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.

Even if the book of Jonah didn’t feature the famous big fish, it wouldn’t take much serious study before you realized that it’s not an historical account. Doug Chaplin cites fourteen facts about the book of Jonah that taken together should really point any thoughtful reader aware of the basics of how literature works away from interpreting the book as historical narrative. The book of Jonah is a great example of how reading Scripture literalistically instead of as literature (“literally”) doesn’t do the text justice.

Nowadays, Jonah is on my short list of favorite books in the entire Bible. But it wasn’t until I realized it wasn’t historical that I began to appreciate it or understand its message and ingenious artistry. I find it highly ironic that once we reject the modernist premium on the historicity of stories, we find that among the Bible’s literary pieces, Jonah is surely among the most similar to modern literary sensibilities in its use of literary styles: as far as I know, its employment of irony and comic exaggeration is almost peerless in ANE literature (although you’ll find good doses of those features in contemporaneous Greco-Roman literature). Its messages of concern for others not like ourselves, the heavy responsibility of being among God’s elect, and the misguidedness of ethnocentrism are among the most “Christian” in the Old Testament.

Yes, those particular lessons could perhaps be drawn out by anyone (mis)taking Jonah as historical narrative. But one other astounding aspect of the book that is not so obvious to an inerrantist expecting accurate history everywhere is the intensely subversive and satirical backbone of the book. As I explained before, Thom Stark points out the sharp contrast between the perspective behind Deuteronomy 20.16-19, in which Yahweh prohibits destroying trees amidst the merciless destruction reserved for untold numbers of humans, and Yahweh’s concluding words in Jonah 4.10-11:

You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?

“And also many animals”! The last words of the book! Yet another example of the author’s hilarious sarcasm and sense of irony, the same sense of irony that, as Chaplin notes, depicts Nineveh repenting immediately despite Jonah conveniently neglecting to mention repentance as an option, and that shows Jonah’s displeasure at Nineveh’s repenting in the shadow of adversity — in the same way he had just finished doing (only more willingly than he had done so)! And on and on. This book is a riot — and it’s beautiful. I think I’d actually be disappointed to discover that it actually happened: I appreciate it all the more for seeing its author’s storytelling skills.

If you truly love the Bible and not merely whatever teachings you have been told are within it, then for heaven’s sake, read each selection on its own terms, even when it means entertaining the possibility that those terms in one author might come into conflict with others elsewhere, and even when it means admitting that a juicy miraculous story that is fun to believe really happened never actually did. Loving the Bible means much the same thing as loving other people: enjoying it for what it is, accepting what is imperfect but can’t be changed, and avoiding the temptation to twist it into the shape of our expectations for it.

Keith Reich over at Know Thyself has put up a post along the lines of my recent one about why I reject Christocentric readings of the OT that view certain passages as consciously or unconsciously about Jesus. He gives several good examples and reasons why he does, too.

My hard and fast rule for reading any scripture is that it should be read in its own historical context.  Therefore, for Old Testament texts, that context is a historical Jewish context. What did these texts mean to the Jews at the time of writing?  What do they mean for the Jews now?  From a Jewish perspective today, these texts certainly weren’t referring to Christ.

A second problem arises in saying that these texts were specifically written about Jesus, whether or not the author knew what he was writing, and that is that these texts do not line up perfectly with what the New Testament says about Christ.  For example, if Jeremiah’s “New Covenant” was fulfilled in Christ, then why doesn’t everyone “know the Lord?” For Jeremiah states,

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD (Jer 31:34).

Or again, if Jesus is the servant from Isaiah 49, how does Isaiah say this,

And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

It seems clear that the servant in this passage is “Israel,” not Jesus.

Christocentrism in the OT.

There’s another example that he calls “the big one” plus some more discussion that you’ll just have to go to his blog to read.

This is the second post in the guest series “Who is Satan?” by Arcamaede. An index for all posts in the series is here.

~ Steve

___________________________________________________
Satan’s development in the Old Testament is very hard to harmonize due largely to uncertainty of the dating of the writings of the Old Testament. What we will attempt to do below is speculate using the boundaries we have.

Associations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Satan are problematic. Even if we were to view the Garden story as history (which I do not), we are faced with a contextual interpretation issue:  the text of Genesis does not make a connection between Satan and the serpent.  In fact, the story gives us a clear indication that the serpent is just a snake (albeit a talking one and apparently a walking one).

We have to go to a later period of the writing of the Bible to find the identification of the serpent of Genesis 3 with the Satan.  Which indicates that the original audience of Genesis probably did not put the serpent in the role of Cosmic source of all things Evil.

In the Old Testament the word that ends up being Satan in English is הַשָׂטָן (ha-satan, pronounced ha-sah-tahn) which literally means “the accuser”.  The word without its article gets translated adversary, accuser, or opponent: e.g. 1 Samuel 29:4 …