Eastern Orthodox Bible

I have been away for a bit and my email has piled up. I hope to answer some of the requests over the next week or so. First, on Bible translations, I remain committed to a few of my favourites, KJV, Rotherham, NRSV, TNIV, CEV and the NLT. That's a good start. There are many worthy Bibles that I am not familiar enough with to have an opinion on. I hope to address one of these today.

The Eastern Orthodox Bible is a recent publication available as a download from this site. I downloaded it here. A few Bibliobloggers have mentioned it here, and here and others here. As far as I know it is not an official Bible of the EOC at this time.

At a first glance, I see some refreshing use of language. For example, we can read "atoning sacrifice" instead of "propitiation," "good news" for "gospel" and "good work" for "noble task."

The language seems to be updated and clear. However, phrases like this abound,

because of your partnership in the furtherance of the Good News, Phil. 1:5

Do not be terrified by your opponents. This will be for them evidence of destruction, but to you, of salvation from God Phil. 1:28

We know that if our earthly tent is dissolved, we have a building from God 2 or. 5:1

This suggests that the project lacks proofreading. I am convinced that some people will be pleased by the updated language along with retention of overall traditional/archaic grammatical structure, but ultimately they will find it very uneven.

On the question of gender I found the same sharp contrast between refreshingly gender inclusive language in one part of the text, and masculinization in another part. The expression "children of God" is found here, along with the inclusion of "sister" in square brackets.

As many as are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. You did not receive the spirit of bondage to [live in] fear again. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption through which we cry, “Abba! Father!” Adopted as children of God: hope of glory. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God; and if [we are] children, then [we are] heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if indeed we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him. Romans 8:14-16

This is how the children of God and the children of the devil are revealed: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, and neither is the one who does not love his brother [or sister]. 1 John 3:10

In First and Second Timothy, however, there is a strong masculine trend,

Indeed, this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior who desires all people (anthropos plural) to be saved 1 Tim. 2:4

There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, (anthropos plural) the man (anthropos singular) Christ Jesus 1 Tim. 2:5

I desire, therefore, that in every place, the men (aner plural) should pray 1 Tim. 2:8

This is a sure word: if a man (tis masculine or feminine) aspires to the office of overseer, 1 Tim. 3:1

What you heard from me among many witnesses, entrust likewise to faithful men (anthropos plural) 2 Tim. 2:2

Perhaps even more surprising is the use of the word "rule" in 1 Tim. 3:5,

Indeed, if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how can he take care of the Church of God?

Overall, it probably does not matter that much. If we can decide to refrain from telling slaves to obey, we should be able to discriminate on other issues as well.

The Eastern Orthodox Bible is based on the Byzantine Greek text, which is close, but not identical to the Textus Receptus which underlies the KJV. The Old Testament is based on the Septuagint.

Changeling

I watched Changeling tonight and was gripped by this tense and dark movie. It is a true story and has no happy ending, no mitigating light moments. It is a true horror film, if you can imagine for one second being caught up in the events of this one woman's life.

I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire and believe it deserved attention for an original episodic structure and unusual setting. But the events of Changeling are true, and Eastwood creates a tightly woven narrative of several different threads, bringing it all together in the end. It is amazing that so much was actually discovered about the fate of the main characters.

Perhaps one of the more shocking scenes, although not the most horrific, shows Angelina Jolie being manipulated into responding to an interrogation in the mental institution in such a way that her insanity is a sure outcome. As another inmate explains, if you respond evenly you are then "depressed," if you smile you are called "inappropriate" and so on. There is no right answer and incarceration is the reward for not saying what the police want you to say. It is worth watching as a piece of social history.

Armstrong on Greek plays

I am reading Karen Armstrong's Great Traditions. I love how she treats Greek plays. So often one hears about Greek philosophy and sometimes too much of the negative stuff too. But Greek plays are are right up my alley. Here is Armstrong. (p.227)

By placing a tortured individual in front of the polis, analysing that person's pain, and helping the audience to empathize with him or her, the fifth-century tragedians - Aeschylus (c. 525-456), Sophocles (c. 496-405) and Euripides (c. 484-406) - had arrived at the heart of Axial Age spirituality. The Greeks firmly believed that the sharing of grief and tears created a valuable bond between people.

Ps I hate to say this but I guess I should. If I cite someone it does not mean that I agree with everything they write. Its too bad that I feel I have to say this. I am enjoying this book and am constantly in dialogue with the author in my mind.

In pursuit of a good map

I am working on finding the appropriate world map. I prefer a Pacific Centric map for obvious reasons, but the last one was not balanced in the north south sense.

Guns, Germs and Steel

I notice that a few people have mentioned Guns, Germs and Steel recently. I read it about 10 years ago along with several other people on our staff at school. It is nice to integrate some of the big sweep books into the elementary curriculum.

We have been reading a lot of books lately on immigrants to North America - the Chinese in San Francisco, the Black pioneers of Nicodemus, Kansas, and the Gold Rush in the Yukon. We also read about pandas in China. To tie things together we have been doing a unit on staple foods around the world.

This really suits me right now. It is so much fun for the kids to eat food that is mentioned in the book they are reading, and then find out where it grows on a map of the world. It is so easy for me to cook up cornmeal mush and serve it with molasses, or cook up some yams in the oven or boil rice. I did tell the kids emphatically that I would not be taking them fishing.

I have been thinking a lot about how to present a map of the world. Traditionally the Atlantic Ocean is in the middle. But this does not suit us who are on the Pacific Rim. So I am using this one for now, and will see how I like it.

In any case, Guns, Germs and Steel is a stimulating book to read if one is teaching resources or world history and geography. Here is an excerpt of one review from Amazon,

The deep significance of this book is that Diamond's thesis is not simply idle speculation. He proves that the Eurasian land mass had by far the best biological resources with which to develop agricultural societies, and was thus more able to form large, coherent, and powerful social entities.

To support this idea, Diamond introduces thorough set of well-researched data on what kinds of plants and animals are necessary to support a farming society. He investigates the biological resources available to potential farmers in all parts of the world. The people of Eurasia had access to a suite of plants and animals that provided for their needs. Potential farmers in other parts of the world didn't-- and so their fertile soil went untilled.

After establishing this strong foundation, Diamond falls into repeating ideas about the formation of large-scale societies. These ideas, while unoriginal, are still compelling, and Diamond presents them in a very clear and well-written way.

Links of interest

Peter and Dave are having a real rip on the feminization of the church. Lots of fun between those two.

Mike is providing an in depth examination of the Eph. 5:21-22 passage. Great stuff. He is trying to put a wrestling hold on the word "submit."

Ben Witherington has the best Valentine's Day post that I have seen. Ha ha.

Here's a novel translation of Gen. 1.

The Mathematics of Love

Update: This post has been edited for brevity. Read the whole article if you want the parts that I edited out. Here are a few excerpts from the THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE [4.14.04] A Talk with John Gottman HT John Hobbins,

I am sure that universality is there. We are no less social than bees, and Von Frisch discovered the language of bees by going right to the hive and watching them dance. So we will discover the human dance. What's an example of what we may find? So far I believe we're going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we'll find that those are universal things.

For the past eight years I've been really involved, working with my amazingly talented wife, trying to put these ideas together and use our theory so that it that helps couples and babies. And we now know that these interventions really make a big difference. We can turn around 75 percent of distressed couples with a two-day workshop and nine sessions of marital therapy. These are couples that have waited as long as six years to get any kind of help. So it's a considerably deteriorated situation. ...

It sounds as if we have a stake in relationships staying together — but we don't. My major stake is in understanding. We have a stake in people not staying together if they don't feel good about their relationship and it's not really going anywhere for them, it's not really helping them build one another's dreams, it's not a relationship that has dignity. But we like to help people understand why it is that it didn't work, so that the next relationship, or next set of relationships, can be better.

One of the major things we found is that honoring your partner's dreams is absolutely critical. A lot of times people have incompatible dreams — or they don't want to honor their partner's dreams, or they don't want to yield power, they don't want to share power. So that explains a lot of times why they don't really belong together.

It's a pretty fantastic article overall. It really resonated with something I mentioned recently in compegal blog, that "love and respect" should not be divided, as they appear to be in Eggerichs' book, but should be offered to one another as a matched couplet. I got the notion that love and respect were something that each partner wanted from Paul Tournier's To Understand Each Other, and from I Married You by Walter Trobisch.

I have some reflections on two parts of the article. First, he divides violence into two kinds.

