayne has built on what David Kotter, executive director of the Council (CBMW), has said.  David has been concerned about “gender neutral” bathrooms and college dorms.  He says:

“There is a direct path between a departure from biblical truth to confusion over gender and finally to concrete examples such as gender-neutral bathrooms. The work of CBMW affects the every day life of every believer.”

Notice how David's “gender neutral” is unambiguously “confusion over gender.”  The executive director of the work of the CBMW is making sure every believer every day won't be confused when a bathroom can be used by men and by women or when a dorm is like an apartment complex with men and women both rooming there.  Biblical truth won't allow such.  And the Jesus of "biblical manhood" only only used bathrooms clearly marked "MEN" and also condemned all Ruths for sleeping on those floors for Boazes only.  And that same Jesus of "biblical manhood" would never give “gender neutral” money advice to yuppy women and men like that confused probably-feminist probably-not-believing Kimberly Palmer has.

And God said,

“Let us make a human

in our image,

by our likeness....”

And God created the human

in his image,

in the image of God

He created him,

male

and

female

He created them.

--Genesis 1

(translated by Everett Fox

from Hebrew

into English)

This is the record of the begettings

of Adam/ Humankind.

At the time of God's creating

humankind,

in the likeness of God did he then make

it,

male

and

female

he created them

and gave blessing

to them

and called their name:

Humankind!

on the day of

their being

created.

--Genesis 5

(translated by Robert Alter,

from Hebrew

into English)

The Intentional Introduction of Ambiguity

Sometimes we readers just can't tell whether a writer (a poet and translator perhaps) has intentionally introduced ambiguities.

I'm thinking now of Nancy Mair's quotations of Michel de Montaigne, which indicate to her that he's one who, like her, seems to "try to sustain a kind of intellectual double vision: to see the feminine both as that which language represses and renders unrepresentable by any human being, male or female, and as that which in social, political, and economic terms represents experiences peculiar to the female."  Ironically, she says of him:

Montaigne’s begins to sound like a feminist project. Which is not to say that Montaigne was a feminist. (“You are too noble-spirited,” he was able to write to the Comtesse de Gurson when she was expecting her first child, “to begin otherwise than with a male.”) But whether intentionally or not, Montaigne invented, or perhaps renewed, a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription of human experience as no other does.

I'm also thinking of Wayne Leman's quotations of Eugene Peterson's translations of the Psalms, and whether the latter was after some intentional rendering of Hebrew or Hebraic Hellene ambiguities.

I'm also thinking of that old / new Irish Hymn, translated, and of another Hebrew / Hebraic Hellene passage of Creativities in the Beginning when God's image was translated rather ambiguously - intentionally?

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And yet, sometimes writers will declare (as Mairs does) their intentions of introducing ambiguities.  Remember how Nancy Mairs says it?

In my writing, I try to sustain a kind of intellectual double vision: to see the feminine both as that which language represses and renders unrepresentable by any human being, male or female, and as that which in social, political, and economic terms represents experiences peculiar to the female. I want my femininity both ways—indeed, I want it as many ways as I can get it. I am the woman writer. Don’t ask me for impregnable argument. As far as I’m concerned, my text is flawed not when it is ambiguous or even contradictory, but only when it leaves you no room for stories of your own. I keep my tale as wide open as I can. It’s more fun this way. Trust me.

And here's how Jorge Luis Borges says it, translating his español into his English or is it the other way around?

Mi suerte es lo que suele domoninarse poesía intelectual.  La palabra es casi un oximoron; el intelecto (la vigilia) piensa por medio de abstracciones, la poseía (el sueño), por medio de imagenes, del mitos o de fábulas.  La poesia intelectual debe entretejer gratamente esos dos procesos.

My luck lies in what might be called intellectual poetry.  The term is almost an oxymoron; the intellect (wakefulness) thinks by means of abstractions; poetry (dream) by means of images, myths, or fables.  Intellectual poetry should pleasingly interweave the two processes.

And now, after reading what Borges says about dreamy poetry and the wakeful intellect, I'm thinking about Alan Lightman's novel, Einstein's Dreams.  How clever to realize, to intellectually understand by the images of a work of fiction, all that might have led you to your understanding of time as relative, especially in relation to your own waking understandings of light.  This is what Lightman's fantastic first novel does for you, and for me, and of course for Albert Einstein.  The book's been translated now into more than 30 different languages.  I asked Lightman about these, and he confessed he'd never yet read a single 1 of these renderings of translators.  I'd been listening to the novelist, who is also an acclaimed astrophysicist; he'd been saying that novelists and other artists use their guts and their hearts to try to capture the imagination, the belief of their readers and viewers.  But scientists, claimed Lightman, do something altogether different:  Lightman says that scientists use their heads to name things objectively, without regard to their readers' belief or imagination.  So I asked Lightman if he'd rather the translators of his novel be artists or scientists.  And do you know what his brilliant answer was?  He said Both.  Of course, translators must intend ambiguities!  They have to both render a work believable and they also must use those "intellectual abstractions."  Yes, "the intellect (wakefulness) thinks by means of abstractions," admits Borges, who also says, "el intelecto (la vigilia) piensa por medio de abstracciones."  And also there's so much more.

