Proverbs 14 Part V

 In the mouth of the dolt is a rod of pride,

but the lips of the wise will guard them.

--Proverbs 14:3

(trans., Robert Alter)

Aristotle tells us that... 

creatures who are brave or just 

(like lions, bulls, roosters 

and the human male) 

have large deep voices....

The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn 

on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: 

as the women of Athens are about to 

infiltrate the Athenian assembly 

and take over political process, 

the feminist leader Praxagora reassures 

her fellow female activists that 

they have precisely the right kind of 

voices for this task.

--Men in the Off Hours 

 (by Anne Carson) 

This Part V of a series could be entitled, "How Aristotle Reads Proverbs 14."  He would want to construct the category that is, above all, the normal one in Nature.  /  And from that he would categorize the other as lesser, perhaps deviant.

But there are those who turn his categories around and upside down.  In this post, I'm hoping that we can see how the proverb we call "Proverbs 14:3" in Hebrew and especially in Greek translation turns the cliché, natural order of hierarchical categories.  Let's come back to that in a while.  First, let's look at how someone recently has categorized translation of the Bible, and other alternatives.  Then, we can read the biblical proverb, and its translation, to see how it goes.

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1. How someone recently has categorized translation of the Bible, 

and other alternatives.

Earlier in the week, John Hobbins sharply divided Bible translations into two constructed categories:

EITHER 

 “translations committed above all to reproducing the wording and register of the original, translating metaphors with metaphors, and sounding strange wherever the thought and language of the source text is strange relative to our cultural matrix.”     /

OR “translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression”

John placed into his latter category (quoted above) only and all the Bible translations that he presumed that Wayne Leman and all the bloggers at BBB must surely favor.  He himself favors his former category.  Unfortunately, John didn't give a single example of any translated text of the Bible to justify his categories.  In reply, Wayne made this plea:  "I hope John can find time to turn his thoughts on translation into a series which will give examples of translation which could be compared with how we might prefer to translate here at BBB."  

Suzanne McCarthy did offer examples.  This is what Wayne was asking for but what John himself did not supply.  And, interestingly, these examples do allow us to begin questioning this binary "EITHER / OR" thinking.  In a helpful comment, she showed how the first translators of the Bible are in the category where John assigns Wayne:

One can also see the odd functional translation in the LXX. Moses was described as saying

ἐγὼ δὲ ἄλογός εἰμι
ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἰσχνόφωνός εἰμι

Is there perhaps a cultural reason why this metaphor was not translated?  Perhaps there are times when strangeness does indicate that the metaphor should be abandoned.

Notice how Suzanne is allowing that that functional clarity in these translation examples may include "strangeness" even when the translators decide that an unusual "metaphor should be abandoned."  There's not the absolute binary that John might force the translation into, either one way or the other.

What her examples show is how the Greek translations of Exodus 6:12 and Exodus 6:30 do not convey (ערל שפתים) -- the strange embodied female-male Hebrew metaphor of "lips"-"un-circumcised."  Instead, the Jewish translators use differently-strange but clear Hellene.  They first use (ἄ - λογός), which is literally something like "lacking"-"word" in 6:12.  And, in 6:30, they use the un-common Greek compound (ἰσχνό - φωνός), which is literally something like "meager"-"sound" for the Hebrew phrase.  The Greek much more clearly represents the problem Moses is trying to convey to God in protest:  he feels he lacks the words to go back into Egypt and to make his political argument; he is concerned that he will sound only meager in the courts of Pharaoh.  Suzanne has translated these Greek phrases as "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)," which give us a bit of the range of metaphorical extensions in the Greek.  The phrases are rare, strange, but clear in the LXX.  (The latter phrase is not in the NT, and that former phrase is only thrice used, uncommonly, in the NT, but not as some sort of Greek biblish; rather as just rather technical Platonic Greek - as in Acts 25:27, Peter 2:12, and Jude 1:10).

