Category Archives: Bible

Discussion of historical and textual issues related to the Hebrew and Greek bibles, and their commentators

Bible, Early_Christianity, John

Another trinity

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We can dream of what the notion of the trinity could have become if Syriac and Aramaic had overrun the Mediterranean, rather than Greek and Latin. A clue is given by the beginning of Ode of Solomon 19, a text usually dated to the 2d c. CE:

1. A cup of milk was offered to me,
And I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness.
2. The Son is the cup,
And the Father is He who was milked;
And the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
3. Because His breasts were full,
And it was desirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom,
and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
[…]

(translation by J. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, Scholars Press, 1977, p. 82). I would have translated 3: “and there was no doubt that his milk would be poured out in sufficiency”. Still a Father doing everything in life and sustaining life, and a Son transmitting power, but at least a female Spirit. Alas, the constraints of translation were such that the LXX writers had chosen way before this text to have neuter Greek πνευμα for feminine Hebrew רוח: not ψυχή, the nightly-visited goddess. From neuter pneuma to masculine spiritus, what other option was there?

Bible

Conservative bible

A new translation of the Bible is in the works. It is called the “new conservative bible”. The guidelines are unsurprising: avoid Liberal Bias at all costs (note the capitalization), don’t emasculate (no gender inclusive language), no dumbing down (tall order), use (they say “utilize”) Powerful Conservative Terms (those capitals again), combat Harmful Addiction (use “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; will that stop Wall Street?), do not downplay the very real existence of hell or the devil (capitals, but I’m getting tired), express Free Market Parables (Looking Forward to the Translation of the Story of jesus Kicking Salesmen Out of the temple), exclude Later-inserted Inauthentic Passages (ah, the adulteress story is out: too easy for liberals to use), etc… etc…

Looking forward to translations of she the spirit doing things, such as “she fluttered over the waters” in Genesis…. Or are our conservatives going with Latin translations of ruaḥ as masculine spiritus? Fun.

A quote to finish with this silly topic: “Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the “social justice” movement among Christians.”

General, Gospels

masculine gods

A certain reviewer of a book on the gospel of Matthew and his contemporaries complains that the masculine possessive goes beyond the evidence and concludes that male scholars should clean up their language. I agree. The review is of Sim and Repschinski, Matthew and his Christian contemporaries and can be found in the Review of Biblical Literature, 09/2009. This reasonable criticism leads the critic to an unreasonable proposition: “Likewise, male pronouns for God annoy me”. I suppose the author means masculine pronouns… Well, concerning the capitalized form of the word God, which I take to refer to the monotheistic entity that appears first in the Bible, I don’t see how one could rewrite the whole Hebrew text. The evidence is that the god(s) worshipped by the Israelites and Judaeans were male, except Ashtoret, Asherah, etc., but the latter ones (and a few baalim with them) were dismissed as un-worshippable a long time ago (though not as early as once thought). Unless the impatient reviewer wants to do away with the monolatric and monotheistic forms given to the biblical divinity in the 7th-5th c. BCE and revert to a version of polytheistic Israel, this divinity is male and will remain so, to the consternation of many.