sexist Roman slogan (and what Paul may do with it)

Kay Bonikowsky has a post up in which she suggests that "Paul was quoting a slogan" when writing in Greek to men and women in Korinth, Greece.  Translator Ann Nyland, likewise, says the following, right in the middle of her translation of what we call Chapter 14 of Paul's letter; Nyland says: "Paul now quotes from the letter sent to him by the Corinthian assembly."

The Corinthian men had quoted the Law of the Roman empire at Paul.  So how did that go?  Well, in a bit, I'll show you.  First, I want to let Cheryl Glenn remind us about that Roman law:

A particular point of Roman male pride seems to have been the deliberate exclusion of women from civil and public duties; and in the first centuries of its history, Roman law reflected rigid legal inequalities between males and females.  Cicero reportedly contemplated with utter dismay a society which "included women in assemblies" and which allowed women "soldiery and magistracies and commands."  "How great will be the misfortune of that city, in which women will assume the public duties of men" (Lactantius, Epitomes 33.[38.]1-5, ascribed to De re publica 4-5, qtd. in Hallett, Fathers 8)....  Over centuries, Roman law constructed and guaranteed the sexual distinction -- and division -- between males and females.  The differential between the legal status of women and that of men was justified by the natural inferiority of women:  their congenital weakness, limited intellectual faculties, and ignorance of law....  Roman women were perpetually restrained by law. [ Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, pages 61-62, emphases mine: the red font the Roman exclusions, the blue the more liberal inclusions elsewhere.]

Glenn goes on from her research to discuss at great length the effects of the Law.  The legal constraints applied to women more severely under Roman rule even more than they had under the old laws and customs of the Greek empire.  The oppressive Law worked to silence women in Rome, in Athens, in Jerusalem and in Korinth:

Like the Greek matron, then, the Roman woman was oppressively busy managing her household and family [i.e., the Roman Domum as the counterpart of the Greek οἰκοδομή -- the OIKO-DOMĒ -- the domain of the home].... Because the Romans clung to the ideal of the domina, of the strong privatized woman, they [i.e., the Roman men] often reacted with perplexity or disgust at the women who pursued intellectual or political aspirations. Unlike the very few Greek women who found acceptance and admiration in the public domain, no Roman woman seems to have succeeded in establishing herself as a public figure in her own right....  The Greeks and Romans [i.e., the men] regarded most women as ciphers, whose worth varied according to the property and family connections accompanying them.  Women were to be traded among men.  And historians -- from the first -- have had little more to say about these women, who were always, particularly in their exceptions, defined by the private, feminine sphere.  The women in my study who passed into the public sphere, even if only temporarily, found themselves vulnerable to assaults on their families, their honor, their sexuality, their "feminine" influence.  These women endured the closest of inspections and critiques by males and females alike, usually being disarmed of their influence and respect in the process.  [ Rhetoric Retold, pages 63, 72-73, emphases mine: the red font the Roman exclusions, the blue the more liberal inclusions elsewhere.]

Okay, so what was the slogan, the Roman law, that the men of Korinth wrote to Paul?  And how did he reply?  Let's look, first at their Greek, then at our English.  (What my translation attempts is to show Paul's play with "feminine" words, with HOME-DOMAIN and with SILENCE and with ALL-inclusion in the ASSEMBLY and with the creative, maternal words of BIRTH.)  Here, hear:

Τί οὖν ἐστίν, ἀδελφοί;
Ὅταν συνέρχησθε ἕκαστος

ψαλμὸν ἔχει,
διδαχὴν ἔχει,
ἀποκάλυψιν ἔχει,
γλῶσσαν ἔχει,
ἑρμηνείαν ἔχει.

Πάντα πρὸς οἰκοδομὴν γινέσθω.

Εἴτε γλώσσῃ τις λαλεῖ,
κατὰ δύο ἢ τὸ πλεῖστον τρεῖς,
καὶ ἀνὰ μέρος,
καὶ εἷς διερμηνευέτω·
ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ᾖ διερμηνευτής,
σιγάτω ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ·
ἑαυτῷ δὲ λαλείτω καὶ τῷ θεῷ.

Προφῆται δὲ δύο ἢ τρεῖς λαλείτωσαν,
καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι διακρινέτωσαν.
Ἐὰν δὲ ἄλλῳ ἀποκαλυφθῇ καθημένῳ,
ὁ πρῶτος σιγάτω.

Δύνασθε γὰρ καθ’ 

ἕνα πάντες προφητεύειν,
ἵνα πάντες μανθάνωσιν,
καὶ πάντες παρακαλῶνται·
καὶ πνεύματα προφητῶν
προφήταις ὑποτάσσεται.

Οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ἀκαταστασίας ὁ θεός,
ἀλλὰ εἰρήνης,
ὡς ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τῶν ἁγίων.

Αἱ γυναῖκες ὑμῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις σιγάτωσαν·
οὐ γὰρ ἐπιτρέπεται αὐταῖς λαλεῖν,
ἀλλὰ ὑποτασσέσθωσαν,

καθὼς καὶ ὁ νόμος λέγει.

Εἰ δέ τι μαθεῖν θέλουσιν,
ἐν οἴκῳ τοὺς ἰδίους ἄνδρας ἐπερωτάτωσαν·
αἰσχρὸν γάρ ἐστιν γυναικὶ λαλεῖν ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ.

Ἢ
ἀφ’ ὑμῶν ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ ἐξῆλθεν;
Ἢ
εἰς ὑμᾶς μόνους κατήντησεν;

Εἴ τις δοκεῖ προφήτης εἶναι ἢ πνευματικός,
ἐπιγινωσκέτω ἃ γράφω ὑμῖν,
ὅτι κυρίου ἐστὶν ἐντολή
Εἰ δέ τις ἀγνοεῖ, ἀγνοεῖται.
Ὥστε, ἀδελφοί μου, ζηλοῦτε τὸ προφητεύειν,
καὶ τὸ λαλεῖν μὴ κωλύετε γλώσσαις·
πάντα δὲ εὐσχημόνως
καὶ κατὰ τάξιν γινέσθω.