The Greek or Hellene strangeness was clearer and maybe more acceptable to the Greek readers of the Alexandrian empire.  The Hebrew metaphor was strange among the Greek colonizers.  But it was strange among the religious Jews worldwide only because of the idea of "lips" being "circumcised."  It's one thing for a Jewish male to be circumcised.  But his lips?  Naomi Seidman discusses how normal and natural penis circumcision was but suggests that to extend this to lips is strange and unclear in any context:

In passages like this one [i.e., Genesis Rabbah 46.1], the rabbis expressed their conviction that circumcision is an improvement over nature, the enhancement of an otherwise imperfect human form.  The circumcised body is not mutilated in removing the foreskin....  Circumcision, then has multiple significations beyond its biblical meaning of a covenant connecting the Jewish people with their God; it is a marker of Jewish affiliation for native Jews and proselytes, an act and symbol of resistance to imperial legislation, the final step toward aesthetic perfection, a bodily representation of Hebrew discourse, the access to Torah that constitutes a barrier for non-Jews and non-males, and perhaps also a sign of linguistic talent (remembering the biblical diagnosis of Moses' influent speech as "uncircumcised lips").

The above is from page 89 of Naomi Seidman's book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation.  What she is saying that some rabbis have said actually bears repeating:  "circumcision is an improvement over nature," but it's an improvement that inherently separates Jewish males from "non-Jews and non-males."  What she's suggesting that Moses might have said is that "uncircumcised lips" is a personal problem that is to be "diagnosed," an individual affliction that separates him from performing the political discourse that he's been called to as a Jewish male circumcised.  Having lips circumcised, metaphorically, could be a critical improvement for this man of the Hebrews.

It's not too much of a stretch, metaphorically, to see this as a gendered problem.  The "lips" are often in the Hebrew scriptures associated with women.  For example, here is the start of Alter's note for his translation of Proverbs 5:3 (with his italics and his bold font):

the stranger-woman's lips drip honey.  The sensual ripeness of the alliteration in the Hebrew nofet titofna siftey zarah has a nearly identical counterpart in Song of Songs 4:11.  In the translation, "lips drip" is a gesture toward this cluster of sound. 

And here Suzanne calls "the lips" (absent from the Sefer Yetsira, perhaps a "masculinist text") "feminine imagery." She says that Julia Smith's English translation of the "story of the tower" of Babel does bring this imagery across.  However, Suzanne cautions us to note:

While lip in Hebrew is one common way to talk about language, along with tongue, it does not usually appear in English. The lip came to represent the feminine, receptivity and passivity.

In other words, the masculinist way of considering the feminine is to categorize it as a lack, an absence from the necessary message, as having not so much productivity but receptivity and as not engaged in activity but actually devolving into passivity.  Is this why the LXX translators chose not to render the Hebrew metaphor used by Moses of himself in Exodus?  Suzanne asks questions, and adds this:

These are my questions and not my answers. But we do know for sure that the translators of the Septuagint chose to use dynamic equivalence in translation instead of a foreignizing oddness when they felt they needed to. No sign of a circumcision of the lips here.

Naomi Seidman stops short of offering the possibility that the strange Greek is a gendered dynamic equivalent of the strangely-gendered Hebrew metaphor.  However, she does consider one version of the LXX translator motivations:

The [Church] Fathers imagine the Jewish translators as passive channels of God’s [clear] message to the world;

To turn this around, however:

in the [contrastive] talmudic account God works to keep certain things [very clear and clearly] between the Jews and himself [i.e., away from the Greek and the Egyptian worlds], not only sanctioning Jewish conspiracy but taking the role of conspirator-in-chief.  In this regard, the talmudic rewriting of the [Christian] patristic Septuagint legend is a trickster text: the [Jewish] translator is a trickster, who in folklore ‘represents the weak, whose wit can at times achieve ambiguous victories against the powers of the strong.’ Not only does the Talmud present the composition of the Septuagint as an elaborate Jewish trick, it also describes the passages in the Hebrew Bible itself as a ‘hidden transcript,’ the private discourse of a minority culture. [page 63]

Notice how the "Fathers imagine the Jewish translators as passive," and remember how "lip came to represent the feminine, receptivity and passivity."  Could there be something gendered in the Greek translation of Exodus 6?  Or could the act of translation itself be gendered feminin-ish:  clear, and yet foreign and still gendered in a strange way?  Why the lack of the lips for the Greek speaking Moses?  But then again, why "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)"?

