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.

blood, sweat, tears, and the ewe-lamb of God

You can't put too fine a point on this.  Female word-images for both Jews and Greeks for centuries have included -

toil,

blood,

sweat,

tears,

milk,

breasts,

virginity,

menstruation,

midwifery,

maternity,

wetness,

births,

touching,

kitchen duty,

meal service,

body washing,

uncleanliness,

sinfulness,

dirtiness

When you read about Jesus in Greek and in Aramaic and in Hebrew and even in Latin, the feminine imagery bleeds through.  This was true long before Anne Carson or any other contemporary feminist read Aristotle in Greek.  It was true before yesterday, when the Dalai Lama of Tibet called himself a feminist.

Reading and listening in English, you can miss much of that womanliness, depending on how phallogocentric your general culture.  We, for example, imagine that not many heard anything much but manly resolve from Winston Churchill in 1940 when he addressed the mainly-male Members of Parliament with his "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."  In addition, we run through blogger Damian's "lack of feminine language in Jesus' names" this month and without a blink quickly concede that "-Lamb (Rev. 13:8) - Lamb of God (John 1:29) - Lamb Without Blemish (1 Pet. 1:19)" must mean "ram lamb" and not, of course, "ewe."

In the last two posts, I've tried to show how Greek writers about Jesus used feminine images of wetness (tears, toil, sweat, blood and food and touching and eating, passing over a Pesah) when talking about him.

In this post, I want to go back to the Lamb image, and to the Breast image, in allusion to Jesus.  Before I do, the quick aside is this:  no one is claiming that the Jesus of history was a woman, that he as a "virgin" (albeit a male) was some kind of spiritual "eunuch," or that the gospel writers were somehow confused about his sex.  Rather, what I'm hoping to show is that Greek language gives dimensions to gender that aren't as restricted as Aristotle would have them, or as many many many of us today would have them either.  To put a woman in a box is conveniently to demean her; Pandora is the sexist male's nightmare.  And Aristotle the logical realist knew this very well.  We might as well pause another moment to listen to Anne Carson, as she acknowledges:

Aristotle accords to the male in the act of procreation the role of active agent, contributing "motion" and "formation" while the female provides the "raw material," as when a bed (the child) is made by a carpenter (the father) out of wood (the mother).  We might note also that the so-called Pythagorean Table of Oppositions, cited by Aristotle, aligns "boundary" or "limit" on the same side as "masculine": over against "the unbounded" and "feminine" on the other side.

    The assumptions about women that underlie the views of Plato, Aristotle and the Pythagoreans can be traced to the earliest legends of the Greeks.  Myth is a logic too.  In myth, woman's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable.  Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable.  Deformation attends her.  She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses.  (Men in the Off Hours, page 133)

When witnesses and reporters and historians used Greek to portray women and Jesus, the feminine leaks out.

JESUS, EWE (LAMB)

By default in English with Aristotle's logic, Jesus is a ram lamb.  Moreover, and after all, everyone knows that the translator John who writes the Apocalypse and the translator John who writes the Gospel and the Peter who writes the Epistle in Greek each use a grammatically masculine form:  1) τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου - 2) ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ and - 3) ἀμνοῦ ἀμώμου.  Now that should box things up, shouldn't it?

Well, unfortunately, things get lost and found in Greek translation.  Post-Passover, the Hebrew is still clear.  We might as well look at what Greek is used in three examples.

1) In Leviticus 14:10, Moses says and allegedly writes:

And on the eighth day he shall take two he-lambs without blemish, and one ewe-lamb of the first year without blemish, and three tenth parts of an ephah of fine flour for a meal-offering, mingled with oil, and one log of oil.

Then along come followers of Moses back in Egypt using Greek, and they make "ewe-lamb" [ כבשה (kibsah)] read this way:  ἄμωμον.  Notice anything about the gender here?

2) In Isaiah 53:7, the Prophet says this:

He was oppressed, though he humbled himself and opened not his mouth; as a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before her shearers is dumb; yea, he opened not his mouth.