In English, that goes something like this:

What is it, then, brothers?
When you meet together, each one may

have a Psalm,
have an Instruction,
have a Revelation,
have a Tongue,
have a Translation.

All gives birth to the Domain of the Home:

Whether it's a Tongue that is uttered,
by two or at the most three,
both a Top Part,
and through to a Translation.

Should there, however, not be the Translation, then: 
Silence in the Assembly!
To oneself, nonetheless, is an Utterance, and to God.

Prophesy, nonetheless, by two or three Utterances,
And the others through to a Judgement. 

Should there come, in fact, some Revelation to another seated, then:
For the first one, Silence!

You all, in fact, are quite able:

One and all may Prophesy
So that all may be Apprenticed
And all may be Called to Encouragement.
And may the Spirit of a Prophecy
Be given Order Under Prophets.

There's not, in fact, a God of Disruption,
but rather of Peace,
which is in all, in the Assembly, of the Holy ones. 

Your women, in the Assembly, are to be Silent! 
Give, in fact, to them no Turn to Utter anything there,
but rather give them their Order Under. 

just as the Law also states

If, however, some wish to be Apprenticed,
Then it's in the Home where their own men are that these may Question.
It is shameful, in fact, for women to Utter anything in the Assembly.

What?!
Is that from you all, The Statement of God springing out like your baby?
What?!
Is this your special delivery?

If someone opines that they have so Prophesied, or are so Spiritual,
then let him understand what I have written to you all:
our Master is giving Commandments.
If, nonetheless, someone is without understanding, then he lacks understanding. 
Therefore, my brothers, yearn to Prophesy,
and to Utter (don't forbid it) a Tongue.
All, nonetheless, with Blessed Form
and according to Arrangement be birthed! 

Mary the Parthenon as equal to Joseph the Heitheon

Let me propose translations of LXX Isaiah 7:14 and of Matthew 1:23 and of Luke 1:26, 27, 34 that do not emphasize virginity. It's not because I'm a "liberal" (therefore not a "conservative") translator trying to diminish or downplay the biblical and accurate stories of pregnancies of virgins. Not sure I fit in either of those boxes ("liberal" or "conservative") very well. I'm not wanting to try a different translating because the Greek word parthenos (παρθενος) never refers to female virgins. We all know of examples where that's the case, where the Parthenon has to be female only and in which the emphasis is on her purity on her being yet untouched by a male.

What I'm hoping to do with English translation is to get at the part of the range of meanings of the Greek word parthenos (παρθενος) that gets beyond the female as the virgin .

Sometimes Often, female virginity is all that counts. For the radical extremist terrorists of September 11, 2001, (as the horrible folklore goes) female virginity was of supreme importance as their reward for their suicide mission. And for US culture in general, male virginity can actually be something of a joke.

The quick point I'm trying to make is one that Hanne Blank shows with her history of the concept of female virginity: there's a huge disparity between how cultures have regarded virginity in girls and women compared with boys and men.

Now, interestingly, Euripedes made use of another Greek word for virgins, untouched.  In his play Hippolytus, the playwright has the character Theseus ask the protagonist:

"Are you the chaste one, untouched by evil?"  David Kovacs is translating.  The words are σὺ σώφρων καὶ κακῶν ἀκήρατος; Notice how a-kēratos (ἀ-κήρατος) is the word for "un-touched" and sṓphrōn (σώφρων) the word for "chaste." The question is whether these sorts of words apply equally to males and to females. For Aristotle, of course, females are botched males, naturally, and therefore, it is important to divide them. The same word, such as sōphrosȳnē (σωφροσύνη) or "temperance," actually divides women and men, for Aristotle, just as for Hitler, Blutes or "blood," actually divided der Jude or "the Jew" and the untainted Arier or "the Aryan."

Homer's Greek did not always so divide people by blood, by temperance, by how and whether they were untouched and untainted and virgin.  The epics of Homer actually made good use of a pair of words that marked difference in sex but that gave import to both girls and boys as equals more or less. The pair included parthenos (παρθενος) as the feminine and hēitheos (ἠιθεος) as the masculine. Both, as a pair, together, refer to unmarried young people, to eligible bachelorettes and eligible bachelors.

You can see this pair in the following excerpt from a fragment of papyri recording a bit from Homer's Iliad, Book 22. It's probably from sometime in the 3rd century B.C.E. and is now in the collection of papyri at the University of Heidelberg.

Alex C. Purves in 1891 translated that bit in the following way:

IL.22.128 παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ' ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιϊν.

IL.22.128 maid and bachelor in amorous prate;

The longer context goes like this, where you can see it as a repetition of the pair:

IL.22.123 μή μιν ἐγὼ μὲν ἵκωμαι ἰών, ὃ δέ μ' οὐκ ἐλεήσει
IL.22.123 Surely, if I solicit him, he will have no pity

IL.22.124 οὐδέ τί μ' αἰδέσεται, κτενέει δέ με γυμνὸν ἐόντα
IL.22.124 nor courtesy, but will slay me like a helpless

IL.22.125 αὔτως ὥς τε γυναῖκα, ἐπεί κ' ἀπὸ τεύχεα δύω.
IL.22.125 woman, a naked man, who have put off mine arms;

IL.22.126 οὐ μέν πως νῦν ἔστιν ἀπὸ δρυὸς οὐδ' ἀπὸ πέτρης
IL.22.126 I may not talk with him from tree or stone,

IL.22.127 τῷ ὀαριζέμεναι, ἅ τε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τε
IL.22.127 like a man and a maid, like

IL.22.128 παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ' ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιϊν.
IL.22.128 maid and bachelor in amorous prate;

IL.22.129 βέλτερον αὖτ' ἔριδι ξυνελαυνέμεν ὅττι τάχιστα:
IL.22.129 better to close with him in speedy anger;

IL.22.130 εἴδομεν ὁπποτέρῳ κεν Ὀλύμπιος εὖχος ὀρέξῃ.
IL.22.130 so shall we know to whom the Olympian gives the glory.

