Ordering Our Thoughts
O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; for His lovingkindness is everlasting. 1 Chronicles 16:34 NASB
Good – Let’s read this verse in its literal Hebrew order. Hodu laYHVH ki tov ki leolam hasdo. Literally, “Thanks to YHVH for good for forever hesed his” (the pronoun is attached to the word). You can immediately see that the English translation significantly modifies the literal Hebrew in order to produce correct English syntax. You can also see that the pronouns and verbs are added in English (although the subject “he” is implied in the Hebrew). Finally, the last thought concerning hesed (which I have left untranslated because there is no English equivalent) does not express the idea that God’s hesed is everlasting but rather that everlasting hesed is His. The difference is subtle but important. The first construction (“His hesed is everlasting”) suggests that hesed is an attribute ascribed to God, an attribute that will last forever. The second (“everlasting hesed His”) focuses on the relational character of hesed and its permanence rather than on God’s attributes. A friend of mine suggests the translation, “for everlasting is His hesed.”
But there is something else happening here that you can’t see in any translation. The two nouns associated with God are “good” and “hesed.” The first (tov – good) is what grammarians call an “absolute” state noun. This means that this noun follows another noun and forms a single idea. For example, “house of David” is a single idea where “David” is in the absolute state. If tov is in the absolute state, then that implies it follows a prior noun and forms a single idea. What is the prior noun? There is only one possibility. YHVH. In this sentence, “good” is not an attribute of God. “Good” and YHVH are one single thought. There is no “good” separated from YHVH and then associated with Him. “Good” and YHVH are the same thing.
If this is clear to you, then something else appears quite confusing. The next noun, hesed, should, according to this analysis, also be in the absolute state. In fact, even the rules of Hebrew grammar suggest that the final noun in a phrase like this one must always be in the absolute state. But hasdo (hesed) in this verse is in the construct state. That means it acts as a relational word in a sequence that looks for the absolute noun at the end. But the absolute noun isn’t at the end. Something strange is happening here. The solution for this odd arrangement is to imagine that tov is in fact the end of the idea and that hasdo is incorporated into the single idea of God-good. In other words, one characteristic of the goodness of God is His everlasting hesed. Neither hesed nor tov can be separated from who God is, and, in fact, thinking of good in relation to God means thinking of hesed.
Ah, this tiny bit of grammar makes us realize how different are our ideas of the way the world works. We think of things in terms of their essence to which we add attributes (this is a Greek way of thinking). So, we think of a tree (as an independent thing) to which we add color, age, bark condition, leaf quality, location, etc. In other words, we automatically imagine that this tree would still be a tree even if it had different branches, different leaves, different color, different location. The attributes are accidental, not essential elements of what it means to be a tree.
But Hebrew doesn’t operate this way. This tree is what it is because of all that it is now. It would be a different tree if any of these things changed. There might be continuity between the tree as it is now and the tree as it would be later, but the two are not the same. If we apply this different way of viewing the world to God, we realize that God is who He is because of who He is now, and He is now who He will always be. He is not described by accidental conditions but rather by the single expression of who He is. Therefore, His “goodness” and His hesed are not extra things added to God. They are what God is.
You know, even trying to explain this in English is hard. I imagine you are having the same difficulty trying to comprehend. And once more we learn just how much our language paradigm shapes the world we perceive.
Have a nice day thinking about all this. And please forgive me for being so “technical” today.
Topical Index: 1 Chronicles 16:34, tov, good, hesed, absolute state, construct state
Thank you, Skip. This makes it easier, not harder, for me to think!
I think that usually when we think of a human being (and this would include ourselves) we are trained to think of ‘ourselves’ as a constant, and our characteristics as evolving, or, changeable; i.e. I was ‘bad’ yesterday, but I am ‘better’ today (hopefully!). Those are time statements for me. When YHVH says He “changes not” I might therefore be tempted to think automatically that that must also be a TIME statement, and then conclude that, because I perceive no evolution, there must be no time involved. Conclusion: YHVH must be out of time (timeless). It is just almost inconceivable to think that He can change His mind, His reactions, His reasons; in fact, He is free to do whatever He pleases, but His, um, CHARACTERISTICS are the constants!
