A Speech on Earth Day, from Aspasia

While it's still Earth Day, maybe you'll be interested in reading what Aspasia said. 

Here is some of what Aspasia said in a speech she wrote.  It's translated by Walter R. M. Lamb in 1925 AD, after it's translated by Benjamin Jowett in 1914 AD, after it's written by Plato in 386 BC, as if Socrates is reading it after Aspasia wrote it some time earlier.  It's in Plato's dialogue Menexenus, which ends with a dispute over whether a woman could really speak so eloquently (or could compose a speech so eloquent).  Much of the point I'm making here is that you have to wade through a lot of stuff men say to hear her.  And none of them gets her earthy mother wordplay (which is highlighted for us below), which I do think the first bible translators of the first book of the bible do get very very well.

(Lamb's version:)

Socrates
There, Menexenus, you have the oration of Aspasia,

Menexenus
And by Zeus, Socrates, Aspasia, by your account, deserves to be congratulated if she is really capable of composing a speech like that, woman though she is.

Socrates
Nay, then, if you are incredulous, come along with me and listen to a speech from her own lips.

Menexenus
I have met with Aspasia many a time, Socrates, and I know well what she is like.

Socrates
Well, then, don't you admire her, and are you not grateful to her now for her oration?

Menexenus
Yes, I am exceedingly grateful, Socrates, for the oration to her or to him—whoever it was that repeated it to you; and what is more, I owe many other debts of gratitude to him that repeated it.

Socrates
That will be fine! Only be careful not to give me away, so that I may report to you later on many other fine political speeches of hers.

Menexenus
Have no fear: I won't give you away; only do you report them.

Socrates
Well, it shall be done.

(Jowett's version:)

SOCRATES: You have heard, Menexenus, the oration of Aspasia the Milesian.

MENEXENUS: Truly, Socrates, I marvel that Aspasia, who is only a woman, should be able to compose such a speech; she must be a rare one.

SOCRATES: Well, if you are incredulous, you may come with me and hear her.

MENEXENUS: I have often met Aspasia, Socrates, and know what she is like.

SOCRATES: Well, and do you not admire her, and are you not grateful for her speech?

MENEXENUS: Yes, Socrates, I am very grateful to her or to him who told you, and still more to you who have told me.

SOCRATES: Very good. But you must take care not to tell of me, and then at some future time I will repeat to you many other excellent political speeches of hers.

MENEXENUS: Fear not, only let me hear them, and I will keep the secret.

SOCRATES: Then I will keep my promise.


(Lamb's version of a bit of Aspasia's speech:)

For every creature that brings forth possesses a suitable supply of nourishment for its offspring; and by this test it is manifest also whether a woman be truly a mother or no, if she possesses no founts of nourishment for her child. Now our land, which is also our mother, furnishes to the full this proof of her having brought forth men; for, of all the lands that then existed, she was the first and the only one to produce human nourishment, namely the grain of wheat and barley, whereby the race of mankind is most richly and well nourished, inasmuch as she herself was the true mother of this creature. And proofs such as this one ought to accept more readily on behalf of a country than on behalf of a woman; for it is not the country that imitates the woman in the matter of conception and birth, but the woman the country. But this her produce of grain she did not begrudge to the rest of men, but dispensed it to them also. And after it she brought to birth for her children the olive, sore labor's balm. And when she had nurtured and reared them up to man's estate, she introduced gods to be their governors and tutors; the names of whom it behoves us to pass over in this discourse, since we know them; and they set in order our mode of life, not only in respect of daily business, by instructing us before all others in the arts, but also in respect of the guardianship of our country, by teaching us how to acquire and handle arms.

(Jowett's version of that same bit of Aspasia's speech:)

For as a woman proves her motherhood by giving milk to her young ones (and she who has no fountain of milk is not a mother), so did this our land prove that she was the mother of men, for in those days she alone and first of all brought forth wheat and barley for human food, which is the best and noblest sustenance for man, whom she regarded as her true offspring. And these are truer proofs of motherhood in a country than in a woman, for the woman in her conception and generation is but the imitation of the earth, and not the earth of the woman. And of the fruit of the earth she gave a plenteous supply, not only to her own, but to others also; and afterwards she made the olive to spring up to be a boon to her children, and to help them in their toils. And when she had herself nursed them and brought them up to
manhood, she gave them Gods to be their rulers and teachers, whose names are well known, and need not now be repeated. They are the Gods who first ordered our lives, and instructed us in the arts for the supply of our daily needs, and taught us the acquisition and use of arms for the defence of the country.

(Plato's version of what Socrates read, the wordplayful bit of earthy Aspasia's speech:)

πᾶν γὰρ τὸ τεκὸν τροφὴν ἔχει ἐπιτηδείαν ᾧ ἂν τέκῃ, ᾧ καὶ γυνὴ δήλη τεκοῦσά τε ἀληθῶς καὶ μή, ἀλλ’ ὑποβαλλομένη, ἐὰν μὴ ἔχῃ πηγὰς τροφῆς τῷ γεννωμένῳ. ὃ δὴ καὶ ἡ ἡμετέρα γῆ τε καὶ μήτηρ ἱκανὸν τεκμήριον παρέχεται ὡς ἀνθρώπους γεννησαμένη· μόνη γὰρ ἐν τῷ τότε καὶ πρώτη τροφὴν ἀνθρωπείαν ἤνεγκεν τὸν τῶν πυρῶν καὶ κριθῶν καρπόν, ᾧ κάλλιστα καὶ ἄριστα τρέφεται τὸ ἀνθρώπειον γένος, ὡς τῷ ὄντι τοῦτο τὸ ζῷον αὐτὴ γεννησαμένη. μᾶλλον δὲ ὑπὲρ γῆς ἢ γυναικὸς προσήκει δέχεσθαι τοιαῦτα τεκμήρια· οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖκα μεμίμηται κυήσει καὶ γεννήσει, ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν. τούτου δὲ τοῦ καρποῦ οὐκ ἐφθόνησεν, ἀλλ’ ἔνειμεν καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις.  μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο ἐλαίου γένεσιν, πόνων ἀρωγήν, ἀνῆκεν τοῖς ἐκγόνοις· θρεψαμένη δὲ καὶ αὐξήσασα πρὸς ἥβην ἄρχοντας καὶ διδασκάλους αὐτῶν θεοὺς ἐπηγάγετο· ὧν τὰ μὲν ὀνόματα πρέπει ἐν τῷ τοιῷδε ἐᾶν—ἴσμεν γάρ—οἳ τὸν βίον ἡμῶν κατεσκεύασαν πρός τε τὴν καθ’ ἡμέραν δίαιταν, τέχνας πρώτους παιδευσάμενοι, καὶ πρὸς τὴν ὑπὲρ τῆς χώρας φυλακὴν ὅπλων κτῆσίν τε καὶ χρῆσιν διδαξάμενοι.

"ALL IN ALL": language

[UPDATE: I wrote this post very quickly in a very short amount of time yesterday. This morning, I thought to go back through to correct the typos and to adjust the Greek marginal formatting and to help you readers out with clarity in other editorial ways. But now I'm hoping you'll just make what you can of it. Know that I have been thinking through or at least thinking on some of these things. The conversation at BBB continues, and it's a good discussion, I think, at least an important one for many of us. Perhaps for you, there's something pertinent too.]

Teacher:  A good language must have one and only one meaning for each single word!
Young pupil Kenneth Pike:  But, sir, how then could we learn language?

         --Ken Pike, recollecting to some of us, his linguistics students

The Stranger: ... ποιήσῃ τῶν στοιχείων ἕκαστον πάντων ἐν πάσαις ταῖς συλλαβαῖς τὸ μὲν ἕτερον ὡς τῶν ἄλλων ἕτερον ὄν, ...
Young Socrates:  Παντά-Πασι μὲν οὖν.