And in Book 18 of the Illiad, the pair of words is used a couple of other times.


The pair of words also can be heard in Homer's Odyssey. With Samuel Butler's English translation of 1900, that with some context went like this:

OD.11.35 ἐλλισάμην, τὰ δὲ μῆλα λαβὼν ἀπεδειροτόμησα
OD.11.35 I cut the throats of the two sheep

OD.11.36 ἐς βόθρον, ῥέε δ' αἷμα κελαινεφές: αἱ δ' ἀγέροντο
OD.11.36 and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came

OD.11.37 ψυχαὶ ὑπὲξ Ἐρέβευς νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων.
OD.11.37 trooping up from Erebus -

OD.11.38 νύμφαι τ' ἠΐθεοί τε πολύτλητοί τε γέροντες
OD.11.38 brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil,

OD.11.39 παρθενικαί τ' ἀταλαὶ νεοπενθέα θυμὸν ἔχουσαι,
OD.11.39 maids who had been crossed in love,

OD.11.40 πολλοὶ δ' οὐτάμενοι χαλκήρεσιν ἐγχείῃσιν,
OD.11.40 and brave

OD.11.41 ἄνδρες ἀρηΐφατοι βεβροτωμένα τεύχε' ἔχοντες:
OD.11.41 men who had been killed in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood;


So now we come to the Bible. Even though the male counterpart is lost after Homer's epic works, there's still reason to believe that readers could have heard "unmarried young person" as what was meant.

Here's Isaiah:

διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον
Thus, this is what he will give -- Master himself will give something to you all -- a sign.

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει
Look, the eligible bachelorette -- in her innermost belly -- will have it

καὶ τέξεται υἱόν
And, she will deliver and have a child, a son

καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ
And, she will call its name EmmanouĒl

Here's Matthew:

Ἰδού, ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει
Look, the eligible bachelorette -- in her innermost belly -- will have it

καὶ τέξεται υἱόν
And, she will deliver and have a child, a son

καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ
And, she will call its name EmmanouḖl

ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον
which is rendered literally

Μεθ’ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός
"with us - God"


Here's Luke:

Ἐν δὲ τῷ μηνὶ τῷ ἕκτῳ
And yet in the sixth month

ἀπεστάλη ὁ ἄγγελος Γαβριὴλ ἀπὸ (or possibly ὑπὸ) τοῦ θεοῦ
there was the Messenger GabriḔl from God sent

εἰς πόλιν τῆς Γαλιλαίας, ᾗ ὄνομα Ναζαρὲθ (or possiblyΝαζαρέτ)
into the City-State of Galilaias named Nazareth

πρὸς παρθένον
to an eligible bachelorette,

μεμνηστευμένην (or possibly ἐμνηστευμένην) ἀνδρί,
to be engaged to a man,

ᾧ ὄνομα Ἰωσήφ, ἐξ οἴκου Δαυίδ·
named Joseph, of the household of David.

καὶ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς παρθένου Μαριάμ.
and she, this bachelorette, was named Mariam,

Εἶπεν δὲ Μαριὰμ πρὸς τὸν ἄγγελον,
Mariam, nonetheless, said to the Messenger,

Πῶς ἔσται τοῦτο,
How is this going to be,

ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω;
seeing how I have not yet known a husband?


Now you tell me, does this translation disrupt the Greek?  Does it rob the narrative of female virginity that would be so very important to men and to males and to the Christian Bible?

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.

---

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?

pt 3, Dynamic unEquivalence: Nida v. Barnstone

This is part 3 of a series. In part 1, we considered how Eugene Nida’s reductive theory of dynamic equivalence opposed Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice of translating. In part 2, we looked at how Nida’s simplistic focus on language as mere communication excludes culture and Jewishness in the Bible and how it takes people like Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo to point out his ethnocentrism and to recover and to give us some recovery from it. In part 3, let’s review Nida’s binary and then let Willis Barnstone propose how to bust that up.

To be sure, Barnstone’s theory of language is as robust as Pike’s. Moreover, his work in translation is informed by his theory and is incredibly prolific. And, certainly, Barnstone’s knowledge of Bible translation is equal to Seidman’s and to Zogbo’s. He’s a well-researched scholar, a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation in general and of Bible translation in particular. I think he knows the anti-Semitic tendencies of much Christian Bible translation, and just a read of his essay, “How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew,” gives evidence. All that to say, I don’t want us to pigeonhole Pike or Seidman or Zogbo or Barnstone as specialists with tunnel vision whose particular and individual and singular respective view only offers just one of several needed vantages from which to take down Nida’s dynamic equivalence theory.

Nor do I want to box in Nida. Nor do I desire for anyone to do that. I do want to notice the problems his reductive theory has caused. I do want you to see he’s caused issues for others and how they must deal with these. So here’s Barnstone.

Barnstone’s issues with Nida include two that I’d like to highlight here. The first is that Nida’s linguistics operates on the binary principle of a sort of reductive “linguistics v. literature,” and especially literature that is part and parcel of cultural patterns and the arts. The second issue is that Nida’s “form v. message” message is an unnecessarily simplistic binary.

