Proverbs 14 Part V

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

but the lips of the wise will guard them.

--Proverbs 14:3

(trans., Robert Alter)

Aristotle tells us that... 

creatures who are brave or just 

(like lions, bulls, roosters 

and the human male) 

have large deep voices....

The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn 

on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: 

as the women of Athens are about to 

infiltrate the Athenian assembly 

and take over political process, 

the feminist leader Praxagora reassures 

her fellow female activists that 

they have precisely the right kind of 

voices for this task.

--Men in the Off Hours 

 (by Anne Carson) 

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

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

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

and other alternatives.

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

EITHER 

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

OR “translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression”

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

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

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

ἐγὼ δὲ ἄλογός εἰμι
ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἰσχνόφωνός εἰμι

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To turn this around, however:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

2.  reading the biblical proverb, and its translation

Now we turn to Proverbs 14:3.

בְּֽפִי־֭אֱוִיל חֹ֣טֶר גַּאֲוָ֑ה וְשִׂפְתֵ֥י חֲ֝כָמִ֗ים תִּשְׁמוּרֵֽם׃

ἐκ στόματος ἀφρόνων βακτηρία ὕβρεως χείλη δὲ σοφῶν φυλάσσει αὐτούς

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

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

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

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

Yes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EITHER 

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

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

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

How Bible Scholars and Translators Miss It

Several months ago, Jane Stranz blogged here and here on how "helpful" one particular book is:  Tom Thatcher's study Jesus The Riddler: the Power of Ambiguity in the Gospels.  I want to give a longer quotation from the book here that seems important.

The only thing I'll add first is this:  Thatcher is a Southern Baptist bible scholar in the USA who's engaging with folkloristics (i.e., the cross-cultural study of folklore) as he tries to get at whether Jesus fits into a larger practice of riddling.  Folkloristics, for Thatcher, just barely touches on Greek rhetorics (in other words, he hasn't recognized the discipline of rhetoric although folklorists have dabbled in it; and Thatcher has no idea how Aristotle - who worked through his own classifications for what's Poetic and what's Rhetoric - so despised riddles and riddling (and riddlish ambiguity and riddlish parables) as strange sophistry and as mere rhetoric, although such riddling ironically stumped Aristotle more than once); so there's much work yet to do (perhaps a dissertation topic for anyone working in biblical studies, historical Jesus work, historiography, rhetorics, feminisms, translation studies, and the like; if you want to do some publishable research with me on this, then just let me know).

Now, here's longish quotation of Thatcher (from page 47) that gives a bit of a definition to "riddle" and a bit of an explanation why so many so far have missed it:

The fact [is ...] that riddles don't necessarily stand out as "riddles" in obvious ways....  Riddles generate intentional ambiguity, and this ambiguity can, in turn, be harnessed to serve a variety of objectives (entertainment, teaching, test of wits, etc.).  But those objectives do not depend on any particular style or form; as noted earlier, any statement of any shape or size can function as a riddle.  Riddles come in a wide variety of forms in many cultures (like mine) simply because variety fosters ambiguity; they're more ambiguous if they don't always look or work the same way.  For the same reason, riddles do not evidence a consistent content.  Even within a single culture, there is usually no narrowly limited set of terms or themes to which they appeal again and again.  As an example, the children's book to which I alluded in the preface, Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddles, includes questions about ducks, bananas, kangaroos, eggs, 200-pound mice, and a host of other unrelated topics.  Riddlers use this license to generate confusion; the more different things a riddle could potentially refer to, the better.  Because the form and content of riddles are necessarily inconsistent, specimens of the genre are most easily identifiable by the way people use them and by the way that other people respond to them.  But this makes the task of locating riddles as the sources for Jesus especially difficult, simply because we are not now in a position to ask Jesus or the Pharisees exactly what they were trying to do with their words on various occasions.  As a result, riddles have fallen below the radar of the typical criteria utilized in historical Jesus research.

What Thatcher is doing is fairly radical.  It's Mary Daly-ish if you ask me.  But if you yourself are anti-feminist-ish, please don't let that scare you off.  Thatcher is really putting Jesus in a very large class of Jewish rhetors, including those who translate and who write some of the Jewish scriptures.  This very large class also includes riddlers in Greek history (which linguistically, of course, intersects with Jewish scriptural histories in a grand way).  But don't let that scare you off either if you're more Christian-ish, even more English Christian-ish of the Anglo, Australian, American, Canadian, New Zealand, Western-World varieties; maybe what Thatcher sees in Jesus can help with better Christian English Bible translation on difficult sayings such as “Ears to hear…” which might be seen (and translated) as a riddle marker.