Then along comes a follower of Jesus called Phillip helping an Ethiopian who's a eunuch, and Luke translates that into Greek (or just quotes the Greek of the Jews of Egypt) as a direct allusion to Jesus this way:

ὡς πρόβατον ἐπὶ σφαγὴν ἤχθη καὶ ὡς ἀμνὸς ἐναντίον τοῦ κείροντος αὐτὸν ἄφωνος οὕτως οὐκ ἀνοίγει τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ

Notice anything about the gender here?  Sure you do.  In the English translation of the Hebrew, you see "her shearers," a direct allusion to "a sheep," certainly a "she" sheep!  In Hebrew, she's רחל (rachel).  In Greek, she's ἀμνὸς.  Notice anything about the gender here? 

3)  In 2 Samuel 12:2-3, the writer has Nathan beginning the famous parable to the adulterer-murderer-liar David this way:

There were two men in one city: the one rich, and the other poor.  The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and reared; and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own morsel, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

Then along come readers of this parable who are Jews using Greek, and they also make "ewe-lamb" [ כבשה (kibsah)] read this way:  ἢ ἀμνὰς.  Notice anything about the gender here?  That's right, the pure sacrificial lamb is a ewe.

JESUS, BREAST (MILK)

Damian has already quoted Halden quoting Melissa quoting Augustine.  It's Latin translated into English, and Jesus is breast milk (in Confessions 7.18.24).  And there's more of that from the Homily 3 on the First Epistle of John:

Whoso knows that he is born, let him hear that he is an infant; let him eagerly cling to the breasts of his mother, and he grows apace. Now his mother is the Church; and her breasts are the two Testaments of the Divine Scriptures. Hence let him suck the milk of all the things that as signs of spiritual truths were done in time for our eternal salvation, that being nourished and strengthened, he may attain to the eating of solid meat, which is, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1 Our milk is Christ in His humility; our meat, the selfsame Christ equal with the Father. With milk He nourishes you, that He may feed you with bread: for with the heart spiritually to touch Christ is to know that He is equal with the Father.

And then there's this equality with the Mother also, from Sermon 369:

Our savior, born of the Father apart from any day.... Go on being filled with wonder; the one who bore him is both mother and virgin; the one she bore is both speechless infant and Word.  Rightly did the heavens speak....  Give suck, mother, to our food; five suck to the bread that came down from heaven (Jn 6:58), and was placed in a manger....  Give your breast to the one who made you such that he might be made in you, who both gave you the gift of fertility when he was conceived, and did not deprive you of the honor of virginity when he was born; who before he was born chose for himself both the womb from which he would be born and the day on which he would be born.

And St. Anselm in his "Prayer to St. Paul" (as mother) says:

But you, too, good Jesus, are not you also a mother?  Is not he a mother who like a hen gathers his chicks beneath his wings?  Truly, Lord, you are a mother too....

And Julian of Norwich in English, our English, in Showings (page 298 of one recent edition) sees Jesus conceiving his offspring, and in labor giving birth, and nursing at his breast, feeding:

But our true Mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life, blessed may he be.  So he carries us within him in love and travail, until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and cruel pains that were or will be, and at the last he died.  And when he had finished, and had borne us so for bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love....

     The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life....

     The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side, and show us there a part of the godhead and of the joys of heaven, with inner certainty of endless bliss.

SUMMARY

Feminine language and womanly imagery (in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, and even English) can be found and are shown for Jesus.  Much of it comes even from within the pages of the canon called the Bible.  This is the language of real human beings, Jews and Greeks, males and females.

Aristotle on Love

Aristotle on the Golden Rule:
Eavesdropping on (Male-Logical-Ethnocentric Ethical) Love

In a post yesterday, we said far too much about us and, therefore, hardly anything about Aristotle. (We were so amused by our own categories of history and fiction, religion and secularism, politics and prayer, and law and love - that we ran out of attention to the father of our logic and how we think it must derive his ethics for us. Yes, I'm talking about how we tend to co-opt a method of knowing in order, for example, to rob Jesus of the Golden Rule as if that's our moral obligation. "But we're only being objective," we protest, "merely investigating the nature of what's really real." We hardly think about why Aristotle hated Heraclitus and why Einstein loved Heisenberg and why Toni Morrison's blind, wise woman, who is "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and . . . alone in a small house outside of town," will, without forgoing much at all, kindly point out the fact that the "systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.") So today let's get right to Aristotle on Love.