First, Barnstone seems to be very generous to Nida. Here’s an excerpt from Barnstone’s book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (page 224):

Returning to mainstream linguistics and literature, the joining of what might be considered science and art has not been “a happy alliance,” to use the words of Henry G. Schogt in his recent book Linguisitics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation. I do not wish to denigrate the work of older pioneers in translation theory: Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Catford’s translation shifts and his application of Firth-Halliday linguistics to translation, Mounin’s linguistic techniques, which represent “un art fondé sur une science” (Problèmes théoriques 17), and the comparative discourse links expressed by the team of Jean-Paul Vinay and the late Jean Darbelnet (the latter my esteemed teacher) are all purely linguistic without reference to literature. Even Nida’s primary purpose has been to spread the Christian faith through denotative translations favoring “content over connotative and associative elements . . . content over form, and . . . decoder-oriented” (Schogt, Linguistics 104). Because their intentions and practice belong to linguistic theory, not literary analysis, they should not be reproached for what is neither their domain nor their intent.

Don’t reproach Nida, Barnstone suggests. But then he goes on to talk about the problems of Nida’s separation of his would-be communication-science linguistics from literature. Barnstone writes:

Disturbing, however, is the frequent expectation that linguistics provides a model for literary translation analysis and theory. We can easily identify the source of the temptation – translation, after all, ordinarily involves a linguistic activity between languages. So why not turn to linguistics for the theoretical frame of literary translation? Because to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literary translation is no more nor less reasonable than to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literature. Linguistics has essentially forsworn literary, and specifically literary translation, theory. That is its privilege and apparently for the moment its fate. Although linguistics and philosophy have largely ignored literary translation, their own work, forbidding to the nonlinguist, unnecessarily casts a shadow over the serious value of nonlinguistic approaches. Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . . it would be welcome.

Okay. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a blog post. I’d urge you to read Barnstone’s books, to see the various things he develops along these lines with respect to Nida and his reductive non-literary theory of translation. (For that matter, I would encourage you to read more of Nida for yourself. I’ll say more in comments if anybody is interested in what I’d recommend.)

Barnstone gets to another problem with Dynamic Equivalence, when he translates the New Testament and writes commentary on it. In his commentary, Barnstone identifies three different registers for translation. Notice three in contrast to simply an EITHER / OR two. Nida posits the simple binary:

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."

Nida writes of "Two [and only two] Basic Orientations in Translating," in his book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, on pages 120-21:

EITHER [1] translation has an orientation towards “formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," which “might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.”

OR [2] there is, “[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message.”

Barnstone rejects this binary. He says there may well be:

[1] a gloss for the reader who wants help with the source text [i.e., an interlinear] and [2] imitation for the ['translating'] writer who wants to collaborate with, adapt, or rewrite a precursor's [originally-authored] work....

There is also [nevertheless] [3] a middle ground between [1] gloss and [2] imitation, whose purpose is to hear the source author more clearly than the translator author (page 1290 of The Restored New Testament, Barnstone’s translation).

With respect to the Bible, an example Barnstone gives of [1] “a gloss” is “[t]he Jesus Seminar translation of the gospels... heavy in explanation and conceptualization of image and metaphor, [that] uses key words to clarify rather than to express.” This is Nida’s so-called “formal or literal equivalence.”

An illustration of [2] “imitation,” according to Barnstone, is “John Dominic Crossan's adroit transformations of Yeshua's sayings into minimalist poems.” For Nida, this would be closer to his ideal of “dynamic or functional equivalence.”

Finally, Barnstone’s alternative to these two is the more exemplary [3] “middle ground” translation approach, the approach that he says “is Tyndale's... autonomous restatement” and is also what Robert Alter is doing “in making the literal literary” with his translating of the Hebrew Bible.

As Barnstone himself attempts making the literal literary in translation of the New Testament, he says, “This is the difficult middle way.” He calls his work [3] “an autonomous text to be read in English as scripture. . . .” (pages 1289-91).

Barnstone gets his idea for [3] “the literal literary” not first from Bible translators such as Tyndale and Alter but from a translator of Homer's Odyssey: from Robert Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald began to translate Homer, he first asked Ezra Pound, “How?” Pound replied, “Let Homer say everything he wanted to say.” This was the middle way between [1] glossing Homer's Greek and [2] imitating it.

There is not doubt that this advice was unusual for Pound. The translator was one who's “normal practice” was never [1] to gloss but was normally [2] to take “tremendous freedoms” as he “imitated, and intimately collaborated with or overcame the author in his best translations from Anglo-Saxon and Chinese.” Barnstone adds: “and they may be his own best poems” not necessarily giving any credit whatsoever to the original authors. Nonetheless, Pound advises Fitzgerald [3] to take the middle way between [1] literal glossing and [2] dynamic or functional equivalence license.

Barnstone explains this [3] “middle ground” approach as “both literal and literary.” We might use Nida’s terms and call it “both formal and functional” and “both literal and dynamic.” Barnstone says:

    The translator in service of the source author becomes more invisible as the art intensifies, permitting the reader [3] to see Homer or Dante or the Bible and, as Pound suggested, [3] to hear them have their say. By contrast, in the inevitable collaboration between author and translator, as we move from [1] re-creation to [2] imitation, the earlier author tends to disappear, overcome by the voice of the translating author. (page 1292).

Nida, to be clear, advocates [2] the dynamic or functional imitation of the text's effect on receptors. Thus, I'd like to end the post now with a contrastive illustration of Nida's approach and Barnstone's.