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Why You May Provoke Re-Membering

At this blog, you've read the phrase "bodies sexed female."  It's a particularly (intentionally) provocative phrase, I think.  It's evocative, to me, in ways reminding me of why some women write, of why Christine de Pizan (writing The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies) and Laura Cereta (writing her letter to Bibolo Semproni) had to write to regender the corpus of male-only history books.

I first heard the phrase "bodies sexed female" from historian Cheryl Glenn.  Glenn is one of our contemporary de Pizans and Ceretas.  She's a good one to listen to during our "women's history month" in the USA.  (Canada's and India's will be in October).  She knows that the body of books inscribing our histories is male only by and large.  Listen:

For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement). . .

Rhetoric always inscribes the relation of language and power at a particular moment (including who may speak, who may listen or who will agree to listen, and what can be said); therefore, canonical rhetorical history has represented the experience of males, powerful males, with no provision or allowance for females. . .

Except for rhetoric, no intellectual endeavor—not even the male bastion of philosophy—has so consciously rendered women invisible and silent. . . .

And hear why:

Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it, nevertheless, continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior.

Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular.

And listen to the conclusion of Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance:

     I am gratified to be concluding this project, but I must resist closure.  A regendered, retold rhetorical tradition opens up--not closes down--investigation into rhetorical practices.  Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it, nevertheless, continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior.  Gendered experiences continue to be difficult, if not impossible, to separate from human ones.  And for that reason alone, the masculine gender, just like male experience or display, has come to represent the universal.  Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular.

     In regendering the tradition [of the history of rhetoric], I have not gone so far as to "destroy gender" or even to "abolish the category of gender" (Wittig 67).  Instead, I have analyzed distributions of power along the axis of gender that have for too long been easily accepted as nature's empirical design for masculine superiority, for patriarchal representations of the universal.  This discourse of regendering has allowed me to examine gender(ed) performances within and across cultural constructions of the body, human identity, and power.

     To this end, the project of regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act, a commitment to the future of women, a promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women.  Of course, gender as a category of analysis contributes to this feminist project, but it is regendering that unsettles stable gender categories and enacts a promise that rhetorical history will be a continuous process of investigating the works of women and men rather than a final product that can be finally or universally represented.  As soon as it is written, any historical interpretation--including this regendered rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance--becomes an anachronism, for it immediately codes its own investigative site as needing/deserving more attention....

Now, ask with Glenn, "is there a 'woman's' or a 'feminine' rhetoric?"  And consider why you may provoke with your answers (by listening to Glenn's conclusion in Andrea A. Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica:  Women in the Rhetorical Tradition):

Usually, such rhetoric comes out of bodies sexed female.... it has surely come out of the mouths of men as well, of African Americans, of political prisoners, of the poor, the uneducated, the weak....  [Such rhetoric of] the (seemingly) disempowered could and does continually incite such powerful response ... those in power are all too often enraged by such rhetoric.

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.

 

Dissoi Logoi and What a Church Father May Have Known

WHERE WE ARE, WHERE WE'VE COME FROM, WHERE WE'RE GOING

Looks like there's a series of posts going here. So let me review and then preview.

The first post shows rhetorical wordplay in the bible that translation teams overlook as they get hung up in debates over which of their two "translation" methods (either "formal" or "functional" equivalence) is the better "solution" to their word problem, which is precisely that they do not "know—with precision—what it means." The second post shows rhetorical wordplay that the bible repeats although a "biblical Greek" educator (namely Bill Mounce) may overlook the power of the rhetoric of word repetition as he seems to repeat a particularly poor English translation of a certain Greek word, (namely "repeating," "repetition," "to repeat" and "repetitious, gossips, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing to one person but another to another person" for δί·λογος / dí-logos /).

This third post shows what early after-the-bible bible commentators said about δί·λογος / dí-logos / and what early before-the-bible sophists wrote in Δισσοι Λόγοι / Dissoi Logoi / that likely got to Paul.

The fourth post might just get into some (feminist rhetorical) motivations for the first three posts.

---

MOUNCE'S COMMENTS; MY RESPONSE

At one of his blogs, Mounce kindly responded to comments from some of us, his readers. And likewise, I want to respond here to two of his points. He said:

* The argument from two early church fathers (i.e., Greek) that they understood it [i.e., the word δί·λογος / dí-logos / as Paul uses it to Timothy] to mean "deceitful" and another as "saying one thing to this man, and another to that" is significant. Greek was their language and their opinion linguistically (as opposed to theologically) is generally seen as important.
* I am unaware of Δισσοι Λόγοι, so I don't really have an opinion. We do know that Paul was very aware of their Greek culture of his day and often find, for example, uses of technical terms in Stoicism but given a Christian meaning.