         --Plato, The Statesman

I like very much the way the philosopher Goodman has stated (1978:x) that "what emerges can perhaps be described as a radical relativism under rigorous restraints" [emphasis mine, KLP].

         --Kenneth Lee Pike, Talk, Thought, and Thing

Here I go again, starting a blog post with three epigraphs.  So you get what I'm doing by now, don't you?  I'm wanting to use language to reflect on language use.

In particular, I want to start my post by blurring the lines between poetry and prose (or so called "propositional truth language").   Let me first (1) rather rhetorically listen in on the English language dialog between two bloggers.  Then (2) let's consider other English.  We might (3) just return to some Greek.  And then (4) we'll talk about translation.

Here goes:

(1)

John Hobbins of the blog Ancient Hebrew Poetry makes a brilliant comment at Dannii Willis's Better Bibles Blog post.  He starts:

"... my inner poet rebels against the notion that it is possible to translate a phrase like 'all in all' into propositional truth language."

John goes on to show how the phrase "'all in all' is part of a "beautiful song." He's already admitted, nonetheless, and has very clearly stated that it's not just lyrical sung poetry but that "propositional truth is [indeed] communicated" in the original Greek phrase that Dannii is concerned with (i.e., παντα εν πασιν).  And yet, John draws attention away from the propositional nature of this Greek phrase and then towards what he calls "the diction of the original."  John remarks pointedly that - because of the phrase's vagueness or ambiguity ostensibly - "it could be taken" by Greek readers and listeners alike "in the wrong way."  He implies that this problem is overcome by context.

Dannii replies rather curtly that the English phrase "all in all" (i.e., to translate the Greek phrase παντα εν πασιν) is "just a nice sounding Christian catchphrase."  And Dannii adds rather syllogistically that "catchphrases have no place in our Bibles."  This is his firm conclusion, and so far John has said nothing to rebut it.

My analysis of this conversation:

What I want to draw attention to is that John uses prose or, what he calls "propositional truth language" to make his claim and to build his case.  He does not use poetry, even poetry in the limited way he himself so propositionally defines poetry in contemporary English at his prosaic blog he's named Ancient Hebrew Poetry.  John himself quotes the lines from a song, but of course he cannot sing it in his written comment.

Dannii then comes back curtly (as I said already), in quick propositions.  But notice the nice sounds in his sentence, "It’s just a nice sounding Christian catchphrase."  With all that alliteration and all of those sibilants and affricates and voiceless stops, it's almost poetry.  Maybe it's song.  And it's rather puny because "Christian catchphrase" seems to be a "catchphrase" of "Christians."  Here's propositional truth proof, some of it propositional and scientific:  Bible Read Through and Christian Catch Phrases and Scientists Warn of Shortage in Christian Catchphrases.

(2)  Now this part 2 on considering other English isn't all that clever.

I just remember reading Sir Philip Sidney's piece "The Defense of Posey [i.e., Poetry]" and thinking, Hey, he is using prose here to defend poetry.  I think Mary Sidney's one of the best translators of the Bible ever -- just thought I'd through that in to see if you were paying attention.  Thank you, then!  And click on this link if I've gotten too propositional for you (and if you want an image of something cool).  And I also remember watching Dr. Ken Pike do a monolingual demonstration, give a follow up lecture with a bit of Q & A, and then recite poetry.

He told poems
as if
they could not
be
told otherwise

Now, I'm thinking I've just made a capital E out of a bad poem.  Don't know what that means, really.  Maybe you'll make something of it.

(3) Now Greek.  No, not Aristotle's this time.  I'm going to show you Plato's Greek (which had some impact on the young Aristotle, I must add).  Plato's got this Young Socrates character learning from a Stranger (and neither is the real Socrates, who taught Plato, or the Socrates who shows up as the real Socrates in most of Plato's dialogs).  The stranger is teaching his student the Young Socrates about Politics and being a Statesman (and they are all men, you know).  His using examples to explain examples to get to the politics stuff.  So he starts with the alphabet.  Yes, Greek.  And he says this:

Ἀνάγειν πρῶτον ἐπ’ ἐκεῖνα ἐν οἷς ταὐτὰ ταῦτα

ὀρθῶς ἐδόξαζον, ἀναγαγόντας δὲ τιθέναι παρὰ τὰ μήπω

γιγνωσκόμενα, καὶ παραβάλλοντας ἐνδεικνύναι τὴν αὐτὴν 

ὁμοιότητα καὶ φύσιν ἐν ἀμφοτέραις οὖσαν ταῖς συμπλοκαῖς, 

μέχριπερ ἂν πᾶσι τοῖς ἀγνοουμένοις τὰ δοξαζόμενα ἀληθῶς

παρατιθέμενα δειχθῇ, δειχθέντα δέ, παραδείγματα οὕτω γιγ‑ 

νόμενα, ποιήσῃ τῶν στοιχείων ἕκαστον πάντων ἐν πάσαις 

ταῖς συλλαβαῖς τὸ μὲν ἕτερον ὡς τῶν ἄλλων ἕτερον ὄν, τὸ

δὲ ταὐτὸν ὡς ταὐτὸν ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἑαυτῷ προσαγορεύεσθαι.

Yes, I hear the It's All Greek to Me catchphrase.  What you might see, nonetheless, is how Plato's Stranger is using a favorite Greek catchphrase of the Greek-writing Roman-citizen Christian-Jew Saul-Paul.  It's not exactly poetry, but it's not exactly propositional truth, not just yet.  This is Plato, remember, not yet Aristotle.  So did you see it, right there in the dialog?  Or at least in the monolog bit of the Stranger?  πάντων ἐν πάσαις

All in all.  He's talking (as Plato's writing) about the each and every correspondences of letters to syllables and such.  As an example of something like this example and like politics.  It's a nice way to learn.  Take something similar but different.  Stack it up next to something similar but different.  See what you can make of that.

And what do you make of the Young Socrates's response.  Oh that's right, you need to see it.  He "says":

Παντά-Πασι μὲν οὖν.

Now, I'll bet you a few pennies that most English translators have completely missed the Greek wordplay here.  You, however, can see it can't you?  All those π's and Π's and παν's and πασ's.  What's that mean?  Well, on the propositional level, the Young Socrates says "Certainly" or "That's altogether so."  At least that's what translator Benjamin Jowett and translator Seth Benardete have respectively said he said.  What if they'd said something more poetic?  More playful?  More punny (or is it punier?)?


Truth be told, and all in all, I really haven't seen this Greek catchphrase or the wordplayful response anywhere much at all between Plato and Paul.


(4)  Okay.  Let's talk.  About translation I mean.  What do you think?

and in three days

Λύσατε τὸν ναὸν τοῦτον

καὶ ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις

ἐγερῶ αὐτόν

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'silly' American translated: herstory

At some point in my blogging, I want to begin focusing on points at which several Bible translators and bibliobloggers have downplayed if not downright denied the fact of much Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek wordplay in the Bible (of Jews and of Christians).  Today, I just want to look at how feminists have worked with wordplay and with (the consequences of) its translation.  You'll see how this comes back to Mary Daly just a bit.

Let me quote extensively from the German / Canadian writer Luise von Flotow and her essay, "Mutual Pun-ishment? Feminist Wordplay in Translation: Mary Daly in German," in Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, edited by Dirk Delabastita.   Biblicists might initially be more interested in the book's essay, "A Portion of Slippery Stones: Wordplay in Four Twentieth-Century Translations of the Hebrew Bible," by Anneke De Vries and Arian J.C. Verheij; however, von Flotow's chapter comes first, and with good reason: she gets at the critical issues more richly.