In my bound, or, sinful, state, I do not like change; in fact, insofar as I am sinning, I CANNOT change, unless I turn around, or, repent, and that’s the dirty little secret about me and change, folks! Its the fox and the grapes that hang just out of reach: because I cannot ‘have’ the change I WANT just by wanting it, I therefore hate it because I cannot serve it to myself. The notion of change, to the yetzer ha-ra, to the flesh, is a bad case of sour grapes, I think (I love Aesop so much). The flesh cannot change itself (without help, anyway), so it concludes, in its insane thinking, that it must be god (because Augustine and Aquinas and all those guys conveniently assigned ‘unchangeable’ as one of G-d’s characteristics I get to conclude that, if something cannot change, it must be god!): therefore, ipso facto, it doesn’t ‘have’ to! Problem solved! OK! God-complexes all around – they are really just on a sliding scale for any of us! So, off to the looney bin with ALL of us! (Sorry, I know I have to quit when I start having way too much fun. Yep. Need to quit right now! Just started catching myself spouting things that don’t make sense again: must be trying to talk about sin again! That stuff just don’t make no sense at all, folks – I cannot even make sentences about it!) Right here, I think, lies our biggest problem. As G-d does not sin, He NEVER has the limits, or, lack of choices, that sin creates; but, because we have such a limited experience of such a state of freedom, we simply don’t know how to think like that.
I used to have trouble with this (not that I don’t have it still!), until I began to suspect at some point that G-d was something that, while I may be made like Him, I may not be made like Him in the ways I think I am. Further, the extrapolation does not follow the other way: He is certainly NOT like me! I am trained to think of myself as a noun, but that does not mean that I can safely assume that I can think about Him as ‘one’. See? Already having trouble! Nope. These days I am doing a whole lot better thinking about Him as more of a verbal construct (thanks, Skip!).
As tov and hesed are, essentially, function words (therefore making them verbs – actions) it automatically clears up that characteristics problem for me. When I started thinking of G-d as pure function; further, as function so pure, so complete, that a Person can be expressed through that function, so many other things cleared up, I am having to go back and read that entire Book again through different eyes (which is always fun!). Not only that, these days, I have started toying with the idea that there may be a possibility that, in some ways, my own ‘noun-ness’ may be more of a flesh, or, yetzer ha-ra possibility, and was never intended to be a starting point for my essence at all. When we are told to worship (exist correctly to His face) in spirit and in truth, there is no mention made of the flesh. Hmm. I have begun to wonder, just a little bit, ya’ll, if my true self may be better expressed in terms of function, too. Perhaps when we are told to become like Him, we are being told to expect to shift over out of a noun reality and more into a verb one, too. Perhaps when I hit total function probability – when I get to full function, in other words, I may find ‘myself’ as less of a noun with certain characteristics, and more like those constants that have a derivative of ‘nounness’. Whoops! Just ran out of Flatland vocabulary. Gotta quit!
Laurita, thank you for explaining this so precisely. You just peeled back a layer of ignorance and helped me to (kind of) grasp the concept that He is action, and that we become like Him as we act like him. Even though my words are common christian ones, yours, and the picture you paint with them, are much more revealing to me. I need to re-read this several times to really implant it for use.
Thank you, Gayle. You know, I am pretty much just talking to myself, well, muttering(!) LOL and you are overhearing me! I almost died at one point because of the ineffectiveness of ‘christianese’; I was so weirded out that nothing at all made sense. I think I now suffer from some sort of super sensitivity to the stuff, which still makes it hard for me to grasp a lot of it when it gets presented in that language. You know, English is perfectly good language, and the translations of the Bible into it were good, but the paradigm thing can really mess things up, Skip has that one right! The problem is not that English is not suitable to transmit the ideas of heaven as much as it has been hijacked, I think, by a gang of pagans who came in and messed things up mightily.