To be sure, it is John Chrysostom who writes of Paul's words, "μὴ διλόγους," the following: "τουτέστι, μὴ ὑπούλους, μηδὲ δολερούς." Roughly, Paul's words mean something like, "not double-speaking," and Chrysostom comments something like: "that is, neither hiding pus under a scab, nor deceiving." To be clear, ὑπούλους is a metaphorical term, a word that Socrates (in Plato's dialogue "The Gorgias") uses a couple of times to disparage the sophistry of Gorgias, the "rhetoric" guy.  The word that Plato's Socrates uses more-or-less means "an infection under covered over."  And δολερούς is a term for beguilement and deceit that runs through Homer's epics.  The term is also what the woman Diotima of Mantinea tells the man Socrates (as he recounts her conversation with him to a bunch of other guys getting drunk on wine with him, in Plato's "Symposium"); Plato says that Socrates says that Diotima says: "Mighty-ful and deceitful is love, all of it!" (ὁ μέγιστός τε καὶ δολερὸς ἔρως παντί).

And to be more clear, Aristotle listens very carefully to his teacher Plato as he's listened to his teacher Socrates. They're all on the watch for sophistry, for rhetoric, for coverings of the infections of deceitfulness.  Aristotle is aware of how women are natural deceivers, so he says.

Aristotle is particularly concerned about the sophists's Δισσοι Λόγοι / Dissoi Logoi /. And we can read all about it in Owen Goldin's wonderful essay, "To Tell the Truth: Dissoi Logoi 4 and Aristotle's Responses" (pages 233-49 of Presocratic Philosophy," ed. by Victor Caston and Daniel W. Graham, Burlington, VT: Ashgate P, 2002). Aristotle is concerned with the truth values of one "logos," and with the deceptive problems of two. Of course, Goldin concedes that "there is no clear evidence that Aristotle [directly] knew the Dissoi Logoi itself," but he points to Aristotle's work that "shows he is aware of the sophistic puzzles concerning truth and falsity that are propounded in the first half of Dissoi Logoi" (page 240).

Fortunately, we can be sure to know Dissoi Logoi at least as well as Aristotle did. Maybe better. I have right here the Greek text, and two translations of it: Thomas M. Robinson's and Rosamond Kent Sprague's of 1979 and of 1972 respectively. Now I'm reading the 7th section where there's that discussion of human expertise and assigning slaves and electing leaders for the people and such. I notice the mention of horsemanship there. Hmmm, I'm thinking to myself remembering Xenophon's expertise with horsemanship and his treatise on the subject in which he stops to advise his readers on something else:

"If someone thinks that I am using sophistic double-speak [δι·λογεῖν / di-logein/] because I have referred to matters already dealt with, then know this: this is not sophistic double-speak [οὐ δι·λογία / ou di-logia/]."

I think Xenophon knew rhetoric. I think he knew his readers may think that the sophists (even in Dissoi Logoi) were covering up the pus of one statement by repeating it as another, that they would deceive readers. Clearly, nonetheless, he repeats something about horsemanship, and he also repeats that he is not engaged in dis-logia or di'-logia (δις·λογία or δι·λογία). He's not making two statements in his repetitions; he's not using double-speak as he repeats.

Now, this may sound like we're all beating a dead horse. But I think Chrysostom knew what Paul was doing. And I think Aristotle knew what Xenophon was doing. And everyone, it seems, was somehow or another familiar with how Dissoi Logoi so much sounded like the di(s)-logia that Xenophon and Paul were getting readers and deacons to avoid.

(Now one more little parenthetical thing. Mounce says that there's another Greek commentator, post-Paul, who claims that di-logia means "saying one thing to this man, and another to that." It would be nice if Mounce would at least tell who that is if he won't give us a text. I've looked and think that the alleged definition [i.e., "saying one thing to this man, and another to that"] is somebody's definition of δί·γλωσσος / di-glossos / as is found in the Septuagint's Wisdom of Jesus (Joshua) Son of Sirach, chapters 5 verses 9 and 14 and chapter 28 verse 13.)

Aristotle & Baron-Cohen & Summers & Sommers: On Difference

A good friend of mine (an academic, a literary scholar, a rhetorician, not a feminist) wrote me last Friday (to share with me Christina Hoff Sommers’s op-ed piece “Academic Inquisitors”). He said:

I wanted to share with you a very interesting, if divisive and perplexing, article from today's Wall Street Journal. The article makes me wonder, don't feminist scholars want to show that women have a different perspective and epistemology? Or does that thesis depend on whether one finds herself (or himself) in the humanities or in science?

