MATHETΩN

Alternatively, one can probe the Greek to perceive Paul Envoy’s mood of stern counsel yield to commiseration. I will translate the whole paragraph.

I would have, then, the men, with uplifted holy hands, to pray everyplace, without anger and arguing; and the women, with seemly carriage and cautious and collected minds, to deck themselves not with curls and gold or pearls or costly clothes but, as befits those who profess piety, with good works. Let a wife learn peaceably, in all submission: I do not allow a woman to teach nor to tyrannize a husband, but to be at peace. For Adám was created first, then Eúa; and so Adám was not deceived, yet the woman once wretchedly deceived has been marked the law-breaker— Yet she will come safely through childbirth, if only she remain trusting, loving, and modestly holy; believe me.

One always reads I Tim ii.15 with astonishment. The astonishment can abate if one remembers that “saved” is obsolete English, not properly the revenant that does Evangelicalism’s bidding. But now one is bemused.

I contrived the following catechism as a comment on the passage.

Q. According to the Hebraíc scriptures, what were the results of the human disobedience after creation?

A. Conscience, and mortality.

Q. Can these ills be remedied?

A. Yes, by God’s special gifts mercy and eternal life, as his son Yesús taught and showed.

Q. And what were the punishments with which God cursed humanity for the disobedience?

A. For males, to encounter pain in their labors, and to find nature tend to resist them; and for females, to tend to submit to men, and to encounter pain in childbirth.

Q. Can humanity be rescued from these punishments?

A. Yes: by persisting through the pain, thus to renew the joys of creation. Specifically, males can emerge from the sweat of work with a new bounty, and a subjected Nature; while females can pass through the pangs of childbearing to the reverence of husbands, and a baby.

“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

What is the point of doing anything that is not impossible?

A girl’s name: Skirmish
A boy’s name: Heart
A girl’s name: Volante
A boy’s name: Chaste
A girl’s name: Emperatriz
A boy’s name: Embrace

“Are you expecting me to accept some tacit meaning in the scripture-fragment you have quoted, sir? I will be quite frank: Why should I care what that fragment means when Bible-gangsters who wield it do not care: they merely point it as a dagger toward the women they wish to menace with it?

“But I will say a handful of things about its meaning; only because Paul the Envoy is dear to me and the verities he wrote dear.

“Then: ( Ist ) Where else in the Scriptures do we read someone ought to keep home? Against the heathen king Habakkuk railed: ‘He is a proud man, neither keepeth at home’ (Hab ii.5). And yet no Southern Baptist Convention resolution I’ve read suggests the President mind the linen. To insist Paul remanded wives to housekeeping because some syllables between it and his phrase are homonymous makes as much sense as to insist books be printed with fruit of the vine because ‘winepress’ can be found in Deuteronomy.

“( IInd ) Obedience to one’s own husband (not―qu’elle idée!―to any other men) is here taught by the same envoy who asserted that there is no difference between men and women (Gal iii.28) and commanded a husband to submit to his wife (Eph v.21). This too is the envoy who taught slaves to obey their masters while at the same time commanding masters to obey their slaves (Eph vi.5ff) and pleading for the freedom of a slave to his master (read the affective ‘Letter to Philemon’).

“And these are not the end of his paradoces. ‘We would know therefore what these things mean’? Much can be explained by considering the next thing I will say, the

“( IIIrd ) ‘That the word of God be not blasphemed’ is the reason Paul counsels young women to obey their husbands. ‘That the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed’ is the reason he teaches slaves to obey their masters (I Tim vi.1). But who would say anything blasphemous about the evangelion if he saw a wife spending on something extra or a slave seeking to escape to Gaul? Peter the Envoy tells his readers who: pagan sinners, ‘foolish men’ that in ignorance assumed that liberty was good only for ‘lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries’. (Read his first letter, particularly the mid part.)

“You see, in Paul’s day the laws of the Roman Empire required slaves to obey masters and wives to obey husbands: a master or a husband who was a Roman citizen even could execute his slave or his wife. Similar laws persisted in Europe until rather recently; the first legal freedoms for women were legislated in England not long before 1800; in Russia women were not emancipated until nearly 1900!

“And so a woman who had believed in Jesus, or a slave who had, would rightly think that she had been saved to liberty (Isa lxi.1; Mat xvii.26; Joh viii.32, 36; Rom viii.2; I Cor xii.13; II Cor iii.17; Gal iii.28, v.1; Col iii.11; et al.). But Paul and Peter hastened to limn for their readers a result: a pagan sinner, observing the laws governing women and slaves unenforced among them, would blaspheme the evangelion, crying: ‘This Way is nothing but a way to evade the mores, to tweak Caesar!’

“( IVth ) And now I beg you, in deep sincerity, to think what acts of ours (be we men) toward women or others might, in our world in our times, give an unbeliever excuse to cry:

“ ‘This religion is only a pretext, a stubborn excuse to do what is unethical!’ ”

“In 1992 details relating to the apparitions that had previously been unreleased were finally revealed.

“A priest who had interviewed the children at the time of the apparitions reported …: ‘Jacinta declares that Our Lady’s dress goes down only to her knees. Our Lady can only appear dressed, obviously, in the most decent and modest way; the dress would have to have come down to her feet. Any other way constitutes the most serious obstacle to the supernaturalism of the apparition and makes us think that it is a mystification prepared by the Spirit of Darkness. …’

“[In official reports,] the earrings worn by the Virgin had been sublimated into a ‘halo’ of light, while the short dress worn by the Virgin during the apparitions had not formed any part of official descriptions; instead, and in sharp contrast, the Virgin had officially been reported as saying: ‘Certain fashions will be introduced which will offend my Son very much.’

“In the 1940s, Pius XII was asked his opinion of what women should wear to preserve modesty. He replied: ‘Below the knee, halfway down the arm, two finger-widths below the collarbone’ — bounds which the Virgin is now known to have been described as breaching during the Fatima apparitions.”

Metaphor or misogyny? Misogyny or metaphor? Such are the dilemmae for a producer of a Focus on the Family radio episode.

In one my siblings listened to on cassette, the famous allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress is retold―now with hip new characters such as Atheist, who speaks a humorous string of non sequitur in a Mandark accent.

In this retelling, Christian’s traveling companion in the original allegory, a young man named Faithful, is turned into a girl named Hope. This is curious, but well enough―surely a lonely metaphysical traveler sometimes needs hope to save him.

But as the pair crosses the Slough of Despond, Hope begs for help and Christian extends a manly arm.

Seneca: “What’s this ‘murder and rape’ bullshit Exoristos?”

Exoristos: “Oh.

“Well I’m not saying boys murder and rape, only that they are culturally trained to do so. Unless they are lucky enough to go to war or brave enough to defy the law, the training is mostly thwarted.

“Instead they have football and dating.”

Seneca: “Football’s cool, but I like wrestling better.”

Exoristos: “Another good example. What’s the point of physically pitting boys against each other? It’s about strength deciding things. It’s about violence deciding things.”

Seneca: “Well that’s how the world works. And no you’re wrong, it’s about fun. Girls do sports too.”

Exoristos: “Well sports isn’t the only training. What happens if a little girl pulls another girl’s hair? What’s the parents’ reaction? They are embarrassed and pull them apart. What happens if a boy pushes another boy?”

Seneca: “ ‘Go little dudes.’ ”

Exoristos: “Pretty much.

“It’s even in fairytales. The guy has to kill something, someone, and then he has to convince the girl. It’s true that, in the happy stories, their desire to be together is mutual―it doesn’t matter―it’s still his will, his actions, and the girl succumbs.”

Seneca: “What’s wrong with that?”

Exoristos: “And when a boy is older he receives advice how to persuade women―he is told a forceful personality will be rewarded, and so on. Not to mention the rules that the boy always must ‘ask the girl out’ or whatever―other way round would be a scandal.

“Never mind what an affront to Eros it is that girls may never act at its promptings! Point is, a boy must learn to force things on a girl―that’s his training.”

Seneca [impatiently]: “Well what’s wrong with that?”

Exoristos [hotly]: “What’s wrong with it? It’s the germ of rape, it’s the seed of slavery. And do you think boys want to be this kind of person?

“Some women want to be equal to men by saying: ‘Let us, too, kill each other and be forcefully promiscuous!’ Does anyone think that, instead, boys should be allowed to be peaceful and tender? Don’t they see―”

Seneca: “Tender!”

Exoristos: “Honest to how they feel! Not that by the time a boy is grown he knows anymore what he truly feels. Don’t you see that, if a girl’s parents somewhere persuaded her not to cry or to tell her friends she loves them, it would be an abuse?”

Seneca: “You are fucked up man. Do you want a hug? Why do you want men and women equal anyway?”

Exoristos [solemnly]: “Because it’s right.”

Seneca: “Boys and girls aren’t the same, period. It’s not right.”

Exoristos: “By equal I mean justice, not sameness.”

[Pause.]

Seneca: “Got to go. Got to pick up Anonyma.”

Exoristos: “Do you believe in God, Seneca?”

Seneca: “Yup. I was saved at three, they tell me. Ha.”

Exoristos: “When was your sister saved?”

Seneca [distractedly; hunting for his keys]: “About the same time. She was fourteen I guess.”

Exoristos: “And did you, or your dad, or some boy at school have to invite her before she was allowed to be saved?”

Seneca: “Okay dude. I’m going out.” [Door slams.]

Exoristos: “Well there you go.”

I found the following on an auto-industry news messageboard and knew it must be preserved for posterity:

“Would you put your child in a Honda? Import cars look third-worldish—we always laugh at all the 4-cylinder cars—and say that guy is too poor to put gas in a real car he has to drive a go-cart and what about so many Asian people don’t love God? I’m married we drive a Chevy to church—we are children of God but God cannot save some kinds of people.

“Put down your Harry Potter witchcraft book—God is in us who can be against us. In other words you think it is better to stand alone do your own thing & be free thinking. Then your wife will want to do the same—without God sooner or later you will crash and burn. Your wife will cheat—your kids will be out of control. It took hundreds of years to make the Good Book as good as it is today—how could any one writer think they could do better?

“So put down your Harry Potter book and give up witchcraft—do you really want a wife who acts like a witch? The devil is the owner of lies the snake is the owner of temptation—do you really want your wife to tempt others so you can never know who she jumped into bed with if you come home from work late—do you want a wife who can lie to you as easy as tell the truth?”