the name Jesus from a mother

Here's a bit from Tamar Kadari that gives the etymology of the name Joshua (aka in Greek transliteration as Jesus):

CHANGING HER NAME FROM SARAI TO SARAH

Gen. 17 relates that God was revealed to Abraham, commanded him regarding circumcision, and also informed him of the change of his name, and of that of Sarai to Sarah. In the midrashic expansion, Abraham says to God: “I see that, in the stars, Abram does not bear children.” God replied: “What you say is so. Abram and Sarai do not bear children, but Abraham and Sarah do bear children” (Gen. Rabbah 44:10).

As regards the significance of this change, the Rabbis explain that initially she was a princess [sarai] over her people, while now she will be a princess over all the inhabitants of the world [sarah] (Tosefta Berakhot [ed. Lieberman] 1:13). In an additional exegetical explanation, because Sarai performed good deeds, God added a large letter to her name, and she would now be called “Sarah” (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Masekhta de-Amalek, Yitro 1). The Rabbis determined that whoever now called Sarah by her former name transgressed a positive commandment (JT Berakhot 1:6, 4[a]). The midrash relates that the letter yud that was taken from Sarai’s name flew up before God. It complained: “Master of all the worlds! because I am the smallest of all the letters, You removed me from the righteous woman’s name?” God replied: “Before, you were in a woman’s name, and at the end of her name, now I put you in a man’s name, and at the beginning of the name [Num. 13:16]: ‘but Moses changed the name of Hosea [hoshe’a] son of Nun to Joshua [yehoshua]’” (Gen. Rabbah 47:1). According to another tradition, half of the letter yud [with the numerical value of ten] that God took from Sarai was given back to Sarah, and the other half was given to Abraham [each received the letter heh = 5 + 5] (JT Sanhedrin 2:6, 20[c]).

After God changed Sarai’s name, He further said (Gen. 17:16): “I will bless her; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her.” The Rabbis understand that the first blessing was that she would give birth to a son, and the second, that she would have milk. According to another exegesis, God blessed Sarah by forming a womb for her. In a third view, the blessing did not focus solely on the issue of birth, but extended to her entire being, which became young again. A fourth opinion derives the nature of the blessing from the continuation of this verse: “I will bless her so that she shall give rise to nations.” The meaning of the blessing, which relates to Sarah’s standing in the eyes of the nations, is that Sarah will be respected by the Gentile peoples, who will no longer call her barren. The midrash adds that Sarah conceived that very same year (Gen. Rabbah 47:2). -- Jewish Women's Archive, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, "Sarah: Midrash and Aggadah"  

Of course, Moses was given his name by an Egyptian woman.  And his name actually sounds like wet stuff, like MaMa too .  This was long before Moses (aka "Mama Says Delivered from Mother Nile") took "the letter yud" from Sarai's name to put it into Hosea's to make it JosHua.  

Then, back in Egypt, the Hebrews some years later translated what Moses did into Hellene this way:

καὶ ἐπωνόμασεν Μωυσῆς τὸν Αυση υἱὸν Ναυη Ἰησοῦν

kai eponomasen Moyses ton Ayse huion Naye, Iesoun

"and he was named by Moses, this Hosea son of Nun was, was named Jesus"

Then some years later, Luke has Gabriel the angel telling mother Mary to name her baby this way:

καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν

kai kaleseis to onoma autou, Iesoun

"and call that name of his Joshua."

Oswald was a terrible exegete

Biddy is indeed a fascinating person. And it is to her that we owe the Christian Classic. Oswald, it seems to me, was very much an impromptu speaker. My question is how much text did he actually preach from? If he only used the verses that Biddy shows for each passage than we can confidently say that Oswald was a terrible exegete.
--Lingamish (aka David Ker)

What do you think?

Just how terrible is the exegesis of John 1:39, for example, by Oswald Chambers in his sermon? Or might Biddy Gertrude Hobbs Chambers better be to blame for his ostensible interpretation of the passage to prove a point? And how important is exegesis here or in other contexts?

(The "exegesis" of John 1:39 is on today's page of his My Utmost for His Highest. Or is it hers? Here's the original version; and the modernized one, which adds a couple of other Bible references as if these are exegeted too).