In his entry "Bible translation," for the first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida gives an example of a translation of his from the New Testament. He writes:

Since the relevance of a message is not in the formal features of a text but in its semantic content, some measure of freedom is required if the target audience is to understand the biblical text. The heavy weight of tradition, however, often stifles a translator's creativity and obstructs a reader's comprehension. For example, most English-speakers have no idea what Hallowed be thy name (the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6:9) really means. The Greek text can be translated literally [1] as 'Sanctified be thy name', in which 'name' is a Semitic way of avoiding a direct reference to God, and 'sanctified' must refer not to the character of God, but to the manner in which He is recognized by peole as being truly God. Accordingly, it is more relevantly rendered [2] as May all people realize that you are God or Help us to honour you as God or even as Help us to honour your name. (page 26)

Barnstone, in contrast, avoids either [1] literally translating or [2] telling readers what must really be meant by the Hebraic Hellene ultimately rendered "relevantly" in a non-Jewish but English "reader-comprehensible" sense.

By the way, the Jewish Matthew translates and writes the spoken Jewish words of the Jewish Jesus to his Jewish audience by this Jewish Greek:

ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομα σου·

Barnstone works, likewise, to Let Matthew let Jesus say everything that he wanted to say. They give voice to Yeshua ben Yosef. "Yet hear that voice and hear a poet." Barnstone lets Matthew, who is Mattityahu, say everything that he wanted to say. He gives voice to Mattityahu:

hallowed be your name.

A literary literal rendering of a Jewish prayer. So who's stifled whom and who's obstructed what?

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.

Dynamic un-Equivalence: Nida v. Pike

This post may be the beginning of a series.  Mainly, I'm wanting to show that not all Bible translators are equal, that not even all of the Wycliffe Bible Translation / SIL translators of the bible are equal.  Hopefully, you'll be able to see that not all are nearly as reductive about the Bible, language, literature, linguistics, and translation as was Eugene Nida.

Nida passed away last week, and his simple now-famous notion of Dynamic Equivalence is getting revisited as it's getting blogged about this week.

Somebody else passed away last week also, and I want to blog about her this week.  In this post, I'd like to blog about her understandings of translating too.  What Nida wrote and propagated, so reductively, worked against her practices some.  So please stay tuned for more on this person and her translation work after we review Nida.

In the interests of trying to keep this post as brief as possible, let me just focus on "reductive" with respect to "translation."  Nida wrote,

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]:  one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."  

Nida is writing as if there is, fundamentally, reductively, just one choice.  Notice the "either / or" binary:

EITHER (A) translation is a "formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," and "[t]he type of translation which most completely typifies this structural equivalence might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original."

OR (B) there is, "[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message."

This is from Nida's book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, in his chapter "Principles of Correspondence," where he writes a section he entitles "Two Basic Orientations in Translating," on page 159.  Earlier in the book, Nida had already begun to develop his now-famous theory as the opposite of "formal equivalence."  Here is the title and first paragraph and first "toward-a-science-of-translating" figure of this chapter (on pages 120-21):

"THE DYNAMIC DIMENSION IN COMMUNICATION

Language consists of more than the meanings of the symbols and the combinations of symbols; it is essentially a code in operation, or, in other words, a code functioning for a specific purpose or purposes.  Thus we must analyze the transmission of a message in terms of a dynamic dimension.  This analysis is especially important for translating, since the production of equvalent messages is a process, not merely of matching the parts of utterances, but also of reproducing the total dynamic character of the communication.  Without both elements the results can scarcely be regarded, in any real sense, as equivalent."

The figure, ironically enough, is Nida's symbol or set of pure symbols by which he's explaining, again reductively, how language is "more than the meanings of the symbols and the combinations of the symbols."  Nida is reducing language to a very reductive model of "communication."  And this is his main point.  This is his main need:  to get rid of and to provide an alternative for what he calls "formal equivalence."  His main point is that the Bible can be reduced to a message and that all the rest, the symbols and their combinations and their meanings, is just fluff.  A message, dynamically, then is equivalent to "The Communique of God."  The Communique of God should come to you, whatever language you read, with "complete naturalness of expression," with "modes of behavior relevant within the context of [your] own culture," and without requiring "that [you] understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message."  It's as if Nida is saying, Forget the context of the Jews and their source languages; in your own natural expressions in the context of your own culture, then, comprehend the message.

Now, I already mentioned that somebody else died last week.  Her name is Eunice Victoria Pike.  She was an R.N., a Registered Nurse by professional training.  She was also a linguist, a literary one, who loved the Bible and worked on its translation.  She wrote a biography of her much more famous brother, Kenneth Lee Pike, and maybe that's how you might of heard of them.  Together, they co-authored a book on translation and on language entitled, Live Issues in Descriptive Linguistics.  Here's their pictures (the two youngest on the left with their other siblings, and then the two together a few years later) from Eunice's biography of Ken:

Ken would talk about how much in debt he was to Eunice, how much he learned from her (I know, because I heard him so talk in his home, when she was there, and in the classroom, talking about his theory of language and of translation, when she was not present).  I learned from her too in the lecture halls, while doing an M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington but going to the SIL campus in Dallas from time to time.  Last week, there was a sweet memorial service for her, not many attending at all, just Eunie's closest friends and her sister-in-law Evelyn.  The obituary has still not been published for her, and there won't be any mention of her on the websites of the United Bible Society or of Christianity Today.  Bloggers won't be remembering her influence on them or won't be arguing that her work is to be regarded as important.

You can find online how Valentina Pavlovna Wassona and R. Gordon Wasson published one of Eunice Pike's helpful letters to them in their book Mushrooms, Russia, and History: Volume II.   If you read it for yourself, you'll read how much they learned from Pike about mushrooms, about how she herself learned from others by listening and by interacting.  This reminded me of what she wrote for a larger audience in her book, An Uttermost Part, in the chapter, "Jehovah," in which she tells the story of letting the new testament, as a boy was reading it (right at I John 4:1), explain "that visions received through the hallucinatory mushroom were not messages from Christ" even though "[m]ost Mazatecs assumed [through syncretistic lore] that they were" (page 105).