Here's von Flotow:

[Among Canadian feminists], translation came to be viewed as creative and cooperative interaction, rather than suspect and uncertain approximation.  And the challenge that wordplay translation presented was answered with 'polysemic' approaches in which the translator used unorthodox, multiple methods to deal with multiple meanings -- even mimetic translation of wordplay, which abandons the conventional striving for semantic equivalence in favour of interlingual formal association.  This, in turn, "violate[d] the current rule that a translation must not give the impression that it is a translation" (Godarad 1987:7), so that the Canadian academic-cum-translator became a reader/writer who was as liberated from the constraints of translation norms, as the writer she was translating was liberated from 'patriarchal' textual norms.

So why is the German version of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology a form of pun-ishment, as critic Pusch claims, and as the hasty disbanding of the German reading circles may show?  If Anglo-American-Canadian feminist academics and critics have been able to integrate foreign wordplay into their critical practice..., why is this not possible with the German text?  (page 54)


....  One particularly salient example [of the German translator's failure] is her footnote to Daly's footnote on the term herstory.
      Daly does not approve of this term; she feels that the term herstory, a neologism for women's history, implies "a desire to parallel the record of men's achievements"....  Prehistory would be a better term to use.  [German translator] Wisselinck enlarges on this, placing her own explanation of Daly's comment before her own translation of Daly's footnote.  She begins by stating that the German language has not yet developed the new woman's language ("neue Frauensprache") that English has, and she speculates that German may lack the capacity to change.  She then goes on to explain that married anglophone couples like to use toothbrush glasses, towels and place mats with His and Hers labels.  It is from this practice, she implies, that the term herstory has been derived.
      The sudden appearance of such lowly domestic items as toothbrush glasses and place mats in conjunction with excuses about why the German language resists change is more than disconcerting; it trivializes the issue.  Anglo-American efforts to change language and thereby change gender awareness are undermined by parallels drawn to 'silly' American cultural artefacts and habits.  The German language appears in counterpoint as a solid constant, impervious to such trivialities [or even impervious to much change].  Though Daly herself disapproves of the herstory wordplay for political reasons, she does not degrade the term in the way the German translation, perhaps unwittingly, does....  (pages 59-60)


All translation of wordplay raises particular problems regarding the transfer of cultural knowledge and specific context-bound shades of meaning, besides the question of the unavoidable differences between semantic items and their range of meanings and connotations in different languages (e.g. Levine 1991; Delabastita 1994).  In addition, wordplay translation in feminist writing has raised issues of political solidarity between women across linguistic and cultural boundaries.  It in fact highlights problems originating in cultural and historical differences, similar to those aired on the occasions of international or 'supranational' women's congresses, where vastly differing economic and cultural groups try to reach understanding and agreement.

Reading Mary Daly in German

The wordplay that laces Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, her classic of 'radical feminist' (now viewed as white-middle-class-educated-feminist) thought, made it a pleasure for me to read in English (perhaps because I, too, fit the white-middle-class-educated-anglophone category).  My first reading of the work in the summer of 1979 had me in stitches over her inventive impudence, her sarcasm and lack of respect for conventional American English and the culture that supports it, and over her unceasing and creative efforts to find ways to take the wind out of the complacent sails of 'patriarchal' language.  The book's main focus is on the historical victimization of women, and on the role filled by 'henchwomen' of patriarchy for this purpose....  For me, the wordplay was one of the more important aspects, providing respite and relaxation from an often disturbing context.
      The German translation of this work was completed by Erika Wisselinck shortly after its English publication.  (page 51)

---

Fortunately, von Flotow has made her entire chapter available right here, at her web site.  You can read how she details Wisselinck's three strategies and failures, as compared to wordplay methods and successes by French-English Canadian translators.

wordplay: herstory

There seems to be a subtle or (if you're a feminist insider perhaps) not so subtle dialectic (debate or conversation) going on between Audre Lorde and Mary Daly.  The one seems not as convinced as the other in the power of wordplay.  And yet both seem to use this tool, don't they?  Listen:

Gynocentric writing means risking.  Since the language and style of patriarchal writing simply cannot contain or carry the energy of women's exorcism and ecstasy, in this book I invent, dis-cover, re-member.  At times I make up words (such as gynaesthesia for women's synaesthesia).  Often I unmask deceptive words by dividing them and employing alternate meanings for prefixes (for example, re-cover actually says "cover again").  I also unmask their hidden reversals, often by using less known or "obsolete" meanings (for example, glamour as used to name a witch's power).  Sometimes I simply invite the reader to listen to words in a different way (for example, de-light).  When I play with words I do this attentively, deeply, paying attention to etymology, to varied dimensions of meaning, to deep Background meanings and subliminal associations.  There are some woman-made words which I choose not to use for various reasons.  Sometimes I reject words that I think are inauthentic, obscuring women's existence and masking the conditions of our oppression (for example, chairperson).  In other cases my choice is a matter of intuitive judgement (for example, my decision not to use herstory).
.... I prefer the power of  the term Prehistory to name the prior importance of interconnected significant events of women's living and dying.  Her-story, I think, shortcircuits the intent of radical feminism by implying a desire to parallel the record of men's achievements.  It fails because it imitates male history.  Inherently, it has an "odor" of mere reactive maneuvering, which is humiliating to women.  It conveys an image of history's junior partner.  The point is not simply that this term is "etymologically incorrect."  It is enlightening to compare this term with such woman-made constructs as man-ipulated or the/rapist, which are also "incorrect," but do succeed in targeting/humiliating the right objects.
....    Another delicate area has been the use of pronouns, especially the choice between we and they to refer to women.  Elsewhere I have stressed the importance of the pronoun we and avoided the "objective" they.  Obviously, there are times when the use of we would be absurd -- for example, when referring to the women of ancient Greece....  Sometimes, since the ambiguity about whether to use we or they is not clearly resolvable, there are difficult choices.  Since pronouns are profoundly personal and political, they carry powerful messages.  Despite the fact that many writers and readers ignore this pronominal power, subliminal clues are transmitted and received.  At times my choice of we or they is a means of realizing my identification with, or separation from, certain roles and behaviors.

--Mary Daly, 1975/78

Now, against Daly's piece of writing here and -- we might imagine -- in response to her process of writing, Audre Lorde writes.  Notice both what Lorde says and also how she says it.  Pay attention to the pronouns (i.e., "us" and "you" and "me" and "our") and to history (i.e., "herstory").  Catch the allusions to "ancient" and to what that includes for Lorde but what it has included, in a much more limited way, for Daly.  Eavesdrop on the subliminal ways that Lorde critiques Daly for "separation" and "reversal" and "erasure."  (The last line I've quoted below from Lorde is not directly addressed to Daly, but, in the context of Lorde's collection of essays, the comment is a profound statement to the white woman [i.e., Daly], who cannot and perhaps has not dismantled patriarchy.  Lorde's use of the word "master," as the daughter of a slave in herstory of race-based slavery, is profound wordplay indeed, a deep de-construction.  What house is being built?)  Listen.

      Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you?  Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your chapter on African genital mutilation in the eyes of other Black women?  And if so, then why not use our words to legitimize or illustrate the other places where we connect in our being and becoming?  If, on the other hand, it was not Black women you were attempting to reach, in what way did our words illustrate your point for white women?
      Mary, I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women - the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our hersotires are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization.  I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color, and how it devalues your own words.  This dismissal does not essentially differ from the specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the murders even now happening in your own city.  When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.  When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise.
      This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between us.  This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely than to attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices.  Should the next step be war between us, or separation?  Assimilation within a solely western european herstory is not acceptable.
      Mary, I ask that you re-member what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself that aids your speaking.  As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders.  But in order to come together we must recognize each other.  Yet I feel that since you have so completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you.
....  The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

--Audre Lorde, 1984

Mary Daly's Meta Definitions (and Meta Methods)

I'm imaging your response as you read my post's title.  Perhaps you're rolling your eyes (as my teenage daughter did this morning when -- upon my asking her again why she was has having to serve detention at her private Christian school -- she said, "I forgot to get my Bible out of my locker for Bible class, okay?").  Or maybe you're just a little intrigued (as my spouse and I are - upon being invited to a Seder this evening after just being invited to a "Lord's Supper" palm Sunday service yesterday).  Or could it be that you're laughing nervously (as the college students of my Vietnamese colleague snickered and shifted when trying to understand and to role play the scene of a U.S. film in which the characters do things not entirely appropriate in a Southeast Asian context)?