And now I'm thinking about novelist Yann Martel.  He's done something very difficult in writing a Holocaust novel, while he himself is neither a Jew nor a historian.  The novel I'm reading now is his Beatrice and Virgil.  His main protagonist, Henry, comes in starting to pitch a novel about the Holocaust to his editors, to the booksellers, to us Martel's readers.  Without spoiling the whole thing (and I'm not finished reading yet), he also tells how the project fails, that it absolutely flops.  But, at the very least, he imagines that he must intentionally introduce ambiguities.  Henry has chosen to use a flipbook format in which the book is read forward to the middle one way but then must be flipped over so that the back cover becomes the new front cover for the second half of the book or, rather, another book in another literal direction.  (Later, Henry struggles with the fact that flipbook is also, ambiguously in an unintended way, a completely different sort of book format as well).  Martel and Henry have to define what they mean:  "a book with two sets of distinct pages that are attached to a common spine upside down and back-to-back to each other."

Here, hear a bit:

        Henry chose this unusual [flip book] format because he was concerned with how best to present two literary wares that shared the same title, the same concern, but not the same method.  He'd in fact written two books:  one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay.  He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject.  But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book.  That was the hitch.  Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart.  That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries--separate aisles, separate floors--and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another.  It's not how writers write.  A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination.  Nor is it how people live.  People don't rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions.  There are truths and there are lies--these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life.  The useful division is between fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies.

What Martel does from this point is to begin to deconstruct the whole notion of intentional, intended ambiguities introduced anywhere, anyplace, anytime.  But we begin to get a bit of what the novelist intends.  It's intention as clever as Nancy Mairs's, and Jorge Luis Borges's, and Alan Lightman's.  (A good interview with Martel is here.  Although the critics seem to be panning his book, I think they haven't read it yet -- at least not its flip side on the other side of the ambiguity.  The best review I've read so far is here.  In another good interview, the novelist defends his fictional writing on the Holocaust here, at Vox Tablet.  What is very clear, whether you like the book or hate it, the author intends to introduce ambiguities; and I like that.)

Our World Without Ambiguity, or humility

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Sunday I visited a friend's church, where we sang the above. Ironically, for being the sort of visionary petition that it seems to aspire to call God Himself to being, it's not a very clear text, is it?

The English is outdated. The metaphors are mixed. The categories are contradictory. The penultimate line above has one person, one male person only, identifying with God, when a larger number of us including males and females is singing. The math, down to the last number, is all wrong. The meanings are many. The phrasing is unnatural. The ESL learners are struggling. And the children surely aren't getting much of anything.

Besides all that, what we read singing is not what's in "the original."

I'm being sarcastic again. But I'm trying to sound a little like Socrates in Plato's Republic [aka Πολιτεία or The Perfect City-State with No Old Poetic Ambiguities Whatsoever].  He wants to establish the ideal Greek world without the mindlessness of the people who follow the old poets of the ancient epic poetry.  One of my friends going to a Christian seminary said that the Republic was one of the required readings for a class, and I wonder why.  I asked her if they'd read Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato, and she said No.  Are they going to read anything by Aristotle who invariably and always writes more logically and less dialogically than Plato his teacher?  She didn't know.

What if I were to try to sound like Aristotle?  I think I'd try to sound like the bible scholars and the linguists who are trying to make the bible sound like Aristotle.  One, for example, says he likes better an English translation that "communicates more clearly the meaning" of a bit of Matthew than the clear translation he is Assistant Project Director for.  Another bible language expert, my friend Wayne Leman the linguist, says that one particular bible translator (whose translation he likes to read) "is such a good English writer and poet that I [Wayne] think he would probably have modified the last line [of some verses of his translation in order] to remove the ambiguity."  To Leman, this particular translator is one of those "English Bible translators [who] introduce ambiguity to a translation which they themselves do not intend."  This is Aristotle's clear and logical and intended rule for his students, of course:  "avoid ambiguities."

Now, Leman is much more forgiving than Aristotle, if they both do want to avoid ambiguities.  Leman lets the particular Bible translator who seems to have introduced ambiguity into his English off the hook, on one and only one condition.  Leman says this "good English writer and poet" shall not introduce to an English language Psalm any unintended ambiguity -- and he shall remove it too -- "UNLESS he believed that the original Hebrew was itself ambiguous."  (Of course, Aristotle believed that all bar-bar-ic languages, such as Hebrew, were ambiguous as was that unclear illogical Greek language of the old poets and of the sophists and of all females and even of his teacher Plato and of Plato's teacher Socrates.)  So it may be okay, in one instance alone, according to Leman, for the poetic English translator of the Hebrew Psalms to introduce English ambiguities:  if he intends to mirror what he believes is the intentional introduction of ambiguity by the original Hebrew writer singer poet into the text of the original Hebrew.

