On the Importance of the Talmud

The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham: Matthew 1:1 NASB

Record – “It is obvious that the Torah contains much idiomatic usage, and translating it literally (as do most translations) distorts the meaning of the text.  To a large degree, the ‘Oral Torah’ consists of a tradition as to how to render the idiomatic language of the Torah . . . To translate it literally would not only go against tradition, but would be incorrect. The Talmud itself warns of this.  In one of the most important teachings regarding translation, the Talmud says, ‘One who translates a verse literally is misrepresenting the text.  But one who adds anything of his own is a blasphemer.’”[1]

“The narratives of the Torah were meant to read like a story, and this too must be preserved in translation.  In telling a story, there is no room for heavy language or complex sentence structure.  Sometimes one Hebrew sentence will be broken up into a number of sentences in English; at other times, two Hebrew sentences may be joined into one in the translation.  The final goal is always clarity and readability.”[2]

Let’s apply these insights to the opening line of Matthew’s gospel.  Matthew announces that he is writing a bíblos.  Unfortunately, translating this as “record” shifts the meaning toward our modern conception of a genealogical record, that is, a list or chart of family connections.  But bíblos is an Egyptian loanword.  “As a loanword from the Egyptian, this first denotes the papyrus. Then, as papyrus replaces wooden tablets for writing, it comes to mean the inscribed paper, the scroll, other writing materials, and finally the writing as book, letter, record, or statute.”^[3]  So, in this context we should read bíblos as story, not record, because Matthew is thinking about the recollection of these events in a way that can easily be communicated to his audience.  And that audience was quite familiar with storytelling.  This might help us explain why Matthew deliberately distorts the actual genealogical record to fit his storytelling agenda of Gematria.  He just moves things around and leaves out what doesn’t fit the story.  This was obvious to the original audience but we find it outrageous because we are looking for a factually correct chart.  Matthew isn’t.  Matthew is providing storytelling justification for his claim that Yeshua is the long-awaited Messiah, and he needs to communicate this in a way that people can remember without copying it all down.  Matthew’s culture is still an oral culture, and even though it was a literate one, storytelling was the common memory aid.

Paul wrote letters.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John wrote stories.  We should keep this in mind when we are pushed toward Greco-Roman exegesis of the text.  As Kaplan points out, literal translation (the hallmark of Christian fundamentalism) is an aberration of the text.  Hebrew is messy, and Hebraic authors utilize this messiness on purpose.

Topical Index: record, bíblos, story, translation, Matthew 1:1

[1] Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah: The Five Books of Moses and the Haftarot, p. v.

[2] Ibid., p. vi.

^[3] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 106). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.