I really have intended to write my post here to reflect on Mary Daly's "meta" definitions and such methods.  Here's a little of what I think.

Who you think you are -- your self-reflective situation -- very much determines what you do with Mary Daly's writings, particularly her book Gyn/Ecology:  the Metaethics of Radical Feminism.  The fact is that such a book demands your response.  Yours.  You may, for example, decide that you need not to read it, or at least not again.  Or don't have time for it, unless someone nice invites you to read along.  Or, when reading it, you might see that you do not get it.  You might accuse it of making your eyes roll or of other things.

My particular interest (at least one of my interests in particular) is the subjectivities that Daly's "radical feminism" evokes and invokes.  How we -- you and I -- might be provoked 35 years later still is of interest.  I am bringing this up during your women's history month.  (I am suggesting that you are doing things, as I am, without necessarily even knowing what or why or how exactly.  But, I am also hopeful and optimistic that we can pay attention.  I don't believe for a second what the anonymous writer of the British Times speculates when he or she suggests that Daly's "initial challenge to established theological doctrines and emerging feminist movements may not appear radical today.")

With her own 1990 introduction to her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly is already writing a 15-year-old history of the writing of her book.  The history includes her most kind and her most critical readers and some of their responses.  Her brief history about her book also includes some of her "exigencies" for writing in the first place.  This is what Lloyd Bitzer, in developing his theory of rhetorical criticism, would call Daly's "rhetorical situation."  She did not write in 1975 in a vacuum; and she was not re-writing in 1990 in a vacuum; and now there's no abstract happy-world vacuum that she's written in, now that she's dead and you're still alive with me, we now part of her history (even if you, or I, ignore or yawn at what she's written and re-written).  Daly's brief history writing is a reflection on, a bringing up to date, the past problems.  And it's one of her reflections on some of the varied responses.  She is not herself alone, so it seems, intending to write the final, the perfect, the definitive, the "super" constructed, the true, the only, the authoritative response.  She is not intending to write anything at all like a definitive response.  However "radical" it comes across to you, it is therefore in some way open to your response.  If her writing is not radical, as you see it, at least it's fairly miraculous, I think, that you've continued reading this blog post on her (radical) writings thus far.

One of the most important statements of re-membering that Daly makes is this memory:

      My reversing of patriarchal reversals in Gyn/Ecology involved/ required functioning in what might be called "a subliminal mode."  This way of thinking/ writing probably would not have been possible for me if I had not spent years studying medieval theology and philosophy, and writing dissertations in these fields at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, the medieval city in which I lived and studied for seven years.  For there I learned to think and write in a theological/ philosophical language that could not say what I was trying to say.  So in my dissertations [both in philosophy and in theology] I was writing in code without realizing that I was doing this.
      ....  Having caught on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse, I was enabled to reverse the process I had learned in Fribourg and decode patriarchal texts, thus exposing their hidden meanings. [pages xxvi-xxvii of the 1990, 15-year-retrospective introduction to her 1975 book.]

What I'd like you and me to re-read is that bit about "writing" that's "without realizing."  This is profound.  Daly is confessing that she has had to catch "on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse."  Elsewhere, in the new Preface of her book, she explains the need to de-mystify some four very specific "male methods of mystification":  Erasure, Reversal, False polarization (i.e., male-defined feminism vs. male-defined sexism), and Divide and conquer.

And in the very next section of her Preface, she explains very clearly (or at least straightforwardly, so it seems) the title and then the subtitle of her book (i.e., Gyn/Ecology and then the Metaethics of Radical Feminism).  These are "a way of wrenching back some wordpower."  She gives the "Merriam-Webster" given definitions of "meta."  She re-views the inventors of (male) ethics, including Aristotle (who, I'm recalling, coined the term "ethics" by smashing together a common Greek word with an uncommon [feminine] suffix).  And she so begins un-erasing and re-versing and exposing the untruths of binarying and of the patriarchal con-questing.  Daly intends to reverse the "reversal."  Men, she sees, have through their history (of women) reversed many things.  Daly's project is akin to post-modernisms' de-conconstructions of constructs of power that come after her.  It's akin to that coined imperative of meta-noia [μετα-νοεῖτε] of the very Jewish Matthew's John-the-Baptist and his equally Jewish Jesus that comes before her.

Therefore -- well before Daly so carefully lets readers in on what she's doing as an intentional author with her title and her subtitle -- she has said this.  (Are you ready?  Am I?  Do we get the nuances here, the changes there, and the generative qualities of self-transformation and not only mere reformation?)

      I have coined the term metapatriarchal to describe the journey, because the prefix meta has multiple meanings.  It incorporates the idea of "postpatriarchal," for it means occurring later.  It puts patriarchy in the past without denying that its walls/ ruins and demons are still around.  Since meta also means "situated behind," it suggests that the direction of the journey is into the Background.  Another meaning of this prefix is "change in, transformation of."  This, of course, suggests the transforming power of the journey.  By this I do not mean that women's movement "reforms" patriarchy, but that it transforms our Selves.  Since meta means "beyond, transcending," it contains a built-in corrective to reductive notions of mere reformism. 
      This metapatriarchal process of encountering the unknown involves also a continual conversion of the previously unknown into the familiar.... (pages 7 - 8)

Jesus: the Second Eve

Carolyn Custis James starts a recent post in the following way:

". . . you are the devil's gateway. . . you are she who persuaded him, whom the devil did not dare attack. . . . Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex, lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on too."
—Tertullian

The view of woman as "temptress" has early roots and is alive and well today both in the wider culture (see links below) and sadly also in Christian circles.

Rape Victim-Blaming Pamphlet
Eve-Teasing Threatens Women in India and Bangladesh

Note that "Eve-Teasing" and "temptress" problem!  And remember how Jill started a post some time back:

I should have known better than to browse through the results of a survey about modesty, given to young Christian men.

Note the male perspective of females, that perspective of Christians.  So pardon me, if you will, for reading and translating some bible, turning the perspectives around.

When so many men blame Eve first, what if Jesus is the second Eve, a sort of tempted temptress himself?  There are two parts to this if you want to track here.

THE FIRST EVE: THE TEMPTED TEMPTRESS

This God formed a Human (dirt from Mother Earth), 

exhaled into his face life breath,

and birthed the Human into a living self. 

-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 2:7

καὶ ἔπλασεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον χοῦν ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς
καὶ ἐνεφύσησεν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ πνοὴν ζωῆς 
καὶ ἐγένετο ὁ ἄνθρωπος εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from  his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 2:7

And so it is written:  [He] "birthed  
the [first] human [Adam] into a living self"; 
the final Adam into a life breather.... 
The first human was birthed out of earth (dirt); 
the second human out of heaven's sky.
-- Paul, to Jewish Greeks in Greece (translated from his Greek to my English in America):  I Corinthians 15:45.... 47

Οὕτως καὶ γέγραπται, ἐγένετο 
ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος Ἀδὰμ εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν.
ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν....  

Ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς, χοϊκός· 

ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. 

