The WOMBman's Bible

What Do You Think About Genesis 3:16?

2011-04-01T10:14:00.004-05:00

Jay sends me a fb message asking,

... on Genesis 3:16. What are your thoughts on this verse? תּשׁוּקה αποστροφη desire, recourse, return ????

My reply:

...on G3:16 ... the LXX is fascinating with its choice of ἀποστροφή. I'd compare with the choice in the nearby G4:7 (and why not ἐπιστροφὴ, as in Song of Songs 7:10)? And there's what Oedipus says to his sons as he lays dying, preparing for Hades (in Oedipus the King by Sophocles): "Ὦ παῖδες, ἥκει τῷδ’ ἐπ’ ἀνδρὶ θέσφατος βίου τελευτή, κοὐκέτ’ ἔστ’ ἀποστροφή." Are the translating Jews saying something here in G3:16? I'd say they're signaling "Eve's" or "Life's" desire ( תּשׁוּקה ) as "away from" rather than "towards" the mortal, human man? In "The Women's Bible," Lillie Devereux Blake stresses "Then follows what has been called the curse. Is it not rather a prediction?... It is a pity that all versions of the Bible do not give this word ["Life" in G3:20] instead of the Hebrew Eve. She was Life, the eternal mother, the first representative of the more valuable and important half of the human race." So, the LXX: Ζωή. The Greek translation is certainly playing with, leaving open, and opening up the meanings of, the Hebrew. What are your thoughts?

Jay:

Thanks for your comments. You seem to have something more than I do. I really am puzzled. There seems something so rich here. What is happening in this curse and what is to be the eventual solution? Victor Hamilton in his commentary suggests that the LXX translators got it wrong. I don't know, but surely they had a reason. A reason to translate תּשׁוּקה as αποστροφη in 3:16 and 4:7 but as ἐπιστροφὴ in Song of Song as you said. And I too cannot understand why the other translators are not translating חוּה Eve as the Jewish translators did Ζωή. I learned the name Eve as a boy and it meant nothing to me until the first time I read her name in the LXX. Wow, what a difference, after the curse the she-man is named by the now curse man, Life. What hope after death. But what is the relationship of the αποστροφη in 3:16 and 4:7 Then rule in 3:16 משׁל κυριεύσει but in 4:7 αρξεις I really don't know.

Me:

What great questions and wonderful uncertainties here. I'd love to ask Sylvie Honigman (a wonderful LXX historian at Tel Aviv University), who makes the claim that to its earliest Jewish readers, the Septuagint was “at least as sacred as the Hebrew original.” And I believe Naomi Seidman (Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at Graduate Theological Union, and a translation theorist) could speculate on how the Talmud version of the LXX's history might offer some ideas on what the Septuagint translators were up to (if *seeming* to get it wrong). Would you mind if I posted our fb conversation here as a blogpost (at /wombmansbible.blogspot.com/) to see if anyone else has thoughts?

Jay:

Yes, you may post it. Looking forward to seeing what others might add.

So now it's your turn. What can you add to our conversation? What do you think about Genesis 3:16 (the writer's and translators' choices)?

The Ambiguous (at least equally half feminine) Image of God

2010-04-29T18:17:00.003-05:00

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In this post, I'd like to suggest - and to show - that the image of God in the language of the Bible is ambiguous. That ambiguity - you should see - is more female than male, more female, that is, in ways that both Aristotle (a male) and Nancy Mairs (a female) might use language. Or maybe you'll concede that it has to be at least (equally half) feminine.

Along the way to our listening to the Bible language, let's listen to Nancy Mairs describing the logical language acts of many men. This sort of logic is exactly the kind we see Aristotle inventing and using. Mairs says:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world.

Then she adds:

Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

Whew. Now we may be ready to hear the language of the Bible. This language purports to exist (or at least to describe a place where and a time when there existed language, creative ambiguous language, creative ambiguous polymorphic language, creative ambiguous polymorphic and therefore feminine language) before any need “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.” If Nancy Mairs or Aristotle had anything to say about it, this language was not very patriarchal from the beginning.

