Undeception

While studying NT Greek in undergrad, I became interested in linguistics. I gradually became alarmed as I discovered that key insights into human language made by linguists were hardly ever taken into account among scholars intending to interpret the Bible from the original languages. Greek and Hebrew are treated by too many exegetes as special codes more than as living, changing, and internally diverse human languages.

Image via Wikipedia

Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

The Gothic Bible is noted for its rather conservative translation, both technically and theologically. Technically, the translation’s almost word by word representation of the Greek Vorlage is enough to have led some scholars of yesterday to understate its authentic Gothic qualities by referring to it not as a translation but as an interlinear gloss. Theologically, although it is known that its translator, the Bishop Wulfila, was an Arian Christian, none have produced any plausible (if any at all) examples of such theologically tinted translation choices. In short, it’s pretty straight-laced as translations go.

But a close observer will notice an occasional liberty taken by the translator, whether consciously or not (those questions are the stuff dissertations are made of — mine included). If my conjecture is right, I rather think that the following case must have resulted from a somewhat conscious choice, undertaken for narrative/theological reasons rather than merely a result of linguistic (lexical) variation.

John 19.6

þaruh biþe sehvun ina þai maistans gudjans jah andbahtos, hropidedun qiþandans: ushramei, ushramei ina! qaþ im Peilatus: nimiþ ina jus jah hramjiþ. iþ ik fairina in imma ni bigita.

ὅτε οὖν εἶδον αὐτὸν οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ ὑπηρέται ἐκραύγασαν λέγοντες, σταύρωσον σταύρωσον. λέγει αὐτοῖς ὁ πιλᾶτος, λάβετε αὐτὸν ὑμεῖς καὶ σταυρώσατε, ἐγὼ γὰρ οὐχ εὑρίσκω ἐν αὐτῷ αἰτίαν.

When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.’

(source: the fantastic Project Wulfila)

As a preliminary, it’s hard to get at the rationale of Wulfila in his choice of the words relating to the crucifixion. Because the Goths were surely familiar with — as they were doubtless the occasional victims of — crucifixion, if they did not borrow either the Latin or Greek words for the practice, a native calque or substitute would have to be coined or appropriated to fill the lexical gap in Gothic. As it happens, it appears that neither the Greek nor Latin word was borrowed: ushramjan is the standard word for ‘crucify’ in attested Gothic. It may have been the regular idiomatic verb used in coordination with galga ‘gallows’, the noun by which Wulfila exceptionlessly translated ‘cross’ (this is itself interesting, but a different question). But interestingly, the verb must etymologically mean not ‘hang’ or ‘impale’, but ‘overpower, rule over’. This terminological obscurement of the mechanics of the brutal process may have been euphemistic or a result of taboo avoidance, indicating the utter humiliation and abasement suffered by recipients of this brutal form of punishment. Another option is that ushramjan is a neologism created by Wulfila, a choice that may have been contextually informed by a theology of the scandalous cross event.¹ Yet although the following observation is certainly compatible with this last possibility, my hunch is that the crucifixion terminology in the Gothic Bible predates Wulfila.

As noted above, the standard word for ‘crucify’ is ushramjan, obtaining in 25 of the 26 attested instances of the verbal root (much text is missing from the Gothic New Testament, unfortunately). The above quoted verse, John 19.6, contains the only instance of the Gothic word without the preverb ut. Now, as an adposition, ut is essentially spatial and cognate with English out, but in conjunction with the verbal element hramjan ‘rule, force’ functions as something of an intensifier, so something akin to ‘ rule over, put under force’ (cf. certain uses of the cognate German aus-). Removing this element, as done here in Pilate’s mouth, would seem to have had the effect of softening the blow, euphemizing the word ever so slightly in contrast to the angry Jews’ demand, “Usrahmei, ushramei ina!”

