Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Languages 03

17 March 2024

The final issue in language is the American preference for brutal clarity over ambiguous beauty. The amount of metaphor and figures of speech in English are massive, but our underlying thought process prefers propositional clarity when it comes to something so important as eternal truth. We get impatient with the Hebrew habit of parables and picturesque wording.

A saying in the Radix Fidem community is that, with Hebrew, context is everything. R/OB talk a bit about different genres of literature in the Bible, and how songs or poetry would be expected to say things differently. Compare in the Exodus where the narrative says God caused a wind to blow and push the water aside, drying the sea bed. In the song later, it's how God's nostrils blasted the sea away. What physically happened and what we might have seen with our eyes is simply not that important, I would contend.

They note that apocalyptic literature is so foreign that modern readers have no idea what to do with it. They tell us that the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) changed the declaration, "God is a warrior" into "God brings wars to naught". The whole point of a parable of that sort is to give your mind freedom to wander the implications, not try to confine your search as apparently the Septuagint did.

One of them mentions the southern metaphor -- "no dog in that fight" -- to say several things. Something is not in our mission or our authority to act, it's messy and involves too many people with exceedingly strong feelings, and I'm not willing to get hurt to change the outcome (if I could).

Metaphors are clues to important statements. Jesus said He was the Good Shepherd. Relate that to Ezekiel 34 where His Father says He is the Good Shepherd and that the leaders of Israel are bad shepherds. Abel was a shepherd. Saul was called a bad shepherd; David a good one. And some scholars have the gall to suggest Jesus never directly claimed to be the Son of God. Isaiah talked about Israel as God's vineyard. Jesus talked about vineyards multiple times. How about the "stone the builders rejected" from Psalm 118?

The full weight of the Old Testament predicted Jesus was coming and what to expect from Him. There is no substitute for some level of familiarity with the biblical languages. At least get a feel for how the languages worked, if nothing else. The authors recommend using multiple English translations because each one was undertaken for different purposes: grammar precision, equivalence, fidelity to an imaginary original, etc. Is it all about the original languages or is it more about the contemporary readability?

They end the chapter with questions that make the following points:

  1. Job never bothered to address cause and effect for his situation. That in itself is a testimony that our western obsession with why Job suffered will lead us astray.
  2. When people hurt deeply, have you noticed how the faithful prefer metaphors and parables, instead of clear propositions?
  3. How would you feel about the task of explaining to a non-believer the metaphor of "the Lord is my Shepherd"?

Comments

Jay DiNitto

Maybe it's just how I read scripture growing up, but Jesus' claims to divinity were pretty clear to me. Maybe I didn't think about it "logically" enough to come to the "correct" conclusion that He really wasn't divine?

I maybe mentioned this in another post of yours, but "One Thousand and One Nights" is a fascinating compilation of NE/ANE stories. At least to me, they were easy to read, but there was some struggle to keep up with the nested allegories. Some of the intent wasn't clear as to why one character was telling a "pointless," complicated story to another, unless you stopped reading it with a purely analytical mind.


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