Well, pardon me for suggesting that the LXX translators were resisting using Aristotle's Greek.  His masculinist logic was exactly what he taught Alexander to use, for his ruthless ends.  And so, in Alexandria, in Egypt, the Greek-speaking Jews translating their own scriptures from their own Hebrew, might have wanted to turn things a bit.

Is this so unlike what Anne Carson reminds us that Aristophanes's women do?  Here's the fuller context of this post's epigraph above:

     It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”).  [See how Aristotle puts this in one of his biological treatises, History of Animals 582a, and in Physiognomics 807a, where he himself has to vocalize nothing, since Aristotle there is a writer to readers, male to other males.]

     The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get fucked a lot.”

     This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle [writing On the Generation of Animals 787b-788] is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.

Is it better to translate strange metaphor for the same strange metaphor (maintaining "un-circumcised lips") in both the Hebrew and the Greek?  Or is there an-other purpose behind translating one strange gendered metaphor for a different one?  In the world of Aristotle's masculinist binary logic, rhetoric for males only, doesn't "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)" turn his cliché?

--

2.  reading the biblical proverb, and its translation

Now we turn to Proverbs 14:3.

בְּֽפִי־֭אֱוִיל חֹ֣טֶר גַּאֲוָ֑ה וְשִׂפְתֵ֥י חֲ֝כָמִ֗ים תִּשְׁמוּרֵֽם׃

ἐκ στόματος ἀφρόνων βακτηρία ὕβρεως χείλη δὲ σοφῶν φυλάσσει αὐτούς

"In the mouth of the dolt is a rod of pride, but the lips of the wise will guard them." - Robert Alter (from the Hebrew and Greek)

"In the mouth of the foolish one a rod of pride; and the lips of the wise shall watch them." - Julia Smith (from only the Hebrew)

"Out of the mouth of fools comes a rod of pride; but the lips of the wise preserve them." - Lancelot Brenton (from only the Greek)

It's striking here is how seemingly literal the Greek translation of the Hebrew is.  Are the Hebrew metaphors strange?  Gendered?  Are the Greek metaphors also both equally strange and gendered?

Yes,

but do note how Aristotle would read this.  He would get the allusions to women although he'd not want to concede that they may be either rhetorically saavy or politically wise.  Maybe females could be sophistic.  But as speakers, especially as political speakers, they'd be useless.

In his Athenian Constitution, he prohibits women from the judicial and the legislative processes.  Only the men can have rods, which some English translators have rendered "canes," "staff," or "staves."  The word he chooses is the one the LXX translators have chosen for the "dolt" in Proverbs 14:3; in the Athenian Constitution, Aristotle describes the male-only instrument for procedures:

The courts [in Athens are to] have ten entrances, one for each tribe, twenty rooms, two for each tribe, in which courts are allotted to jurors [who are men, not women], a hundred small boxes, ten for each tribe, and other boxes into which the tickets of the jurymen drawn by lot are thrown, and two urns. Staves [βακτηρίαι] are placed at each entrance, as many as there are jurymen, and acorns to the same number as the staves [βακτηρίαις] are thrown into the urn, and on the acorns are written the letters of the alphabet, starting with the eleventh, lambda, as many as the courts that are going to be filled. [63.2, trans. by H. Rackham]

Aristotle would not have thought of Aristophanes's play as funny in the least.  Here's a bit where the lead woman is encouraging another woman to pretend to be a man of the court, to trick the court's audience, while the audience of the play is in on the trick:

Praxagora:  Quick then [disguised woman], take the chaplet; the time's running short. Try to speak worthily, let your language be truly manly, and lean on your staff [βακτηρίᾳ] with dignity. [line 150, trans. Eugene O'Neill]

So Aristotle would only allow only men who speak in politics to have the "rod," the staff, βακτηρίᾳ.  But he would think in terms of lips [χείλη] and open mouths [στόματος] when he categorized women, who were to be wives, to bear babies.  Here's from his gynecological writings:

