MATHETΩN

It is generally accepted — among those who accept Divine Authority — that having heard the Divine Voice is an advantage: that the religious legalist enjoys knowledge and favor above the rest of humankind. But Paul Envoy says that those claiming this advantage may be special mainly in that they are specially cursed among humankind: He writes to the Jews in Rome: “The name of God is defamed among the nations because of you … [who] boast of a Law” — and then most risibly can never keep it.

How are you advertising your chastity?

“But, semantics aside, the general practice of modern English translators of suppressing the ‘and’ when it is attached to a verb has the effect of changing the tempo, rhythm, and construction of events in biblical narrative. Let me illustrate by quoting a narrative sequence in Genesis 24 first in my own version, which reproduces every ‘and’ and every element of parataxis, and then in the version of the Revised English Bible. The Revised English Bible is in general one of the most compulsive repackagers of biblical language, though in this instance the reordering of the Hebrew is relatively minor: Its rendering of these sentences is roughly interchangeable with any of the other modern versions … . I begin in the middle of the verse 16, where Rebekah becomes the subject of a series of actions.

“

And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, “Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, “For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.” And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.

“And this is how the Revised English Bible, in keeping with the prevailing assumptions of the most recent translations, renders these verses in what is presumed to be sensible modern English:

“

She went down to the spring, filled her jar, and came up again. Abraham’s servant hurried to meet her and said, “Will you give me a little water from your jar?” “Please drink, sir,” she answered, and at once lowered her jar on her hand to let him drink. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, “I shall draw water also for your camels until they have had enough.” She quickly emptied her jar into the water trough, and then hurrying again to the well she drew water and watered all the camels.

“There is, as one would expect, some modification of biblical parataxis, though it is not so extreme here as elsewhere in the Revised English Bible: ‘And she let him drink his fill’ is converted into an introductory adverbial clause, ‘When she had finished giving him a drink’ …; ‘and she hurried’ is compressed into ‘quickly’; ‘and she ran again’ becomes the participial hurrying again’. (Moves of this sort, it should be said, push translation to the verge of paraphrase — recasting and interpreting the original instead of representing it.) The most striking divergence between these two versions is that mine has fifteen ‘and’s, corresponding precisely to fifteen occurrences of the particle waw in the Hebrew, whereas the Revised English Bible manages with just five. What difference does this make? To begin with, it should be observed that the waw, whatever is claimed about its linguistic functions, is by no means an inaudible element in the phonetics of the Hebrew text: we must keep constantly in mind that these narratives were composed to be heard, not merely to be decoded by a reader’s eye. The reiterated ‘and’, then, plays an important role in creating the rhythm of the story … [while] the elimination of the ‘and’ in the Revised English Bible and all its modern cousins produces — certainly to my ear — an abrupt, awkward effect in the sound pattern of the language … .

“More is at stake here than pleasing sounds, for the heroine of the repeated actions is in fact subtly but significantly reduced in all the rhythmically-deficient versions. She of course performs roughly the same acts in the different versions — politely offering water to the stranger, lowering her jug so that he can drink, rapidly going back and forth to the spring to bring water for the camels. But in the compressions, syntactical reorderings, and stop-and-start movements of the modernizing version, the encounter at the well and Rebekah’s actions are made to seem rather matter-of-fact … to obscure what the Hebrew highlights, which is that she is doing something quite extraordinary. Rebekah at the well presents one of the rare biblical instances of the performance of an act of ‘Homeric’ heroism. The servant begins by asking modestly to ‘sip a bit of water’, as though all he wanted were to wet his lips. But we need to remember, as the ancient audience surely did, that a camel after a long desert journey can drink as much as twenty-five gallons of water, and there are ten camels here whom Rebekah offers to water ‘until they drink their fill’. The chain of verbs tightly linked by all the ‘and’s does an admirable job in conveying the sense of the young woman’s hurling herself with prodigious speed into the sequence of required actions. Even her dialog is scarcely a pause in the narrative momentum, but is integrated syntactically and rhythmically into the chain: ‘And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug. … And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.’ The parallel syntax and the barrage of ‘and’s, far from being the reflex of a ‘primitive’ language, are as artfully effective in furthering the ends of the narrative as any device one could find in a sophisticated modern novelist.”

– Robert Alter

“Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern revisions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew.”

– Robert Alter

(He goes on to show that the modern versions’ sense of Hebrew is generally worse than the KJV’s.) I like the quotation because it recognizes how bad is the modern translations’ English!

I ran across a poignant thread at an Evangelicalist website yesterday; a young man begs to know if his father is in hell or in heaven. I’ll reproduce parts of the thread below, heavily edited:

I am desperate and seek answers. Although my dad led a sinful life he knew God. A few weeks ago, the preacher came to him and he confessed his sins and prayed to be saved. Last night he passed away. Is he in heaven now? Is it possible that our prayers could still save him, if he is not? I am very upset and can’t function. I can’t bear the uncertainty. Please help and guide me.

If the preacher is from a Bible-believing church, then he is saved.

It was not just an accident that your father confessed and repented. God reads the minds and hearts of men and plans everything accordingly.

I hope you are in fellowship. We are to be in submission to our church so that we are under God’s protection when difficult times come, such as this.

Do not let the devil beat you with lies like praying for him; praying for the dead is witchcraft.

If your father confessed his sins and prayed to be saved, why would you doubt that he is saved?

You can be sure that your Dad is in heaven. The same with my mum: She said the sinner’s prayer, didn’t get baptized, died last year, but, thank you Jesus, she is saved. Amen.

Those who err against American society are punished with — American society.

The federal prisoners among whom I spent last weekend are fed only highly-processed or synthetic foods; no vegetables or fruit are served with any meal. At the prison store, bananas sell for three dollars each, cheap generic sneakers for ninety dollars. Indolence and boredom are enforced. The library is closet-tiny. Only top-40 radio plays: no one can choose from albums. Fox News is on television except for certain breaks for action movies. The chapel wall bears a plaque of rules for speakers: no contrasting of religions, no discussing prison or the government, no radical ideas. New-age religious materials are prominent, but also tracts by once-saved-always-saved-ers. Inmates are pasty and slow-moving, and full of vague hope for nothing.

In ancient Greece, no specific ceremony was required for marriage, only mutual agreement and the fact that the couple must regard each other as husband and wife accordingly. Married Greek women had few rights; for example, a woman whose father died without sons was forced to divorce and marry a cousin.

In Rome, marriage and divorce happened by simple mutual agreement. There were several types of marriage in Roman society. The “conventional” form required witnesses and a woman lost her rights and inheritance and became the subject of her husband. The “free” form could happen even without written agreement and a woman retained the rights and property of her original family, as a subject of her father.

In the earliest Christian era, marriage was a private matter with no universal religious or civil ceremony. However, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch is on record as encouraging couples to “form their union with the approval of their bishop”.

In sixth-century Europe, marriage among elites had become political and polygamous. For example, a German king, a baptized Christian, acquired four wives for strategic reasons such as their relationship to foreign kings.

In twelfth-century Europe, marriage had become a business agreement between family leaders, who taught that love was incompatible with marriage and encouraged discreet adultery. Monks countered with the invention of “courtly love”, which involved chaste trysts outside marriage.

In fourteenth-century Europe, ordinary people had lost the right to choose whom to marry. The lord provided them with spouses of his choosing, although some allowed peasants to pick a partner by paying a large fee.

By the sixteenth century, European marriage had come to acquire a universally-accepted form of a verbal promise, known as the “verbum”, followed by physical union, the “consummationis”. Churches were available to register the marriages, but this was not obligatory. All matters of rights and property within marriage had become the adjudication of church, rather than state, courts.

In 1563, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent decreed that a marriage must be a ceremony officiated by a priest with at least two witnesses. The Council also authorized a Catechism, which defined marriage as “the conjugal union of man and woman, contracted between two qualified persons, which obliges them to live together throughout life.” Similarly, in 1753, England, under the Anglican Church, required marriage by a religious ceremony observed by witnesses.

The Reformation moved the role of recording marriages and adjuticating rights to the state. John Calvin enacted a Marriage Ordinance of Geneva that imposed “The dual requirements of state registration and church consecration to constitute marriage.” Most law eventually came to exempt Jewish or Quaker marriages, allowing them to govern their own customs.

In Enlightenment Europe, a concept of “civil marriage” became a legal alternative in most nations to church marriages.

(Condensed and adapted from Wikipedia.)

I do not think that the defenders of traditional marriage can in the end win this raging fight, even if they were to find a spokesman who can be erudite. For supposedly Americans’ minds are to sort out a legal purpose for marriage — is it a smattering of economic rewards? is it a merit-badge? is it a license to venereal congress? — but all the while their hearts have no legal sensation, but a personal feeling hot-sweet as nostalgia: that marriage is one person’s promising another to love him always and become his family and recording that for the world to see.

I’d recently told you about the NIV 2010, which promises to remedy the “obsolete English” of the ’80s.

Now Conservapedia, a popular website begun by a homeschool-cooperative teacher who claims encyclopedias are “too liberal”, has announced a project to retranslate or paraphrase the Bible according to “conservative principles”.

Among the changes they propose to Holy Writ are these:

If the project does become a retranslation, it must be a “thought-for-thought translation” the better to remove “liberal bias”.

The version must use “powerful new conservative terms” to replace existing “defective language”. For example, to prevent anyone from using the Bible to promote “socialism”, the words “friend”, “laborer”, and “fellow-laborer” should be replaced with “the conservative term ‘volunteer’ “; “shrewd” should be replaced with “resourceful”; and “words such as ‘word’, ‘peace’, and ‘miracle’ ” should be replaced with unspecified substitutes.

“Logic” must be applied to the version “with its full force and effect”, by emphasizing the vice of sins (they mention gambling twice) and the “very real existence of the Devil and Hell”.

The version must “fully express Free Market parables”, highlighting the “numerous economic parables” in the Bible and explicating “their full Free Market meaning”.

It must “exclude liberal-interpolated passages” such as “the adulteress story” and Luke’s account of Jesus’s last words. “These quotations are favorites of liberals [but] should not appear in a Conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus never said [such things] at all.”

It must “prefer conciseness over typical liberal wordiness.”

To our homeless youth “drop in” center, on Wednesdays, comes a dapper young intern from Eugene Bible College. He is tall, blond, and adept at holding his hands and mouth in a moderately-fashionable way. I have often envied him moving among the youth, wished for his bravado, and wondered what he has to say.

Tonight I had some leisure, was in the right spot, and heard what he has to say:

“Hey guys — guys can I just pray for you?

“Hey guys okay we’re gonna just stand here and pray.

“First — hey — do you guys have Jesus in your hearts? You know, have you asked for Jesus?

“Cause it’s not really any use praying unless you do. That’s the first thing.

“Does anybody want to just accept Jesus before we pray?”