Now that I've started you listening to some of the stories, why not listen to a few more "lived issues" in the descriptive linguistics and translation work of Pike?  She writes, in her book Words Wanted, of actually working with Nida to check her translation from Greek into Mazatec. 

"Dr. Nida sat with the Greek and the Spanish New Testament in front of him, and I with the Mazatec.  My job was to look at the Mazatec and give him a quick literal translation into English.  He compared what I said with the Greek, asked questions, and agreed or disagreed.

Among other things he pointed out that we had translated a number of Greek metaphors rather than the specific words.  One example was found in Acts 14:8.  'Being a cripple from his mother's womb' was the Greek expression, but no Mazatec ever says that.  'Ever since he was born,' Dr. Nida suggested.  He emphasized the fact that it was the message we were supposed to get across, not just words" (page 96).

It may sound as if Nida's corrective of Pike was one that she followed absolutely and without questioning.  However, if you keep reading, then you do hear in her story some of her reluctance on the very next page:

"We could even apply the suggestions Dr. Nida had made for the Book of Acts.  Well -- (sigh) -- O.K.  We would change [to make some revisions]" (page 96) 

Her view of language, of translation, is far more robust than his reductive notion is.  She saw the Greek in the book of Acts as meaningful, as important to learn from, even for an English reader.  Could the Greek letters and words and phrases be reduced to a message?  Did it have to merely and so baldly mean simply and only this message:  "Ever since he was born"?  Doesn't this translating rob the mother of her biology, of her womb, of her body?  And should the Mazatec then literally now equal the English, which only dynamically equaled then the Greek?  Do you see the problems that Nida's reductive either/ or approach causes?

As evidence of how much more astute Pike was about language than Nida, let's look at other things she observed.  She learned from her Mazatec-speaking friends that men, not women, will "whistle-talk."  This whistle-talk was not with speech, not with words, but was with the "symbols" of pitch.  The whistle-talk, moreover, was not a whistled song.  "A whistled song was smooth, almost continuous, whereas whistle-talk was punctuated with pauses [with pitches that] were limited [and was] slower and more stately than music."  She bemoaned the fact that she herself had never learned to whistle, not even a song.  But she laughed that being a woman gave her a pass:

"The only thing that saved me from being completely outclassed was the fact that in Mazatec culture women were not supposed to whistle.  They understood the men's whistle-talk, but unless they were tomboys they responded verbally [i.e., with spoken words, phrases, clauses, and sentences]" (page 30).

And Pike, a woman, learned whistle-talk, from a woman, no less:

"Ida was a tomboy, and she was not the least bit ashamed of whistling.  With her help we learned to recognize and approximate, 'Come here,' 'What do you want?', and a few other frequently used expressions.  Much of her teaching was done while we were walking, and I did pretty well on the level part of the trail, but after we had climbed a little while, I quit trying.  Ever-impatient Ida wanted to know why.  I told her that I had not any breath.  She chuckled and turned to her friend, 'Poor thing.  She left her breath down the path.  God down and get it for her" (page 30).

Notice several things from this story about Pike and her robust, non-reductive view of language and of translation:

1. She acknowledged sociolinguistic differences between men and women in speech acts.
2. She did not require women to obey the men's rules for whether woman could whistle-talk or not.
3. As a woman, she learned from another women to do only what men were to do.
4. The whistle-talk was full of discernible emic (insider) symbols and form and forms.
5. A merely dynamic equivalence of whistle-talk as only a message to be communicated would lose much meaning and much social interaction.
6. Communication, a message, was important in whistle-talk, but it wasn't the only important thing to be learned, performed, or translated.
7. She was humble, a learner, and relied on friendly people to teach her the significances of language.
8. She laughed and enjoyed word play and engaged in humor through puns and indirect and robust messages that were infinitely dimensioned.
9. She appreciated language as translatable, as messageS, as multi-modal, as varied within any given mode, as social, as gendered, as feminist-resistances, and on and on.

The above is not an exhaustive list.  I'm just making a few observations off the top of my head.  You should have more to make.

Lest we get so formulaic with these enumerations, let me give just one more story from Pike (and there are, oh, so many in the books I've already mentioned by her).  Here's the one in which she pays attention to learning and to teaching and to collaborative learning in Mazatec and its translation.  Listen, enjoy:

"[T]he subject [among us women] changed to the apron I was wearing.  It was a plastic apron, and one of the women asked me what it was called.  I was always startled when they asked me the name for something in Mazatec.  I was the one who was trying to learn their language, and it had not occurred to me that I could teach them any of it.  I answered with a word I thought appropriate, [the Mazatec phrase for] apron.

'Is that cloth?' asked one of the women and felt it.  Then I remembered that the parts that made up the [the Mazatec] word apron meant, 'cloth-put-against.'  No, it was not cloth -- so what should it be called?  The women discussed the problem.  First they wanted to know what it was actually made of.  They did not have a word for plastic, so the best I could dos was to tell them that it was something like rubber -- the word they used when describing any waterproof material.  The women tried out the combination 'rubber-put-against' but they rejected it.  Finally, a bit hesitatingly, they agreed on 'cloth-put-against-which-is-rubber,' that is, a 'rubber apron.'  That little incident helped me to see that the original meaning of word parts (like cloth) can be lost when the broader meaning of the compound has become well established.  Little hint like that helped me to be patient with visitors -- I was constantly learning from them -- and encouraged me to go calling" (page 33).

So what did she learn?  How did she theorize language and practice translation?  And what do you learn from Pike that Nida's reductive model would not allow?