Jewish rhetorics of the translated text

At this blog today, we come to a text that has men arguing over the proper reading of pure texts of the bible. The text we come to is a fragmented text. It is a text of Jewish translation from Hebrew-Aramaic into Greek. I've translated it below into English - unrefined translating. (It's called John 8; at least some of it is). Before the translating, here's a bit of commentary.

In the text (John 8), the point of issue for the arguing men is an unnamed woman and the force of the "hallowed" whole text of scripture (סֵפֶר תּוֹרָה, "book of Torah"), the undisputed, unfragmented canonical text of Moses. The unidentified text in question may also even be a piece of the whole (perhaps a translated piece, called Numbers 5). That whole "hallowed" text (or the parts) posed questions back then ( - especially when the parts were translated from holy Hebrew to homeric Hellene). But that undisputed text of males also poses questions now. If a woman today "as a Jew" asks "Is the text sexist?" and if she answers "Of course it's sexist!" - then is she disrespecting what a man, whether goyim or Jew, sees, in opposition, as his own "non-feminist alterity"? (I'm quoting my blogger friends Rachel Barenblat and John Hobbins). So do women get a say? Or mustn't the text get the last word, according to men? Mustn't women bow to this text of men as their (1) light, (2) compass, and (3) mirror?

The text we're coming to at this blog today is that different one (John 8). That fragmented one. It is what John "as a Jew" translates after his prologue. The text continues the story, carries the themes introduced, and builds the suspense. Ostensibly, the text is also (1) light, (2) compass, and (3) mirror - for men. But is it only these? Or does it more regard the position of the woman and of the man, in contrast? And how? Doesn't the translating do more than (1) just enlighten, more than (2) simply pass one along to the right point, and more than (3) merely flip one's natural image back and around?

Is this fragmented text (1) only proposition, (2) only imposition, and (3) only transposition?

Might it also be a(p)positions as well? In other words, as if playing with words, isn't this fragmented text both an a-positioning and an appositioning? Doesn't this text of this Jew take our positions and take them away? Aren't we un-positioned as outsiders to the text and by the text? And yet, and yet, doesn't it also as well throw its positions alongside its readers' positions, alongside our positions? An appositive, a re-placing of one noun next to another noun so that they change each other? Doesn't an appositive in language give the reader agency to interpret it as one noun both against and towards the other so that each changes, not only the two nouns in the reading but the reader also?

(1) Proposition is Aristotle's method, the "light" of logic.
(2) Imposition is the method of Alexander the Great, world domination to all points of the "compass."
(3) Transposition is Plato's method and Socrates' - finding the ideal by dialectic, by that "mirror" within the apparently real.

But what of the Hebrew methods of persons above the text? Isn't the text fragmented after all? And what if the person is Joshua? See the men of that first Joshua, right after Moses, listening to a woman, a prostitute, a foreigner named Rahab. Now listen to the translator of that later Joshua, that translator named John, listening to a woman, an adulteress, a female without a name as she is brought up on charges against the text of light, the compass, the mirror, the Book of Moses. These stories are thrown violently alongside your own, aren't they? Stories of the mothers of Moses, stories of Eve the mother of translation. And aren't the methods really those of a woman, your contemporary and mine, who "as a Jew" must be brought up against the text as if "obligated to find something within it which speaks to me [to her] on a spiritual level"? If the text is "patriarchal bullshit of the highest order" - then isn't something owed "to the text to be able to move beyond that knee-jerk reaction and to find something in it which speaks to me [to her]"? A(p)positioning. In other words, rendering, interlating, translating, parallelism, parable, analogy, indirection, subjectivity, profound and profoundly self-transformative hermeneutics.

Aren't these the methods of Aspasia, the prostitute, the foreigner in Athens, the rhetorician, the one paid so much differently than the (male) sophists, the translator of texts who silently writes ephemeral words in the dirt, in the dirtiness? And so we come again to the Greek rendered by the Jew, methods rendering other methods. The Jewish methods inclusive of other methods as rendering, translating, interlating, a(p)positioning. Listen to John "as a Jew" using rhetorics "as a Greek woman." Note how this translator has his Joshua speaking words as parallels to his prologue.