It is a sign of conception in women when the place is dry immediately after intercourse. If the lips of the orifice [τὰ χείλη ᾖ τοῦ στόματος, literatlly "the lips of the mouth"] be smooth conception is difficult, for the matter slips off; and if they be thick it is also difficult. But if on digital examination the lips feel somewhat rough and adherent, and if they be likewise thin, then the chances are in favour of conception. Accordingly, if conception be desired, we must bring the parts into such a condition as we have just described; but if on the contrary we want to avoid conception then we must bring about a contrary disposition. [Hist. of An., 583a, trans., D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson]

If Aristotle or Alexander or any Athenian male trained in good Greek were to read the LXX Proverbs 14:3, then immediately they would read (or mis-read) it as strange, as gendered, but as a reversal of the Aristotelian logical belief that females are inherently lesser than males, that women are not to engage in rhetoric or politics, and that women are just tricky like the sophists but not at all wise.  The Hebrew proverb in Hebraic Hellene actually mirrors the Hebrew feminine metaphors, but it takes them forward into political dimensions as well.

Is it just either one sort of translation or the other?

EITHER 

 one of those “translations committed above all to reproducing the wording and register of the original, translating metaphors with metaphors, and sounding strange wherever the thought and language of the source text is strange relative to our cultural matrix.”     /  ?

OR one of those “translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression”?

Well, not exactly.  Doesn't Proverbs 14:3 in Greek turn the constructs of the imperial Greek males and the royal Egyptian men all around?  Is it the ones with the rods who are wise?  The rods for males only?  Or are the rods jammed in their proud mouths?  Hasn't protection, rather, come from the lips that are wise?  What a funny wise turn, resisting the binary, from the feminine Hebrew to the feminine Hellene.

Hebrew "King": Mama moving waters, Like rain showering, Cupped hands receiving

from Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, and her post Yom Kippur 5770:

5. King

The word מלך, "king," is a prevalent metaphor in the High Holiday liturgy. We can see this through a new lens if we unpack the individual letters of the word:

• מ / mem: this letter can be found in the mmm of mama and ima, the m-sound at the beginning of the word mayyim (waters, both cosmic and otherwise). Mem is a letter of motherhood and water.
  
• ל / lamed: this letter begins up high, then takes a crooked path to reach the ground below. Like the flow of divine abundance which begins on high and divagates as it reaches us; like our lives, which start out straight but always wind up complicated. Lamed is a channel from high to low.
  
• כ / chaf: this letter is cupped, like hands brought together to receive.
  

These three letters flow together sequentially in the alef-bet. Here in our liturgy they speak to us of divine kingship or sovereignty -- and they also speak to us of the root metaphor of motherhood and divine flow, coming down through its crooked channels into our hands.
Before reciting the ha-Melech prayer on Yom Kippur morning, Simcha Zevit gives over this teaching in the name of Reb Marcia Prager, and then invites us to rise and embody it: hands waving above our heads like the rish-rush of the waters, then twisting and flowing down toward the ground, then cupped to receive abundance and then to offer it to someone else in the room. Suddenly melech doesn't seem to be so much about power-over anymore.

evidence of feminine language in description of Jesus

Suzanne wrote a post today called "More feminine language for God."  She points us to Damian's post today, "Even more evidence of feminine language in description of God."  He points us to a comment from James K. A. Smith who points us to "a further reference in Augustine to ’suckling on the Breast of Jesus’ in his sermons on John or 1 John." Damian says of that last bit "but I couldn’t find evidence of it."  Interesting.

Well I confess I haven't bothered to go looking for the Breast.  And I doubt as many care about Augustine as they do about the New Testament writers.  Therefore, below I do show evidence of how four gospel writers show women and Jesus together.  And eventually one of them shows Jesus behaving like those women, modeling and exemplifying for his apprentices ways of being and of doing (like women, feminine perhaps like God.)

After the gospel writers' Hellene comes my English, which some comes from Willis Barnstone's Hebrew.  It's about as transparent as possible, from Mark 14, Matthew 26, Luke 7, and John 12 & then 13.

