In Translation
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, Jeremiah 1:4 NASB
The word of the Lord – By now, I hope, we know that Hebrew is messy. Many of the sentences in the biblical text have multiple levels of meaning, are subject to nuances that cannot be captured in English (or any other language) and act more like connecting fibers than complete thoughts. In addition, Hebrew’s grammatical structure and vowel absence allows considerable latitude in the actual text itself. Things happen in Hebrew that simply cannot happen in Indo-European translations. We can usefully compare these characteristics of Semitic languages to Far Eastern languages. Donald Keene says “Japanese sentences ‘trail off into thin smoke,’ a vapor of hanging participles. In other words, Japanese sentences avoid closure.”[1] Hebrew is much the same.
But we should not be surprised or dismayed. Whenever language skirts the edge of human consciousness, strange things happen. Whenever a new paradigm breaks on the horizon, the old rules, even the rules about syntax and grammar, bend—and sometimes break. Notice these comments about Shakespearean language as the Western world was emerging from the Middle Ages:
“[Shakespearean language] is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with abruptness. . . Shakespeare uses language to darken. He mesmerizes by disorienting us. . . Shakespeare’s language hovers at the very threshold of dreaming. It is shaped by the irrational. Shakespearean characters are controlled by rather than controlling their speech.”[2]
Doesn’t this remind you of “and the word of the Lord came to”? Are we really expected to correctly and definitively understand the vocabulary, syntax and grammar of God? Don’t Hebrew sentences leave us with a tangle of dangling participles?
If this is true of Shakespeare at that most crucial time in the history of Western art and literature, why do we think we must have the final, correct answer from the biblical text? If Shakespeare is untranslatable, how can we think Moses is? What is wrong with our paradigm that forces us to believe “Truth” can only be seen one way?
Is the Bible history? What is “history” for ancient Hebrews? Is it anything like our event sequence fixation? Is the Bible theology? When did theology become a religious concern—and why? Is the Bible a guidebook for modern decision-making? Or is it poetry? “Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpation of the body.”[3] “The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest internal dialogue in world literature.”[4]
How long was the enterprise to create a language of the divine; a language created by prophets? Do you imagine that your Western, abstract, container-based attempts to wrestle control from nature by forcing it into logical forms is even close to the trail of thin smoke left by the prophets’ declarations?
Can you think outside the box?
Topical Index: language, Shakespeare, poet, prophet, truth, Jeremiah 1:4
[1]Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, pp. 174-175.
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The first weekend in November I will be speaking at the NCS retreat in upstate New York. There are two different sessions. The first is for men only. We will be studying the Hebrew idea of community and its importance for personal restoration.
The second is for couples. It starts on Saturday night. That conference will concentrate on the work in Guardian Angel and continue with a practical workshop for those who attend.
I have been informed that there are still open spots for these sessions, so if you want to attend, CLICK here for the information.
I wonder if Adam and Eve heard the Word of the Lord without multiple meanings before they disobeyed that Word of the Lord. Is it our hearts that become messy when the Word of the Lord comes to us and we hide out of shame because we no longer simply trust and obey that Word? Maybe it is His mercy and grace that His Word is given to us in a way that brings as much light as our darkened, fearful minds can handle. The more we believe that His Word is perfect and all His ways are just, the more we will be able to know and trust the Spirit of His Word. We may interpret the Word of the Lord in a way that is messy but the true matter of that Word is clean, bright, pure and altogether lovely.
corrected “hears” to “hearts” Is that what you intended?
But I would like you to consider this: perhaps the Word of the Lord is MESSY because it is clothed in human form and INTENTIONALLY so. Maybe the idea that if we just got rid of all of the things that make us human we would see it clean and bright and pure is really the Greek notion of absolute truth in disguise. HAs there ever been a time in human history when God’s word was without any hint of something else, something we can’t quite understand?
Yes, I do believe it is intentionally clothed for human interaction. I would agree there was never a time when humans could completely understand God. But was the human interaction with Him before sin the same as interaction with Him in the presence of sin? Did the Voice sound lovely before sin? I was thinking along the lines of Yeshua being the Word made flesh. Most people couldn’t understand Him. He said it was to our advantage that He went away because the Helper would guide us into all Truth. If to be human is to be in union with our Creator, wouldn’t the water of the Word and the light of the Word make us more human because sin is what makes us inhumane? I do find being human to be harsh and ugly at times. I picture life being much more beautiful if I was one with the Father as Yeshua is One with the Father. Thank you for challenging me.
Always appreciate your comments. Keep providing them.
Skip
If Hebrew is messy, God chose to use it nonetheless
because of its gaps and crevices and places we can’t
quite determine.
This language works because it is like us: incomplete.
Our Creator made us like Him in that we are creators
ourselves. He implanted the deepest truths within us,
and He invites us to search them out. His Word is helpful,
deeply inspiring, although not an end in itself.
Yeshua gave us a clear clue. “The kingdom does not come
with your careful observation . . . because the kingdom of God
is within you.” Lk 17:20-21
And, yet, so many people wonder “where” He is.
Nice insight
In third grade I learned how to tell whether or not something was alive: I learned that life organized itself by cells; could reproduce itself; change and grow; respirate; receive nourishment from its environment and metabolize it; had homeostatsis (shalom); could respond and adapt. Isn’t this a parallel for Heb. 4:12’s description of the “word of God”? “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
Pilate asked a question framed in a Greek world: “what is truth”? There is no answer to that question. Wrong question. Inquisitions and intifadahs against heretics and lists of qualifications of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ are all based upon Pilate’s question. They all assume truth to be a static ideal; a thing to be ‘owned’ or adapted TO.
But the Bible treats truth as a living entity: and One declared Himself to be Truth in the flesh; an embodiment of reality in its entirety, for truth IS reality. YHVH, in Jer. 23:24 declares that He “fill(s) heaven and earth”. Our God is the life: the missing “dark energy”; the love that holds everything together. He is the verb that creates the substrate for all nouns. Truth is not only alive: truth IS that life; that love; that medium of exchange without which not only would life not be possible; no interconnection could exist, for God IS the connection of all in all.
Is not His Word Himself? He claims that that Word is adaptable: living; responsive to differing people and circumstances. Everybody is going to read it differently, and it adapts itself to each one of us differently, too, just like life does, for life is uniquely designed to produce and to protect individuality by means of a communal, or connected, substrate.
There is a Book written just for me, but I don’t define what it says; instead, it defines itself according to where I am at: Truth finds me; I don’t find Him. May I humbly set my heart to hear His voice in His Word today!