My modest suggestion is that Wulfila’s choice here may be intended to highlight Pilate’s somewhat sympathetic, laissez-faire attitude toward Jesus’ treatment as presented in the Gospels for his Gothic readers, whereas the full blunt force of the word is everywhere else throughout our corpus on full display. When the Jews demanded to grind Jesus under foot, Pilate conceded that they could indeed stomp on him. Perhaps Wulfila saw, as most Christians seem to have, that Pilate is painted by the evangelist to have been reluctant about Jesus’ punishment or at least that he wished to distance himself from the grisly results of the Jews’ cruel intentions for Jesus.

_____________________________________
¹ We must avoid the temptation to explain ‘overpower, rule over’ as an Arian emphasis on Christ’s human fallibility and defeat, especially considering that non-Arianism was already fully kenotic and that the scandal of a crucified Messiah was certainly felt by all Christians.

Recently I ran across an old article¹ in the journal Language and had to smile at its similarity to a recent topic in the redaction criticism of the Gospels for which I previously noted a parallel in the translations I am studying in my dissertation.

In the Gothic translation of the Bible, at i Cor. xiii 2, we find swaswe fairgunja miþsatjau translating the Greek ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάμεν (in the English version ‘so that I could remove mountains’). I wish to call attention to the word miþsatjau of the Gothic. One is struck by the inexactitude of the translation. Μεθ-ιστάμεν means ‘to move from one place to another’, or at least ‘to remove’, ‘to move away’. Μiþ-satjau should mean ‘to place with’ or ‘beside’, almost the reverse of the meaning of the Greek word.

Of course the difference is between two closely related semantic fields. Even in Old English, the word wið, which is the source modern English with, meant more commonly ‘against’ than ‘accompanying’. One at first wonders how “with” and “against” could be so closely related. It’s actually quite simple: it comes down to spatial considerations. Spatially speaking, friends who “see eye to eye” and competitors “standing nose to nose” are virtually indistinguishable. One who leans “against the wall” is very much “with the wall”. Many of us (at least in America) will talk of “fighting with” opponents rather than “fighting against” them. This is no isolated incident: it’s decidedly cross-linguistic because of the way the human brain most typically categorizes relationships in a fundamentally spatial sense. For instance, most prepositions in Indo-European seem to have started out as spatial adverbs, most of which have gotten metaphorically used to the effect that I can in a certain sense be with a friend who actually lives across the country in the sense that we figuratively “see eye to eye”. The Greek preposition/preverb μετα(-) sometimes denotes a transfer or change of location,² analagous to Latin trans- In the verb μεθιστάμεν³ here, we have at root something like ‘stand away from’ to the effect of ‘move away’, which the Gothic translator appears to have misconstrued to mean ‘stand with‘. But this is odd: while μετα can indeed mean ‘with’, it does so much more rarely in preverbs, and this is the only instance in the Gothic Bible in which miþ ‘with’ is prefixed to a verb in such a mistranslation of Greek μετα-. Here is Rice’s assessment:

As an explanation of the passage I offer the following: The translator was the victim of a momentary lapse, and, betrayed by the sound of the Greek prefix in the form μεθα- which stood in the original text, he erroneously supplied miþ- in his translation in place of the more or less accurate af- of Luke 16.4. The respective sounds represented by miþ- and μεθα- are closer than might at first seem, for the Greek e was close, the Gothic i was open, and by this time (4th century A.D.) θ was a spirant and equal to þ.

So there you have it: translator’s fatigue. It appears Wulfila should have called it a day before beginning chapter 8! _____________________________________

¹ Rice, Allan Lake. 1933. A Note on the Gothic Bible, i Cor. xiii 2. Language, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 87-88.

² As an illustration of my earlier point about the spatial roots of prepositions, one of μετα‘s most common meanings, ‘after’, resulted when ‘a change of physical space’ got metaphorically applied to time. Thus μετα typically covered both the spatial ’change to a place hence’ and the temporal ‘change to a time hence’.

³ In this verb, underlying meta-(histami) ‘I stand’ underwent a phonologically conditioned change to meth-(istami) before the aspirated consonant h of histami.

Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.

Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.

Continue Reading →