Καὶ ὄντος αὐτοῦ ἐν Βηθανίᾳ, ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ Σίμωνος τοῦ λεπροῦ, κατακειμένου αὐτοῦ, ἦλθεν γυνὴ ἔχουσα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτελοῦς· καὶ συντρίψασα τὴν ἀλάβαστρον, κατέχεεν αὐτοῦ κατὰ τῆς κεφαλῆς. Ἦσαν δέ τινες ἀγανακτοῦντες πρὸς ἑαυτούς, καὶ λέγοντες, Εἰς τί ἡ ἀπώλεια αὕτη τοῦ μύρου γέγονεν; Ἠδύνατο γὰρ τοῦτο τὸ μύρον πραθῆναι ἐπάνω τριακοσίων δηναρίων, καὶ δοθῆναι τοῖς πτωχοῖς. Καὶ ἐνεβριμῶντο αὐτῇ.  Ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν, Ἄφετε αὐτήν· τί αὐτῇ κόπους παρέχετε; Καλὸν ἔργον ἠργάσατο ἐν ἐμοί.

And while he was in Poverty's House [בית עניא / Beth Anya, bethany], in the house of Shimon [שמעון] the AIDS patient, he was reclining.  A woman came with an alabaster jar of myrrh perfume, that pure and extravagantly expensive spikenard ointment.  Breaking the alabastar jar she poured it on his head.  So, some stir up each of the others by saying, "Why would someone waste the myrrh?  It could've been sold for three hundred Silver Tenths [Denarii, denarion] and given to the poor!" And they provoked her.  So, Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ , ya'hoshua] said, "Let go of her!  Why would someone pour trouble on her?  It's a good, beautiful work she's worked in me."

--Mark's telling & translating, and my translating Mark

Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ γενομένου ἐν Βηθανίᾳ ἐν οἰκίᾳ Σίμωνος τοῦ λεπροῦ, προσῆλθεν αὐτῷ γυνὴ ἀλάβαστρον μύρου ἔχουσα βαρυτίμου, καὶ κατέχεεν ἐπὶτὴν κεφαλὴν αὐτοῦ ἀνακειμένου. Ἰδόντες δὲ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ ἠγανάκτησαν, λέγοντες, Εἰς τί ἡ ἀπώλεια αὕτη; Ἐδύνατο γὰρ τοῦτο μύρον πραθῆναι πολλοῦ, καὶ δοθῆναι πτωχοῖς. Γνοὺς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Τί κόπους παρέχετε τῇ γυναικί; Ἔργον γὰρ καλὸν ἠργάσατο εἰς ἐμέ.

So, when Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ , ya'hoshua] was in Poverty's House [בית עניא / Beth Anya], in the house of Shimon [שמעון] the AIDS patient, a woman came with an alabaster jar of precious myrrh perfume, and she poured it on his head, as he's kicking back for dinner.  So, seeing that, his apprentices get stirred up by saying, "Why would someone waste that?  That myrrh could've made an extra excess, and it could've been given to the poor.  So, getting an earful, Joshua said, "Why would someone pour trouble on this woman?  It's a work of beautiful goodness she's worked into me." 

--Matthew's telling & translating, and my translating Matthew

Καὶ ἰδού, γυνὴ ἐν τῇ πόλει, ἥτις ἦν ἐν τῇ πόλει ἁμαρτωλός, καὶ ἐπιγνοῦσα ὅτι ἀνάκειται ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ τοῦ Φαρισαίου, κομίσασα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου, καὶ στᾶσα ὀπίσω παρὰ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ κλαίουσα τοῖς δάκρυσιν, ἤρξατο βρέχειν τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ τοῖς δάκρυσιν, καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσεν, καὶ κατεφίλει τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἤλειφεν τῷ μύρῳ. Ἰδὼν δὲ ὁ Φαρισαῖος ὁ καλέσας αὐτὸν εἶπεν ἐν ἑαυτῷ λέγων, Οὗτος, εἰ ἦν προφήτης, ἐγίνωσκεν ἂν τίς καὶ ποταπὴ ἡ γυνὴ ἥτις ἅπτεται αὐτοῦ, ὅτι ἁμαρτωλός ἐστιν....   Καὶ στραφεὶς πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα, τῷ Σίμωνι ἔφη, Βλέπεις ταύτην τὴν γυναῖκα; Εἰσῆλθόν σου εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν, ὕδωρ ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας μου οὐκ ἔδωκας· αὕτη δὲ τοῖς δάκρυσιν ἔβρεξέν μου τοὺς πόδας, καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμαξεν.  Φίλημά μοι οὐκ ἔδωκας· αὕτη δέ, ἀφ’ ἧς εἰσῆλθον, οὐ διέλιπεν καταφιλοῦσά μου τοὺς πόδας.  Ἐλαίῳ τὴν κεφαλήν μου οὐκ ἤλειψας· αὕτη δὲ μύρῳ ἤλειψέν τοὺς πόδας μου. 