Let's let Aristotle speak for himself, shall we? Translator Harris Rackham does. (But aren't we amused that Jeffrey M. Perl and his friends suggest that Aristotle and his translators need anything more than logic? Perl and his pals recognize nuance, complexity, and un-forgone mid-wifery properties: "It takes a rhetorician more ingenious than Aristotle to refigure 'a lover of war' as an isolated pawn — though, as Harris Rackham demonstrates, a translator can devise a sort of logic: 'For one by nature unsocial is also a "lover of war" . . . inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts.'" Yes, I know, I'm suggesting we're not so much going to listen to Aristotle's original authorial intent as much as we are going to listen with our own. And yet Krista Ratcliffe suggested this long ago: our recovering Rhetorical Listening from its banishment by Aristotle so as to authorize eavesdroppers). When Aristotle says one thing, Rackham gets it as that very same (dynamically equivalent) thing (and the Greek reader, especially the one of racial and sexual and academic privilege should not make an error). When the author writes, the invisible translator renders precisely. First a glossary, then Aristotle:

φιλίας [philías] = "friendship"
φιλήσεις [philēsis] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "friendship"
ἀντιφίλησις [anti-phílēsis] = "reciprocal affection"

φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = "friend"
φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = (person) "loved"

φιλεῖται [phileĩtai] = (to be) "loved"
φιλητοῖς [philētoĩs] = "loveable"
φιλοῦσιν [philoũsin] = (to) "love"
φιλοῦσι [philoũsi] = (to) "form attachments"

ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to) "enjoy"
ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to be) "fond of"
ἀγαπᾷ [agapã] = (to) "care for"

ἐρωτικοὶ [érōtikoì] = "to fall in love"
ἐρωτικῆς [érōtikēs] = "love"

ἀλλήλους ... καθ’ αὑτοὺς
[allēlous ... kath' aűtoùs]
= "each other in themselves"

Now listen:

Now these qualities differ in kind; hence the affection [φιλήσεις] or friendship [φιλίαι] they occasion may differ in kind also. There are accordingly three kinds of friendship [φιλίας], corresponding in number to the three lovable [φιλητοῖς] qualities; since a reciprocal affection [ἀντιφίλησις], known to either party, can be based on each of the three, and when men love each other [φιλοῦντες ἀλλήλους], they wish each other well in respect of the quality which is the ground of their friendship [φιλοῦσιν]. So that there is a different species of will-wishing in each case.

Thus friends whose affection [φιλοῦντες] is based on utility do not love each other in themselves [ἀλλήλους οὐ καθ’ αὑτοὺς φιλοῦσιν], but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other [ἀλλήλων].

And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy [ἀγαπῶσι] the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us.

Hence in a friendship [φιλοῦντες] based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved [φιλούμενός], but as useful or agreeable. And therefore these friendships [φιλίαι] are based on an accident, since the friend [φιλούμενος] is not loved [φιλεῖται] for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be.

There's more in the Nichomachean Ethics:

And the tastes of youth change quickly. Also the young are prone to fall in love [ἐρωτικοὶ], as love [ἐρωτικῆς] is chiefly guided by emotion, and grounded on pleasure; hence they form attachments [φιλοῦσι] quickly and give them up quickly, often changing before the day is out.