Unfortunately, who can know what the original poet songwriter's intentions were?  And how can we " in our generation ... fully understand the original Hebrew, much less the profound wordplay and connections present in the language"?  Now I'm quoting a former blogger named Iyov, who is quoted by another of my linguist blogger friends, Suzanne McCarthy.  McCarthy a former blogger at Better Bibles Blog here goes on to say that

The psalms are uniquely suited for the study of commentary through the centuries, for seeing how diversely and personally the Hebrew has been translated by one generation after another, for simply surrendering the rational mind to an acceptance of ambiguity in the original text.

What Iyov and McCarthy have made us do is to stand outside of an unclear, ambiguous text.  They've made us stand far away.  They've made us assume a lowly position.  We cannot even understand everything in the original text.

I was thinking about whether to give the original Hebrew text that Leman's "good English writer and poet" Bible translator was rendering into English with his perhaps unintentionally introduced ambiguity.  I was getting ready to try to show how ambiguous the Hebrew is.  I was considering bringing in the Greek translation of that Hebrew by certain Jews who would certainly be using the Hellene in ways that Aristotle considers vague and unclear and highly ambiguous.  But it may be better, for now, just to come back to those lines that I started this post with.

There is great humility here in those lines, with the ambiguities.  Perhaps ambiguity calls for humility.  Perhaps change of vision requires ambiguity.  Perhaps that's the point, one of the many many possible points, of the original text.

Now, just to be clear, the original text is old ambiguous Irish:

Rop tú mo baile, a Choimdiu cride:
ní ní nech aile acht Rí secht nime.

Rop tú mo scrútain i l-ló 's i n-aidche;
rop tú ad-chëar im chotlud caidche.

Rop tú mo labra, rop tú mo thuicsiu;
rop tussu dam-sa, rob misse duit-siu.

Rop tussu m'athair, rob mé do mac-su;
rop tussu lem-sa, rob misse lat-su.

If you're a native speaker of modern Irish, then it may make a wee bit more sense like this:

Bí Thusa ’mo shúile a Rí mhór na ndúil
Líon thusa mo bheatha mo chéadfaí ’s mo stuaim
Bí thusa i m'aigne gach oíche ’s gach lá
Im chodladh no im dhúiseacht, líon mé le do ghrá.

Bí thusa ’mo threorú i mbriathar ’s i mbeart
Fan thusa go deo liom is coinnigh mé ceart
Glac cúram mar Athair, is éist le mo ghuí
Is tabhair domsa áit cónaí istigh i do chroí.

But the story goes that one Mary Elizabeth Byrne, an Irish linguist, rendered those old and ancient and ambiguous Irish lines into English something like this in 1905:

Be thou my vision O Lord of my heart
None other is aught but the King of the seven heavens.

Be thou my meditation by day and night.
May it be thou that I behold even in my sleep.

Be thou my speech, be thou my understanding.
Be thou with me, be I with thee

Be thou my father, be I thy son.
Mayst thou be mine, may I be thine. 

And then one Eleanor M. Hull introduced even more English ambiguity to the lines of Byrne by making it more poetic in 1912:

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,
be all else but naught to me, save that thou art;
be thou my best thought in the day and the night,
both waking and sleeping, thy presence my light.

Be thou my wisdom, be thou my true word,
be thou ever with me, and I with thee Lord;
be thou my great Father, and I thy true son;
be thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one. 

A bit later someone put it to an Irish tune, and some many years later and across an ocean, one Sunday some of us of many generations later sang it in a church, where the English now was American and mostly Texan, with many of the verbs swapped around or lopped off to fit a version played with guitars and drums. 

I think we may have been doing what McCarthy said we might best be doing:  "simply surrendering the rational mind to an acceptance of ambiguity in the original text."  It's not entirely clear to me, but it seems one of the points of the hymn, of the prayer.

and in three days

Λύσατε τὸν ναὸν τοῦτον

καὶ ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις

ἐγερῶ αὐτόν

When the enemies of Jesus asked him to give them a sign of his authority, he gave them a riddle instead (see John 2:19). These opponents were still puzzling over it when the imperial Romans had him pinned naked to the executioner's cross (see Mark 15:29 and Matthew 27:40).

Now if we translate John's Greek translation of Jesus's Hebrew-Aramaic riddle into English, then we have decisions to make, don't we?

1) If we want the English to be natural (i.e., the translator's idea of what "our natural English" must be), then it would go something like "GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995)" has it:

"Tear down this temple, and I'll rebuild it in three days."

2) If we're a "relevance theory" bible translator (i.e., focusing on the message, the content so pragmatically communicated), then we might need to make sure the reader knows that "temple" really doesn't mean just temple but rather Jesus's body.  And we're relieved to find, then, that the gospel writer, John, has gone on to do just that.  So we can keep "temple" there in John 2:19 and let his 2:21 explain for us in English with footnotes as the NET Bible translators do:

"But Jesus47 was speaking about the temple of his body.48"

47tn Grk “that one”; the referent (Jesus) has been specified in the translation for clarity. This Greek term is frequently used as a way of referring to Jesus in the Johannine letters (cf. 1 John 2:6; 3:3, 5, 7, 16; 4:17).

48tn The genitive “of his body” (τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, tou swmato" autou) is a genitive of apposition, clarifying which temple Jesus was referring to. Thus, Jesus not only was referring to his physical resurrection, but also to his participation in the resurrection process. The New Testament thus records the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as all performing the miracle of Christ's resurrection.