You know, the British Isles were evangelized early on, and the seed fell on good soil. For hundreds of years the Body prospered there and the Sabbath was celebrated right up until the Romans decided to invade again. This time, in the guise of ‘christians’. They were up to those old Balaam tricks, and it worked, kinda. This time they were met with love, though. So they called for a meeting of all the bishops, and they all came, hundreds of them, with love in their hearts and smiles on their faces, but with refusal to concede to the Sunday, and Rome did what she always did with such as that, and promptly slaughtered them all. I think they probably slaughtered the language at the same time. You know, in old Anglo-Saxon the perfectly good word “belief” was a combination of two words. The first one was “be” which meant “by”, and the other was “lief” which meant “life”. What one lived by was actually his be-lief, or, his by-life. It is the kind of life that you live by. Now, something happened on the way to that word, and I think it was just downright unholy. This is the reason I have turned from any words that Rome may have gotten hold of to use for its purposes, and decided to just start over. I figured if it is the real truth, it can use any words it wants to to get itself across. Kinda like a test to see if it is true. I know we are very crippled in our language now, and nothing really has escaped the corruption, I suspect. But, then, I did get burned pretty badly! Bless you. And us all!
Even though early in my adult life I came to the revelation that “the church” is “wrong” and that the root of the problem is the deviation from Hebrew insight, I am still cocooned in the spider web of western philosophy.
Even when discussing the merits of Hebrew roots with my son, he sporadically point out to me (correctly) that my arguments demonstrates Greek thinking.
Your posting today, anew made me realize the layers upon layers that needs to be negotiated before we can come to an unpolluted understanding of the real YHWH
Is this the same concept that John is conveying in “1 Jn 4:8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
Thanks, Skip,
There is so much in today’s post that will provide fuel for meditation. And also action.
Technical is good every now and then. Those subtle differences are so enlightening. Too bad we have to find them on our own and can’t just see them in English. I wonder if ki tov and ki leolam hasdo parallel and complement each other. Couldn’t we translate it “For [God is a god] of goodness” in order to capture the absolute state even though we often translate verbless clauses like this in a predicative manner? Perhaps God’s goodness relates to/parallels His everlasting chesed. Is not His goodness manifested by His chesed? Just a thought.
“God is who He is because of who He is now,” – isn’t this true about man also? I am reminded of Ezekiel 33:12 – 15. Many times we tend to think ourselves of being fine, saved and forgiven while our deeds tell a different story.
“We behave like wild animals or goats while the Shepherd is looking for sheep” – Skip, Ps 23 in Paleo-Hebrew
“This tree is what it is because of all that it is now.”
Does this get in to the temporal issue? The past and future are myths leaving us only with what is now, in this moment, then in the next and the next after that, and so on? Moment after moment of choosing life or death. What we choose each time leaves us with what we are now. Right now, in this moment. What will we be in the next moment? Well, let’s see how we choose.
Now perhaps we can understand why David could say (and Paul) that he was blameless and righteous before the Lord. Makes me realize that I need to write another TW about this.
And it casts dispersions on the “once saved always saved” dogma. I can see why it might not be as simple as the quaint comfort slogan.
More is welcomed. I strain each day to digest all this good, good stuff.
Michael don’t forget you bring the dessert as often as not! I like digesting your stuff a lot, too.
🙂
As I read the last part of this post and the example of a tree, I couldn’t help think about the olive tree imagery of Romans 11. Skip said “This tree is what it is because of all that it is now. It would be a different tree if any of these things changed. There might be continuity between the tree as it is now and the tree as it would be later, but the two are not the same.” Would this apply to the natural olive tree that now has a wild olive branch grated into it? Is it now a different tree? And if so, how? I don’t have answers. These are just thoughts that went through my mind. If Skip (or anyone else in the community) has answers, I would appreciate hearing them.
Shalom Mel,
It makes no difference, nor has any effect on the Olive tree we are grafted onto, we will be bearing same fruit though once wild, and so long as we totally rely on the root system of the Tree we are grafted onto to draw our provision from. Hope that helps.
Is that why in Psalm 136 He IS “make great wonders”, “lay the earth on the water”, “divide the Red sea in two”, “strike great kings” and so on, as in “He is good”? (my own poor translation from Hebrew..trying to convey my point/question). He IS what he Does, right? If I got it right then Psalm 136 is awesome, it’s not “thank God because he did all this things” , but rather “Thank this God: this is who he is”.
We have a joke (not sure if it’s in English as well):
Why is an elephant big and grey? Because if it was small, white and round it would have been a pill 🙂
🙂
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