Others of you more qualified than I and more personally vested in the rhetoric here should have good answers to these questions. Please feel free to comment! But because my friend asks me, and because I can’t sit quiet when I think (with the mother of my children) about our first-born (our son) in the academy and our other children (our daughters) not far behind, here’s what I say:

Yes, women and men are different and have valuable differences. You and I are different (whoever we are). Gender makes different; race makes different; class makes different; place makes different; disability makes different.

No, finding myself in the humanities or in science does not erase the difference of one human body from another. Or the difference of one human brain from the next (whether autistic, if that’s the “far end of the male norm -- the ‘extreme male brain,’ all systematizing and no empathizing” or “wired to be . . . better empathizers” if that’s the other extreme in the female norm, as per scientist Simon Baron-Cohen, as per journalist Sommers.)

So, I ask:

Aren’t all men and women created equal (if we are different in body and brain and perspective and epistemology and rhetoric)?

And is Aristotle a humanitarian or a scientist when he declares that

Greeks are different from (and therefore superior to) Barbarians;

natural born masters are different from (and therefore superior to) natural born slaves;

males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, who are merely

males botched in the biology of conception by the mother’s mal-functioning;

and males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, because males have more teeth and males have heads full of sperm and have backbones that de-seminate the powerful fluid from the brain to the testicles, the natural receptacles for in-semination (if the females serving as mothers would just get the procreation process right)?

on academic snobbery: where are the true feminists and Hellenists?

Feminists and Hellenists should provide antidotes to academic snobbery. More on that in a moment. First, a true story about some personal moments.

This is my introduction to the attitudes and behaviors of intellectual superiority. In the fall semester of my sophomore year of college, all my professors happened to be thirty-something know-it-alls. Sure enough, they fostered critical thinking in me and, I suppose, in my classmates. But they also heightened my painful sensitivity to academic snobbery. In the course of the next five semesters, I couldn't help but notice how even the most experienced, tenured professors tended to retain (well beyond their thirties) this quality: they were all arrogant intellectuals. They made us students know we were mere undergraduates.

I remember one prof who, in class, actually attacked the identity of one student. As the student left crying, the teacher declared victory of one sort or another. (The victory, I found out later, was also, at least, the professor's own "victory" over the "identity," a personal identity rejected. Two of my friends at that university, struggling over the same identity, had taken their own lives that same semester. I myself shared--but not openly--the same personal identity, an identity I did not choose. The next year, another friend with the same identity--a friend from high school who I'd followed to the college--decided to drop out the last month of the last semester of the senior year, just as the parents arrived from overseas for graduation. Private coping with a profound identity was not something snobs, in the public academy, helped with. At least we were not entirely alone). In all my classes, I clearly remember, the instructors who were men treated very differently the students who were women (just because they were women). Many of my classmates who were women, some of them feminists, were starting to talk about the arrogant thought and actions of power of some of these professors. (My classmates never used that radical word "feminist" nor the other useful terms many undergraduates today find commonplace: "sexism," "misogyny," "deconstruction," "hermeneutic of suspicion," "meta-narratives," "cultural studies," and "post structuralism, post colonialism." The U.S. was, then, riding out our second wave of feminism--and we had not yet begun to whiff the postmodern air stirring at the time in France. And I was taking semester after semester of classical Greek, not yet connecting the importance of the Hellenistic roots either philologically or philosophically. I will explain what I mean here below). It's taken me decades, now, to get to the point where I can find antidotes to academic snobbery. I've gone in and out of my thirties; in and out of my own hypocrisy, my own arrogance of intellect; in and out of a semester of seminary to examine academically--spiritually?--my own angst with my personal identity, which I need not name here; through a master's degree in linguistics; through the coursework and qualifying exams of a Ph.D. in "English" focused on ancient Greek rhetoric and on feminist rhetorics; into life as a spouse, life as a parent; and into a score of years of work with ESL college students--those women and men truly on the outside of the academy in monolingual America. It's June 3, 2007, and now I'm (nearly) ready to suggest two antidotes to academic snobbery.

First, feminists should offer an antidote to academic snobbery. Humility and profundity are the hallmarks of the woman who gets looked down upon by men (just because she's a woman) and who is seen as lacking the capability of being as rational as men are (precisely because she's not a man). Modesty and emotional depth are hardly the characteristics of self aggrandizing rational(izing) snobs.