What Turns Genesis Sexist and When

"This is God's good design.
A design for male headship -- leading, protecting, and providing for the woman.
A design for female submission -- submitting to and helping the man; a companion-helper 'fit for him.'
Some will be doubtful ... even upset by this teaching of God's good design for men and women."

This is an except, the above lines are, from a new curriculum for young people, entitled "Rejoicing in God's Good Design: A Study for Youth on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood."  It's co-authored "By Gary Steward and Sally Michael."  Is it any coincidence that he is named first and, then, she after him?  Is that part of the editor's design?  The "this" referred to in the first line here are several written out verses in Genesis, namely bits of "Genesis 1:28, 2:15, 18" and "Genesis 1:31."  (A similar study, by the same two co-writers, this man and woman pair, is called "The Design of the Creator: Man Created Male and Female" and starts in with "Genesis 1:24-28, 31a.")

Thanks to Suzanne for mentioning this as she blogs on "Women's orientation to work: part 1."  In connection with the curriculum for youth (which she notes is linked to by the Council on "Biblical" Manhood and Womanhood), Suzanne has readers look at "Gen. 2:15, 18 and Gen. 3:16-19."  Bob makes the helpful comment that in Genesis 3:16 the Greek translation ἀποστροφή for the Hebrew (תשוקה) turns the preferred CBMW meaning around.

I'm interested in what turns Genesis sexist.  And just when things turned sexist.  Who is confused?  The CBMW has one interpretation.  The man-first, woman-second team authors of this curriculum focus on the ostensible confusion caused when you don't focus rightly on these few verses.  The four-men-and-men-first "Team" helping these two authors and the same "Team" with eight more following women helping these two authors are all working against this confusion.  (Go ahead; click the link again and read their plea to focus on these verses and to avoid confusion about it's one CBMW interpretation.)

Suzanne, however, gets us reconsidering.  So consider what she writes:

So I want to look at alternate interpretation for Gen. 3:16. The consequences of the fall for the woman relate to childbearing and her relationship to her husband. The consequence of the fall for the man relates to the soil. The most obvious interpretation is that just as woman was taken out of man, so the fall returns her to man. And in the same way, as man was taken out of the soil, so he is returned to the soil. We need to consider that the story of Adam and Eve has internal plot coherency that is not necessarily related to universal truths about men and women.

And that's it.  Those trying to train youths to see God's design in nature as having women and females submit to men and males really make the most of one interpretation of just a few verses.  They want Adam after the fall into sin and Eve after the fall into sin to be the normative good design.

The only other thing I really want to add here is something Jane Williams has written.  In her online essay "The Book of Genesis, part 6: Patriarchs and others," Jane asks "What is to be made, theologically, of the unabashedly male-dominated, hierarchical world of Genesis?"  And she begins to answer by suggesting what Suzanne has suggested.  She's not just looking at a few verses to dogmatically train youths about "God's good [sexist] design" for all times.  She's looking at all of Genesis, at how it flows downhill quickly into confusion from the hint of something good.

Jane rather astutely says this:

Genesis is a patriarchal narrative, through and through. Its world is one where women exist entirely as adjuncts to men, and where safety and success for women lie in marriage and reproduction. Monogamy and sexual fidelity are not expected of men. It is also a world where slavery and servitude is taken for granted. So the person with the least control over her own destiny is the female servant.

If there is a hint at the beginning of Genesis that this state of affairs is not part of the original ideal, it is accepted as inevitable for the rest of the narrative. The creation stories seem to imply that there is equality and partnership between the man and the woman before "the fall", and that the division of people into different "tribes" comes from violence and betrayal, rather than being inbuilt. Later on in the Pentateuch, when Moses is given the law by God, to regulate the life of God's people and demonstrate God's values, some basic rights for women and "aliens" are enshrined. But these silver threads do not predominate in the male-dominated, hierarchical world of Genesis.

There are strong women in the patriarchal narratives, but their lives and their influence revolve around their husbands and children.

Proverbs 14 part vi: Gender in 2011

The Gender of Proverbs 14 in 2011

When writing Part II of this series, I had just read the official and public Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) statement against the NIV 2011 denouncing its gender inclusive English.  So we looked at Proverbs 14:12 in the NIV 1984 and also in the NIV 2011; and, in our discussion, we didn't stop short of looking at the proverb's translation from the potentially gender-neutral words of Hebrew and Greek:  ish (אִ֑ישׁ) and anthropois (ἀνθρώποις).   In Part III, we started in with Kristen's suggestion that "Perhaps the NIV 2011 was incorrect in leaving out that the word 'iysh' does appear here."  I'd also suggested that, in a later post, "we may get into the fact that, in Proverbs 14, the Hebraic Hellene translators from the Hebrew have in certain verses have really restricted the translation and have confined the meaning to men only, to males and not to females.  For example, in verses 7, 10, 30, 33 there are the words ἀνδρὶ, ἀνδρὸς, and ἀνὴρ [andri, andros, aner] that are not at all gender neutral or gender universal."  Now, in this Part VI, let's look carefully and closely at gender in all of Proverbs 14, in 2011, in English translation.

Let's do this because the gender words are the now-very-public problem that the official SBC men have with the NIV 2011.  I'm going to ask that you look with me at every English gendered word in five different translations of Proverbs 14.  The five are these:

1. the HCSB, produced by the SBC publishing house;

2. the ESV, which R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, also recommended to the SBC "for serious study" before the HCSB was produced;

3. the NIV1984, the old version which is less of a "profound disappointment" to the SBC men and less of an "inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture" in the eyes of the SBC resolvers because the older Bible did not have so much "use of gender-neutral [English] language";

4. the NIV2011, the newest version that really is now a publicly "profound disappointment" to the SBC men and really does seem to be an "inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture" in the eyes of the SBC resolvers because it really does have the "use of gender-neutral [English] language";

5. the NLT, the newest translation to just narrowly beat out the HCSB in familiarity among SBC pastors and to very widely to beat out the HCSB in familiarity among other Christian ministers in the USA.