3) If we're a Jesus Seminar type, then this isn't very satisfying at all.  And so you might write a section of an essay and entitle it "Proto-John 2:19" and then go on to make and give warrants for your claim 

"that Mark 14:58==John 2:19 is a claimed saying of Jesus in a shared narrative source of Bethsaida-Mark and John."

Hence, in all three cases (i.e., [1] in natural English translation, and / or [2] in Relevance Theory translation, and / or [3] in historical Jesus de-/ re- construction non-translation), you can avoid the riddle.

You can avoid Jesus's very likely allusion to the Hebrew book called (עֶזְרָא) Ezra, which might mean in English something like an abbreviated form of "G-d helps."  You can avoid the likely fact that Jesus is not only saying something about himself (i.e., his body, as John 2:21 tries to make clear) but that he is also getting his enemies to identify things about themselves (i.e., that they might be like those temple-destroyers in the narrative of G-d Helps). 

You can avoid having to go to the Jews' own translation of Ezra from Hebrew to Hellene (i.e., the "Septuagint" or "LXX"), which no doubt Jesus and his enemies were aware of.  There, of course, in Ἔσδρας Βʹ (or Esdras 2) one may read this:

αὐτοῖς ἀφ’ ὅτε δὲ παρώργισαν οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν τὸν θεὸν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ἔδωκεν αὐτοὺς εἰς χεῖρας Ναβουχοδονοσορ βασιλέως Βαβυλῶνος τοῦ Χαλδαίου καὶ τὸν οἶκον τοῦτον κατέλυσεν καὶ τὸν λαὸν ἀπῴκισεν εἰς Βαβυλῶνα

But after that our fathers provoked the God of heaven, he gave them into the hands of Nabuchodonosor the Chaldean, king of Babylon, and he destroyed this house, and carried the people captive to Babylon. (here Englished by Lancelot Brenton in 1851)

In this Hebrewish Greek, there's freedom for John the gospel writer to put Jesus's riddle into Hebrewish Greek as noted above.

You also can avoid the allusions to Joshua.  This Joshua (aka "Jesus") is giving his enemies a riddle for a sign, but you can avoid that he is also by his riddling making further allusions to his sweet namesake, his very violent predecessor.  What's with this three days imperative thing?  And who crosses to the other side?

עִבְרוּ בְּקֶרֶב הַמַּחֲנֶה, וְצַוּוּ אֶת-הָעָם לֵאמֹר, הָכִינוּ לָכֶם, צֵידָה:  כִּי בְּעוֹד שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים, אַתֶּם עֹבְרִים אֶת-הַיַּרְדֵּן הַזֶּה, לָבוֹא לָרֶשֶׁת אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם נֹתֵן לָכֶם לְרִשְׁתָּהּ.

Pass through the midst of the camp, and command the people, saying: Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye are to pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the LORD your God giveth you to possess it. (here Englished by the JPS translation team of 1917)

So the point I'm getting at here is that the riddle of Jesus is a very serious inside joke.  It's a Jewish insider riddle.  He's not going to explain it.  He's not going to explain it to you, especially.  His followers (i.e., the male disciples) won't get it until it's too late (or unless they're female perhaps).  And his enemies to his dying day will pretend like they didn't get it.  And it's radical wordplay that involves the listener and the reader (okay, yes you and me this time) who must construct of it what can be constructed.  And better bible translations really had best get some of that without trying to avoid it or to give it all away all too soon.

New Testament Translation Question

(Let's not use the word "feminist" today.) Let's (instead) focus precisely on the Greek text of the New Testament. Let me make a suggestion that I've made before, and then ask a question. Here's that suggestion:

that Mark is translating Jesus to give a pluralistic hermeneutic when he has him saying and asking:

Καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς, Οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην; Καὶ πῶς πάσας τὰς παραβολὰς γνώσεσθε;

And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?

The entire parable and this whole pericopic episode seem to get at interpretive difficulties and ways of being and repentance and subjectivities against pretended objectivity and the like. Yes, I know I'm exegeting isogetically - but isn't that some the point here in Mark 4? To keep outsiders out and insiders in and to multiply statements and so forth?

So the question:

How differently would you read this story of this parable if it started, really and textually, in Mark 3:31? With Jesus being challenged about his ostensible inattention to his mother and his brothers. Yes, I know the manuscripts and therefore the text critics go bananas here in verse 33. But Mark has Jesus turning the whole question of precise definition back to those challenging him:

Καὶ ἀπεκρίθη αὐτοῖς λέγων [ἀποκριθεὶς αὐτοῖς λέγει], Τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου [ἢ οἱ] [καὶ οἱ] [ἀδελφοί μου] ἀδελφοί [μου].

And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

Then he goes even further, and Mark does as well with his Greek:

34 Καὶ περιβλεψάμενος κύκλῳ τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν [τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν κύκλῳ] καθημένους, λέγει, Ἴδε, ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί μου

Ὃς γὰρ ἂν ποιήσῃ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ἀδελφός μου καὶ ἀδελφή [μου] καὶ μήτηρ ἐστίν.