The young do desire to pass their time in their friend's [φιλίαν] company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship [φιλίαν]. The perfect form of friendship [φιλία] is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends [φίλοις] wish each alike the other's good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends [φίλοι] for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship [φιλία] of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.—

And there's the distinctive distinguishing of love based on science - far separate from that of the poets and pseudo scientists like Heraclitus and Heisenburg - who know nothing of logic or objectivity:

Some try to find a more profound and scientific explanation of the nature of affection. Euripides writes that ‘Earth yearneth for the rain’ when dried up, ‘And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.’ Heracleitus says, ‘Opposition unites,’ and ‘The fairest harmony springs from difference,’ and ‘'Tis strife that makes the world go on.’ Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that ‘Like seeks after like.’

Dismissing then these scientific speculations as not germane to our present enquiry, let us investigate the human aspect of the matter, and examine the questions that relate to man's character and emotions: for instance, whether all men are capable of friendship [φιλία], or bad men cannot be friends [φίλους]; and whether there is only one sort of friendship [ἓν εἶδος τῆς φιλίας] or several [πλείω]. Those who hold that all friendship [...] is of the same kind [οἰόμενοι] because friendship [...] admits of degree, are relying on an insufficient proof, for things of different kinds also can differ [τὰ ἕτερα] in degree. But this has been discussed before.

Perhaps the answer to these questions will appear if we ascertain what sort of things arouse liking or love. It seems that not everything is loved [οὐ πᾶν φιλεῖσθαι], but only what is lovable [τὸ φιλητόν], and that this is either what is good, or pleasant, or useful. But useful may be taken to mean productive of some good or of pleasure, so that the class of things lovable [ὥστε φιλητὰ] as ends is reduced to the good and the pleasant.

But before we leave there's that hint at a Corinthian love, that Christian one, of that man named Paul, who begins to stretch in an other way Aristotle's more objective "agape" love (before he tells the women to be silent in the church and to ask their husbands at home). Says Aristotle, in his Ethics, logically avoiding hyperbole and other extremes:

The man who exceeds these limits cares [ἀγαπᾷ] more for such pleasures than they are worth. Not so the temperate man; he only cares for them as right principle enjoins. . . . Men who have inherited a fortune are reputed to be more liberal than those who have made one, since they have never known what it is to want; moreover everybody is specially fond of [ἀγαπῶσι] a thing that is his own creation: parents and poets show this. But it is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is not good either at getting money or at keeping it, while he is profuse in spending it and values wealth not for its own sake but as a means of giving.

That brings us back to Jesus, to the Golden Rule, to the various translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John of the conversations and questions. They are not so logical, so predictable, so categorical. They listen, with their own intent, as they listen to Moses, and to God. Have we answered all of our questions about Love, and the Law? Do we know its shape definitively (as if Greek male elite ethically)?

Would we recognize that "The love of God and for God resides in a gap"? Why are we listening to silenced women, like Julia Kristeva with her Tales of Love and their erotic, apagetic, philetic ambiguities? Like Jane's attention to ... Maggi Dawn and Jeanette Winterson and Simone preaching ... Bits and pieces, fragments, gaps, inbetween.

Who is my "neighbor"? and what must that mean?, asks Suzanne.

If we keep up this nonsense, we'll never listen to Aristotle only and only to his original designs on the Golden Rule.

Reading Anointed in Greeky Hebrew

Yesterday our pastor preached a brilliant sermon (on the ways Moses changed and matured) the text of which was Hebrews 11:24-26:

²⁴By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. ²⁵He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. ²⁶He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. (NIV)

Today I want to look at other things in and around the text:

--> especially the ways the early writers and / or editors and / or translators liberally (or "progressively") change this text to increase the play in it (and by "play" I mean both "playfulness" and also interpretive "wiggle room");

--> but how the Christian Bible translators seem to want to do the opposite.

Here's Greek for comparison:

24Πίστει Μωϋσῆς μέγας γενόμενος ἠρνήσατο λέγεσθαι υἱὸς θυγατρὸς Φαραώ, 25μᾶλλον ἑλόμενος συγκακουχεῖσθαι τῷ λαῷ τοῦ θεοῦ ἢ πρόσκαιρον ἔχειν ἁμαρτίας ἀπόλαυσιν, 26μείζονα πλοῦτον ἡγησάμενος τῶν Αἰγύπτου θησαυρῶν τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἀπέβλεπεν γὰρ εἰς τὴν μισθαποδοσίαν.