And look, a woman "in the city," she's certainly there in the city, a sinner.  And knowing that he's going to be kicking back for dinner in the house of the Separatist, she brought in an alabaster jar of myrrh perfume.  And standing behind his feet, she was crying, streaming tears, beginning to wet his feet with the tears.  And with the hair of her head she was moping them.  And she was kissing his feet.  And she was slathering the myrrh perfume.  So, look, the Separatist who'd invited him said to himself:  "This one, if he were a prophet, should know what sort of someone this woman is, someone who "touches" him, that she's a sinner....  And turning toward the woman, Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ , ya'hoshua] said to Shimon [שמעון] the Separatist, "Pay attention to this woman.  I come into your house.  Water on my feet?  There's none given!  So, her tears wet my feet.  And with the hair of her head she mops up.  Kisses for me?  There's none given.  So, she from the moment she comes in, there's not stopping her from kissing my feet.  Oil for my head?  There's none slathered on.  So, she slathers her myrrh perfume on my feet."

--Luke's telling & translating, and my translating Luke

Ὁ οὖν Ἰησοῦς πρὸ ἓξ ἡμερῶν τοῦ Πάσχα ἦλθεν εἰς Βηθανίαν, ὅπου ἦν Λάζαρος, ὃν ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν  Ἰησοῦς.  Ἐποίησαν οὖν αὐτῷ δεῖπνον ἐκεῖ, καὶ ἡ Μάρθα διηκόνει· ὁ δὲ Λάζαρος εἷς ἦν ἐκ τῶν ἀνακειμένων σὺν αὐτῷ.  Ἡ οὖν Μαριὰμ  λαβοῦσα λίτραν μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτίμου, ἤλειψεν τοὺς πόδας τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, καὶ ἐξέμαξεν ταῖς θριξὶν αὐτῆς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ· ἡ δὲ οἰκία ἐπληρώθη ἐκ τῆς ὀσμῆς τοῦ μύρου.  Λέγει οὖν εἷς ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ, Ἰούδας Σίμωνος Ἰσκαριώτης, ὁ μέλλων αὐτὸν παραδιδόναι, Διὰ τί τοῦτο τὸ μύρον οὐκ ἐπράθη τριακοσίων δηναρίων, καὶ ἐδόθη πτωχοῖς; ....  Εἶπεν οὖν ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Ἄφες αὐτήν·   ἵνα εἰς τὴν ἡμέραν τοῦ ἐνταφιασμοῦ μου τηρήσῃ αὐτό.

Then, Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ , ya'hoshua] six days before Passover [פֶּסַח Pesach] went into in Poverty's House [בית עניא / Beth Anya], where Elazar [אֶלְעָזָר , lazaros] was, raised out of his corpse state by Joshua.  Then, they prepared supper for him there.  And Martha served.  So Elazar was one of the ones kicking back with him.  Then, Miriam  [מִרְיָם , mariam] took a pound of myrrh perfume, that pure and extravagantly expensive spikenard ointment.  She slathered it on the feet of Joshua.  And she moped with her hair his feet.  So, the house filled with the smell of the myrrh pouring out.  Then, there came this statement out of an apprentice of his -  Judah [יְהוּדָה , ioudas] of Keriot - the one about to give him up in betrayal:  "Huh? why wasn't this myrrh of someone's not sold for three hundred Silver Tenths [Denarii, denarion] and given to the poor?!"  Then, Joshua said, "Let go of her!  so that until the day when I'm put in the ground, she keeps it."