Here's the language to hear:

And God said, "Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth."

And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God He created him,
male and female He created them.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold say over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth."

These are, of course, not God's words. Or are they?
Nor are they the words of Moses. Or are they?
Rather, they are the ambiguous English words of Robert Alter, aren't they?

But as bar-bar-ic, Aristotle would likely say, are these Greek words of the Jews, translating in Alexandria's empire, as if they were Sappho or somebody:

καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός
Ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ' εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ' ὁμοίωσιν,
καὶ ἀρχέτωσαν τῶν ἰχθύων τῆς θαλάσσης
καὶ τῶν πετεινῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ
καὶ τῶν κτηνῶν καὶ πάσης τῆς γῆς
καὶ πάντων τῶν ἑρπετῶν τῶν ἑρπόντων ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.

καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον,
κατ' εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν,
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς.

καὶ ηὐλόγησεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς λέγων
Αὐξάνεσθε καὶ πληθύνεσθε,
καὶ πληρώσατε τὴν γῆν καὶ κατακυριεύσατε αὐτῆς,
καὶ ἄρχετε τῶν ἰχθύων τῆς θαλάσσης
καὶ τῶν πετεινῶν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ
καὶ πάντων τῶν κτηνῶν καὶ πάσης τῆς γῆς
καὶ πάντων τῶν ἑρπετῶν τῶν ἑρπόντων ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.

And as least equally ambiguous is this language:

כו וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ; וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם, וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל-הָאָרֶץ, וּבְכָל-הָרֶמֶשׂ, הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל-הָאָרֶץ.

כז וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ, בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ: זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה, בָּרָא אֹתָם.

כח וַיְבָרֶךְ אֹתָם, אֱלֹהִים, וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם אֱלֹהִים פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ וּמִלְאוּ אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, וְכִבְשֻׁהָ; וּרְדוּ בִּדְגַת הַיָּם, וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם, וּבְכָל-חַיָּה, הָרֹמֶשֶׂת עַל-הָאָרֶץ.

Why Censor a Mother, Twice?

2010-04-24T09:59:00.011-05:00

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Tim Bulkeley at Sansblogue has posted on "The censored Bible: translating Psalm 90." He sees in the Hebrew of Tehillim 90, in these lyrics of Moses, what is "explicitly (I think) maternal imagery for the creation of our world." Nonetheless, as Bulkeley explicitly puts it, most English translators "censor" out the maternal from the language of Moses. "Why?"

At this blog of mine here, I'm mostly interested in why the Jews using their own Greek in Alexandria, Egypt would read their ancient Hebrew (in their scriptures) any given way. I want to first look at Tehillim 90 (renumbered πθ, or 89). Then I want to look at another hymn or psalm or song or tehillim of Moses, an earlier one in what the Septuagint renames as Deuteronomy 32.

Psalm 89 (Tehillim 90)

As we all know, for Psalm 89 (Tehillim 90), the Septuagint translators put Moses's "explicitly" maternal Hebrew into their Hellene this way:

κύριε καταφυγὴ ἐγενήθης ἡμῖν
ἐν γενεᾷ
καὶ γενεᾷ
πρὸ τοῦ ὄρη γενηθῆναι
καὶ πλασθῆναι τὴν γῆν
καὶ τὴν οἰκουμένην
καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἕως τοῦ αἰῶνος σὺ εἶ

Why? Is it not so explicitly maternal now? Perhaps it's very playful, rhyming words with rhythms and alliterations that we English readers don't so easily hear, if we can see some of them. Notice the punning (whether intentional or not) in the ἐγενήθης /e-genēthēnēs/ and in the repeated γενεᾷ /genea/ followed by γενηθῆναι /genēthēnai/ followed by γῆν /gēn/. But where is the γυνή /gynē/, the woman with a womb? Why is the motherly imagery censored out? Or, at the very least, why is it so implicit, so hidden in the text, so subtle?