Immediately, the reader is transported back to Egypt to ask questions.

There's the daughter of Pharaoh (θυγάτηρ Φαραω) in Hebrews 11:24; and she's lifted right out of Exodus 2:5 & 2:6 & 2:7 & 2:8 & 2:10 in the Greek translation of the Hebrew. That is, this "Hebrews" text points in reverse to an earlier Jewish-Greek translation of the traditional masoret Hebrew text, playfully named "Exodus" (i.e., the Odyssey-like "Way Out of Egypt"), commissioned and completed in Egypt. In Egypt, professor Sylvie Honigman of Tel Aviv University points out, the commissioned Hebrew translators render their old text in the "Homeric paradigm." And, as we're looking back to how the writers and/ or editors and/ or translators of the "Epistle of Hebrews" writes in Greek, Jared Calaway, at his blog Antiquitopia, lets us see and hear the Homeric play - through the first or second century right up to our own.

What we're beginning to question is whether Christian Bible translators work in this paradigm (i.e., the paradigm of Homeric play of the Hebrews). Or is the paradigm of Christian Bible translators more typically aristotelian? Aristotle, by logic of course, wanted to avoid ambiguities in Greek. The text was to lock down the meaning and was to say the one thing that the original author intended and nothing else.

As the reader reads the text above in English translation, an initial question is whether the text points forward to the future. To a precise point. And how far forward into the future? And whom and what might the text be pointing forward to? The quick and precise and unambiguous and objectively obvious answer must be: "to the Christian Christ." But we may be resorting to aristotelianism again - as if that's "translation." And we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren't we? So back up from now. Let's back up from "Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" when such a remote spot focuses on a place such as bible-belt USA, where non-Hebrews here and now (the majority the population I dare guess) claim "The Book of Hebrews" as a text for Christians alone despite the fact that most Jews can rightly reply, "You can have it!"




Back in Egypt, there's this new King of Egypt (not necessarily Φαραω but certainly the monarch put there in Alexandria after the city is named after Alexander the Great who, we have to add, learned under Aristotle in the aristotelian paradigm). And there, but in the Homeric paradigm, in the Hebrew play with the Greek text in Egypt, this newer King is like the Pharaoh of old who interacted with Moses. Except he must interact with Hebrews who are translators of Moses. As the writer(s), or editor(s), or translator(s) of the epistle of Hebrews quote from these earliest translators, we wonder whether they sensed any fear in those first translators - but we have little doubt that they sensed anything but the proof of belief and the lack of fear in Moses. They write:

27Πίστει κατέλιπεν Αἴγυπτον, μὴ φοβηθεὶς τὸν θυμὸν τοῦ βασιλέως, τὸν γὰρ ἀόρατον ὡς ὁρῶν ἐκαρτέρησεν.
27By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible. (NIV).

The reader immediately notices something and someone hidden. Perhaps more than one somebody missing. Yes, the invisible God. Yes also the hidden daughters. For all the repetition given to this daughter of Pharoah (Exodus 2:5 & 2:6 & 2:7 & 2:8 & 2:10) and for all of the recognition given to her, the text never gives her name. We know her because her name is invisible and unspoken and she acts like God: she saves the dying, the male, the Hebrew, the son. And she alone gives him his name. The name she gives translates into Hebrew wordplay: משה - the Egyptian Mosheh punning playfully on the agency of his Egyptian MaMa אם who Mercifully delivers him משה from the Muddy Ruddy Bloody Murderous waters מים - as if out of the womb and out of the lips of the Egyptian mother and midwife and princess christener and nurse provider.

In the old Greek text (that Hebrew translation done back in Egypt as "Exit Odyssey" or Exodus 2:11), Moses grows up: μέγας γενόμενος Μωϋσῆς. In the new Greek text (as Hebrews 11:24), the transition seems as abrupt: Μωϋσῆς μέγας γενόμενος. By the new text, the reader is carried back but is simultaneously thrust forward to a midrash-like analysis of an entire episode of the old story. An entire complex narrative turns on one little clause: ἠρνήσατο λέγεσθαι refused to be known. In the old story, the grown boy becomes a witness to injustice and murder and flees the scene. In the new text, he becomes the son of a mother no longer and is faithful to another.

At least this is how most English Christian translations of this text lock down the story.

It never moves forward from that.

There's the rejection of the female, a rejection of the faithful salvation by a woman of a male as if she were his very own mother and as she collaborates with other women braver than fathers and brothers (either Hebrew or Egyptian) - the baby's very own mother and sister collaborating with the princess - the incredible mix of Egyptians and Hebrews, faithful language and rhetorical naming and playful translation and ancient feminisms.

The Christian text in English rejects the feminism. So let's read more closely. Let's ask questions so that the apparent male dominance and Christian dominance of the text doesn't make it always only one thing and never ever anything else. (Yes, I know - such dominance sounds like Aristotle not necessarily anything like the Septuagint translators or the writers of Hebrews of a far different, absolutely more different in play.)

How different might the text (i.e., the Greek translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew in the Homeric paradigm) be?

The identity "υἱὸς θυγατρὸς Φαραώ" in Greek might be translated in English as "a son of a daughter of Pharaoh." The collocation of son and daughter does not suggest an easy dominance of one over the other or even of the one purely different from the other. The collocation, in fact, syntactically mirrors an appositive - which is just a fancy way of saying that both nouns translate one another in what Mikhail Epstein might, rightly, see as an inter-lation as much as a trans-lation. And both, then, are related together to the proper noun "Pharoah" in a sense. This reading (which English translators tend to lose with "the son of the daughter of the Pharaoh") makes the contrast in the next verse very compelling.

There's more feminism (more gender inclusivity) than unmarked male-dominant sexism in Hebrews 11:25. (Long before the English bible gender debates in Chrsitianity especially, we get this inclusiveness in the Greek text of Hebrews). The identity "τῷ λαῷ τοῦ θεοῦ" in Greek is definite even in translated English: "the people of the god." The contrast of identities for the Hebrew around Πίστει is from indefinite son-daughter of Pharaoh to definite people of the Divine One. There's no necessary rejection of females or of the participation of a foreign Egyptian female. Moses, of faith (and prior to Jesus Christ and faith in him), does not lose his sonship with respect to the daughtership of the princess of Egypt. Moses is not even renouncing his lineage in the least - as Paul seems to when calling himself a Hebrew of Hebrews (of a particular tribe of the nation of Israel with a baby's circumcision to boot) while renouncing this identity "for the sake of Christ" as we read that in English. No - Moses "a son" who is in many ways like "a daughter" of Pharaoh is also one of "the people of God." And "a daughter" like that, we read in the old text and say again, is like "the God" who saves the son. If it we're not for her, he would not have the name Moses, the wordplay name, the feminist name of a princess collaborating in translation with a few slave women.

Which brings us to another verse:

26μείζονα πλοῦτον ἡγησάμενος τῶν Αἰγύπτου θησαυρῶν τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἀπέβλεπεν γὰρ εἰς τὴν μισθαποδοσίαν.

Christians who translate tend to make the "τοῦ Χριστοῦ" here refer to "Christ Jesus" only and obviously, quite objectively and logically, to no one else. (In another post, we've wondered why the English translation has to commit what Robert Alter calls "the heresy of explanation" when referring in Greek to Ἰησοῦς - who must always and only be explained by the translator to the reader as either "Jesus" or the other guy "Joshua.") So now again the English translator finds useful Aristotle's convenient logic boxes. "Christ" is the real (if abstract) category for the "Christian" - and nothing else fits.

But the text of Hebrews pushes readers back again to the Septuagint. First, we go back to Egypt and to daughters and a son being rescued. But then the translation brings us to lyric and poetic Hebrew beyond the epic narrative "Exodus."