34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Do you see how bold this interpretation? How additional to the text this marked detail? Is this a set up for the story of a sower sowing? Does gender matter? Embodiment in interpretationS? Wordplay in Texts?

In the words of Jesus: What does the text say? How do you read it?

Reading Joshua in Greeky Hebrews

Is it absolutely necessary to read Hebrews 4:8 in the Greek (as perhaps once upon a time a translation of Hebrew into Hellene) and to conclude absolutely that the text must only refer to Joshua of the Book of Joshua? Sure, the verse comes right after the two quotations of Psalm 95:7. (The first quotation begins that discussion of Moses and the people unable to enter "rest" in the promise land; and the second directly precedes verse 8 of Hebrews 4.) Sure, the writer most definitely intends "Joshua" when using the Greek name Ἰησοῦς. So I'm not asking what the writer intended, or what the text directs all readers to.

Rather, I'm asking if there can't be a second meaning here. Could there be a meaning that the writer never intended at least not at first? And could there be a second meaning that all readers won't quickly get but that some might agree to? Could it be a meaning that the writer (or that the Greek translator of the Hebrew writer) would concede?

You know, we tend to think that Thomas Jefferson would concede to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that "All men are created equal" is a text that allows later readers to see that "All men and women are created equal" is a second possible meaning.

And C.S. Lewis thinks, likewise, that Plato would concede that he was writing also about the suffering and death of Jesus when he wrote about the unfair suffering and death of Socrates. (Lewis thinks that Virgil might deny he was writing about mother Mary and baby Jesus when he prophesied of a virgin birth - and yet, Lewis believes Virgil's text has this second meaning).

And readers such as Mary Daly get us seeing positive meanings in "eavesdropping" and unintended sexist meanings in "the-rapist" (once the "therapist," for example) and in "stag-nation" (first intended perhaps benignly as only "stagnation").

But would the language of the Bible, the Christian part of it no less with the Hebrews name nonetheless - would that language really ever have wordplay which racists or sexists might try to eliminate? I think the game of many male Christian Bible translators today is to "disambiguate," which means to declare for the reader that there must be only one meaning, and then to declare in the same breath what the single meaning must be. (No one often thinks that this is Father Aristotle's game too - the sexist, racist Aristotle one might add).

What I'm trying to ask also is whether translating Ἰησοῦς as "Joshua" in Hebrews 4:8 but as "Jesus" in Hebrews 2:9, 3:1, 4:14, 10:10, 10:19, 12:2, 12:24, 13:20, and 13:21 robs the English reader? Willis Barnstone thinks "Jesus" actually robs this Jew of his Jewishness and that this English transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew actually robs Jews of this Joshua. And Barnstone, himself a Jew, is also an acclaimed Greek classicist, a brilliant translation theorist and historian, and an outstanding translator of many texts including the gospels of the New Covenant. Barnstone wonders what would happen if the world of translators, by analogy, made Socrates not Greek by transliteration and in an anti-Hellenist move then turned the world against all Greek people who are responsible for his death. That, I think, is often a bit much for anglo-centric Western Bible translators of the Christian church of this century to take in.

So I'm just asking: What's the problem for readers really when the translator is brave enough to avoid what Robert Alter calls the "heresey of explanation"? And what's the benefit if the English Christian "Jesus" in Hebrews were always "Joshua"? And might ever the reader be able to see the play when Joshua (as Jesus and / or as Joshua) can be the one(s) who did not give the people God's rest way back then?

Here's the verse, and I'd love to hear what you think:

If, in fact, they by Joshua had been given rest,
there wouldn’t ever have been another spoken of after that day.

If, in fact, they by Jesus had been given rest,
there wouldn’t ever have been another spoken of after that day.

εἰ γὰρ αὐτοὺς Ἰησοῦς κατέπαυσεν,
οὐκ ἂν περὶ ἄλλης ἐλάλει μετὰ ταῦτα ἡμέρας.

hidden English "man" of a woman's heart?

But
OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag--
It's so elegant
So intelligent
. . .
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or woman
--But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
(from T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land")

Suzanne has another compelling post up: this one on the question of whether "the Greek word anthropos, when used for an individual, always refers to a 'male human being'." She quotes from and reviews and offers a counterexample to a statement in Michael Marlowe's "The Ambiguity of 'Anthropos'".

I want to draw attention to another troubling statement in Marlowe's essay, his conclusion:

The usage of words relating to gender and humanity in the Greek language are no less "sexist" than the ordinary English usages which feminists have been trying to abolish for 30 years now, and this may be seen clearly enough in the case of the word anthropos. It is also evident that [. . . writers] have confused the issue with specious arguments about Greek words and linguistics are merely distracting us from the fact that the "inclusive language" debate has to do not with Greek but with our English words and their meaning, and the recent attempts to reform our English usage along politically correct lines. On this question of English usage the professors of Greek have no more authority than any layman who is acquainted with the English language.