My guess is that the translators in Egypt were being very careful. My hunch is that they knew what they were doing. My observation has been that they were resisting the Greek of Aristotle, who boxed up (his elite male-only Greek-citizen-only) language in order for him and his own to avoid ambiguities of blathering barbarisms and slippery sophistries and womanly whimsies. Our best guess is that, in most cases, the Jews in Alexander's empire, back in Egypt, were looking further back to Homer's and Hesiod's and Sappho's poetry and Euripides's plays, and to much more poetic and playful, and sometimes hilarious Hellene.

So now let's look at the song of Moses in what they call Deuternomy 32.

Deuternomy (Devarim) 32

Buckeley's comment at my other blog got me looking at and listening to Moses here. Consider these two lyrical lines of maternal imagery in Hebrew (i.e., verse 18):

צוּר יְלָדְךָ תֶּשִׁי

וַתִּשְׁכַּח אֵל מְחֹלְלֶךָ׃

Now here's that in Hebraic Hellene:

θεὸν τὸν γεννήσαντά σε ἐγκατέλιπες
καὶ ἐπελάθου θεοῦ τοῦ τρέφοντός σε.

Now here's that in patriarchal English bible translations:

You deserted the Rock, who fathered you;

you forgot the God who gave you birth. (NIV)

You neglected the Rock who had fathered you;

you forgot the God who had given you birth. (NLT)

(You ignored the rock who fathered you

and forgot the God who gave you life.) (God's Word®)

You have no thought for the Rock, your father,

you have no memory of the God who gave you birth. (Bible in Basic English)

Of the Rock who became your father, you are unmindful,

and have forgotten God who gave you birth. (World English Bible)

Note the difference in the Jewish English of Robert Alter:

The Rock your bearer you neglected

you forgot the God who gave you birth.

With the Christian English translations above, we quickly need to ask "Why Father?" And "why not mother?" or just (as Moses and Alter have) at least a hint of her?

With the Jewish Greek, we now need to ask "Why θεος /theos/ [or God]?" And "why not πετρας /petras/ [or Rock]?"

I really wonder whether Jesus or even if Matthew was asking the same questions of the Septuagint translators here. The name and this re-naming of Peter (i.e., the disciple of Jesus) is a clear play on the Greek. But the Jewish translators of Moses song (i.e., Deuteronomy) tend to "censor" out the word for Rock and replace it with the word for God. Why?

Now, to be clear, the Jewish translators do use the Greek word for rock in verse 13: μέλι ἐκ πέτρας καὶ ἔλαιον ἐκ στερεᾶς πέτρας. (And Alter uses similar English words for Moses' Hebrew: "honey from the crag and oil from the flinty stone.")

There are two different Hebrew "rock" words in v 13, respectively: (סֶלַע) and (צוּר). The word that Moses uses repeatedly is the latter one here. And he writes this rock word or he sings it some eight repeated times for the Divine One and for other divinities in the short context of Deuteronomy chapter 32. (See verses 4, 13, 15, 18, 30, and 31). However, in contrast, the Jewish translators of Hebrew into Hellene choose never, not even once, to use the Greek word for Rock to mark God or even gods.

Why "censor" out the maternal rock imagery?

Well, we can only guess, can't we? I think there may be some sensitivity to Moses for the translators now back, as Jews, in Egypt. I also speculate that they, being familiar with lots of Greek writings, hear some comparisons between unkosher ethnic polytheistic stories and those of Moses. They don't want either the polytheistic Egyptians or the polytheistic Greeks appropriating their Moses. They probably have watched and heard (or at least heard of) the plays of Euripides being revived and played right there in Alexandria. They've been considering how to translate Ex-Odys 17, where God commands Moses to smite the Rock; and they've been considering how to translate Numbers 20, where Moses smites the Rock in impatient disobedience to God. They're not wanting to call God "Rock" in Deuteronomy 32 (which we just looked at). Why not?