-- Paul, to Jewish Greeks in Greece in his Greek:  I Corinthians 15:45.... 47

Adam was, in fact, the first formed, 
then Eve.
Adam was not the one deceived.
The womb-wife woman was, 
birthed, in transgression, out of deception.
-- Paul, to the half-Greek-half-Jew Timothy in Greece (translated from his Greek to my English in America):  I Timothy 2:13, 14

Ἀδὰμ γὰρ πρῶτος ἐπλάσθη,
εἶτα Εὔα·
καὶ Ἀδὰμ οὐκ ἠπατήθη,
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ
ἐξαπατηθεῖσα ἐν παραβάσει γέγονεν·
-- Paul, to the half-Greek-half-Jew Timothy in Greece in his Greek:  I Timothy 2:13, 14

... the snake deceived Eve 
in its delightful delusion ....
-- Paul, to Jewish Greeks in Greece (translated from his Greek to my English in America):  II Corinthians 11:3

... ὁ ὄφις ἐξηπάτησεν Εὕαν
ἐν τῇ πανουργίᾳ αὐτοῦ ....
-- Paul, to Jewish Greeks in Greece in his Greek:  II Corinthians 11:3

THE SECOND EVE: IN EVERY WAY LIKE THE TEMPTED TEMPTRESS (WITHOUT THE MESSY MISSES)

This God created a Human poetically,
He created It, as a portrait of God, poetically,
He created Them, Boyish and Girly, poetically,
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 1:27

καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον
κατ’ εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from  his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 1:27

Adam said,
"Now here's bone
out of my bones,
flesh out of my flesh.
Let's call her Womb-Wife Woman
since she herself came 
out of a Husband-Man."
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 2:23

καὶ εἶπεν Αδαμ
τοῦτο νῦν ὀστοῦν  
ἐκ τῶν ὀστέων μου
καὶ σὰρξ  
ἐκ τῆς σαρκός μου  
αὕτη κληθήσεται γυνή
ὅτι  
ἐκ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς
αὐτῆς ἐλήμφθη αὕτη 
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 2:23

Adam nick-named
his Womb-Wife Woman "Life"
since she's mother of all the living.
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 3:20

καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αδαμ
τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή
ὅτι
αὕτη μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 3:20

Jacob birthed Joseph, the husband-man of
Miriam,
out of whom was birthed Joshua,
the so-called Anointed....
The anointed Joshua's birth went like this:
"His mother Miriam, 
having gotten engaged to Joseph,
before they actually got together,
discovered that protrusion in her belly
out of a special breath of holiness."
-- Mattityah, to Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Matthew 1:16.... 18

Ἰακὼβ δὲ ἐγέννησεν τὸν Ἰωσὴφ τὸν ἄνδρα  
Μαρίας,  
ἐξ ἧς ἐγεννήθη Ἰησοῦς, ὁ λεγόμενος χριστός....
Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ ἡ γέννησις οὕτως ἦν.
Μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ 
Μαρίας τῷ Ἰωσήφ,
πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτούς,
εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα  
ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου.
-- Mattityah, to Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek:  Matthew 1:16.... 18

Then Joshua was guided up into the desert
by the Breath
to be tested by the Diabolical spirit....
Coming toward him, the Tester said.... 
-- Mattityah, to Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Matthew 4:1.... 3

Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀνήχθη εἰς τὴν ἔρημον
ὑπὸ τοῦ πνεύματος,  
πειρασθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ διαβόλου....
Καὶ προσελθὼν  ὁ πειράζων εἶπεν αὐτῷ....
-- Mattityah, to Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek:  Matthew 4:1.... 3

... the Snake said to the Womb-Wife Woman:
What's this that "God said"....?
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 3:1

... καὶ εἶπεν ὁ ὄφις τῇ γυναικί
τί ὅτι εἶπεν ὁ θεός....
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from  his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 3:1

We do not, in fact, have a chief priest
who is not able to feel our pain with us in these frail weaknesses of ours.
He was tested in each and every thing, our very same way,
without messy misses.
-- an anonymous unknown author or authoress, to Jews everywhere in his or her Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Hebrews 4:15

Οὐ γὰρ ἔχομεν ἀρχιερέα
μὴ δυνάμενον συμπαθῆσαι ταῖς ἀσθενείαις ἡμῶν,
πεπειρασμένον δὲ κατὰ πάντα καθ’ ὁμοιότητα,
χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας.
-- an anonymous unknown author or authoress, to Jews everywhere in his or her Greek:  Hebrews 4:15

The God-Master said:
"It's not good that the Human is alone.
I'll poetically create for him his helper."
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Genesis 2:18

καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ὁ θεός
οὐ καλὸν εἶναι τὸν ἄνθρωπον μόνον
ποιήσωμεν αὐτῷ βοηθὸν κατ’ αὐτόν
-- Moses, to Jews living outside of Egypt translated in Egypt from his Hebrew by other Jews into their Greek:  Genesis 2:18

In that he felt his own pain being tested,
he is able - to those being tested - to help.
-- an anonymous unknown author or authoress, to Jews everywhere in his or her Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  Hebrews 2:18

Ἐν ᾧ γὰρ πέπονθεν αὐτὸς πειρασθείς,
δύναται τοῖς πειραζομένοις βοηθῆσαι.
-- an anonymous unknown author or authoress, to Jews everywhere in his or her Greek:  Hebrews 2:18

He made the statement to test him.
He already saw, in fact, what he was so poetically about to create in this situation.
-- Yohan, to Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek (and from Greek into English by a goy in America):  John 6:6

Τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγεν πειράζων αὐτόν·
αὐτὸς γὰρ ᾔδει τί ἔμελλεν ποιεῖν.
-- Yohan, to certain Jews in and around Palestine in his Greek:  John 6:6

the Prostitute...

the Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation

Joshua is an important book for many reasons....  But what makes the book of Joshua overwhelmingly important is that it stands as a bridge, a link between the Pentateuch (the writings of Moses [i.e., "the Law," Torah]) and the rest of Scripture.
--Francis A. Schaeffer

We assume that the Homeric poet had a number of stories about Odysseus to draw on, but that he judiciously selected those stories that went together to transform what might have been merely an elaborate travel tale into an epic that explores the dimensions and facets of a larger-than-life heroic character....  A literary text, ...with stories and tales intricately linked into a single unitary document, seeks to explain, to bring meaning and order to paradoxical events of human experience.  In this sense, Joshua... approach[es] the Odyssey.
--Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis and Willard van Antwerpen, Jr.

Shortly after the translation was achieved, the Greek text of the Law would have been read and studied in Jewish synagogues in Alexandria....  With time, familiarity with the text grew.  Alexandrian and Egyptian Jews would slowly come to hold the LXX as sacred -- at least as sacred as the Hebrew original....  [T]he collective translators are part of the Homeric paradigm.
--Sylvie Honigman

You see what I'm doing, don't you?  I'm starting a post entitled "The Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation" with three epigraphs.  The epigraphs are to help us get to what I call "feminist rhetorical translating" of the Bible. They're to help us to uncover, to recover perhaps, some early and likely resistances to Aristotle.  The first epigraph is to emphasize that "the book of Joshua" comes after Torah, just as post-modernism comes after modernism but just as much as midrashim come after the oral-then-written tradition of Moses.  The second epigraph is to emphasize that "Joshua" is literary history.  The third epigraph is to emphasize that the little bit of Joshua in Greek that I'm going to post on (below) is midrashic, Homeric, Aristotle-defying stuff.  It's not the way we typically think of translation today, and that's the point of most translators who follow after Aristotle, isn't it?  But why not remember what the first translators of the Bible did?  Maybe we'll learn something.

This post has three main chapters.  They are:  I. Hebrew Wordplay, II. Aristotle's Word, and III. Opening Pandora's Pentateuch.