I'm so glad Marlowe tries to move the discussion away from "professors" to "any layman" and from ancient "Greek" to our shared "English." We should notice that he himself has a "bachelor's degree in English Literature" and in "the biblical languages. . . the MA degree." I wonder what he thinks of what the man T. S. Eliot is doing with our English language in "The Waste Land." Yes, let's get beyond this authority, this alleged sexism in common English.

So, if we just consider the English language that we all share as lay-men, then is the question of gender in our shared ordinary vocabularies really something that deconstructive "feminists" are abusing and are challenging only "along politically correct lines"? As I asked in my previous post, do men challenging a woman and her language really "hear her"? But do they actually "hear her feel"?

I'm challenging "any layman who is acquainted with the English language" to hear what the (woman) writer Nancy Mairs feels. This is from pages 86-87 of her voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. In this conclusion to her chapter, "Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva," Mairs starts a struggle, a stuttering adventure in communication with you using the language you know (ambiguous as it is) if you just stay with her:

As my groping here suggests, despite my instruction by a host of gifted feminist critics, I certainly don't yet have a clear vision of what woman's writing might be. Pace Jacques Lacan, I know the phallus is no transcendental signifier--nor transcendental anything else--but I don't know what my transcendental signifier is, if indeed there is any such thing, which I doubt, since the whole concept seems far too located to express my experience of the world. My "I" seems simply not to be the male-constructed "I.": It is more fluid, diffuse, multiplex (giddy, duplicitous, and inconstant, I think men have called it). Maybe we need another sort of signifier for the female self--the "O" might be a logical choice, or rather a whole string of Os: OOOOO. That's me.

The fact of the matter, though, is that when I sit down at my desk to tell a story, I can't begin, "OOOOO woke this morning to the song of a cardinal in the fig tree outside the back door." Radical feminist writers like Monique Wittig and Mary Daly experiment with techniques for reinventing reality by exploding patriarchal linguistic patterns. But in passages like this one--

The Powers to break the framers' frameworks are within women. Dis-Covering our Lust of Be-ing, we can easily swing open the doors to our freedom. We work to attain the Prudence of Prudes, the Courage of Crones, the Distemper of Dragon-identified Fire-breathing Furies. Furiously focused, we find our Final Cause.

--all those hyphens and capital letters and puns and alliterations give me a wicked case of intellectual indigestion, and after twenty pages I'm too dyspeptic to go on. If I want to speak plainly to you about particulars--and I do, more than anything else--I must use the language that I know you know.

I want a prose that is allusive and translucent, that eases you into me and embraces you, not one that baffles you or bounces you around so that you can't even tell where I am. And so I have chosen to work, very, very, very carefully, with the language we share, faults and all, choosing each word for its capacity, its ambiguity, the space it provides for me to live my life within it, relating rather than opposing each word to the next, each sentence to the next, "starting on all sides at once . . . twenty times, thirty times, over": the stuttering adventure of an essay.

The Silence of (Rahab and) the Joshuas

The majority of bible translators today know better than the first authors and initial translators of the texts of the bible. Or they think they do.

Most bible translators today don’t follow the Hebrew authors and translators of the Jewish scriptures. Instead, bible translators now tend to follow the philosopher Greeks: they follow Plato in idealizing and Aristotle in rationalizing. It’s a Western culture coup d'état.

In general, English translators today idealize not only (A) the texts (as The “Holy” Bible) but also (B) their own logical methods of translation (which they see as their obedient “faithfulness” to the “original” texts and authors, whom they idealize as “the Author”). They have been disciples of the semi-platonic Jerome or Martin Luther who tries to protest not only the Pope but also Aristotle. They have been much more recent followers of the platonic, neo-Aristotelian Noam Chomsky or Eugene Nida or Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson or Wayne Grudem or John Piper or the various theo-logical committees of the big bible publishing houses.

Specifically, they can both (A) silence a woman (Rahab) who speaks in the Hebrew and (B) sacrifice the richness of Jewish history (in Joshua) for Christianized disambiguity.

(Oh, and the vast majority of bible translators today are men. They are not women. Women tend to be more open to different translation methods and necessarily alternative ways of looking at the texts. One woman even looks for evidence that the unnamed authoress of the book of Hebrews is a woman. But perhaps I digress; perhaps.)

Let’s look at two textual examples: Joshua 2:14 and Hebrews 4:8.

Joshua 2:14 goes like this:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ לָהּ הָאֲנָשִׁים נַפְשֵׁנוּ תַחְתֵּיכֶם לָמוּת אִם לֹא תַגִּידוּ אֶת־דְּבָרֵנוּ זֶה וְהָיָה בְּתֵת־יְהוָה לָנוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ וְעָשִׂינוּ עִמָּךְ חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת׃

The very first bible translators were Jews, true insiders to their own texts (unlike bible translators today). And yet, they were “commissioned” to translate by a goyish Egyptian king who was the lackey of a goyish Greek world conqueror. (I’m talking about the legend of king Ptolemy Philadelphus II and Alexander the Great and the translators of what has become known as the Septuagint, or the LXX). So they were more faithful to the Hebrew than to the Greek. And they still translated Joshua 2:14 this way:

καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῇ οἱ ἄνδρες Ἡ ψυχὴ ἡμῶν ἀνθ' ὑμῶν εἰς θάνατον. καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν Ὡς ἂν παραδῷ κύριος ὑμῖν τὴν πόλιν, ποιήσετε εἰς ἐμὲ ἔλεος καὶ ἀλήθειαν.