Are they being sensitive to how these stories in Greek will sound, well, so Greeky, so polytheistic Greeky?

Here's how a bit sounds from the women in Euripides's play Ion (at around 1120, as translated by Robert Potter, with Euripides's Greek interpolated back in by me):

When Creusa's husband left the god's oracular shrine, he took his new son to the feast and the sacrifice he was preparing for the god. Xuthus then went where the flame of Bacchus leaps, so that he might drench both rocks [πέτρας] of Dionysos with the slaughter, as a thank-offering for the sight of his son, and he said: "You, my child, stay here and raise a tent, fitted on both sides, by the toil of carpenters. If I should remain a long time in my sacrifice to the gods [Θεοῖσιν] of birth, set up the banquet for the friends who are there."

Notice the close associations of maternal deities and the rocks for bloody sacrifices to divinities. Do the Jewish translators really want God, their maternal Rock, sounding like Διονύσου πέτρας and Γενέταις Θεοῖσιν?

And here's another bit from Euripides. It's from Bacchae (from around line 690, as translated by T. A. Buckley, again with the Greek of Euripides we're looking at together put back in):

Your mother raised a cry, standing up in the midst of the Bacchae, to wake their bodies from sleep, when she heard the lowing of the horned cattle. And they, casting off refreshing sleep from their eyes, sprang upright, a marvel of orderliness to behold, old, young, and still unmarried virgins. First they let their hair loose over their shoulders, and secured their fawn-skins, as many of them as had released the fastenings of their knots, girding the dappled hides with serpents licking their jaws. And some, holding in their arms a gazelle or wild wolf-pup, gave them white milk, as many as had abandoned their new-born infants and had their breasts still swollen. They put on garlands of ivy, and oak, and flowering yew. One took her thyrsos and struck it against a rock [πέτραν], from which a dewy stream of water sprang forth. Another let her thyrsos strike the ground, and there the god [θεός] sent forth a fountain of wine. All who desired the white drink scratched the earth with the tips of their fingers and obtained streams of milk; and a sweet flow of honey dripped from their ivy thyrsoi; so that, had you been present and seen this, you would have approached with prayers the god whom you now blame.

There may be at least two problems with this Greek play for the Greek translators. First, there's this association to milk and honey, imagery of the promised land far away now from where they are back in Egypt. Second, there are Greek women, Greek mothers, doing what Moses and what God did. That is, these ethnic goyim mothers are generating, are bearing forth, are giving birth and motherly sustenance to their people in ways that might be compared with the One God and that one special servant Moses.

So when Moses is singing of God the Rock, like a mother of the people of Israel, in Hebrew, then why not -- given the Greek imagery elsewhere and especially in the multiply polytheistic Egypt of Alexander -- just censor out Rock and specify God when it's sung in Hellene? Why not use θεος /theos/ [or God] and not πετρας /petras/ for the Jewish maternal imagery of Moses in Deuteronomy? [UPDATE: Bob MacDonald inspires me to include some illustrations here, including one of David, with rock in sling and rod in hand, as he's getting inspired to sing, some time later, Psalm 18. I couldn't find an artist's rendering of Job's inscription, so we'll all just imagine that one. But the good point Bob's making is that the imagery is, in the mind of the translators, fairly rich.]

In summary, we hear Hellene sounding rather Hebraic and playful in Psalm 90 of Moses and definitely Hebraic though not as Greek-ish in the Deuteronomy 32 song of Moses. We suspect the translators are motivated by the sounds of their languages. But we still wonder what motivates the patriarchal censorship of some English Bible translators.

How to translate the word torah?

2010-04-23T06:41:00.005-05:00

It's happened again.

Men are taking words, categorizing their meanings, and keeping them from mixing. The fear for Aristotle, as we all know by now, was that females would pollute males. Therefore, his scientific logic separated females - as botched or deformed males - from males. Likewise, the slippery words of women, if not boxed up and kept in check, would infect the world of men.

