Removing Trauma

“ If the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had not been for me, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed. God has seen my affliction and the toil of my hands, so He rendered judgment last night.”  Genesis 31:42 NASB

Fear – We are a fragile audience.  At least that’s what the translators must believe because, in this case (and others I suspect), the tone of the verse is modified so that it won’t be so dramatic.  The trauma is removed.  How is this done?  Simple.  Change the translation from “dread” to “fear.”  In this verse, the Hebrew word is paḥad. It is most definitely not yārā, the common word for religious awe (fear). The choice of paḥad means that the author wanted his readers to see something other than “fear.”  He wanted the full, emotional impact of this word, a word about “the immediacy of the object of fear or upon the resulting trembling,”^[1]to push the reader to recognize something about Isaac that was not expected.  But modern translations (and even some classic translations) don’t want Bible readers to think of Isaac as afraid of God.  After all, “dread” (the proper translation) implies great apprehension and significant trauma.  Dread implies being terrified, anxious, trembling. Dread implies recoil and quaking. Dread implies flight as a means of protection.  But since Isaac is one of the patriarchs, these descriptions cannot fit him (at least that is what we have been told), so we need to mollify the description by changing it from “dread” to “reverent fear.”  Even the Jewish commentators often move in this direction.  No one wants a God that scares you to death!

But that’s precisely the kind of God Isaac had.  In my book, Crossing, I try to show that Isaac spends nearly all his adult life running away from God.  Why?  Because Isaac believes that God cannot be trusted.  After all, it is the God of his own father Abraham who instructed his father to kill him.  That traumatic event completely reversed everything Abraham told him about YHVH, so much so that Isaac never again returns to his father’s presence.  Abraham’s God scares Isaac to death.  Even his son, Jacob, knows this to be true. After all, this statement in Genesis is Jacob’s assessment of his father’s, Isaac’s, relationship with YHVH.

Why is it important for us to correct this watered-down translation? Because if we don’t realize that Isaac operates under traumatic stress, we won’t see what God does to heal him. And we won’t understand the story of Jacob, who is the product of a traumatized father.  We will entirely miss the purpose of the story, a story that is not about some eschatological promise fulfilled by the Church but rather the story of a completely dysfunctional family brought about by unresolved trauma.  In other words, if we read the translators’ softened version, we won’t hear our own cries in the lives of these terribly injured people.  We will read theology instead of emotions.  And God will remain unable to heal our trauma because we don’t have a story about healing someone else’s trauma.

Topical Index:  paḥad, dread, trauma, yārā, fear, Genesis 31:42

^[1]Bowling, A. (1999). 1756 פָּחַד. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 720). Chicago: Moody Press.