It appears that these original translators “changed” the text. But isn’t that what translators do? Let me step aside that rhetorical question just to explain. In English, the Hebrew was translated the following way by the “commissioning” of British emperor James I, whose translators also had access to the LXX and to Jermone's Vulgate and to Luther's Bibel:

“And the men answered her, Our life for yours, if ye utter not this our business. And it shall be, when the LORD hath given us the land, that we will deal kindly and truly with thee.”

But in English, the Greek LXX alone was translated this way by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton by himself:

“And the men said to her, Our life for yours [even] to death: and she said, When the Lord shall have delivered the city to you, ye shall deal mercifully and truly with me.”

Do you see the difference? The original Jewish translation of the Hebrew into Greek (or the LXX which Brenton turns to English) is different from the James I English translation. The Jews have “καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν” (for which Brenton has “and she said”) for the original, ambiguous Hebrew phrase “אמֶר.”

Now, to be fair to the King James Commission on The Translation of The Holy Bible, they may just be following Saint Jerome or the rogue Martin Luther, who fail to give the prostitute Rahab her say. Who do you think your favorite Bible’s commission is faithful to, which platonic idealist who silences the woman, that is? (Of course, the LXX Commission, and Sir Brenton, let Rahab speak in Joshua 2:14 in the original Hebrew text and in the Greek and in the English translations).

So let’s quickly run back to the New Testament and to the book of Hebrews and to Hebrews 4:8.

To be sure, all the writers of the New Testament (all men, except perhaps for that unnamed authoress of the book of Hebrews)—all of them really like the translators and the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. The New Testament writers without fail also write in Greek, and when they quote the Old Testament they quote the Greek translation. That’s not to say they don’t like the original Hebrew text; they do. It’s just to say, every single writer of the New Testament chooses to write in Greek, and chooses to read also the Greek translation when quoting from the ancient Hebrew scripture.

Not surprisingly, when recording what first century Jews said in Hebrew or Aramaic, the New Testament writers—every single one of them—translated the Hebrew speech into Greek. And when the speech was ambiguous, which Hebrew and most any language is from time to time, the New Testament writer-translators were good enough to let us readers sort things out.

So here’s what the writer of the book of Hebrews says in Hebrews 4:8:

εἰ γὰρ αὐτοὺς Ἰησοῦς κατέπαυσεν οὐκ ἂν περὶ ἄλλης ἐλάλει μετὰ ταῦτα ἡμέρας

Now, notice bible translators today have tended to split over the ambiguity here. But it seems that Saint Jerome and the protesting Martin Luther parted ways here too. And since, many bible translators follow either the one or the other, we get the split.

Here’s Jerome and then Luther (but go on to check how your favorite Bible translation gives way to the one or the other):

nam si eis Iesus requiem praestitisset numquam de alio loqueretur posthac die

Denn so Josua hätte sie zur Ruhe gebracht, würde er nicht hernach von einem andern Tage gesagt haben.

The quick thing to note is that Jerome makes Ἰησοῦς Iesus but Luther makes him Josua.

Now, of course Jerome can tell the difference between “Jesus” and “Joshua” and so can the writer of the book of Hebrews. But the unnamed, anonymous writer of the book of Hebrews wants to keep the language in Greek as ambiguous as it is in Hebrew. She gives the reader of her Greek and the earlier Hebrew quite a bit of credit. (Okay, I’ll give you that—there’s no rigid evidence that the writer of Hebrews is “she”; and yet “he” sure writes and translates as openly as a “she” might).

But Jerome and Luther have to disambiguate, which is what bible translators today do. They want the ideal text to say one thing and one thing only. And if there’s a choice left to the reader, well the translator gets to decide for her. (In this way, Jerome and Luther are not only Platonists, they are also Aristotelians. They want the ideal Text, and they want it to say One thing and NOT another thing).

So to be clear, Jerome turns Joshua into Jesus, and Luther turns Joshua into Joshua. Most bible translators today follow either the one or the other.

But the writer of the book of Hebrews lets Jesus be Joshua also. She trusts the early translators, you know, the ones who let Rahab speak in Joshua 2:14. She trusts us the readers to see the ambiguity, to interpret for ourselves, and to hear the various voices in the text, not just Jerome’s voice or Luther’s voice.

(Now I do know of two English translation teams who have decided to translate both Joshuas in the Greek text Hebrews as "Joshua." They are Jewish groups, and I'll not name them here because they do have bias that they confess, which may just distract from the point of this post. Their bias is not platonism or neo-aristotelianism, however. And, as mentioned before, the translator and translation theorist Willis Barnstone, who is a Jew, not a Christian, translates the Greek Ἰησοῦς as Yeshua).