Chapter I --
Hebrew Wordplay

In the Hebrew version of Joshua, there's plenty of wordplay before translation.  By "wordplay," I mean both playfulness with words and wiggleroom in their interpretation.  For example, the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ) is playful and is ambiguous.  According to bəmidbar Sinai (aka Numbers 13:16), Moses nicknamed or renamed his assistant who had been named Hosea; and the former renamed the later the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), and he did so by mixing the younger person's name (הוֺשֵׁעַ) with a contraction of the unspeakable Name (יהוה).  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to a later Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), perhaps, this littlest letter י -- in the name and in the Name -- is declared to be significant when he says (through the Greek translator Matthew):  "ἰῶτα ἓν ἢ μία κεραία οὐ μὴ παρέλθῃ ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου" (i.e., Mt 5:18, "neither the littlest letter י nor some serif stroke will go away from Torah").  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to midrash after Torah, there comes more interpretation of the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ); it is a name born of G-d from the name of the woman Sarai (שָׂרַי) who, as a mother, gives up her letter (י) which becomes his "letter yud."   But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to the freshest of rabbinic teachings of 2009, we should be able to see something:  can't we see it, whether Moses writing Torah intended it or not, that "one's two eyes are the two yuds"?  There is Hebrew wordplay in the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), the name of certain people and the name of the first post-Pentateuch parchment.

In Hebrew, likewise, the name of the prostitute is playful and is full of illustrative possibilities.  Rahab (רָחָב) is a playful name with lots of interpretive play (or hermeneutic wiggle room in it).  She's a maid and she's a monster.  "Broad" might be a fair English language translation, since she's a woman and is wide like land where women can be gotten.  You really have to see the Hebrew of Genesis 34:21 to get this:

הָאֲנָשִׁים הָאֵלֶּה שְֽׁלֵמִים הֵם אִתָּנוּ וְיֵשְׁבוּ בָאָרֶץ וְיִסְחֲרוּ אֹתָהּ וְהָאָרֶץ הִנֵּה רַֽחֲבַת־יָדַיִם לִפְנֵיהֶם אֶת־בְּנֹתָם נִקַּֽח־לָנוּ לְנָשִׁים וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵינוּ נִתֵּן לָהֶֽם׃

These men [are] peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, [it is] Broad (רַֽחֲבַ) enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters.

Beyond the wordplay in names, then, there's play in the narrative, in "book" of Joshua itself.  The book of Joshua follows the closed books of Moses and thereby opens up a new library of books in Jewish history after Moses.  God has spoken to Moses, who has nicknamed Joshua and has written down everything God said, and put what's written in a box to be re-read.  Looking into that Torah box of Moses, says Hebraist Rachel Barenblat, "it can seem that the point the writer is trying to make is deliberately obscured beneath layers and levels of allusion and allegory."  Looking beyond that Torah box of Moses, says Christian linguist David Ker, one sees "more about humans than God...  that revelation comes in the context of a long trajectory of God’s dealings with humanity... a metanarrative... a long train wreck of the nation of Israel through apostasy and rejection of God’s covenant....  Ethnic hatred. Religious conflict. Revenge culture."  The first hero, right out of the box, is not even from the nation of Israel, and is not even a male, and is not even a clean female.  Rather, the very first hero is a foreigner, a woman hero, a prostitute for men, a dirty goyish heroine.  And, in Hebrew, there's a point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind.  The story starts with her but, in order to get on with purifying the promised land, the story continues without her.  There's more than enough wordplay stuff in the Hebrew story (after Moses) to do a Ph.D. dissertation on and to blog and to teach and to publish on for years.

Aristotle despised such wordplay (as barbaric) and decided to shut it down (at least in Greek).  This is what makes the Jewish translation of Hebrew into Greek so fascinating.  As we'll get to in Chapter III, the translating Jews seem to want to open up meanings, rather blatantly playing with Aristotle's own words.

Chapter II --
Aristotle's Word

The Jewish-Greek translation of the book of Joshua is just as full of wordplay as the Hebrew original.  The wordplay of the translators, however, seems intentionally to spite Aristotle.  To get a good look at that in the next chapter, it's useful in this chapter to review Aristotle's project with the word.

Aristotle developed "logic" (λογ-ική) to box up the overdetermined, ambiguous slippery and playful Greek concept of "logos" (λόγος).  (Never mind that Aristotle himself is engaged in wordplay here.)  He railed against ambiguity, against parable, against hyperbole, against sophism.  He called "rhetoric" (ῥητορ-ική) a counterpart to "dialectic" (διάλεκτ-ική) -- both lesser than logic the way a female is lesser than a male.

Rhetoric, of course, is what Gorgias the sophist did.  And dialectic is what Socrates and Plato did.  The question is whether they could get to absolute reality, to pure knowledge, to certain truth.  Aristotle did sympathize with his teacher Plato, and his teacher Socrates.  They understood how Parmenides had separated "aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) or true truth from "doxa" (δόξα) or mere opinion.  They similarly understood how Gorgias, the mere rhetorician, had mixed "aletheia" and "doxa" in his "praise" of the prostituting Helen.  But Aristotle, when he wrote of rhetoric, used logic and got to true scientific knowledge (or ἐπιστήμη aka episteme) with the central concept of the "enthymeme" (ἐνθυμημα) or the "rhetorical syllogism" as the "body of 'pisteis' (πιστεις)" -- which has become known by rhetoric scholars today as the body of proofs or the body of persuasion.  (If you click on the previous link, then do notice how Aristotle boxes up "doxa" as the safer "endoxa.").  Aristotle taught his logic to elite Greek boys like Alexander the Great.  And Aristotle's project of a pure male logical elite Greek empire was nearly achieved by Alexander.

When we look at the Greek translation bit from the book of Joshua in the next chapter, the words to pay attention to are episteme, doxa, aletheia, enthymeme, and pistis.  Aristotle had a clear and pure and unambiguous and intentional meaning for each of these important words of logic (to avoid womanish rhetoric).  And yet the Jewish translators seem to have other things in mind.

Chapter III --
Opening Pandora's Pentateuch

My title for chapter III is playful, an attempt to drop Pandora's name so as to get us remembering what happened when her box was opened.  Pandora, of course, is the first woman for the Greeks which makes her some like Eve, the first woman of Torah and like Rahab, the first woman after Torah.  When wordplay translation opens up stuff after the Pentateuch, well, then, you can figure what happens.

My thesis is that the 72 translators of the legend of the Septuagint worked against Alexander's and Aristotle's project.  Here they are, Jews back in Egypt, again under the rule of a kingdom not their own.  Sylvie Honigman suggests that, though in this potentially subservient position, they've rather subversively turned Alexandria Egypt into a new Jerusalem, that they've resisted the imperial impositions of Aristotle's logic.  That's not to say they are pre-logical or post-logical or a-logical or illogical.  It is to say that they see what Aristotle has done by boxing up Greek.  They get what he intends by using the little "-icky" suffix on words, by changing "logos" to "logic."  They avoid the suffix like an Egyptian plague.

Now we can look at what the Jewish translators do by rendering the Hebrew of Joshua into Hellene.  We come again to that "point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind."  We come to a turn, to the first villain.  This guy's trouble and troubling, and so his name is Achan (עָכָן).  We've come to the point in the story where the heroine is no longer necessary, to Joshua 7:1.

The contrasts are stark.  Whereas the hero is a woman, the villain is a man.  She's a foreigner; he's a son of Israel, from the very Jewish tribe of Judah.  They both hide something, but her lying and her knowledge of God save her; his eventual truth-telling and his opinion of God destroy him.

So now we get to the Greek.  For Aristotle, females were scientifically objectively lesser than males.  Males were the ones with the science, with certainty about Nature and Reality and Truth.  Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Roughly, they mean (respectively) the following for Aristotle:  (a) "sure knowledge," (b) "mere opinion," (c) "Truth with a capital T," (d) "persuasion's logical body [which is less rigorous than a pure logical syllogism]," and (f) "proof or persuasiveness."

But this same Greek for the Jewish translators in Alexandria was more open.  They seem to take a tight set of Aristotle's strictly boxed up words and open them up.   Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Now, not only do they mean the very boxed up meanings Aristotle meant them to mean but they also have Jewish-barbaric meanings as well.  Respectively and roughly, these Greek words for the Jewish translators also mean the following:  (a) "a whorish woman's confession," (b) "glory to God," (c) "the truth of a man named Trouble," (d) "outlawed coveteousness," and (f) "working faith or belief in God."

Here's the text.  I'm giving both the LXX translator's Greek and Brenton's English translation (mostly).

In Joshua 2:5, Rahab the prostitute persuades.  First, she lies, saying to the men of her nation about the Jewish spies:  "I know not [οὐκ ἐπίσταμαι episteme] whither they are gone."  Then (in verse 9), the foreign prostitute says to the Jewish spies:  "I know [ἐπίσταμαι episteme] that the Lord has given you the land."  The barbarian goyish woman denies having certain scientific knowledge and then claims she has it.  The LXX translators are using Aristotle's word as dirty, womanly opinion, as mere doxa.  By her rhetoric (through the Hebrew-to-Hellene translation), this prostitute saves and is saved.

So we leave the heroine and come to the villain.  His rhetoric is poorer, is less persuasive.  But the Hellene translation by the Hebrew readers is just as playful.

In 7:19, Joshua (the story's protagonist) says to the villainous trouble-making troubler named Achan:   "Give due opinion, that is, give glory (δόξαν doxa) this day to the Lord God of Israel, and give a confession; and tell me what thou hast done, and hide it not from me."  The translators use a word Aristotle associates with lying (i.e., doxa) as something inherently owed to God.  The wordplay is ironic, is funny, is suggestive of meanings now flying out of the box.

Then Achan replies (in verses 20 & 21):   "In truth [Ἀληθῶς aletheia] I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel: thus and thus have I done:  I saw in the spoil an embroidered mantle, and two hundred didrachms of silver, and one golden wedge of fifty didrachms, and I like a Torah outlaw coveted [ἐνθυμηθεὶς enthymeme] them and took them; and, behold, they are hid in my tent, and the silver is hid under them."  The translators have Achan confessing not with mere doxa but with Aristotle's absolute Truth.  But he confesses that he broke the 10th commandment of the Ten Commandments, and the translators have him "coveting" when they have him using Aristotle's "rhetorical syllogism," which is Aristotle's "body of proof or persuasion."  It seems the Jewish translators of their own playful Hebrew into playful Greek were playing with Aristotle and his student Alexander.

IV --

an afterword

Now, I understand that many rhetoricians and many bible scholars are going to argue with me here.  They might say:

"Sometimes words are homophones -- that is, they have different meanings though they sound (and sometimes even look) the same.  'Enthymeme' in Aristotle's Rhetoric is not the same word as 'enthymeme' here in Joshua 7.  You don't understand the nature of language and linguistics, basic stuff."

But I'm going to appeal to the rhetoricians and the bible scholars to talk to one another.   I'm going to ask us to compare our histories, to see how we fit in with Aristotle's paradigm.  (There's another word, the Greek word pisteis, that rhetoric scholars and bible scholars use differently too.  The New Testament writers, like Aristotle, are very keen on getting this right, and around Rahab - a woman, a prostitute, a foreigner - it seems most important -- See Hebrews 11:31 and James 2, especially 2:25)  So I would say this, in reply:

"The LXX translators tend to open up meanings of Greek words that Aristotle shut down.  The words and the meanings were once used by Homer, by Sappho, by the playwrights, and the other poets of old.  And the Septuagint translators have the vantage, the advantage, of seeing how both Aristotle and his predecessors used language differently.  The first Bible translators, the Jewish translators of their sacred Hebrew scriptures into their sacred Hellene scriptures, were much more open to wordplay than we tend to be.  We tend to follow Aristotle in shutting down meanings of words.  But the original linguists translating the Bible originally knew and behaved better, more playfully.  I think we could call it Torah and even post-Pentateuch persuasion.  If Willis Barnstone is willing to call Eve 'the mother of translation', then why can't we imagine Pandora as another Eve?   Why can't we be more willing to open the box?"

The real tragedy is the silencing of women (whether by rhetoric studies - more muting and erasing of women than "the male bastion of philosophy" - or whether by bible translation scholarship).  This silencing happens, I'm convinced, in large measure because of Aristotle and what feminists rightly call his boxed method of phallogocentrism.  Whether you're a man or a rhetoric scholar or a bible translator, what you risk missing by following Aristotle's separationist method is hearing women.  For example, you may miss hearing "Rahab and her sisters" as noted by Suzanne McCarthy in this BBB post; and you may miss hearing what Rahab has said (as noted in another post here at this blog) which notes how, in Joshua 2:14, "The Jews [translating their own Bible] have 'καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν' (for which [English translator] Brenton has 'and she said') for the original, ambiguous [and wordplay] Hebrew phrase 'אמֶר'.”  I'm hoping that we can at least listen to wordplay in bible translation, that we can remember what Greek was like before (and after) Aristotle, and in the best of all worlds that we can listen to so-called "womanly" discourse that acknowledges "all men and women" as "created equal."  We may have to recover feminisms, rhetorics, and translating that Aristotle once boxed up and put away.

 

Getting Luke 2:14 as Glorious Wordplay

Dr. Jim West is concerned about getting it right. He's posted on "getting Luke 2:14 right" in translation. He gives Luke's Greek. And, in issuing a translation challenge to readers, West makes clear that getting it right is to translate "so as to make it sensible and yet retain its meaning." The strong implication is that not getting it right means its opposite: getting it wrong. So West observes "the KJV misses the boat ... translating ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας erroneously." He likes "the Douay-Rheims go at it" as "[f]ar better," saying, "however, I translate ‘Glory to the highest God; and on earth, peace to men of good will.’

What West leaves readers to presume is that a chorus of angels is dancing in the sky and is singing in Greek or that Luke is translating the angelic song and dance into Greek. In either case, Luke's writing is a transposition of something fantastic. There is wordplay here that West, in getting his translation right, doesn't engage. And his own rendering of ἀνθρώποις as ‘men’ makes us wonder if he's working to get his "right" position clear on gendered language. I think we will do well to return to the chorus to listen. Here's Luke's Greek again:

δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας.

Now, even if you don't know Greek you can see some play in the language. And by play, I mean both fun playfulness and interpretive wiggle room. Look and listen again:

δόξα and εὐδοκίας are bookends. They mean different things (as West tries to get it right) and they mean the same thing too. Let's come back to that in a minute.

ἐν ὑψίστοις and ἐν ἀνθρώποις are rhymes. They're different but they sound similar.

And if you know a bit of Greek, then you know that καὶ often conjoins phrases but often contrasts phrases. And Luke's chorus of angels is doing both at the same time.

Now if you know a good bit more of Greek, then you hear these angels talking like the sophist Isocrates. One of his favorite things to do was to play with the difference and the similarity of δόξα and εὐδοκίας. I don't have time to show you, but if you ask in comments, I'll give some examples from Panegyricus, Plataicus, Nicocles, To Philip, Panathenaicus, and Antidosis, if you like.

What we should take time to do is to listen now to the chorus in Euripides's play Heracleidae and to compare that with the chorus in Luke's gospel. I don't have time to translate it, but David Kovacs's translation is fine. Here are a few lines in English and then in Greek:

But do not fall prostrate and lament the gods' dispensation, do not grieve overly in your heart. For the unhappy girl has a death-portion that is glorious, a death on behalf of her brothers and the land, and the renown that will await her on the lips of mortals is one of great honor. Heroic goodness involves itself ever in toil. Her deeds were worthy of her father, worthy of her noble lineage. If you show reverence to the death of the brave, in this I am your partner.