Anne Lamott Translates Luke 2:39-52

"What on earth did Mary do when Jesus was thirteen?"

Here's what I think: She occasionally started gathering rocks.

If we take the incarnation seriously, then even good old Jesus was thirteen once, a human thirteen-year-old. He learned by doing, as we have to. He had to go through adolescence. It must have been awful sometimes. Do you know anyone for whom adolescence was consistently okay? But in his case, we don't know for sure. We see him earlier, in the Bible, at twelve, when he's sneaking to the elders in the Temple. He's great with the elders, just as Sam is always fabulous with other grown-ups. They can't believe he's such an easygoing kid, with such good manners. In the Temple, Jesus says things so profound that the elders are amazed. "Who's this kid's teacher?" they wonder. They don't know that Jesus' teacher was the Spirit.

But at the same time he's blowing the elders away, how is Jesus treating his parents? I'll tell you: He's making them crazy. He's ditched them. They can't find him for three days. Some of you know what it's like to not find you kid for three hours. You die. Mary and Joseph have looked everywhere, in the market, at the video arcade. Finally they find him, in the last place they thought to look--the Temple. And immediately, he mouths off: Oh, sorry, sorry, I was busy doing all this other stuff, my father's work. Like, Joseph, you're not my real father--you're not the boss of me. I don't even have to listen to you.

And what is Mary doing this whole time?

Mary's got a rock in her hand.

I turned around. Sam sat grimly, and I fixed him with gimlet eyes, pinning him to the seat until he could see the error of his ways.

It seems idiotic for Sam to challenge me so often, since he has no income to speak of, and he can't drive. I looked at the face in the altar, toothless and muckled, with its folded-over mouth. In the alder branches above me, a little gray bird flitted about, modest but melodious. The leaves of the alder quivered. I started to miss Sam. He's every single good thing, including honest, and openly questioning and angry, that I love so much. The other day he said, with enormous hostility, "We are the only family that doesn't display its china." I responded nicely that we don't have any china and he said, "That's my point."

The hills behind me were close, curvy and feminine. The quaking leaves of the alder sounded like rain against a skylight.

I looked over at my bad boy. he was staring out the window with resigned misery, as if he were on his way to the dentist. I thought about stoning him. Jesus would have said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, and tax collectors, and thirteen-year-olds," which means, "You are totally pissing me off." And he'd have said this right before he picked up a rock.

I bet he had a good arm, being a carpenter and all. I bet he could take a kid out at 150 yards. I thought of Sam's most infuriating habits; how snotty he can act, how entitled, his clothes and towels always dropped on the floor; the way he answers the phone, sounding like Henry Kissinger and only pretending to take down messages.

What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. . . .

----

pages 98,99,100 of Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

It's copyrighted, I'm sure, so please buy the book, or check it out from the library--there's an audio version, a reading by the author. Don't tell her I gave so much away here, please.

or

Here's how my 12-year-old has to read it in her fundamentalist Christian school. Which gives her cause, she feels, to act like Lamott's Sam or Lamott's Mary's Jesus.

or

Check out Lingamish's rendition today, which he must call "Cyber-Psalm 51." Read it, and see if you can figure out why.

Gender Matters

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).
--Cheryl Glenn

Shelly Mandell, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at a rally recently by saying - in an echo of Gloria Steinem a generation ago - "This is what a feminist looks like." As a women's historian, I would have to disagree. Mrs. Palin, despite her membership in the organization Feminists for Life, is not really a feminist. She is, rather, a "maternalist"- a woman who accepts the gendered division of labor but uses her assignment to home and family to claim the right to public participation.
--Sonya Michel