I could say lots more. But I couldn't write anything better than Nancy Mairs has written, sitting in a wheel chair "waist-high in the world," in a body she didn't choose. So I just recommend scholar Mair's Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

Second, Hellenists should give us another antidote to academic snobbery in twenty-first century America. I use the English word, should, here with all the ambiguous imperative-subjunctive glory we academic insiders give it. Some of you are demanding, then, that I say what I mean. Let me just warn you that, with the classic poetic feministic Greeks, I'm mainly going to play with language. (I may sound like a snob, at first. But I'll try to translate if you'll agree to try to read on and ask me questions, continue this dialogue: jkgayle at gmail dot com privately or comment here publicly.)

Helen (or Ἑλένη) is, after all, the beautiful beginning, middle, and end of Hellenism. She is a person whose personal identity--an identity she did not choose--divides and unifies. Hence, she is humble and profound. She did not choose, either, to be captured by Paris of Troy or recaptured by Menelaus or Theseus, or in epic legend by Homer and in rhetorical praise by Sappho and Gorgias and Isocrates. (I know this sounds like snobbish name dropping.) Here's how we should care: the stories of Helen are stories of a person; they are stories of beauty and of battle; they are stories of nation building; they are stories of people; they are stories of stories; they are stories of learning, of literature, of letters, of literacy, of orality. They are stories of personal identity, of passion, of profundity, of deep change in who I am and in who you are. They are stories of flawed deities and flawed humanity, stories of humility, stories of woman and man and of common humanity. They are stories that should bring down the arrogant academic.

We get our English word, academic, from their Hellenistic origins. Plato used the word to name his Ακαδήμεια, his Academy. It's related to that other word we Americans tend to love: δημοκρατία, or democracy. Both words, of course, share a common root: δῆμος, the Hellenistic word for common people, for the ones who tend to be on the outside. So where do arrogant academics in America get the right to their attitude and their behavior of power over the common sophomore? Hardly from the humble, profound Ακαδήμεια. (Just a quick aside on Plato. Feminist scholars in the history of Greek rhetoric, including Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Lisa Ede, and Madeleine Henry, have begun to show us that just as we know of Socrates from Plato, we know of Aspasia from Plato. The former, Socrates, is the much more famous teacher of Plato, the inventor of the famous Socratic method. The latter, Aspasia, is hidden in the infamy of her membership in the ἡετερεία, or "heterae," the kept women of ancient Greek higher education. But now our more inclusive, more humble and profound histories of Hellenistic influences on our American academy show something new. Of course, Plato credits Aspasia for writing for and influencing male speech givers. And yet, Plato may also have known that the Socratic method really was something that Socrates received from Aspasia, from a profound, lowly woman in higher education.)

Will you now revisit with me the first sentence of Homer's Hellenistic Odyssey? I want us to look at, to listen to, a phrase from the fourth line of the first book (repeated in Book XIII, Line 90).

It reads and speaks (humbly and profoundly) this way:

πολλὰ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν

or

many passions [Odysseus, our hero] suffered by heart

These are the very same sorts of words and ideas that Aristotle, in his Hellenistic Rhetoric, uses much later. In the opener of his treatise on rhetoric, for instance, Aristotle complains that all previous compilers of writings on the "skills of statement" have neglected central concepts. He talks about how common rhetoric is among all people, and he names πάθος and θυμα (or passion and heart) as key concepts thoroughly mixed up with and mixed in with the common rhetoric and conversation of all people.

Here's our problem now in America, where the academy tends to be full of academic snobs.
We have divided the common from the ivory tower. That is, we move from Homer's opener to Aristotle's and think there's nothing common between them, and hardly anything here or there for the common person.

So, in our literate minds, we move from the heart of orality to literacy alone.
From epic poetry to didactic rhetoric.
From story to precept.
From passion suffered to "pathos" as merely one of three available means of persuasion competing somehow with "ethos" and the much preferred "logos."
From passion, then, to "pathos," and from "pathos," ultimately to "logos."
From profound heart to shallow "enthymeme," as a heady syllogism in formal rhetoric.
From Helen to Hellenism, from Hellenism to Greek, from classical Greek to American academic English.
From the common to the snobbish.
From either feminism to Hellenistic intellectualism or from intellectualism to feminism
(but never to feminism in Hellenism or Hellenism that is feministic).
From the personal identity of Hellenism, feminism
to the impersonal intellectualism of higher ivory tower education.

We can hardly fathom that anything we do in the university in this nation today, from our high vantage, should cause us to bear any responsibility for the suicide of two undergraduates and for the decision to drop out of college by a third. Will the higher education labels we put on ourselves and our students (whether "traditionalist" or "feminist" or something else) bring down our arrogance? Do we work against student passion and profundity? What can we learn from our dropouts? Are we too snobbish also to acknowledge the humble feminist and deep Hellenist roots of our academy?