We've reconstructed it from what we have learned by talking to people about it, and it does seem that there are two very distinct forms of violence. One form is where the conflict escalates, and people somehow lose control. They get to a point where the trigger seems to be feeling disrespected and there's a loss to their dignity. They feel driven to defend that dignity, and start doing things like posturing and threatening while in a state of high and diffuse physiological arousal, and they increasingly have a loss of control. The violence tends to be symmetrical, and there is not a clear victim and perpetrator.

Another kind of violence, which is very different, is where one person in the relationship is using violence to control and intimidate the other person and is very much not physiologically aroused, very much in control and trying to do something to the other person that alters their idea of reality. There is a perpetrator and a victim here, The late Neil Jacobsen and I have called this kind of mind control "gaslighting," after the movie with Ingrid Bergman.

I'd like to understand those two kinds of violence. I think the first one is treatable, particularly early, by looking at the couple relationship and changing the relationship. It may be even treatable later on, by slowing things down enough and physiological arousal has a place in it. The second type of violence is more elusive at the moment, although some initial experiments that I and Julia Babcock and her students have designed show promising proximal, that is, short term effects with these perpetrators.

After this, the author does not discuss violence in this article. But he does later say,

Because men are different. Men have a lot of trouble when they reach a state of vigilance, when they think there's real danger, they have a lot of trouble calming down. and there's probably an evolutionary history to that. Because it functioned very well for our hominid ancestors, anthropologists think, for men to stay physiologically aroused and vigilant, in cooperative hunting and protecting the tribe, which was a role that males had very early in our evolutionary history.

Whereas women had the opposite sort of role, in terms of survival of the species, those women reproduced more effectively who had the milk-let-down reflex, which only happens when oxytocin is secreted in the brain, it only happens when women — as any woman knows who's been breast-feeding, you have to be able to calm down and relax. But oxytocin is also the hormone of affiliation. So women have developed this sort of social order, caring for one another, helping one another, and affiliating, that also allows them to really calm down and have the milk let-down reflex. And so — it's one of nature's jokes. Women can calm down, men can't; they stay aroused and vigilant.

What the article does not discuss is that in a violent relationship of the second kind, if the vicitm is a woman, she is prevented from all affiliation. And she develops a noticable startle reflex. So, in fact, I reacted to this particular aspect of the article. I have never noticed men with a pronounced startle reflex. But, when others noticed this in me, in social settings, I began to realize that violence had a price, it was a harsh paymaster. While I have never noticed a startle reflex in another adult, I have noticed it in children every once in a while.

This aspect of things was not really discussed in the article. Women who are mistreated are prevented from affiliation and develop hypervigilance and all the negatives aspects of this. They travel from sadness to anger fairly quickly too.

The second reaction was about honouring your spouse's dreams. If your dreams are incompatible then you must part ways. Actually maybe I do agree with this. I don't know. I have a friend whose husband wanted to work in the north for a few years. I don't think he even asked her to go with him. He wanted a guy sort of experience in the far north. They are still married and they do keep in touch, but these kinds of things puzzle me. No answers here. Perhaps women leave too, this seems unmanageable. The scriptures say to just let someone go.

The really powerful part of the article was about the determining role of affection and humour, mutual respect and honour. In concluding my post on egalitarianism the other day, I wrote,

Likewise in marriage we demonstrate Christ’s love if we love one another and honour each other with kindness and affection, bearing each other’s burdens.

Sounds a little preachy perhaps. However, I am trying to practice this. When I dropped my daughter off this morning, after near shipwrecks on matters of cleaning the kitchen, her telling me which route I should take to drive her to school and other petty stuff which really ticked me off, I waved good-bye with "I love you, sweetheart." And I meant it. I am not going to spend the rest of my life arguing with those I love. Not that I am not capable of it.

Right now, I am not really relating to this as a marriage issue, but I think all enduring relationships must communicate affection and respect. As Gottman said, these are universal things.

Eph. 5:22

As a follow up to my post on Eph. 5:21 is interesting to look at a post by Mike on Eph. 5:22. Interesting.

Blog Debate: “Why I Am An Egalitarian”

While some interactions on the women in the church and home issue have gone completely sideways for reasons that are not entirely clear; other interactions have been rather friendly and collegial to my mind.

In fact, recently I had commented on Denny Burk's blog and the Evangelical Village blog guys decided to have an egal vs comp debate, and what with one thing and another, I wrote the representative egal post. It was posted this morning.

I hope you enjoy my writing, dear friend.

babble from babel 12

There are many who use the symbol of the tower of Babel for their enterprises. Babelfish is one common application. Lots of fun to be had there!

An exceptional blog using this theme is Babelstone. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in scripts and the east, unicode or Phags-pa. Andrew West is also the creator of the Babelmap. Here is his series on the Tower of Babel. I hope you enjoy the tour.

Another interesting post on the tower of Babel is at Koinonia. The British Museum has a show on Babylon as well.

I would like to get back to the story but I am not quite sure when.

Slumdog Millionaire

I had been hearing good things about this movie for a while so it was exciting to finally get to see it. I loved it. It had some very sad and realistic views of life in India along with scenes of religious violence and deaths. It also had strong child actors and just enough lightness to make it bearable.

I don't know whether a young child should be allowed to see some of the scenes. For example, there is a scene where a man chloroformed a boy and scooped out his eyes so he would earn more money as a beggar. I don't know the rating, but the movie is a must see. Just watch out for these scenes.

So where is the lightness? Perhaps riding the rails is a universal metaphor for finding a better life. Perhaps selling the shoes of foreigners who remove them and leave them in a pile before entering the Taj Mahal, represents pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. In any case, it strikes a universal chord.

Add to that the theme of the three musketeers running through the script. If you don't know the name of the third musketeer, I will not tell you. But I was familiar with Alexandre Dumas from a very young age and was delighted that, in this story, the third musketeer is a little girl named Latika.

Complegalitarian

Some people have been blogging about the Complegalitarian blog. I was one of the first posters on the blog but soon resigned. I was immediately convinced that it was counter intuitive. I did continue on and off to comment on the blog. However, after being subjected to a series of attacks involving false statements made about me, I left completely for some time. I also appealed to the moderator to have it closed since I was not comfortable with the premise.

Then I received an email from another commenter there expressing concern regarding the exegesis of Eph. 5:21. This is one of the statements made on complegalitarian with regards to this verse,

I construe Ephesians 5:21 as it was always construed, so far as I am aware, until quite recently. That is, “one another” is understood not strictly but loosely to refer to some among the aggregate submitting to others in the aggregate rather than all in the aggregate submitting to all in the aggregate.

My particular difficulty with this is that the verse was not to my knowledge construed this way. I am not aware of anyone who construed it this way before Wayne Grudem.

Here is Clement,

“So in our case let the whole body be saved in Christ Jesus, and let each man be subject (ὑποτασσέσθω) to his neighbor, to the degree determined by his spiritual gift,”1 Clement 38.1

Here is Chrysostom,

Let there be an interchange of service and submission. For then will there be no such thing as slavish service. Let not one sit down in the rank of a freeman, and the other in the rank of a slave; rather it were better that both masters and slaves be servants to one another;—

He clearly indicates that this verse explicates mutual relations and not simply the reinforcement of the hierarchical value of the submission of some to others.

Here is Calvin,

God has bound us so strongly to each other, that no man ought to endeavor to avoid subjection; and where love reigns, mutual services will be rendered. I do not except even kings and governors, whose very authority is held for the service of the community. It is highly proper that all should be exhorted to be subject to each other in their turn.

Here is Adam Clarke,

Submitting-one to another] Let no man be so tenacious of his own will or his opinion in matters indifferent, as to disturb the peace of the Church; in all such matters give way to each other, and let love rule.

And here is BDAG,

“Of submission in the sense of voluntary yieding in love. 1 Cor. 16:16, Eph. 5:21 … 1 Clement 38:1″

One of the main tenets of Christianity is usually to have an attitude that God is not a "respecter of persons." (Acts 10:34) At least that is how I was raised. If Eph. 5:21 means that some people are to submit to other people, then it sounds like a different religion than the one in which I was raised. Not that that was perfect by any means.

In any case, this is why I went back to comment on Complegalitarian. I would be interested in knowing if there were commenataries which suggested that Eph. 5:21 means that in the church some submit to others. Otherwise I will continue in the belief in which I was raised on this matter.

Welcome to the Sticks

If I am not blogging so much you will know I am at the movies. There has been a wonderful spate of French movies out recently and I went to see the latest tonight - Welcome to the Sticks - good for a belly laugh.

The humour is organized around two premises. First, through a series of mishaps, the main character ends up being transferred to the north of France instead of the Riviera as he had hoped. We can identify here, and all the "north" jokes go over well with a Canadian audience.

