The stories
behind words provide their meanings.
Knowing
the stories behind the words of Jesus reveal his meanings,
if you
do not know his stories your brain will link your meanings to his words.
Those are facts!
The
stories of Jesus were “Hebrew stories,” not “English
stories” (see previous email). A person’s language
affects “the way a person thinks.” I not only speak
American English; I think in American English too.
Jesus not only spoke
Hebrew; he thought in Hebrew.
How
are they different? There is an arc to English stories and English
translations of the Bible. They have a beginning, followed by a storyline, and a
clear ending. Often a problem is involved, the storyline deals with how to
solve it, and by the ending the problem is solved. One thing many Christian
stories have above all is certainty.
Hebrew
readers rarely find tidy stories with logical A to Z progressions
in the Bible. Biblical Hebrew is beautifully unruly, often ambiguous,
multiple in meaning, hard to pin down and events are not always written in the
order in which they occur. Just because an event is written about after
another event does not mean it chronologically follows it.[i]
In
addition, an action is regarded as being either completed
or incompleted.
Hebrew, therefore, knows of no past, present, or future tenses,
and there is “no early and no late” in the Torah. So, with an
ancient Hebrew text that repeats, and sometimes seems to contradict itself, a
willingness to consider various possibilities is essential. But for
readers of English translations, many translators “added the familiar arc of
English stories,” thereby covering up many of those “beautifully unruly
things” and replacing them with “Christian certainty.”
Hebrew thinking must be
applied to the books of the “Old Testament”
because that where most
of Jesus’ sacred narratives are found.
Language
is not simply words. Language is an opening into a way of thinking, a view
of the world, a naming of its neighborhoods.
Grammar
is a universe.
The tiniest parts of grammar tell a story. It is impossible to read a word
without its neighbors. You have to see the first line in its relationship to the
to the lines that follow it. It is not easy to make a language come alive
for someone who does not speak that language. It is a challenge to rename
the seemingly familiar and name the completely unfamiliar.[ii] Examples of those
challenges are found in the Genesis 1:1 (King James Version).
In the beginning God
created the Heavens and the Earth.
The
two underlined words are so familiar to Christian readers that the just
suggesting they may mean something else sounds crazy. In addition to that, when
they hear about things Hebrew speaking observant Jews won’t do, that sounds
crazy too. For example, what would you do if I asked you to write “God”
on a piece of paper for me? Every Christian I know, would be happy to write it on
a piece of paper.
The
Hebrew word translated “God” is transliterated “elohim.”
Transliterated means the Hebrew letters and symbols are converted to
English letters. In Jewish
traditions today, any paper with the Hebrew word for “elohiym”
on it, must be treated with respect and could not be thrown out – it would
have to be buried. Instead of writing “elohim,” an observant
Jew would probably write “elokim.” Jews were the same way in the
time of Jesus.
“Heavens”
is a translation of the Hebrew word transliterated “shamayim.” In
Genesis 1, it is the name of a “solid dome-like structure located beneath
the surface of a deep shoreless body of water.” “Skies”
is a much accurate description of “shamayim.”
Modern
readers also face problems created by Archbishop
Stephen Langton, Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus, and Robert Estienne (a
printer). Langton inserted chapter
breaks into the entire
biblical text. Kalonymus and Estienne inserted verse markers.[iii] Below is Genesis 2:4 from the King James Bible.
“These are the generations of the heavens
and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God
made the earth and the heavens.”
●
What is different about the two underlines phrases above? In the first phrase “heavens
is first,” while in the second phrase the “earth is first.”
●
The time reference in the first phrase is “when they
were created,” while in the second it is “in the day that the Lord God
made.”
The
Torah scroll that we have today came down to us from Ezra the Scribe. He was
born and trained to be a scribe in Babylon. After completing his work on the
Torah scroll, he carried it to Jerusalem in 458 BCE. He was skilled at working
with Babylonian cuneiform tablets. When several tablets were
needed to record a story, to preserve the sequence they were read in, "titles"
and "catch lines" were used. They were taken from the
first words of the first tablet and repeated at the end of each subsequent
tablet.[iv]
Now let’s apply this to the first two stories in Genesis.
●
Genesis 1:1 has the heavens
and of the earth
(marks the beginning of the story).
●
Genesis 2:4a has the
heavens and of the earth (marks the end of the story).
●
Genesis 2:4b has the earth
and the heavens (marks the beginning of the next story).
The insertion of chapter and verse markers destroyed
the original contexts of the first and second stories in Genesis.
This is reinforced by the fact that chapter one ends with completion
of Day Six and Day Seven is in chapter two. In the Jewish culture,
a week has seven days. I
will continue this discussion in my next email.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
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[i] The
Grammar of God by Aviya Kushner © 2015; Spiegel & Grau, New York, NY; pp.
xxiii, xxx.
[ii] The
Grammar of God; p. 100.
[iv] New Discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis by Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman, C.B.E. Marshall, Morgan & Scott, LTD. London; Edinburgh; p. 44.
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