Abraham the Evangelist
Abram took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the people which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan; so they came to the land of Canaan. Genesis 12:5 NASB
People – Language evolves. Words that used to mean one thing now mean something else. There are plenty of contemporary examples. “Gay,” for instance. If you try to read Chaucer in Old English, you might stumble over many of these “English” words. The same is true for Shakespeare. Unfortunately, we forget this fact when we read the Bible. We know that the words have been translated, but we assume that the translation is contemporary, that is, that the translated words printed in the text mean what we understand them to mean today, not when the text was translated. This is not a new phenomenon, and it’s not unique to English. Consider the way that some rabbis understood the Hebrew word nepešin this verse. As you know, nepeš is typically translated “soul” in English, but, of course, it doesn’t mean the Greek idea of “soul” (psyche). It’s not soul vs. body. Nepeš is more like “person,” as the NASB suggests with the plural “people.” But in the first century, the Hellenized idea of “soul” was very influential. Gordon Tucker’s comment makes this clear:
“The notion that Abraham and Sarah made converts to monotheism in Mesopotamia is derived from a nonidomatic reading of Genesis 12:5, which tells us that Abram and Sarai set out for the land of Canaan with ‘all the wealth that they had amassed, and the persons that they had acquired in Haran.’ Now the last phrase apparently means members born into the family (though not to them directly; Sarai was, after all, barren) and/or male and female servants whom they acquired. However, the Hebrew phrase could also be rendered as ‘the souls that they made in Haran,’ and it is this reading that led some Rabbis to conclude that they ‘made souls,’ that is, converted pagans, in Haran.”[1]
Since nepeš can be translated “soul,” these rabbis understood Abram’s action as evangelistic. In other words, he “saved souls,” an idea that became the watchword of Protestant Evangelical theology. Abraham was the first missionary. The point Tucker makes is that this sort of reading could not have been possible prior to the adaptation of the Greek idea of soul as a religious category. Rabbis who read the text in this way already accepted the Hellenized psyche as the true essence of Man. The “souls” they acquired was just a way of saying that they accumulated converts. In other words, the meaning of nepeš had already evolved by the time of the rabbis, and this carried over into the Christian era, eventually becoming the basis of the Catholic idea of conversion. We might find this evolution puzzling, even tragic, but it points to a deeper problem. The same thing happens with us. In order to read the text of the Bible, we not only have to know how the original language evolved, we have to know how our own language has evolved: how “wont” became “accustomed,” or “bowels” became “compassion,” or “gainsay” became “contradict,” or “haply” became “chance.” To read the text is to translate twice. Keep that in mind. Maybe it doesn’t always say what it means.
Topical Index: translation, evolution, nepeš, person, soul, evangelical, Genesis 12:5
[1] Gordon Tucker in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (Continuum, New York, 2007), p. 193, fn. 6.