Let the Reader Understand

Mike Aubrey posted a few days back on “knowing” a language. He said, “Knowing a language as in fluency and knowing a language as in linguistic description are very different.” And Mike led off by pointing us to Eric B. Sowell’s post in which he said, “One of the verbs for ‘knowing’ something in Greek is γινώσκω. . . The word is ambiguous. . . ”

Now, with all the humility that Eric calls for,
(and with all the humility that Mike suggests by saying there are “very different” ways of “knowing a language”),
I’d like to turn to another Greek word.

The word is ἀνάγινώσκω. It’s what we know in English as “read.” But it’s a funny word because in Greek it’s a compound word that suggests metaphorical meanings. It’s the combo of γινώσκω [ginOskO, or “know”] and the prefix ἀνά [ana-, or “re-” or maybe “top down”]. So it could be “know from the top down” or “know all over again.” Even for ancient Greek readers, it’s not a precisely defined and precisely “known” word. Nonetheless, the context, the application, has to do with digesting written or visually constructed or pictorial or graphic materials. In English today, we try to tidy that up by using our ambiguous but all-important words from Latin, “literacy” and “literature.”

Now let me show three instances, the three, in which Aristotle uses ἀνάγινώσκω in the Rhetoric. And then let’s “read” the four contexts in which a similar word is used by translators and authors in the Bible. (The Bekker pages and lines are 1407b 11; 1413b 13; and 1414a 19. The Bible references I’ll give below.)

First, Aristotle prescribes the following as he rails against the ambiguities in the writings of Heraclitus:

ὅλως δὲ δεῖ εὐανάγνωστον εἶναι τὸ γεγραμμένον καὶ εὔφραστον· ἔστιν δὲ τὸ αὐτό·

George Kennedy translates that this way:

“What is written should generally be easy to read and easy to speak—which is the same thing.”

(I think Kennedy loses the wordplay, which shows how much Aristotle unwittingly writes like Heraclitus, also ambiguously. But that’s another post for much later.)

Second, Aristotle prescribes “knowing how to speak good Greek” (which is how Kennedy translates τὸ μὲν γάρ ἐστιν ἑλληνίζειν ἐπίστασθαι); he writes to define and to classify the different acceptable and unacceptable styles:

βαστάζονται δὲ οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί, οἷον Χαιρήμων (ἀκριβὴς γὰρ ὥσπερ λογογράφος), καὶ Λικύμνιος τῶν διθυραμβοποιῶν.

“But [poets, translates Kennedy] who write for the reading public are [also] much liked, for example, Chaeremon (for he is as precise as a professional prose writer [logographos]), and Licymnius among the dithyrambic poets.”

Third, Aristotle is denouncing what Kennedy says is “demegoric style” of Greek, which is “like shadow-painting” in which “exactness is wasted work and the worse.” In contrast, Aristotle prescribes another style of speaking Greek:

ἡ μὲν οὖν ἐπιδεικτικὴ λέξις γραφικωτάτη· τὸ γὰρ ἔργοναὐτῆς ἀνάγνωσις·

(Kennedy “reads” that this way: “The epideictic style is most like writing; for its objective is to be read.”)

Now we fast forward several decades, to Alexandria (the namesake of conquering Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil), where the Hebrew scriptures are being translated. The commissioned translators take the Hebrew of Habakkuk (2:2) and put it into Greek as follows:

καὶ ἀπεκρίθη πρός με κύριος καὶ εἶπεν Γράψον ὅρασιν καὶ σαφῶς ἐπὶ πυξίον, ὅπως διώκῃ ὁ ἀναγινώσκων αὐτά.

“And the Lord answered me and said,
Write a vision,
And clearly on a tablet,
so that the reader might pursue them.”
(George E. Howard, NETS)

“And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision, and [that] plainly on a tablet, that he that reads it may run.”
(Sir Lancelot Brenton)

Then we fast forward several more decades, to Jerusalem. Here’s Mark (13:14) translating Jesus with his own writerly commentary and instruction to the reader:

ὅταν δὲ ἴδητε τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως ἑστηκότα ὅπου οὐ δεῖ--ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω--τότε οἱ ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ φευγέτωσαν εἰς τὰ ὄρη

“When you see the ‘abomination of desolation’' standing where it should not--let the reader understand-then let those in Yehuda flee to the mountains,”
(Willis Barnstone)

Likewise, there’s Matthew (24:15) translating Jesus translating Daniel, with the writer's commentary and instruction:

ὅταν οὖν ἴδητε τὸ βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου ἑστὸς ἐν τόπῳ ἁγίῳ (ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω)

“So when you see the abomination of desolation
standing in the holy place,
foretold through Daniel the prophet
(let the reader understand),”
(Barnstone)

Finally, there’s Revelation (1:3), with John translating a prophecy, with instructions and promises and warnings to the reader:

μακάριος ὁ ἀναγινώσκων καὶ οἱ ἀκούοντες τοὺς λόγους τῆς προφητείας καὶ τηροῦντες τὰ ἐν αὐτῇ γεγραμμένα ὁ γὰρ καιρὸς ἐγγύς

“Blessed is the one who reads and blessed are they who hear the words of this prophecy and who keep what is written in it. For the time is near.”
(Barnstone)

Can we know from the top? Have we let the reader understand? Who is ὁ ἀναγινώσκων? Are we blessed οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί?