Going Deeper (1)

Then the seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark of the Lord went on continually, and blew the trumpets; and the armed men went ahead of them, and the rear guard came after the ark of the Lord, while they continued to blow the trumpets.  Joshua 6:13  NASB

They continued to – According to the grammar of the TWOT, the word translated “they continued to” is a participle (Qal, absolute) of the verb הָלַך (hālak)’ to “go, walk.”  Makes sense, right?  The priests walked between the armed men and the rear guard, blowing the rams’ horns.  There’s nothing remarkable in this translation of the Hebrew.  But the problem isn’t the meaning of the verse.  The problem is the text itself.  Here’s the Hebrew verse:

וְשִׁבְעָה הַכֹּהֲנִים נֹשְׂאִים שִׁבְעָה שׁוֹפְרוֹת הַיֹּבְלִים לִפְנֵי אֲרוֹן יְהוָה הֹלְכִים הָלוֹךְ וְתָקְעוּ בַּשּׁוֹפָרוֹת וְהֶחָלוּץ הֹלֵךְ לִפְנֵיהֶם וְהַמְאַסֵּף הֹלֵךְ אַחֲרֵי אֲרוֹן יְהוָה [הולך[] הָלוֹךְ וְתָקוֹעַ בַּשּׁוֹפָרוֹת

Notice what’s happened in the red highlighted text.  This is the verb as it is read: הָלוֹךְ.  But what’s written in the text is this: הולך.  Remember that you can’t see the word that is read from the text.  You just have to know that’s how it’s read.  What you see is what’s written.  If it were only a matter of qere ketiv, then we’d simply say, “One word is written, but another is read.”  We’ve seen this before.  Traditional reading modifies the written text.  But in this case, it isn’t simply a modified reading.  The text itself has grammatical contradictions.  What I mean is that most of the sentence is in the present tense with one verb in the future tense, but it’s translated as if it were past tense.  The qere ketiv recognizes this in one case and corrects the reading so that the story makes sense.  Well, kind of. . .

The verse reads (literally) “and seven the priests carrying seven shofarot of rams’ horns before the ark of God going to go (the text is in green) will blow (a vav conversive) shofarot and the armed men go in front of them and go the rear guard after the ark of God הולך will blow with shofarot.”  The red text is read as a participle, i.e., “they going,” but the spelling is present tense, “they are going.”  As you can see, the other verbs in the sentence are sometimes present, sometimes future.  Something odd is happening here.

Notice that the green text is present tense, masculine plural (הֹלְכִים) followed by a present tense masculine singular (הָלוֹךְ), the same form read into the text later in the verse, but not the same as the other occurrence the action of the rear guard (הֹלֵךְ).  More on this in a moment.  It’s a translation nightmare.  Simply reading הולך as if it were a participle doesn’t correct all the other anomalies.  In fact, it appears as if the verb form found in the green text is simply repeated as the audible part of the red text despite the fact that the red text is written differently.  In other words, the tradition “borrows” a previous spelling to replace the written spelling.  How could all this happen, in one verse, no less?  As my rabbi said, the translator is “more interested in preserving the flow of the narrative than the accuracy of the tenses.”

But the real problem is this: without the tradition (and the vowel pointing), how could you ever know that you should substitute the prior verb form at this place in the text.  After all, the word in the text that is not read is the present tense of the verb, so why not read it that way?  Furthermore, the doubled verb in green treats the second occurrence of the verb in a typical Hebrew construction called the infinitive absolute (more on this later) as a means of emphasizing the action, but that can’t be the case in the red text because the action verb (“to blow”) comes after הָלוֹךְ, not before, as is necessary if הָלוֹךְ is treated as an infinitive absolute.  It is not possible to know which tense is used in Hebrew without the vowel pointing.  This means that tradition determines how the text should be read.  If that’s the case, then why do we need the qere ketiv in the first place?  Why not just read הולך as it is written?

Maybe there’s another reason the verb tenses are such a mess.  If you recall, the Gospel accounts often use a present tense Greek verb when the story is actually past tense.  The reason for this is that without punctuation (like quotation marks) the authors employ odd tenses in order to create a scene where the reader is drawn into the account.  It’s as if they want the reader to actually be present in the event, so they use the present tense instead of the past.  As the introduction to the NASB notes:

“ . . . in some contexts the present tense seems more unexpected and unjustified to English than a past tense would have been.  But Greek authors frequently used the present tense for the sake of heightened vividness, thereby transporting their readers in imagination to the actual scene at the time of occurrence.”[1]

This is called the “historical present.”

Perhaps the same convention is being used in this Hebrew text.  The narrator wants the reader to actually experience the event as if it were happening right now, so he switches from past to present tense. Of course, we translate the verse as if it were a record of a past event, and properly so, but when we correct the verb tenses, we remove the expediency of the text.  If that makes sense, then we’ve resolved this bad grammar.  As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that the authors of the Gospels thought in Hebrew but wrote in Greek, so if this mechanism appears in Greek it might be because it was already present in Hebrew.

However, we run into another problem.  The grammar isn’t correct, at least not as it is written, and if we believe that God is the ultimate author of the text, then we might conclude that God didn’t get the grammar right.  Our explanation of qere ketiv doesn’t remove the grammatical problems.  This becomes an issue for those who hold a doctrine of inerrancy.  Qere ketiv only highlights the problem.

You could claim that the text as it is read is correct and if we had the original scroll we would find the audible word rather than the currently written one.  Of course, this is an argument from silence since we don’t have any of the originals.  This argument also assumes that no one noticed the grammatical confusion and continued to copy the mess over and over.  Or we could suggest that the text always contained this confusion (no matter who wrote the original) and the scribal insistence on accurately copying the text simply continued to include it.  Either way, we have a problem with any doctrine that claims that text is inerrant, unless we mean “inerrant” is nothing more than the words are exactly correct despite the fact that they don’t make sense.  In this case, qere ketiv undermines inerrancy.

Does that make you feel as if you can’t trust Scripture?  After all, if this is really a mistake, who’s to say there aren’t many more?  The certainty of the text wobbles, and if your faith depends on certainty, well, you’re in trouble.  But remember that this grammatical error in the text has been known for thousands of years, and people continued to find nourishment in Scripture.  The only ones who encounter devastating consequences for their beliefs here are those whose faith rests on a commitment to certainty in transmission and meaning.  If it has to be unquestionably true, then a grammatical error is a dart in the heart.  For the rest of us, Scripture is a human effort to speak about a divine relationship—and humans make mistakes.  The real question might be: Are we willing to give up the need to be right?  Do you have to have the “truth” in order to believe?

What do you take away from this long examination?  First, translations dumb down the text no matter how careful they are.  There is just no way to get all these interesting subtleties into a translation.  So, stop thinking you know what the Bible says because you read it in translation.  You might have an idea about what the text says, but you don’t have a clue about everything else it hints at.  Second, the actual original language text pushes you to think deeper.  Nothing is simple when it comes to God communicating to men.  Remember that—and ask for more.  It’s there.  You just have to find it.  So go dig.

Topical Index: qere ketiv, hālak, continued, Joshua 6:13

[1] “Notes on the Translation of Greek Tenses,” in New American Standard Bible (Moody Press, 1963).