Second, in the "north" they speak a regional dialect somewhat reminiscient of a dialect I am familar with from Noranda, Quebec. This dialect also has a parallel in Judges 12,

Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say Shibboleth.' If anyone said, 'Sibboleth', because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.

Here is one of the main dialogues,

Philippe (Kad Merad) : Mais pourquoi il est parti avec les meubles ?
But why did he leave with the furniture?

Antoine (Dany Boon) : Baaaah, ch'est p'tête les chiens...
Uh, maybe they were his/the dogs...

Philippe : Quels chiens ?
What dogs?

Antoine : Les meubles...
The furniture ....

Philippe : Mais pourquoi il aurait donné ses meubles à des chiens ?!
But why would he give the furniture to the dogs?

Antoine : Mais non : les chiens ! Pas les kiens [en ch'ti, "ch" se prononce "k" et inversement] il les a pas donné à des kiens ! Il est parti avec.
No, his. Not the dogs. He didn't give it to the dogs. He left with it.

Philippe : Mais pourquoi vous m'avez dit qu'il a donné ses meubles à des chiens ?
So why did you tell me that he had given his furniture to the dogs?

Antoine : Mais j'ai jamais dit cha !
But I didn't say that/cat!

Philippe : Quoi des chats ? Vous m'avez dit des chiens ?!
What do you mean "cats?" You told me dogs!

Antoine : Bah oui ch'est les chiens !
Yes, they are his/at the dogs.

Philippe : Ah... les siens !
Oh, they are his!

Antoine : Oui, les chiens, ch'est cha !
Yes, his/the dogs, that's it/cat.

Philippe : ...les chiens, les chats... Putain, mais tout le monde parle comme vous ici ?
Dogs. Cats! Shit, does everyone talks like you here?

Anyway, you can see how untranslatable this is. The entire movie depends on this kind of silly word play. My neighbour had seen the movie and she complained about how she couldn't understand why the subtitles were so poorly translated because they were not a literal translation but tried to create a similar wordplay in English. I thought they did a reasonably good job with the subtitles, but the dialogue in French was very funny - although perhaps it wore thin towards the end.

It was a heartwarming plot in any case, and if you love the sound of the carillon, the movie will be worth it for you on that account alone.

Septuagint Day

One of the really fascinating things about the Septuagint is that the first published translation into English was done in the United States by Charles Thomson and printed by Jane Aitken.

Charles Thomson was the Secretary to the United States Congress from 1774 to 1789, when he resigned to pursue his scholarly interests. Thomson was fascinated with the early Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the “Septuagint”. He produced the first translation of the Septuagint into English, and the first new modern-English translation of the New Testament in the western hemisphere. Charles Thomson spent twenty years perfecting his translation, and then he sought a publisher.

The publisher he found was the daughter of the famous Robert Aitken, who had produced the first English Bible printed in America in 1782. Her name was Jane Aitken. On September 12, 1808, in Philadelphia, Jane Aitken published Charles Thomson’s translation of the Bible into modern English in four volumes, making her the first woman to ever print a Bible, and the first publisher of a modern-English Bible since the King James version of two centuries earlier.

I have been reading some of William Loader's book The Septuagint, Sexuality, and the New Testament and hope to blog about it soon.

Wolters on Junia

(Updated) I know it is still the last few moments of Septuagint Day and I am going to post on that soon. But more immediate things appear.

Al Wolters article on Junia which I blogged about earlier on the Better Bibles Blog, has appeared and was linked to by Mike. He writes,

It’s a model of careful scholarship, and argues quite forcefully that Iounian is a retroversion of a Hebrew or Aramaic MALE name.

But, in fact, Wolters conclusions are here,

Finally, although the Hebrew name yëhunnï is attested only for men, both it and the assumed longer form yëhunnïyàh(û) could in principle be women's names as well, since Hebrew sentence names are used indiscriminately for both genders.68 However, the case is different for Greek names like Νικίας. To the best of my knowledge, they are used exclusively of men, in both secular and biblical Greek.69 If the ΙΟΥΝΙΑΝ of Rom 16:7 belongs to this declensional type, then it is almost certainly a mans name.

This conclusion still leaves open the question whether it is more likely that the IOTNIAN of Rom 16:7 reflects a Hebrew masculine name or a Latin feminine one. The answer to that question depends largely on how one assesses the likelihood that Paul would have considered a woman to be "prominent among the apostles" (see Metzger, Textual Commentary, 475). To some, probability will still favor the quasi consensus of recent scholarship that IOTNIAN in Rom 16:7 refers to a woman. To others, the epigraphic and philological evidence for the existence of a Hebrew name Yëhunnï/Ίουνιας will tip the scales in favor of a male apostle. In my own opinion, a plausible (but not a decisive) case can be made for either position.

What this does is simply demonstrate that anyone can interpret this passage according to what they already believe. Its a nice piece of writing otherwise.

There are a few things that Wolters does not explain. In fact, he writes,

It is likely that this widespread interpretation of the name at least partially accounts for the fact that all accented manuscripts of Rom 16:7 have the reading Ίουνίαν (with acute accent)It would be a mistake to conclude from this that the scribes of these manuscripts all interpreted IOTNIAN as a feminine name

However, since the accents were added much later and by that time all the Greek commentators had already decided that she was a woman, this is hardly relevant. Chrysostom had written of her as a woman and there is no mention of Junias as a man until the 13th century. David Jones on the CBMW site writes,

Many patristic exegetes understood the second person mentioned in Rom 16:7 to be the wife of Andronicus, such as: Ambrosiaster (c. 339-97); Jerome (c. 342-420); John Chrysostom (c. 347- 407); Jerome; Theodoret of Cyrrhus (c.393-458); Ps.-Primasius (c. 6th cent.); John Damascene (c. 675-749); Haymo (d. 1244); Hatto (?); Oecumenius (c. 6th cent.); Lanfranc of Bec (c.1005-89); Bruno the Carthusian (c.1032-1101); Theophylact (c. 11th cent.); Peter Abelard (1079-1142); and Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160).39.

In this case, one must assume that manuscript copiers all believed that Junia was a woman.

Another thing to note is that the variant Julia also existed in P46, so this manuscript copier also thought she was a woman. Once again there is no secondary evidence preceding the 13th century that Junia would be male. Therefore, I fail to see the relevancy of discussing the accents.

It is, on the other hand, interesting that there is a remote possibility that this could be the transliteration of a male Hebrew name. That appears to me to be technically possible although there is no contemporary evidence for a masculine Junias. It is an interesting article and I always enjoy Al Wolters' writing, but I do not feel that his argument is forceful.

I would comment on Mike's blog but I can't remember my wordpress password, so I will have to let it pass.

Women Bible Translators: Index

I am listing here the women translators of the English Bible that I have blogged abut so far, or intend to blog about, as well as other women who have been involved in Bible translation. Their translations represent a wide spectrum from the overly literal to the colloquial and easier to read translations. So far it appears that woman have largely the same variety of concerns regarding Bible translation that men have. I hope to add more and look forward eventually to listing some women's commentaries.

Annie Cressman
Karen Jobes
Helen Barrett Montgomery
Ann Nyland
Francis Siewart
Julia E. Smith
Helen Spurrel
Francis Werner

Translators of the Psalms

Sylvia Dunstan
Anne Locke
Mary Sidney

Other notable women in Bible translation

Jane Aitken

Francis Werner

I have mentioned Julia E. Smith as a Bible translator of the 19th century who had provided the most literal, or word for word, translation of the Hebrew Bible available until recently.

Last year the Ancient Roots Hebrew Bible appeared. Francis Werner was inspired through her own Bible study and by Beth Moore to provide a "translinear" translation of the Hebrew Bible. She writes,

The Translinear method was born from a detailed scientific analysis of several bible versions. A portion of the analysis can be found in the Compare Bible Versions section of this website. (I have published the analysis of 20 bible versions under the Truth in Translation series. Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Surprising Bias in the Old Testament is now available on this website.) The reason we need resources like cross-references and Interlinear bibles is because none of the bibles that have been published to date are close enough to the original language. They have extra words, are missing many unique words, and were not utilizing English consistently with the original language.

So all the classic bible study tools are needed to find out what the ancient text really said.But what would happen if all the all the ancient words matched the English language 100% of the time? You wouldn’t need a cross reference column. You wouldn’t need to compare them in an Interlinear bible. You wouldn’t need to double check the original word in a concordance.

The highest compliment I've received so far is from a Hebrew professor in town: "This would be very beneficial for our students, mainly because they will be able to tell much more than the usual translation gives them concerning some of the features of the original languages without having to know those languages." And I didn't even bribe him.

Put on the "magic glasses" and see the Old Testament exactly the way it was written. Transport yourself to the Ancient Roots of the original language with the most exact methodology ever published for completeness and consistency. Join me and enjoy the outpouring of insights.

You can browse this Bible here. Werner has also reviewed other study Bibles on Amazon. For an academic review of her accomplishment I recommend this commentary. Her book Truth in Translation has also received singularly negative reviews.

However, she has provided a view into the Hebrew roots of words and if one wants to find more about the poetic language and imagery of Hebrew, this reveals something of the language to non-Hebrew readers. Here is the Babel story from the Ancient Hebrew roots Bible,

All the land was of one lip and of one word. As they were journeying east, they found a canyon in the land of Central-Iraq and they dwelled there. They had brick for stone and had bitumen for clay. Man said to neighbor, "Brick whitens by burning it thus on a pyre." They said, "Thus we will build a city and a tower with its head in heaven to make our name. Otherwise we will scatter over the face of the all the land." Yahweh descended to see the city and the tower which the sons of Adam built. Yahweh said, "Behold, one people, all with one lip, all began to do this! Now none are protected from their plotting which they do.

It has a close resemblance to Julia Smith's version. It is an odd thing really. I have seen some people invent the most impossible interpretations of the Bible from using interlinear's like Werner's. But the truth is that even among those who claim to know the original languages well enough, one sometimes comes across oddities. I recommend using this Bible in combination with your favourite translation, perhaps the NRSV.

In my view the Ancient Roots Hebrew Bible is one more tool, and does not replace learning Hebrew, but realistically who has time. It also reflects the desire of women to participate in the creation of meaning around the sacred text. Perhaps if more women were included in the academy women might not produce translations which so singularly lack endorsement.

Francis Werner must be listed as a woman bible translator.

babble from Babel:11

A post which I linked to previously has disappeared so I must redo some thinking here. I did not save the post so I can only provide some small insight into what was written.

The only part that remains in my memory is the story of Moses in the bulrushes. There are too many similarities to the Babel theme for me to let this one fall by the wayside.

Instead of providing the Hebrew and Greek this time, I will provide some literal translations and compare them. The first is Julia E. Smith's translation of the Hebrew Bible, the second is a literal translation of the Septuagint, and the third is the Douay Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate.

And she will not be able able any more to hide him, and she will take for him an ark of bulrush and will pitch it with bitumen and pitch, and she will put in it the child, and will put it in the sedge by the lip of the river. Julia E. Smith's translation of the Hebrew.

But when they could hide it no longer, its mother took a basket and plastered it with a mix of pitch and tar and she put the child in it and placed it in the marsh beside the river. New English Translation of the Septuagint.

And when she could hide him no longer, she took a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and pitch: and put the little babe therein, and laid him in the sedges by the river’s brink, Douay-Rheims

Once again the term for "lip" goes completely untranslated in the Greek, while in most English translations one can read "brink" or "bank." In fact, the Greek word for "lip" cheilos can mean "brink" or "rim" but here the translators of the LXX simply did not translate the Hebrew with any term at all. The reader falls on empty space.

While the word itself refers simply to the lip, it was also used to refer to the womb. By leaving out the Greek word cheilos as a translation for the Hebrew word for "lip." a feminine metaphor was lost. It was not until Julia Smith made her literal translation from the Hebrew that this term was finally translated into English.

I am arguing here for the participation of women in the enterprise of Bible translation, as a means to engage with the full range of semantic and poetic content of the original writings. While "lip" represents the womb, or women as life-generating agents; the "lip" also represents one of the points of articulation for language, one that is essential for generating meaning.

babble from Babel:10

In blogging about Babel it was not my original purpose to blog about gender. But metaphor lends itself to gender. I have taken some poetic license with these posts. I do not claim that the authors of the original Hebrew writings used certain words with the intent of communicating something about gender, but I argue that later translators were influenced by the subliminal gendered metaphors, to translate, or not translate, certain concrete imagery. This happened over and over until the language has become impoverished of many images. The preponderance of those images saved and transformed into every day language are more likely to be masculine.

Perhaps this is not accurate, and my thesis will just be an incentive for the reader to pay closer attention to the detail, and form an opinion of her or his own.

And now for my post this evening, I will cite a passage written by Dante in Latin on the topic of the tower of Babel and then provide the translation by Umberto Eco into Italian and finally an English translation of Eco's Italian. You can see for yourself the image that is lost.

Here is Dante's Latin,

qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur, nisi culpa presumptionis humane dissipata fuisset, ut inferius ostendetur. Hac forma locutionis locutus est Adam; hac forma locutionis locuti sunt omnes posteri eius usque ad edificationem turris Babel, que ‘turris confusionis’ interpretatur; hanc formam locutionis hereditati sunt filii Heber, qui ab eo dicti sunt Hebrei. Hiis solis post confusionem remansit, ut Redemptor noster, qui ex illis oriturus erat secundum humanitatem, non lingua confusionis, sed gratie frueretur. Fuit ergo hebraicum ydioma illud quod primi loquentis labia fabricarunt.

Here is [a Spanish translation of] Umberto Eco's original Italian,

y es precisamente tal forma la que habrian utilizado todos los habiantes en su lengua, si no hubiera sido desmembrada por culpa de la presuncion humana, como se mostrara mas abajo. Con esta forma linguistica hablo Adan: gracias a esta forma linguistica hablaron todos sus descendientes hasta la construccion de la torre de Babel, que es interpretada como 'torre de la confusion': esta forma linguistica fue la que heredaron los hijos de heber, que de el tomaron el nombre de hebreos. Solo ellos la conservaron despues de la confusion, para que nuestro Redentor, que segun el lado humano de su naturaleza debia nacer de ellos, disfrutase no de una lengua de la confusion, sino de una lengua de gracia. Fue, por tanto, el idioma hebreo el que pronunciaron los labios del primer hablante.

And here is Fentress' English translation of Eco's Italian,

and it is precisely this form that all speakers would make use of in their language had it not been dismembered through the fault of human presumption, as I shall demonstrate below. By this linguistic form Adam spoke: by this linguistic form spoke all his descendants unitl the construction of the Tower of Babel - which is interpreted as the 'tower of confusion': this was the linguistic form that the sons of Eber, called Hebrews after him, inherited. It remained to them alone after the confusion, so that our Saviour, who because of the human side of his nature had to be born of them, could use a language not of confusion but of grace. it was thus the Hebrew tongue that was constructed by the first being endowed with speech.

And now here is the literal English translation of the last line in the [Spanish translation of] Eco's Italian,

It was, thus, the Hebrew idiom which the lips of the first speaker pronounced.

Another case of disappearing lips! What is it with these guys? We all have lips - plain, old, ordinary lips to speak with, but we see that the LXX translators, the editor of the Sefer Yetsira, Bible translators, and now James Fentress, Eco's translator, just wrote "lips" right out of the text. And so we speak only with our tongue, with an impoverished tongue.

Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language.

Eco, Umberto. La Busqueda de La Lengua Perfecta.

Notes: And I don't have a copy of this book in Italian. If you do I would be delighted to post Eco's original translation of Dante.

I have committed some kind of grievous error writing Spanish without accents, but it is not a language that I am familiar with, and I am still on a borrowed computer without my usual keyboard.

I am sure that my complete ignorance of Spanish must seem funny but there is very little Spanish in my Canadian environment.

Marie Dentière: Defense of Women

Let her speak for herself,

Not only would some slanderers and adversaries of the truth want to accuse us of too great audacity and boldness, but also some of the faithful, saying that women are too bold to write to one another about Holy Scripture. To them one can allowably respond that all those who have written and who have been named in Holy Scripture are not judged to be too bold, since some [women] are named and praised in Holy Scripture as much for their good morals, actions, behavior, and examples as for their faith and doctrine. Like Sarah and Rebecca, and principally among all the others of the Old Testament, the mother of Moses who, in spite of the edict of the King, had dared to keep her son from death and have him raised in the house of the Pharaoh, as it is amply declared in Exodus 2. Regarding Deborah, who judged the people of Israel during the time of the Judges, she is not to be disregarded. (Judges 4.)

I ask, would it be necessary to condemn Ruth even though she is of the feminine sex, on account of the history written about her in her book? I do not think so, seeing that she is numbered in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. [3]

What wisdom had the Queen of Sheba, who is not only named in the Old Testament, but Jesus had dared to name her among the other sages. [4] If it is a question of speaking of the graces which have been given to women, what greater [grace] has been given to any creature on the earth than to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, to have carried the son of God? [5] It was not less [than that given] to Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, to have given birth to a son so miraculously, being sterile. [6]

What preacher has done more than the Samaritan woman [7] who was not ashamed to preach Jesus and his word, proclaiming him openly before all the world as soon as she understood from Jesus that it is necessary to adore God in spirit and in truth? Where is the one who can boast to have seen the first manifestation of the great mystery of the resurrection if not Mary Magdalene, from whom he had expelled seven demons? And the other women to whom it was declared by his Angel, rather than to men, and commanded to speak, preach and declare it to others?

And although there has been some imperfection in all women, nevertheless men have not been exempt from it. Why is it so necessary to criticize women, seeing that a woman never sold nor betrayed Jesus, but a man named Judas. Who are the ones, I ask you, who have so invented and fabricated ceremonies, heresies, and false doctrines on the earth, if not men, and the poor women have been seduced by them.

Never was a woman found to be a false prophet, although they have been fooled by them; although by this I do not wish to excuse the great malice of some women, which can surpass all measure, but there is no reason to make of it a general rule without any exception, as they [the critics of women] make daily; and principally Faustus, that mocker, in his Bucoliques ; seeing that, I certainly cannot keep silent, since these are more recommended and utilized than the Gospel of Jesus which is prohibited to us [women] and this story-teller [Faustus] is held to be good in the schools. [8]

Therefore, if God has given grace to some good women, revealing something good and holy to them through his Holy Scriptures, will they dare not write, tell, or declare it to one another for the sake of the slanderers of the truth? Ah, to wish to hinder them would be too impudent, and it would be too foolish to hide the talent that God has given us, we ought to have the grace to persevere until the end. Amen.

Jeanne de Jussie & Marie Dentiere
Dentiere by J. D. Douglass

bibble babble

Our Computer, who art in cyberspace,
Infallible be thy name,
Thy sphere come,
Thy code be done,
On paper as it is pixels.
Give us this day our daily byte
And forgive us our typos
As we forgive those who type against us
but deliver us from all error

For thine are the pixels,
and the power and the process
for ever and ever amen.

babble from Babel 9

My post today will be too simply invite you to read Kurk's post here on the naming of Moses, and how it relates to some of the ideas I have been exploring here. Amazingly, we see again the proximity of pitch and bitumen, of lip and naming.So Kurk's post must be babble from Bable post # 9.

I also want to signal the emergence of two bloggers, Kurk and Iyov, with women's voices, participating in the creation of meaning. Iyov, now in retirement, was the first who inspired me to study the story of Miriam, and to revisit the books of the law with new eyes. Kurk as reconsidered his retirement and continues to explore the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

babble from Babel 8

Genesis 11:4

And they said Come on!
let us build for ourselves a city,
and a tower with its head in the heavens,
so let us make for ourselves a name,
- lest we be scattered abroad
over the face of all the earth. Rotherham

And they will say, Come,
we will build to us a city,
and a tower, its head to the heavens;
and we will make to us a name,
lest we shall be dispensed
over the face of the earth. Julia Smith

Dixerunt itaque, Agite
aedificemus nobis civitatem & turrim,
cuius caput centingat caelum, atq;
ita faciamus nobis nomen;
ne forte dispergamur
super faciem universae terrae. Pagnini

et dixerunt venite
faciamus nobis civitatem
et turrem cuius culmen pertingat ad caelum
et celebremus nomen nostrum
antequam dividamur in universas terras. Vulgate

It is striking that both Smith and Rotherham retain the terms "head" and "face." The tower has a "head" and the earth has a "face." These are not translated into the Latin of the Vulgate but do find a place in Pagnini's Latin translation. Pagnini is known for a more literal rendering of the Hebrew than Jerome. Jerome's translation must be considered to be of the dynamic equivalent type for this passage.

Whatever your views on translation, it is good to know these names, Pagnini, Rotherham and Smith. They are the heroes of transparency and word for word translation. They have a sense of the sound and flow of the language. They are not just translating meaning, but metaphor and imagery, alliteration and assonance.

babble from Babel 7

Here is the story of the tower from Julia Smith's Bible. HT Kurk I love the rhythm and minimalism. Its transparent to the Hebrew for the most part.

1. And all the earth shall be one lip, and the same words.
2. And it shall be in their removing from the east they shall find a valley in the land of Shinar; and they shall dwell there.
3. And they shall say a man to his neighbour, Come, we will make bricks, and we will burn to a burning, and brick shall be to them for stone, and potter's clay shall be to them for potter's clay.
4. And they will say, Come, we will build to us a city, and a tower, its head to the heavens; and we will make to us a name, lest we shall be dispensed over the face of the earth.
5. And Jehovah will come down to see the city, and the tower which the sons of men built.
6. And Jehovan will say, Behold, the people one, and one lip to them all and this they begin to do; and now it will not be restrained from them all which they shall imagine to do.
7. Come, we will come down and mix their lip that they shall not hear a man the lip of his neighbor.
8. And Jehovah will disperse them from thence over the face of all the earth; and they will cease to build the city.
9. Therefore its name was called confusion, for there Jehovah confounded the lip of all the earth; and from thence Jehovah dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

Its right and proper that a woman would translate the Hebrew word for lip with the English one. While lip in Hebrew is one common way to talk about language, along with tongue, it does not usually appear in English. The lip came to represent the feminine, receptivity and passivity.

It is a very odd thing, but in one of the additions to the Sefer Yetsira, the Book of Creation, which is a treatise on language and creation, the five places of articulation are described. One would expect that the lip would appear as one of the places. But in this masculinist text, all the places of articuation are represented by the tongue. The lip is not mentioned. Clearly from other parts of the text, the tongue was related to circumcision - it was a parallel organ of generation.

Here is the passage from Peter Hayman's translation, page 93,

The twenty-two letters are the foundation: three primary letters, seven double (letters), and twelve simple (letters). They are carved out by the voice, hewn out in the air, fixed in the mouth in five positions: Aleph, Het, He, Ayin, Bet, Waw, Mem, Pe, Gimel, Yod, Kaph, Qof, Dalet, Tet, Lamed, Nun, Taw, Zayin, Samek, Sade, Resh, Shin, They are bound to the tip of the tongue as the flame to the burning coal.

Aleph, He, Het, Ayin are pronounced at the back of tongue and in the throat.

Bet, Waw, Mem, Pe are pronounced between the teeth and by the tip of the tongue.

Gimel, Yod, Kaph, Qof, are cut off a third of the way up the tongue.

Dalet, Tet, Lamed, Nun, Taw, are pronounced by tip of the tongue with the voice.

Zayin, Samech, Sade, Resh, Shin (are pronounced) between the teeth with the tongue relaxed.

Notice the complete lack of any reference to the lips and the assignment of all articulation to the tongue. While the circumcised organ has agency in creating new life; the tongue, or language, has agency in the creation of the world. In this book the world is created by language, a masculine form of energy having agency. Only the tongue articulates language and not the lips.

And why does the lip not appear in the Sefer Yetsira? I don't know, but its absence is peculiar. Is the feminine imagery absent on purpose?

The point is that the lips are a necessary location of articulation for language. The lips are no more passive than the tongue. Just as the tongue has agency, so do the lips. The lips are a different, complementary point of articulation. They are not a passive receptacle. Nor is the womb.

The feminine image of vessels for sefirot, now prevalent in Kabalah, does not appear in the Sefer Yetsira. It is a book which morphed over time, both in Hebrew and in its many interpretations. While the masculine imagery is deliberate in at least one of the additions to this book, it may be absent in other versions. I offer only some remarks on the oddity of the absence of the lips from this book.

We need a world which accepts and lauds the agency and creativity of women alongside the agency and creativity of men. We need both the masculine and the feminine voice to create our world in the image of God. This is the meaning of the Sefer Yetsira, for this reader, that as we articulate language we create meaning, we create the world we live in. It is the language given us by God, to both men and women, to people of all races. If we listen only to one voice, we lack a full understanding of what is being said. It is as if we were listening to someone talk with only the tongue and no lips, or only the lips and no tongue.

Marie Fortune

Lundy Bancroft's book has been considered one of the best on the topic. He also recommends Marie Fortune of the Faith Trust Institute. This if from her website.

"For the most part clergy have hindered rather than helped women break free from their abusive partners. Our apathy, denial, exhortations, ignorance, and misinterpretations of the Bible have added to women's pain and suffering and placed them in even greater danger. The time is long overdue for us pastors to stop turning our backs on domestic violence and begin speaking out against this sin. We have a responsibility to preach and teach the biblical truths about God's love, which binds women and men together as equals rather than ordering them in a hierarchy. As long as we refuse to fully carry out our pastoral duties, victims of domestic violence will continue to crumble emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually underneath the weight of brutality and scriptural misinterpretations, which no human deserves.

- Rev. Al Miles Domestic Violence: What Every Pastor Needs to Know

The Abusive Mentality:1

I feel that this topic is so serious and so severely misunderstood that I am going to blog pieces of Lundy Bancroft's book for a bit. Here are a list of realities about abusers,

1. He is controlling.
2. He feels entitled.
3. He twists things into their opposites.
4. He disrespects his partner and feels that he is superior to her.
5. He confuses love and abuse.
6. He is manipulative.
7. He strives to have a good public image.
8. He feels justified.
9. Abusers deny and minimize their abuse.
10. Abusers are possessive.

I'll get into the details later. I firmly believe that the teaching that the husband has more authority than the wife is a condition in which abuse thrives. This does not mean that men who are not exposed to this teaching in church cannot find it somewhere else. This does not mean that women cannot be abusive. This means, simply put, the notion that one person has more authority than the other is a reality of abuse.

I feel that this is a safety issue, so I am going to comment on compegal.

Myths about abuse by Lundy Bancroft

In complegalitarian the conversation has turned to spousal violence. It is a place where many commenters like to be anonymous, although maintaining a name of some kind. I support anonymity in this context and I am disappointed that real names have been introduced into published comments in this context, betraying the confidentiality of at least one commenter. Let me repeat, I support anonymity in this context and I would like to promote it.

For this reason and others, I am a conscientious objector to the complegalitarian blog. However, I feel the need to comment on this most recent post. First, the author, Marilyn asks some good questions.

One commenter responds,

Yes, symptoms become causes in their own right, but the root causes are nonetheless other.

A person’s personality type (here, OCEAN, the big five personality traits, is more helpful perhaps than Myers-Briggs: watch out for neuroticism and disagreeableness), upbringing, history of being abused by others, family of origin’s history of mental illness and personal history of mental illness, personal choices in terms of substance abuse, self-medication, and patterns of addiction - these things are the root causes of abuse.

Now, let me introduce you to Lundy Bancroft, who I believe is a recognized author in this area. In fact, I believe he is the best.

The Myths about Abusers page 23 - 24

1. He was abused as a child.
2.His previous partner abused him.
3.He abuses those he loves the most.
4. He holds in his feelings too much.
5. He has an aggressive personality.
6. He loses control.
7. He is too angry.
8.He is mentally ill.
9. He hates women.
10. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment.
11. He has low-self-esteem.
12.His boss mistreats him.
13.He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution.
14. There are as many abusive women as abusive men.
15.His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner.
16.He is a victim of racism.
17. He abuses alcohol or drugs.

Bancroft meticulously supports his claims that it is a myth that these things cause someone to become an abuser.

Thank you, Lundy Bancroft. I will blog soon about some of the causes of abuse.

Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That? I recommend this as the best book on the topic. It takes no position on any religious viewpoint. It is refreshingly devoid of that kind of comment. Every pastor should own this book.

Internet Anonymity

Anonymity is a common feature on the internet. On this post at my last count, 87 out of 135 commenters were simply "Anonymous." It appeared that the blog owner may have been commenting anonymously also.


The topic? Complementarianism and egalitarianism. The tempers run high. A few people still use their full names there. Others link to their own blogs. This is a serious place and in my opinion, it is the premiere spot on the internet for debating this topic.

The mix of commenters is fascinating. It ranges from totally unknown and outrageously scrappy surivors of abuse, to ministers and authors of published books. (Versus those of us whose books are neither written nor published.:-)

On another note, in the last month 4 or 5 complementarian blogs have either posted about me, or invited me to comment at length or invited me to post, all with my real name. It's interesting because sometimes an egalitarian will say to me that I approach exegesis like a complementarian. I don't know about that, but I do read complementarian books.

Here is lonely old me, having abandoned the brotherhood of man, and now I am working on the siblinghood of humanity. What next? I read a comment recently using "Babel" as a symbol of the disunity between comps and egals. Perhaps introducing a new babble can lead to some bridge building.

Equal participation in decision-making for women

From a paper by World Vision,

• Create programmes and raise awareness among men and women to acknowledge and alleviate the burdens of women’s triple role in their home, workplace, and community, and promote women’s equal participation in decision-making.
• Enhance the social support system to enable women to work outside of the home by providing free/subsidised and good quality day-care centres for infants and elders.
• Governmental and international agencies, NGOs, employers, and trade unions must ensure equal rights and equal pay for all women.
  Women in leadership must be encouraged to build their capacity, confidence, assertiveness, and leadership skills while increasing the number of female staff who serve as role models. At the same time, men must be made aware of the shared benefits of gender equality, enabling them to relate to and work positively with empowered women.
• Furthermore, World Vision suggests partnership with social institutions such as churches, council of elders, community leaders and other sources of influence to remove barriers that prevent women from full participation.
• Educate men and women on shared gender roles that allow familial and social equity leading to households and societies where both genders have equal opportunities and access to resources and decision making.

You might read this paper and be glad that you don't live under the conditions described within. Yes, but considering the comparative prosperity of North America, women still suffer from a shocking amount of violence and discrimination. Since this is the same within the Christian community as outside it, it is time for the church as a whole to make a stand against the denial of equal decision-making power to women around the world and at home.

Let's pull together on this and better the lives of women and children here and around the world.

And here are some thoughts from Carolyn McCulley on this.

Ish as "participant"

I need to do a lot of organizational stuff on this blog and add a recent comments widget among other things.

I want to thank David E Stein for an extended comment on Babel 3. This is regarding the gender connotations of ish.

kephale: head of the Roman army?

A commenter recently posted this comment,

If “kephale” is in fact used to refer to generals of armies, the Roman Emperor, and the leaders of tribes (which Sue confirmed for us), then is this even really remotely debatable anymore?

I confirmed that kephale was used as tribal leader, uniquely for Jephthah. This passage is so problematic that this use of kephale is sometimes not cited as proof that God is (supposedly) the authority over Christ, or the husband is (supposedly) an authority over the wife.

But what about the "general of the army. "

Here is a passage from Grudem's study and his rebuttal to Richard Cervin,

The next example Cervin rejects as ambiguous is:

(23) Plutarch, Pelopidas 2.1.3: In an army, The light-armed troops are like the hands, the cavalry like the feet, the line of men-at-arms itself like chest and breastplate, and the general is like the head.

Here Cervin says, Plutarch is using the human body as a simile for the army. This is obvious in context, which Grudem again fails to provide{20} . " . . Plutarch does not call the general the 'head of the army'; he is merely employing a simile. This example is ambiguous at best, and may thus be dispensed with" (p. 101).

In response, Cervin is correct to point out that this is not a metaphorical use of head in which the general is called the head of the army but is indeed a simile in which Plutarch says, The general is like the head. It is indeed a helpful distinction to point out these similes and put them in a separate category, for, while they may be helpful in clarifying the use of a related metaphor, they are not precisely parallel. (my emphasis)

But I would not agree that the example therefore may be dispensed with, as Cervin says, for it is of some value in understanding the metaphor, but precision of analysis would be better served by putting it in a distinct category. I appreciate Mr. Cervin's suggestion at this point.

Here is more of the context,

For if, as Iphicrates analyzed the matter, the light-armed troops are like the hands, the cavalry like the feet, the line of men-at‑arms itself like chest and breastplate, and the general like the head, then he, in taking undue risks and being over bold, would seem to neglect not himself, but all, inasmuch as their safety depends on him, and their destruction too.

First, it is significant that the text says, "as Iphicrates analyzed the matter" indicating that "head" was not the normal way to refer to the general. This is an image used uniquely in this one place. It has to be explained that the general was "like" the head.

Next, Plutarch was born between 45 and 50 AD. Here he is writing about the general of a Roman army. In Latin the word caput had a more extended range than kephale had in Greek.

In Greek, the word kephale had a technical use in military terms, the right-hand half of a phalanx in Arrian's Tactica 8.3, which is a late first/early 2nd century treatise on Roman military practice, in Aelianus' Taktike 7.3 written about the Greek army, and the word is used for a band of men in Job 1:17 LXX. If kephale has a technical military use as something else, it is not easily pressed into use for the "general."

Last, but not least, the general in an army is one person over many. There is no indication that this is useful in 1 Cor. 11 for either the trinity or for marriage. This metaphor is not particulary useful for wedding sermons either.

The purpose of this post is not a further exploration of this topic, but just an opportunity to make available some of what has ;aready been written on this topic.