Πρὸ δὲ τῆς ἑορτῆς τοῦ Πάσχα, εἰδὼς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὅτι ἐλήλυθεν αὐτοῦ ἡ ὥρα ἵνα μεταβῇ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου πρὸς τὸν πατέρα, ἀγαπήσας τοὺς ἰδίους τοὺς ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, εἰς τέλος ἠγάπησεν αὐτούς.   Καὶ δείπνου γενομένου, τοῦ διαβόλου ἤδη βεβληκότος εἰς τὴν καρδίαν Ἰούδα Σίμωνος Ἰσκαριώτου ἵνα αὐτὸν παραδῷ, εἰδὼς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὅτι πάντα δέδωκεν αὐτῷ ὁ πατὴρ εἰς τὰς χεῖρας, καὶ ὅτι ἀπὸ θεοῦ ἐξῆλθεν καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ὑπάγει, ἐγείρεται ἐκ τοῦ δείπνου, καὶ τίθησιν τὰ ἱμάτια, καὶ λαβὼν λέντιον διέζωσεν ἑαυτόν.  Εἶτα βάλλει ὕδωρ εἰς τὸν νιπτῆρα, καὶ ἤρξατο νίπτειν τοὺς πόδας τῶν μαθητῶν, καὶ ἐκμάσσειν τῷ λεντίῳ ᾧ ἦν διεζωσμένος.  Ἔρχεται οὖν πρὸς Σίμωνα Πέτρον· καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ ἐκεῖνος, Κύριε, σύ μου νίπτεις τοὺς πόδας;  Ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Ὃ ἐγὼ ποιῶ, σὺ οὐκ οἶδας ἄρτι, γνώσῃ δὲ μετὰ ταῦτα.

So, before the feast of Passover [פֶּסַח Pesach], Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ , ya'hoshua] had the idea that his moment had arrived in order he was stepping out of this world to go to Daddy.  He had loved his own in the world; into "the end" he had loved them.  And as supper time came, the devil had already placed into the heart of Judah [יְהוּדָה , ioudas], son of Shimon [שמעון] of Keriot, that he should give him up in betrayal.  Joshua had the idea that everything had been given him by Daddy into his hand and that from God he had come and to that God he was going.  He raised himself out of his seat at supper, and dropped the robe, and took a towel of linen as his girdle.  Now, he tossed water into the wash pan and began to wash the feet of the apprentices and to mop up with the linen towel which was that girdle around.  Then, he went to Shimon [שמעון], Rock [petros].  And made this statement to him, "Master, you're washing my feet?"  Joshua retorted, and said to him, "What I'm creating, you can't understand yet.  So, you'll know about it after this."

--John's telling & translating, and my translating John

What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap?

April DeConick says, "Alright, the gender gap among bibliobloggers is appalling. The gender gap has nothing to do with the internet or women being afraid to blog or publicly speak our minds since women do this in many other internet forums."

At her blog, The Forbidden Gospels, she goes on to make a proposal for what we are going to do about the blogger gender gap! Her hypothesis and proposal:

So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven't been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: "But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

So I say, enough of this nonsense and rationalizations. This is what I'm going to do. This weekend when I have more time, I am going to get the women bibliobloggers (all of them) into my sidebar blog roll. I am going to start with this list that Biblioblog Top 50 has so kindly put together on women's blogs (their so-called marginal blogs). And if any of my women readers have biblioblogs not in that list, or if any of my readers know of other women bibliobloggers not in that list, send that information to me and I will add it to the blog roll. Those links will be there for anyone who wishes to copy them and get them into their own blog rolls.

So feel free to join in! April links to her email address at her own blog. Read that full post, and feel free to do something about the blogger gender gap.

(To be clear, I myself am not blogging. Just relisting my old blogroll of the blogs of many of you whose blogs many men in the biblioblogosphere may have considered "marginal." It's here now both in an RSS feed form and in the sidebar (individual links) format. For those of you sifting thru, you'll find blogs by some who've stopped blogging, many who are feminists, many who are bibliobloggers, and some who are feministbibliobloggers. The point is there are many who "post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible" and there are many more to recognize.)