ἀλλὰ σὺ μὴ προπίτνων τὰ θεῶν φέρε,
μηδ’ ὑπεράλγει φροντίδα λύπᾳ·
εὐδόκιμον γὰρ ἔχει θανάτου μέρος
ἁ μελέα πρό τ’ ἀδελφῶν καὶ γᾶς·
οὐδ’ ἀκλεής νιν
δόξα πρὸς ἀνθρώπων ὑποδέξεται·
ἁ δ’ ἀρετὰ βαίνει διὰ μόχθων.
ἄξια μὲν πατρός, ἄξια δ’ εὐγενίας τάδε γίγνεται·
εἰ δὲ σέβεις θανάτους ἀγαθῶν, μετέχω σοι

Now, let's hear again Luke's chorus, with some of the same words bolded.  Then we'll try a translation into English.

δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας.

Brilliant renown to god in the highest places and on the ground peace in blessed honor to mortals.

See how I'm trying to run with some of the playful renderings of Kovacs?   See how Luke's Greek-singing angels sound like Euripides's chorus?   If and when there's more time, maybe we'd play with the chorus a bit differently; but it'd be some the same too.

What Bible Translation Sounds Like

Sometimes Bible translation sounds like gibberish. But gibberish can sound really important, even condescending. Let's look at an example in a moment. Before we listen in on biblistic language, here are a couple of non-biblical true stories of mine.

First Story. Someone really important to me once questioned one of my words. That somebody is Carolyn Osiek, a New Testament scholar who is a feminist who served on my dissertation committee. As we were in the Greek restaurant of all places talking about how I was accusing Aristotle of coining technical-and-abstract words to box in others, she turned the conversation to me (on me?) to ask: "Are you coining the word feministic?" "What word would you use?" I retorted. "Something like, 'in feminist ways' or 'by means that are feminist'," she replied. And she could have explained, "feministic sounds like you're looking down on feminists"; but she didn't need to say anything. I stopped using the word for a while, and when I did use it tried to make sure no one mistook me for Aristotle. A little later, I blogged this post on how rhetorical "-istic" can be. How little parts of words sound like big, condescending stuff.

Second Story. My college roommate from Japan was a helpful tutor when I was taking classes in Japanese language. My private lessons included listening to and trying to say tongue twisters like, "なまむぎ　なまごめ　なまたまご." Of course, I heard that as, "namamugi namagome namatamago," which hardly rolled off my tongue. This, of course, means 生麦生米生卵. It might be something you hear in a kitchen (if not as a joke on Japanese language learners): "raw wheat, raw rice, raw eggs." Even if I'd wanted to make my roommate-tutor feel my pain, I couldn't. He didn't stumble over my mother tongue the way I tripped over his. He'd grown up bilingual, and he spoke his English Rs and Ls and Ws and Fs as fluently as I did. The lessons were playful ("-mugi, -gome, -mago") but pronounced a difference between us. How little parts of words sound like big, condescending stuff.

So, now, there's this story in the Bible. It's also become a story of bible translation. This is the example of gibberish I was talking about at the beginning of this post. Sounding really important and smart, the translation usually goes like this:

Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.

This really is one of the best translations of Judges 12:5-6 in my opinion because it forgoes the really strange English word "fords" and uses the much-clearer phrase "shallow crossings" instead. This is the New Living Translation. But, like every other translation of the Bible I've heard, there's the weird "Shibboleth" / "Sibboleth" thing that seems give us English readers (especially non-Ephramites) some kind of insider track here. We'd more quickly side with the killers than the killed here.

What we don't get by the sounds-only translation is what the Hebrew word שִׁבֹּלֶת means to some of the early readers of the story. Quite literally, it's an ambiguous term that can mean either "corn stalk or grain waves" or "water flood or stream." And the Jews translating this word into Greek (in the Septuagint, "Judges A" AND "Judges B") make the Hebrew mean either σύνθημα or στάχυς [sun-thema OR stachys]. The first Greek word is just a signal to the reader who seems to know the story well:  it means something like a "theme together" or an "inside joke" (or a "password" -- which is how translator Philip E. Satterthwaite moves the Greek into English in the New English Translation of the Septuagint).  The second Greek word, in this context, is sometimes translated into English as "Stachys."  (And that's exactly how English translator Sir Lancelot Brenton translates it while Satterthwaite clarifies the word to mean "Ear-of-Corn"). The Greek word στάχυς, of course, is ambiguous. Greek readers know it means "ear of corn" but it also is used for the "lower part of the abdomen."

So if you read the story in Greek translation from the Hebrew, then it is funny because the Ephramites can't pronounce "corn stalk" and they get stabbed in the point of their body that looks like a corn stalk: they get a sword run through the lower part of their abdomen.  Or if you read the Judges A translation from Hebrew to Greek, then it's more serious because the translator is just reminding Jewish readers how one group used a password (an inside joke) on the other group, deadly serious stuff.  In both Jewish translations (from Hebrew to their Hellene), the reader never hears the Ephramites stumbling over the word (i.e., as if saying "Sibboleth").  The silence is important, I think, because the translators are giving a nod to their readers and not entirely trying to explain what would be understood if listening to the story in Hebrew.  (Sylvie Honigman, the scholar in Jerusalem who's looked at the legend of the Septuagint, says that the Greek here is in the Homeric not the Alexandrian [or Aristotelian] paradigm -- that's important to me as I look at how Aristotle abstracts language and the early Greeks refused to do that.  The Jews, with their scripture, are much more playful than many of our English translations - in Aristotelian fashion - give them credit for).

And if you read the story in Hebrew translated into as playful English, then it goes something like this. And here I give apologies to my good Japanese language tutor:

So they say to him,
"So say 'cornstalk rows like water flows'."
So he says "colnstark lows rike watel hrows."
So he can't rightly get it right.
So they seize him.
So they make his blood flow at the crossing of the Jordan.
So at that time some forty two thousand fall

some forty two thousand of the tribe

                                        of that twice-blessed second born of

fall

Now listen to the Hebrew:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ לֹו אֱמָר־נָא שִׁבֹּלֶת
וַיֹּאמֶר סִבֹּלֶת
וְלֹא יָכִין לְדַבֵּר כֵּן
וַיֹּאחֲזוּ אֹותֹו
וַיִּשְׁחָטוּהוּ אֶל־מַעְבְּרֹות הַיַּרְדֵּן
וַיִּפֹּל בָּעֵת הַהִיא מֵאֶפְרַיִם אַרְבָּעִים וּשְׁנַיִם אָלֶף׃

And hear the Greekistic translations:

Judges A
καὶ εἶπαν αὐτοῖς εἴπατε δὴ σύνθημα
[nothing's needed here]
καὶ οὐ κατηύθυναν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως
καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτῶν
καὶ ἔσφαξαν αὐτοὺς ἐπὶ τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου
καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐξ Εφραιμ ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ δύο τεσσαράκοντα χιλιάδες

Judges B
καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῷ εἰπὸν δὴ στάχυς
[nothing's needed here!]
καὶ οὐ κατεύθυνεν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως
καὶ ἐπελάβοντο αὐτοῦ
καὶ ἔθυσαν αὐτὸν πρὸς τὰς διαβάσεις τοῦ Ιορδάνου
καὶ ἔπεσαν ἐν τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ ἀπὸ Εφραιμ τεσσαράκοντα δύο χιλιάδες

Don't you hear how language keeps us out?  If it's "shibboleth" and we can say it, we think we're in.  But the Jews translating from Hebrew to their own Hellene didn't feel the need (in either Greek version) to separate out only the sounds of שִׁבֹּלֶת and σύνθημα or στάχυς.  The Hebrew writer of Judges seems to allow readers to play close attention to the interplay between the water crossing of the Jordan river and the word (i.e., water flowing like grain growing) used to trip up the Ephramites at that cross.  The Jews translating the Hebrew into their Greek, similarly, remind the readers that this is word play.  How it sounds can be fatal.  (In somebody's gibberish, that's just fatalistic?)