ESV Study Bible on authentein

Here is a selection from the ESV Study Bible on 1 Tim. 2:12. HT Evangelical Village. I have bolded one particular sentence.

1 Tim. 2:12 I do not permit. Paul self-consciously writes with the authority of an apostle (e.g., 1 Thess. 4:1; 2 Thess. 3:6), rather than simply offering an opinion. This statement is given in the context of Paul’s apostolic instructions to the church for the ordering of church practice when the church is assembled together. In that context, two things are prohibited: (1) Women are not permitted to publicly teach Scripture and/or Christian doctrine to men in church (the context implies these topics), and (2) women are not permitted to exercise authority over men in church. (The reference for both “teaching” and “exercise authority” here is within the context of the assembled church.)

Women teaching other women, and women teaching children, are not in view here, and both are encouraged elsewhere (on women teaching women, cf. Titus 2:4; on women teaching children, cf. 2 Tim. 1:5). Nor does this passage have in view the role of women in leadership situations outside the church (e.g., business or government).

The presence of the word or (Gk. oude) between “to teach” and “to exercise authority” indicates that two different activities are in view, not a single activity of “authoritative teaching.” “Exercise authority” represents Greekauthenteō, found only here in the NT. Over 80 examples of this word exist outside the NT, however, clearly establishing that the meaning is “exercise authority” (not “usurp authority” or “abuse authority,” etc., as sometimes has been argued).

Since the role of pastor/elder/overseer is rooted in the task of teaching and exercising authority over the church, this verse would also exclude women from serving in this office (cf. 1 Tim. 3:2). Thus when Paul calls for the women to be quiet, he means “quiet” with respect to the teaching responsibility that is limited in the assembled church. Paul elsewhere indicates that women do speak in other ways in the church assembly (see 1 Cor. 11:5). See also note on 1 Cor. 14:34–35.

Now I would like to cite the well known complementarian scholar Dr. Kostengerger on the lexical evidence for the meaning of authentein. On Between Two Worlds he responded to a series of questions on 1 Tim. 2:12. Once again, I have bolded the relevant sentences.

Second, H. S. Baldwin takes up the matter of the likely meaning of authentein. The KJV translates this word “usurp authority,” and more recently many feminists, such as I. H. Marshall, have argued that the word has a negative connotation. If so, they say, Paul prohibited only women’s negative exercise of authority in the church, as well as women’s false teaching, not their exercise of these functions, properly conceived. Baldwin’s study shows that authentein was an exceedingly rare word in NT times that occurs in the NT only in 1 Tim 2:12 and elsewhere only once or twice prior to the writing of 1 Timothy.

3. So, then, in the case of 1 Tim 2:12, is the word study method by itself inconclusive?

Yes, I believe that’s right. The fact that lexical study in this case, owing to the limited data, of necessity remains inconclusive leads naturally to the next chapter in the book,

I am concerned at the impression of near certainty that the ESV Study Bible communicates to its readers. There is no evidence that warrants this. When dealing with the word of God, used as law in the lives of many people, it is a serious issue when information which is vague and indecisive is presented as solid and trustworthy. I wish to let people know that the ESV Study Bible does not always reflect the consensus of scholarship.

Rick Warren says no to divorce

There are about a dozen things that are extremely disturbing in this post.

Rick Warren: Abuse is no excuse for women to seek divorce

Bruce Ware and the Westminister Confession

Thanks to Peter's comments on the preceding post, I have found that the ETS doctrinal statement is based on an answer to a question in the Westminster catechism. This, in turn, is based on the Westminister Confession.

In the unity of the Godhead head there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God Son, and God the Holy Ghost.1

In Deitatis unitate personæ tres sunt unius ejusdemque essentiæ, potential ac æternitatis; Deus Pater, Deus Filius, ac Deus Spiritus Sanctus.

Potentia

Potentia is the liturgical Latin equivalent for potestas, meaning authority. The meaning of potentia in Lewis and Short includes the following -

• might, force, power.
• ability, faculty, capacity
• political power, authority, sway, influence
• the rule of an individual, monarchical power,
• supreme dominion, sovereignty,

I do not believe that the Son can be equal to the Father in power and under him in authority. This is consistent with what we know about the word kephale. It has no meaning of "authority over" in the Liddell Scott lexicon. There is not one occurrence prior to the New Testament of kephale meaning to have "authority over" one's own people. That is why it is not in the lexicon.

I was not aware that for many years, in sitting under the leadership of Dave Short and Jim Packer, that I was being taught by those who would nuance the fundamental creeds of historic Christianity. I am very disappointed at my own naivete.

My difficulty with Kevin Giles is that he attempts to demonstrate that power and authority mean the same thing in English. Whether they do or not is completely irrelevant. The fact is that "power" or potestas in the Vulgate and the creeds represents exousia in Greek, and this is now translated into English as "authority." In English it is possible for "power" and "authority" to have distinctive meanings. In classical and liturgical Latin it is not. (Potestas translates exousia and is translated into English as "power.") And this is what the creeds were written in.

When I left David Short's church, he pressed me to read Grudem's kephale study. I was unimpressed. I was unaware of exactly how divergent the Christianity of that church had become.

In my opinion few members of the congregation are aware of this controversy. However, last spring Bruce Ware spoke at a local pastors' conference with Dave Short. A younger pastor preached the doctrine best formulated by Ware in our church last summer. I do know that a couple of people walked out publicly. I have no first hand knowledge of further reaction, but I would not be surprised if some resistance emerges.

Bruce Ware and historic Christianity

I have been concerned that some might believe that Bruce Ware had said that Christ was not equal to God. However, he strongly affirms that the Son is equal to the Father in essence. Yet he clearly states that the Son has a distinct role.

To confirm some of what Dr. Ware has said, I looked at Father, Son and Holy Spirit where he wrote,

Yet notice one more detail. Paul begins his prayer bowing his knees neither to the Son nor to the Spirit but to the Father, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named." The Father then is the Sovereign Ruler over heaven and earth, controlling even the very names that every creature is given. From this position of sovereign supremacy, it is the Father who has the authority to grant this prayer's fulfillment, and so ultimately all glory and thanksgiving must go to him.

Because of this, Paul prays to the Father that the Spirit will enlarge the likeness and experience of Christ in those who believe. As Paul's prayer so clearly indicates, then, the Spirit works in our sanctification to bring honour and glory to the Son, to the ultimate glory of the Father.

From this it appears to me that Ware affirms:

1 The Father has sovereign supremacy above Christ.
2 The Father is supreme in authority over Christ.
3 The Father uniquely has authority to grant answers to prayer.
4. All thanks and glory go to the Father.

I note that the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society is this.

God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

The Athanasian Creed says,

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

Sed Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti una est divinitas, aequalis gloria, coeterna maiestas.

Augustine writes,

For he was not sent in virtue of some disparity of power or substance or anything in him that was not equal to the Father, but in virtue of the Son being from the Father, not the Father being from the Son.”*

non secundum imparem potestatem uel substantiam uel aliquid quod in eo patri non sit aequale missus est, sed secundum id quod filius a patre est, non pater a filio.

Here are extracts from the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary.

Maiestas

• greatness, grandeur, dignity, majesty


• sovereign power


• the paternal authority

Potestas

• Political power, dominion, rule, empire, sovereignty


• Magisterial power, authority, office, magistracy
  
• have lawful authority and jurisdiction

In addition to this the Latin word potestas uniquely translates the Greek word exousia in the Vulgate and must be presumed to mean "authority. " I do not see how it can be shown that Augustine did not say that the Son was not unequal to the Father in "authority."

I suggest that majesty and power are synonyms of sovereignty and authority. A study of Latin will demonstrate that potestas did indeed mean authority, and maiestas meant sovereignty. Christ is equal to the Father in authority and sovereignty according to historic Christianity.

I believe that historic Christianity taught that Christ was equal to his Father in authority, power, sovereignty, dominion and rule.

babble from Babel 6

Here is the second half of Gen. 11:3 in several different forms.

נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים‏
niləbənâ ləḇēnîm ‏‏
let us make bricks,

‎ ‏‏ וְנִשְׂרְפָה לִשְׂרֵפָה
wəniśərəfâ liśərēfâ
and burn them thoroughly

הַלְּבֵנָה לְאָבֶן
halləḇēnâ lə’āḇen
brick for stone

וְהַחֵמָר לַחֹמֶר
wəhaḥēmār laḥōmer:
and slime for mortar

In these four lines the second proposition repeats the sounds of the first one. The first two times this is achieved by using a cognate word, a related word, really a different form of the first word. In the third line, the two words are not related semantically but are still similar in sound. In the fourth line, the words are once again related.