First, from the phrase "τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ" to Exodus 2:3 in Greek translation and a similar clause:

ἐπεὶ δὲ οὐκ ἠδύναντο αὐτὸ ἔτι κρύπτειν, ἔλαβεν αὐτῷ ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ θῖβιν καὶ κατέχρισεν αὐτὴν ἀσφαλτοπίσσῃ καὶ ἐνέβαλεν τὸ παιδίον εἰς αὐτὴν καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὴν εἰς τὸ ἕλος παρὰ τὸν ποταμόν.

Notice the verb, κατέχρισεν - it's what the Hebrew daughter is doing. She's anointing the basket, she's "besmearing" says translator Lancelot Brenton, and she's "plastering" it says translator Larry Perkins. And those who read Homer's epic Odyssey remember hearing this at least four times as women are doing things on behalf of others in need:

τὰρ ἐπεὶ λοῦσέν τε καὶ ἔχρισεν λίπ’ ἐλαίῳ,
ἀμφὶ δέ μιν φᾶρος καλὸν βάλεν ἠδὲ χιτῶνα,

In another post at another blog, we've read the wordplay of Hebrews into Greek. But the point we want to make here is that such play is Homeric not aristotelian. The very idea of the Greek translation that "Christ" the English word comes from is from early ancient Greek feminism. It's messy stuff of lyric of epic of women of poetics of rhetorics that Aristotle tried to avoid. It's the messy stuff that Christ-ian translators today still try to avoid.

But it's the very stuff that Hebrews writing and translating their own scriptures embraced and produced.

So, in Hebrews 11:26, the writers-translators have Greek readers turning. Turning first back to the Homeric translating of Exodus 2:3 - a daughter translating a basket into a womb. We are taken back again to the Christ-verbs (to things women do and do again) in the Odyssey. Next, Hebrews 11:26 takes us back but forward a bit.

We are now turned to and turning in the "Strummings of Strings" in the "Psalms." The salient sounds of "τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ" have their reverberations in Psalm 89.

(The Psalm in Hebrew is more "A Maskil [מַשְׂכִּיל "wise, nationalistic song"] of Ethan [איתן 'the Enduring'] the Ezrahite [אזרחי "Native Son"]-- notice the wordplay of the Hebrew names lost but found anew in the Greek a wise, nationalistic song which in Greek is by Αιθαν τῷ Ισραηλίτῃ or literally, "Shining / Blazing, the Israelite." Bacchylides loves the word αἰθᾶν in speaking of Apollo - so why not use it for איתן, the play on אזרחי?).

Listen to the reverberations from Hebrews 11:26 in the lyric Greek, in the Greek Psalm that is of Αιθαν τῷ Ισραηλίτῃ the "Shining Israelite." Here's the song in responsive dialogue with the Lord in Greek (Psalm 89:52, echoing 89:38, echoing 89:20). Listen:

οὗ ὠνείδισαν οἱ ἐχθροί σου, Κύριε,
οὗ ὠνείδισαν τὸ ἀντάλλαγμα τοῦ χριστοῦ σου

σὺ δὲ ἀπώσω καὶ ἐξουδένωσας,
ἀνεβάλου τὸν χριστόν σου·

εὗρον Δαυιδ τὸν δοῦλόν μου,
ἐν ἐλαίῳ ἁγίῳ μου ἔχρισα αὐτόν.

Who Anoints as a Greek woman might (verse 20)? And whom is Anointed (mashach משח)? Isn't God anointing his son David?

Why is the psalmist complaining? What good is the anointing if it seems the Lord is casting it off (verse 38)?

When the enemies reproach the anointed one, won't there be remembering (verse 52)?