The effort to create new metaphors for God bespeaks an understanding of monotheism that rejects the worship of a single image of God in favor of a new and inclusive notion of unity. Many Jewish feminists have pointed out that the inability of most Jews to imagine God as anything but male is a form of idolatry in that it identifies a finite image with the reality of God. Jews are used to thinking of idols as stones and carved figures, but verbal images can be equally idolatrous in their fixedness--indeed, can actually be more dangerous for being invisible. Underlying feminist metaphors, by way of contrast, is a conception of monotheism, not as a single image of God, but, in Falk's phrase, as "an embracing unity of a multiplicity of images." . . . God is not male. God is not a lord and king. God is not a being outside us, over against us, who manipulates and controls us and raises some people over others. God is not the dualistic Other who authorizes all other dualisms. God is the source and wellspring of life in its infinite diversity. God--as our foremothers seem to have known--is present in all aspects of life, but present not just as father and protector but as one who empowers us to act creatively ourselves. . . . God is known in community, encountered by the Jewish people at Sinai at the same time they became a community. But God embraces the inexhaustible particularities of all communities and is named fully by none.
--Judith Plaskow

he decisively broke with the conventions of his day that excluded women from receiving instruction on the Law and taught them openly and individually on the same profound matters he taught his male disciples.
When Jesus taught the multitudes, he employed metaphors from a woman's experience to draw their interest. He visited places where women commonly gathered. Beside a well, he engaged the Samaritan woman in serious theological conversation about living water. And here, in the house at Bethany, he spoke at length with Mary, despite her unfinished domestic duties and pressure from her sister.
--Carolyn Custis James

With the blessings of God, this [translation of mine] is the first complete English translation of the Quran that uses [an alternative to] the original [and male-traditional] meaning of "to beat" [a wife] in 4:34 which was [in my translation] "to go away." The translator gives three arguments for why this is so: . . . .
1. The word "beat" is a command which the Prophet chose not to carry out; and 2. The Arabic word "beat" has 25 meanings so why chose a meaning that does not follow the legal and moral principles of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet? 3. Interpreting the word as "beat" contradicts 2:231 and fosters divorce rather than marriage, commands to immorality and prohibits morality which is one of the definitions of a hypocrite in the Quran (see 9:67).
--Laleh Bakhtiar

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle. . . . Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves. . . . But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What . . . if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? . . . . What if Truth were a Woman . . . what then?
Cixous replies,
Then all stories would have to be told differently. . . .
--Michelle Baliff

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly. . . . since woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
--Anne Carson

And I finally realized the irony of my reasoning: by enthymemically arguing my case from existing commonsense assumptions . . . , I was retreating into an Aristotelian rhetoric of common sense (i.e., the sense we hold in common), which was the very rhetoric that my manuscript challenged. Now I grant you, Aristotelian rhetoric is a very powerful, very useful way to reason. But as I argued . . . , it can be gender blind, that is, naïvely blind to concerns of gender. What I was realizing in my own life was that it can also be race blind. . . . When asking myself whether my defense of Woolf, Daly, and Rich was as race blind as Aristotle’s treatise of rhetoric was gender blind, I answered myself with a well-intentioned, “Of course it is.”
--Krista Ratcliffe

Western rhetorics, at least the legacies of them that we have inherited through scholarship, are demonstrably dominated by elite male viewpoints and experiences.
--Jacqueline Jones Royster

We must risk, then, getting the story crooked. We must look crookedly, a bit out of focus, into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories, trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar. In short, we need to see beyond the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the unseen.
--Cheryl Glenn

Mary Sidney Herbert, translating

The first English translator of Aristotle's Rhetoric in 1685, writes the Preface to King James II and VII. There is reference to Sir Phillip Sidney and to "his sister, the Countess of Pembroke." The one is praised for his rule and his military accomplishment, the other for being "the ornament of her age":

Accomplifhments, which you your felf fo confpicuoufly inherit by a long defcent of Famous Anceftry. Story, that near will dye, admires Ireland once govern’d with applaufe by Great and Prudent Sidney; no lefs Famous for the overthrow of Shane, Oneal and all his Rebel Crew. Nor can Time deface the Memory of Sr. Philip, of whom Thuanus, Juvenis virtute, ingenii foleria & eruditione preftans; nor of his Sifter the Countefs of Pembook, once the Ornament of her Age.

I'm not going to say much more here. Below is a snippet from Mary Sidney's translation of Psalm 139, in comparison with the Geneva Bible, the King James I Bible, and the original Hebrew and the first Greek translation. See how different the translating by Mary Sidney Herbert! (And note that Robin P. Williams as done a fair amount of research speculating that Mary Sidney wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. See http://www.marysidney.com/.)