Four lines each having a repeated set of sounds, creates the "babel" or "babble" of the people talking, the meaninglessness of the yammering, the repetitive nature of this talk, whose goal was to promote the building of a city and a tower. No wonder God broke it up and dispersed these people.

Let's try this. (linking words are omitted with the readers indulgence.

bake ourselves bricks
fire them with fire
brick for block
bitumen for bond

Now you get the some rhythm, some babble. Let's see how the translators dealt with this.

πλινθεύσωμεν πλίνθους
ὀπτήσωμεν αὐτὰς πυρί
ἡ πλίνθος εἰς λίθον
ἄσφαλτος ὁ πηλός

In the Septuagint there was clearly an attempt to maintain the alliterative aspect of this speech.

faciamus lateres,
coquamus eos igni.
lateres pro saxis
bitumen pro cæmento Vulgate

faciamus lateres,
igni coquamus
lateres vice lapidum
bitumen vice cæmento Pagnini

Pagnini makes only one revision from the Vulgate replacing saxis with lapidum. However he does this in order to create an additional alliteration. It appears to be deliberate.

Gen. 11:3 is one of the most evocative verses of the Bible.

They spoke,
person to the one next,
let us
bake ourselves bricks
fire them with fire
brick for block
and bitumen for bond

Here we have one of the most important propositions of the bible, that each of us is in reciprocal relations with our next one. Here we also have one of the most alliterative utterances of the bible, brick for block.

What a perfect presentation of precept and pleasure..... But what happens next?

babble from Babel 5

Note: The discussion of vocabulary for circumcision in this post reflects issues which would have affected the translators of the scriptures into Greek. It does not reflect the language for circumcision in Hebrew.

This is not exactly from Babel but it has to be part of this series. First, you must read Kurk's post here and the last section on how circumcision was translated into Greek.

Here is a funny thing. In Hebrew there was the akrobustia (1) which was peritemno, or cut around, we now say, circumcised; but also the word of your mouth, logos, which if you remember well is called the "lip" in Hebrew, ought to be likewise circumcised, but in the case of Moses was, in fact, un-cut-around - he stammered.

And this does not sound so bad in Hebrew, since the heart Lev 26:41; Jer 9:26 can also be un-cut-around and the ears too Jer 6:10. So, in Hebrew, this is just an expression.

But the Greeks would have none of that. The translators of the Septuagint could not write that Moses was of "uncircumcised lips." They clearly found this kind of formal equivalence to be impossible and refused to accept such a foreign notion in this case. In Greek the ears could literally be "uncircumcised" and the heart, as well. This leads me to believe that the Greek translators did, indeed, associate the "lips" with the female pudenda, and deliberately rejected the possibility that "lips" could be circumcised.

Here we see the stammering dynamic equivalence of the Greek translation. But first, the Hebrew is

וַאֲנִי עֲרַל שְׂפָתָיִם

and literally means "I am of uncircumcised lips" KJV

The Greek translators, however, tried out both ἄλογός and ἰσχνόφωνός, an indication of their inhibitions on this topic.

ἐγὼ δὲ ἄλογός εἰμι Ex. 6:12

I am un wordy (wild and irrational)

ἐγὼ ἰσχνόφωνός εἰμι Ex. 6:30
I am weakvoiced (stammering)

cum incircumcisus sim labiis? Jerome (I lack Pagnini's Exodus)

with uncircumcised lips

The Greeks, of course, knew that the ancient Egyptians practiced female circumcision, and perhaps the Hebrews did not want that phrase found in their scriptures. The earliest written record of female circumcision dates back to Herodotus.

It has not been possible to determine when or where female circumcision originated. Theories and supposition date it as far back as the 5th century, BC. Herodotus stated that the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and Ethiopians practiced female genital excision 500 years before the birth of Christ. Although it is commonly believed that female circumcision originated in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs, there is no evidence of infibulation in the Egyptian mummies.

The practice has been documented in pre-Islamic Arabia, ancient Rome, and tsarist Russia.l As late as 1870, British surgeons performed female circumcision to treat psychological disorders. In the United States, as late as 1954, clitoridectomy was practiced for the treatment of melancholia and had been recommended for nymphomania, hysteria, epilepsy, kleptomania, and even truancy.2

Today, female circumcision is common in 30 African countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Yemen.3

But traveling back from Ex. 6 to Ex. 1, we find another story of bricks and mortar. This time the Hebrews, both men and women, were making bricks as slaves. Pharoah wanted to eliminate the baby boys but he could not,

And the midwives said unto Pharaoh: 'Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwife come unto them.'

The Hebrew women were lively or חָיוֹת and did not have trouble giving birth. I want to know if this means that the Hebrew women were "lively" or like "livestock," either one would work well here. Were the Hebrew women uncircumcised and able to give birth with greater ease than the Egyptian women? And why are we still debating this topic, or rather being silent on this topic still today? Has the world progressed in several thousand years?

These are my questions and not my answers. But we do know for sure that the translators of the Septuagint chose to use dynamic equivalence in translation instead of a foreignizing oddness when they felt they needed to. No sign of a circumcision of the lips here.

Thanks to Carolyn McCulley for posting on this topic recently.

Notes:

(1)LSJ 1. akro-bustia , hê,
A. foreskin, LXX Ge.17.11, al., Ph.Fr.49 H., Act.Ap.11.3.
II. state of having the foreskin, uncircumcision, Ep.Rom.2.25, etc.
2. collect., the uncircumcised, ib.2.26, 3.30, etc. (Prob. from akros and a Semitic root, cf. Bab. buśtu 'pudenda', Heb. bōsheth 'shame': wrongly derived from akros, buô by EM53.48.)

Liddell and Scott 1871 (only for use in schools) says this:

akrobustia - uncircumcision

(No doubt teenage boys should not be reading about pudenda!)

babble from Babel 4

It happens that I live at a point in the city that gets a fair bit of snow. It is still snowing almost three weeks from when it began. I can't drive anywhere and walking is difficult too. Some streets are plowed but our neighbourhood is a mess.

In this exercise I am working for transparency and not a finished translation.

Once again, here are the first few words of Gen. 11:3.

Dixitque alter ad proximum suum Jerome

And he said other to his next one

Dixeruntque alter ad alterum Pagnini

And they said other to other

καὶ εἶπεν ἄνθρωπος τῷ πλησίον

And he/she said person to the one next

וַיֹּאמְרוּ אִישׁ אֶל-רֵעֵהוּ

And they said ish to his/her fellow

Some of the questions are about reciprocity. Is there a plural verb because the ish says something to the next one who then reciprocates. In English as well, they spoke one to another. Clearly they both/all spoke. This is reciprocity. Not that some spoke to others. At least that is not what Pagnini says, but other to other.

And then there is the question of whether ish is a man, or a person. There is no indication here either way. I am not aware of any translations which use a word for a male adult human, such as man, in this case. The literal Greek clearly translates ish as anthropos, a person.

The last interesting feature here is the use of the Hebrew word reicha, usually translated into English as "neighbour." In English this has the connotation of next door neighbour, but in Hebrew it is anyone from your "companion" to a "fellow human." This is much debated. In Greek, it is the "one who is next." The question of who is one's next one, and how one loves one's next one, is a daunting moral question, but of paramount importance.

Here is the mitzvah of V’Ahavta L’Reicha Kamocha (love your neighbor as you love yourself.)

This mitzva is one of the most popularly quoted and least understood mitzvot. How can you command someone to love? What is the definition of your neighbor? How can you love someone like yourself? Ramban asks these questions and bases his interpretation of the mitzva on the explanation of Hillel who restates the pasuk in the following way (as per the story of teaching the whole Torah standing on one foot):


"What is hateful to you do not do unto your neighbor. This is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary" (Shabbat 31a)

Rest in peace.

Calvin 3

I edited this post because John has since explained to me that he intended to use a mixture of dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence to compare the Latin and the French of the first few passages of Calvin's Intutitutes. When the dynamic equivalent passages were compared, and an additional factor of dropped words, and added metaphors were added in, the comparison between the two was lost in the English, at least to my eyes. I simply did not recognize how he was revealing differences in the original structures.

On the other hand, when I am comparing the Latin of Jerome and Pagnini, I take a completely opposite approach and begin with an extremely literal word for word translation in order to reveal the differences and demonstrate the contrasting vocabulary. Words are less likely to be dropped in this case, as I compare each word in turn. This creates an awkard working translation which is what I am aiming at.

It happens that John had an entirely different and equally valid goal in mind. Sometimes two different people approach a task in contrasting ways.