משיח mashiyach חרף charaph

ὠνείδισαν oneidisan τοῦ χριστοῦ tou christou

Or will all be lost in translation? In the aristotelian paradigm of "translation" that separates:

"male" from "female"
"the son" from "the daughter"
"peasant women" from "a princess"
"Moses" from "Egyptian lips"
"Hebrews" from "the kingdom of Egypt"
"Jesus" from "Joshua"
"Christ" from "feminine anointing"
"Christ" from "David"
and finally
"Christian Hebrews" from "Jewish Hebrews"

In this post, I know I'm using hyperbole, exaggeration for effect. I'm not trying to overwhelm anyone with the exhaustive possibilities of wordplay. I am wanting to show some of the unaddressed power of Aristotle's method. And to show how separating and silencing Christian translation, by its limited logic, has tended to be. And to show that aristotelianism is not what Hebrew translators (including women as agents in Hebrew narrative) tend to use. And to reassure all of us that logic is okay as long as logic is not our only human tool or our only personal language.

like God: women speak

First, there's a helpful description written by Nancy Mairs of "feminine discourse" (at the end of this post).

And also there's linked here a poem "LIKE GOD (TAZRIA)" beautifully and profoundly written and spoken by the incredibly talented Rachel Barenblat after which she says,

The Hebrew word for womb is רחם / rechem; the Hebrew word for compassionate is רחמן / rachaman. Every time we call God Ha-Rachaman, "The Compassionate One," we're also subtly hinting at the existence of God's womb. (Kind of brain-breaking if one presumes that the word "God" is masculine, isn't it?) The ability to nurture new life in the womb and then bring it forth into the world is something women have in common with God -- at least on a metaphorical level.

And here and here and here is Suzanne's important series "McCarthy vs Wallace" in which she most carefully and insightfully writes explaining and exposing: "Once again, this is the level of [patriarchal hierarchy] scholarship used to keep Christian women out of leadership positions in the church."

And Gitl Wallerstein-Braun writes here to begin her essay on fundamentalist "Judaism and feminism" with a story of her own:

It was some twenty years ago, when I was summoned to meet the principal of the local ultra religious girls school attended by my four daughters. I left the meeting shell shocked by the unexpected rebuke I was given. Across the other side of the desk from me, the deadly serious young man castigated the immodest cut of the neckline of my dress.

This experience switched me on to the subversive agenda to keep us religious women in our place; from asking any questions about the disproportionate sacrifices we were compelled to make for our ancient way of life. We were denied all academic and literary stimuli. We were expected to endure the often devastating physical toll of multiple pregnancies and child births. So it dawned on me that our communal religious ethos may represent some issues other than teaching the fear and love of the Lord.

And there's Zohra Moosa, who writes here in answer of a rather logical and rather typical question of separation, of Islamic "Faith and feminism": "I was asked directly whether I found it difficult to reconcile the two, whether there were inherent tensions I had to navigate and how did I square my religion and my belief (the two were conflated in the question) with my feminist convictions."

And Asma Barlas writing again voices here that:

I do not like to call myself a feminist; yet, the label continues to stick!

The truth is that long before I learned about feminism, I had begun to glimpse a message of sexual equality in the Qur’an. Perhaps this is paradoxical given that all the translations and interpretations that I read growing up were by men and given that I was born and raised in Pakistan, a society that can hardly be considered egalitarian. Yet, the Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong.

But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language--hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how. From reading Muslim history, on the other hand, I discovered that Qur’anic exegesis became more hostile to women only gradually and as a result of shifts in religious knowledge and methodology as well as in the political priorities of Muslim states. And, from feminism, I got the language to speak about patriarchy and sexual equality. In other words, it was all these universes of knowledge that enabled me to encounter the Qur’an anew and to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either.

Now Nancy Mairs. She is not claiming at all to speak for God or even like God here. (She has written another book in which she discusses the Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith.) But here I wanted you to hear. To see her description of feminine discourse - as you yourself think about faith, perhaps your own faith, and perhaps even God. (Oh, and you have to get through a few paragraphs of patriarchy first, the dominant implication of a "chain of immortality" that is male first, but what's so new about that? Please be patient.)

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

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

Which is not women's language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. . . . The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces "woman [explains Domna C. Stanton] to man's opposite, his other, the negative of the positive." No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman's immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: "Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on [observes Julia Kristeva]." Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

--voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, pages 40-42.