So let's read these five English Bibles and compare their gendered words in Proverbs 14.  Let's read each verse, each proverb, below, in this order:  HCSB then ESV then  NIV1984, and then NIV2011 and last NLT.  I've highlighted with various colors the feminine, masculine, neuter (i.e., gender-neutral), and gender-inclusive nouns and pronouns.

I'll let you figure out which Hebrew and Greek nouns and pronouns are being translated from.  But can you also answer these English-only questions?

1.  In which proverbs below do all five translations agree with respect to the gender of the nouns and pronouns? 

2.  Are there any proverbs for which the HCSB does the "profoundly disappointing" thing of making "use of gender-neutral language"?  (Do look below for yourself.  Okay, let me answer:  YES.  Now can you tell me which verses in Proverbs 14 below the HCSB uses gender-neutral language for?)

3.  Are they any proverbs for which the HCSB makes MORE "use of gender-neutral language" than the other four translations?  Does the HCSB really make more "use of gender-neutral language" than the NIV 2011 in some of the proverbs noted below?  (Again, Yes.  So please note which proverbs.)

4.  Is there a proverb for which the HCSB genders "Wisdom" feminine?  Which one?

5.  Are there any proverbs for which the ESV does the profoundly disappointing thing of making "use of gender-neutral language"?  (Do look below for yourself.  Okay, let me answer:  YES.  Now can you tell me which verses in Proverbs 14 below the HCSB uses gender-neutral language for?)

6.  Are they any proverbs for which the ESV makes MORE "use of gender-neutral language" than the other four translations?  Does the ESV really make more "use of gender-neutral language" than the NIV 2011 in some of the proverbs noted below?  (Again, Yes.  So please note which ones.)

7.  Is there a proverb in which the NIV1984 makes God's gender inclusive?   YES.  And which one is it?

Please have a read for yourself.  Please feel free in comments to share your answers to the above questions or your thoughts about anything else you see here.  (Remember, the order of the trnaslation, verse by verse and proverb by proverb here, is HCSB, ESV,  NIV1984, NIV2011, and NLT.)

 

 

 

So what does the gender-neutral language of Proverbs 14 in the HCSB, the ESV, the NIV1984 and 2011, and the NLT say about the SBC men who have made their targeted resolution?  

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(Now, for anybody wanting it, here's a bit of the background on the controversy surrounding these words in 2011.  If you would like to read the SBC resolution against the NIV 2011 for yourself, Suzanne McCarthy links today to several bloggers who've quoted it directly and have given links to the primary sources.  

Moreover, for more background, since we're getting into the language of Proverbs 14 (language which Robert Alter refers to as ancient "Hebrew" poetry), you may also want to see this.  You may also want to how John Hobbins claims that "Old Testament scholars who blog have expressed dissatisfaction with the new NIV."  He links to 4 bloggers total, unless you also count him with his 2 links to his own blog.  He agrees with 3 and disagrees with the 4th.  However, 1 blogger John agrees with has mainly expressed only dissatisfaction with the advertising of the NIV 2011 and not with the gender-neutral language of the translation.   Likewise, another 1 has expressed dissatisfaction but not so much with the gender-inclusive English "beef" that the SBC has.  Then there's the 1 who does express dissatisfaction with the gender-neutral language of the NIV 2011, as the SBC resolvers have.  As mentioned, John includes himself among the dissatisfied, as 1 who shares the gender "beef" of the SBC men.  To be clear, John only links to 3 other "Old Testament scholars who blog who blog have expressed dissatisfaction" and only 1 of whom [other than himself] actually shares the gender "beef" of the official Southern Baptist men resolving to denounce the NIV 2011.  That John so far finds only 1 in agreement with him as he validates the resolution of the SBC men is important.  It's important because he goes on to mention 1 blogger with whom he has the disagreement, and John puts that this way:

So far as I know, the only blogger/ Biblia Hebraica scholar who offers praise for the new NIV is Joel Hoffman. He expressed satisfaction for the its gender-sensitive modifications of NIV 1984; he describes them as gender-accurate. These kind of changes satisfy some but raise the hackles of others. In Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist contexts – the largest church polities in the US – a reaction against gender-sensitive translation has set in.  Both faith traditions seek to retain a degree of independence from prevailing cultural trends. This is no doubt salutary. At the same time, it would be easy to build bridges across some of the divides if the debate were not dominated by Ninja warrior types on both sides.

It's curious the way John has put this.  He's called "salutary" what he sees as independent "Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist" efforts to resist cultural corruption, suggesting that the SBC resolution against the NIV 2011 and its language and its use and its sales is somehow a resolution against "cultural trends" that ostensibly must be reacted against.   And John has mentioned the "Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist" as if in some contrast to Joel, who self identifies not as a Catholic or a Baptist or even a Christian of any sort but as the child of someone who has built language bridges with Christians.  One of Joel's parents - also a blogger/ Biblia Hebraica scholar - says this:  "I am a liturgist. 'Liturgy' is a common enough word among Christians, but it does not flow trippingly off Jewish tongues, and I am not only Jewish but a rabbi to boot."  Here we have the SBC vs / the NIV2011 and "accurate" vs. / "inaccurate" and a few scholarly bloggers vs / the NIV2011 and John vs / Joel and "the largest church polities in the US" vs  / "prevailing cultural trends."  All these divisions.  These are important background to how we might read Proverbs 14 in 2011.  Sorry for the long digresssion.  [To see John's words here in 2011 on his "beef" with the words of the NIV 2011, go here. ])

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