Vav – Some Hebrew Magic (2)

May Your favor also come to me, Lord, Your salvation according to Your ^[o]word; Psalm 119:41  NASB

Also come to me – וִֽיבֹאֻ֣נִי  Oh my, what a lot is packed into such a small word!  We’ve explored the oddity of “come” and “go.”  We’ve noticed the shift in tense from future to past.  We’ve looked at the jussive “wish.”  We noted that “also” gets thrown in for English readers.  We’ve explained the plural form of the verb on the basis of the plural noun and discovered that God’s ḥesed isn’t a single, saving occurrence.  Then we changed the whole picture by pointing out that the psychological distressing portrait of the author is not textually supported.  Rather, it’s a Western paradigm.  In other words, this verse, and the rest of the vav section, has been translated according to our Western idea of internal angst.  It’s not found in the historical foundation expressed by the author’s past tense verbs.  Why would the translators make such a significant change?  Or better yet, how could they miss this point?

To answer these two questions we have to look at the place of tradition in the life of ancient Israel.  Faith isn’t a set of propositional beliefs reiterated in some creed.  That’s a Western idea.  Faith in ancient Israel is a way of life, a way of doing things passed down from one generation to the next along with the stories and instructions derived from those stories.  Faith isn’t something added to who I am; it is who I am.  It’s my tribal, national, spiritual, and material identity.  The absolute bottom line of who I am is a chosen one.  Whatever status or burden accompanies that fact is engraved into me.  So, when I recall God’s ḥesed, I am in fact recalling the foundation of my identity.  I am no more or less than the summation of all God’s interaction with my heritage, and it is not possible for me to not be the product of this heritage. This is, in fact, incorporated into the vav-conversive construction of the verb bo’ simply because read literally in its grammatical form it incorporates both past and future in the present moment of using it.  It is like saying, “Your ḥâsādĕcame to me, comes to me, and will come to me.”  But this is an ancient Hebraic view, not the view of modern translators.

The modern conception of faith treats our spiritual appetite as an attribute of personality.  In other words, faith is one of many possible ways of describing me.  I am who I am regardless of my spiritual relationship or lack thereof.  In Western thought, the “I” exists independently of the flexible and arbitrary attributes attached to the self.  So, I am still me, myself, independently of my ethnicity, racial background, current citizenship, or present religious convictions.  All of those are now simply accidents.  In fact, even the most fundamental distinctions that have governed our conception of human beings for millennia are now considered merely individual choices (e.g., gender identity).  History, tradition, heritage, and lineage are no longer essential elements of my personal identity.  Modern man or woman is the product of his or her personal choices, end of story.  Identity is self-created, not inherited.

Because Western-oriented translations are subject to this shift in psychological identity politics, God’s historical choice of a people is not a significant factor in self-determination.  In addition, the Christian Church’s usurpation of the role of Israel requires the abolition of God’s eternal choice of a certain ethnic group.  The door must be kicked open to change what God did.  The vav-consecutive verb stands in the way because it suggests that God’s past choice continues into the future, but Christian theology requires that God’s past choice of Israel be changed to replace Israel with the empire of Christ.  The influence is very deep and very subtle, but it results in reading these vav passages as if they are present, personal, internal struggles, not projections of past divine choices.

Just how much anti-Semitism is buried in the bowels of translation is often nearly invisible.

Topical Index: ḥâsādĕ, boʾ, ve’ybō’ŭnî,  may come to me, Psalm 119:41