Kinship
“ I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God.” John 1:34 NASB
Son – Listen, I don’t want to stoke the fire here. I’m not interested in kindling another Trinitarian blaze. But recently I read something by Joel Hoffman, a well-respected Hebrew linguist and translator, that revealed another issue in the Trinitarian debate. Hoffman was writing about cultural background in the Song of Songs. He made no application of his statement to the Trinity. But I found it intriguing. Here’s what he wrote:
“So we see that ‘father,’ ‘brother,’ and ‘son’ represent power in Biblical Hebrew. Because kinship terms are not typically used this way in English, ‘son,’ ‘father,’ and ‘brother’ are the wrong translations. In English, these terms are used broadly and are not limited to kinship, so the translations don’t jump off the page as wrong. But they are.”[1]
The point is that the terms “father” and “son” are not simply kinship terms in the Tanakh. They are words that express power relationships, or we might say, relative status. In other words, biblical texts use the word “father” to describe a person as superior in power and status when compared to “son” or “brother.” That’s why Pharaoh can be called “father,” or Moses, or other important powerful people. When we read “father” or “son” in Hebrew, we are reading about relative status, not just kinship.
This has a significant impact on the Trinitarian claim that the “Son” and the “Father” are equally God. A person in the Hebrew culture would know that the use of “son” and “father” means just the opposite. They are not equal in status or power. They might be related (or they might not), but this much is clear: they aren’t equal. When John the Baptist states that Yeshua is the son of God, he is absolutely not saying that Yeshua is equal to God (or ontologically the same, as later Christian doctrine will claim). He is saying that, as son, Yeshua may have a rank above all other men, but he is still less powerful and less important than the Father. Of course, later Greek-based Christian theologians didn’t see this because they didn’t live in a Hebrew culture. They interpreted the texts from their own cultural point of view and derived a completely non-Hebraic interpretation. But Jews would never have been confused about this, so they never believed that Yeshua claimed to be equal to YHVH in any way.
All this seems to make sense until we get to Thomas. “Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”[2] Doesn’t Thomas’ statement prove that Yeshua is God? Well, maybe not. We have no issue with “my Lord.” That is a declaration of submission, just like the knights of the Round Table called King Arthur “Lord” (even if the story is fictional). The issue is the appellation “God.” The Greek term in John is theós. It’s possible that Thomas used this Greek word (after all, his name is Greek), but it seems quite unlikely. He probably blurted out his declaration in Hebrew. That means he used the term ʾēl or ʾĕlōhîm. A comment in the TDNT is crucial here:
Neither ʾēl nor ʾĕlōhîm has originally the same meaning as Yahweh. They both denote God generically rather than personally, are of polytheistic derivation, and need qualification to denote God individually. ʾēl as a name outside Israel is secondary and does not help us to understand biblical usage. When used alone for Yahweh (Is. 40:18 etc.), or as a parallel to Yahweh (Num. 23:8), the point is that Yahweh alone is ʾēl, though not necessarily with a polemic against other gods.[3]
What Thomas does not say is Israel’s God’s personal name. He does not say, “My Lord and my YHVH.” Furthermore, divinity in the first century was not digital, that is, either someone was divine or they weren’t. Divinity was a sliding scale.[4] It was about the relationship of power and superiority in consideration with other men and other gods. So, Caesar Augustus could be elected divine by the Roman Senate because of his status above other men. He was treated as a god, not because he was God but because he was somehow superior to all other men.
If we recall that “father” and “son” also describe status and power relations, we could suggest that Thomas is declaring Yeshua to be superior to all other men on the sliding scale of divinity, not that Yeshua is YHVH. Since theós, ʾēl, and ʾĕlōhîm are all ambiguous terms requiring additional clarification, we don’t know precisely what Thomas meant. And we can’t ask him to explain. What we know is that he declared fealty to Yeshua. That he considered Yeshua superior to other men and worthy of divine status may be all he meant. That would be consistent with first Century Hebrew thinking.
What do we learn from Hoffman’s insight about “father” and “son”? Perhaps nothing more than this: be much more careful about assumptions you bring to the text. These men wrote in a culture that isn’t like yours at all.
Topical Index: father, son, Trinity, Lord, God, theós, ʾēl, ʾĕlōhîm, John 20:28
[1] Joel Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, p. 162.
[2] John 20:28 NASB
[3] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 325). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[4] Compare Paula Fredriksen: “The Greek idea of a gradient of divine power cohered with and facilitated Hellenistic Jewish theology. ‘The elohim of the goyim are idols,’ the Psalmist had sung in Hebrew (Ps 96.5). ‘The theoi of the ethne are daimonia, however, is the way that his words sounded in Greek: ‘the (lower) gods of the nations are demons’ (Ps 95.5 LXX; cf. 1 Cor 10.20). This translation (or reinterpretation) of ‘idols’ as ‘demons’ had theological significance. Idols (as Jewish texts tirelessly taught) were man-made representations of powers: ‘they have eyes that cannot see; they have ears that cannot hear’ (Ps 115.5-6, 135.16-17). An idol is a dumb image. A demon, however, is not an image of a supernatural power, but the power itself, a lower divinity. Any human can destroy an idol; no human can destroy a god. This Jewish translation of Psalm 95 (96), then, at once elevated and demoted the Greek gods, granting that they were more than mere idols while placing them, qua daimonia, in positions subordinate to the Jewish god on Hellenism’s own cosmic map.” (Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, p. 40).
