What You Don’t Read

Within it there were figures resembling four living beings. And this was their appearance: they had human form. Ezekiel 1:5 NASB

Figures – Ezekiel’s vision is fodder for all kinds of eschatological grist mills. The history of interpretation of these verses demonstrates how paradigm pre-suppositions affect religious belief. But this penchant to read the text within the reader’s context is only part of the problem with this passage and with all of the Hebrew Bible. Aviya Kushner’s observation is crucial:

Hebrew is probably more flexible than English, especially biblical Hebrew: a sentence can begin with a subject, a verb, or an object. In the Hebrew Bible, a verb often appears before a noun; the common biblical phrase, “and God said” is actually, “and said God” in Hebrew, a construction not used in modern Hebrew. For translators, this one seemingly small difference in sentence structure can create big problems, because once the order of a sentence is altered, the meaning can be up for grabs too.

Besides this difference in sentence structure, there is the additional complicated issue of word structure. Hebrew is a Semitic language, and therefore its words come from trilateral—that is, three-letter—roots. These roots can have multiple manifestations—as verbs, nouns, and occasionally even adjectives. These related words share a kernel of meaning, but it takes a somewhat knowledgeable reader to understand how a word functions grammatically in a particular passage. And that’s not all. This root issue is exacerbated by the fact that the ancient text was not vocalized, or written with vowels, until the eighth century. Furthermore, since, according to many scholars, the Bible was originally an oral composition, which was then copied and recopied by hand, human error—the tiniest slip of the hand—is certainly a possibility.[1]

What does this mean for contemporary readers of translated biblical texts? It means that when we rely on the translation for our understanding, we are committing what we believe into the hands of someone who decides what the word order is, what form of the roots will be used, and what vowels will be placed with the words. These considerations occur before you read a single sentence in the Bible. And you didn’t make the decisions. Therefore, what you read is not what God said. It is what the translator determined God said according to his decisions. Just word order alone sometimes alters the impact of the text. We find this often is the case in the Psalms. Just adding the copula (“is”) where it does not exist in Hebrew can change the meaning for us. And reading the text as if it contains the logic of the Western world when it expresses the logic of Semitic thought has significant influence on what we think God’s word really says.

In this passage from Ezekiel, the words “there were” is an addition. The word translated “figures” is really demut, a word that means “comparison, likeness” or “appearance.” But these are only the tip of the iceberg. Consider how rich even this simple word is in the context of Ezekiel’s vision:

Although this substantive is used only twenty-six times in the ot, it is a very important word. It appears in the theophanic section of Ezekiel (1:5, 10, 13, 16, 22, 26, 28; 10:1, 10:21, 10:22, and quite often in juxtaposition with kĕmarê “like the appearance of.” Ezekiel is very careful never to say that he saw God, ʾĕlōhîm (as did Isaiah in his prophecy, Isa 6: I, the object or content of Isaiah’s vision is ʾădōnāy), but only that he saw the likeness of God or the likeness of the entourage that surrounds God. In such practice he is comparable to Daniel (Dan 10:16) and John in the Apocalypse (Rev 1:13), and perhaps Heb 7:3 (the introduction of Melchizedek). All of the above references in Ezekiel refer to visual similarities, but Isa 13:4 shows that dĕmût can be used also for audible similarities, and structural similarities in the sense of being a pattern or model (II Kgs 16:10, parallel with tabnît).^[2]

A Hebrew reader of the Bible would recognize these connections, and furthermore (and perhaps even more significantly) this reader would also realize that there is a special “relationship between ṣelem (“image,” q.v.) and dĕmût (“likeness”) in Gen. Nowhere else in the ot do these two nouns appear in parallelism or in connection with each other.”^[3]

The bottom line? The Bible in Hebrew is far more complicated than we would like to imagine. Translation is far more difficult than we think. That means there is much more room for different interpretations of the text and much more flexibility in theological constructs. If you think you have the answer, you’re probably wrong.

But then, in the Hebrew way of life, faith never depended on having the right answer, did it?

Topical Index: Hebrew, Semitic languages, translation, demut, Ezekiel 1:5

[1] Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God, p. 27.

^[2] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 437 דָּמָה. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke, Ed.) (electronic ed.) (191–192). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[3]Ibid.