In the world of bible translation (which is far and away mostly male in 2010AD), a recent problem is the Greek word, νόμος. We can transliterate it with English letters as nómos. Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog separates it, as a word "in the New Testament," from "the word torah [תּוֹרָה] in the Old Testament," although he calls the one "the equivalent" of the other. The important point in the conversation there so far is the separation of the "Old Testament" from the "New Testament" and the Hebrew word from its Greek counterpart.

Wayne has pointed us to the separation Paul Franklyn has been struggling with. Franklyn is the Associate Editor for the Common English Bible translation. Franklyn gives a bit of translation history:

"The first efforts to translate torah occurred in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is known as the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the Bible used by the Greek New Testament authors. So the Hebrew word torah was translated as the Greek word nomos, which we render as law in English. Nearly all English translations tried to be consistent and rendered "law" as the meaning of torah across the Old Testament and New Testament."

There is a tremendous point here to notice that gets overlooked by another separation of words. The point is this: that the Jews translating their own scriptures used their own Greek to render their own Hebrew. It's not so clear that they were intent on locking down the meanings of either torah [תּוֹרָה] or nómos [νόμος]. Both words have slippery meanings and wet uses. Yes, I said "wet," and we might as well say "womanly" too. But let's come back to that.

What gets overlooked is how multivalent and how polymorphic the words are in their uses and in their meanings. If we just take the Greek word nómos [νόμος], then we can begin to see the separations and the boxing up and the locking down. In English, of course, Franklyn has boxed up the word as meaning "law," at least when it comes to the Bible. Franklyn says the biblical nómos [νόμος] = "law."

Now, I'm using math symbols because men in the past have used math to claim that nómos [νόμος] = "law." No one is denying the two facts both (a) that there is such an equivalence and (b) that men have established the equivalence. Aristotle wrote of nómos [νόμος] in the context of the laws of mathematics. And his teacher Plato wrote an entire dialogue on Nómoi [Νόμοι], which has come to be called "Laws." Like his student Aristotle, Plato's project in his writing is to circumscribe the sophistry of the sophists (as he does in his dialogue "Gorgias") and to curtail the poetry of the poets (as he does in his dialogue which we know as "Republic"). Aristotle takes the separation to the Nth degree; he's not content with dialogue or, "dialectic," being able to do the job of boxing up slippery meanings. (In fact, Aristotle claims that a "rhetorician" such as Plato's Gorgias uses "rhetoric" as a counterpart to "dialectic," which Plato uses. Sophistry and poetry are nearly as slippery as women's language. This is all very technical. But that's Aristotle's point.) Women's logoi as slippery wet words needs to be separated from the logic of men.

We should be clear to say that neither Leman nor Franklyn have tried to separate women from their blogging. Neither man is bringing up gender at all. Nor is either excluding females in any way. Nonetheless, they have used the Platonic and the Aristotelian methods of separation. The Aristotelian method is one that classes but then it ranks. And the rankings, it claims, are just natural. This sort of method is the very one that classes females as inherently and naturally inferior to males. We just want to be a little careful in drawing the conclusion of such logic, if we can follow it.

So I just want to suggest that nómos [νόμος] has not always been so boxed, so technical, so legal, so related to the law of nature, to firm "law." And I also want to suggest that the Hellene of the Jews translating their Hebrew may have been a resistance to the Laws of the Greek empire. Sylvie Honigman says in her history of the legend of the Septuagint that these particular Jews translated in the Homeric (not in the Alexandrian) paradigm. Alexander, as we all know, was in the Aristotelian tradition. Alexander the Great learned from Aristotle before he set up his great Polis called Alexandria Egypt, where the translations into Greek were commissioned. I'm suggesting that the Jews there used slippery Greek, the kind that is found in the poets, such as Homer, not the legal technical Greek of Aristotle.

So we might as well hear Homer. Here's from the Iliad, book 20, lines 248 - 255. First hear Homer as Richmond Lattimore translates, then as Ian Johnston renders the words. Notice how slippery and how even wet and womanly the conversation between two men here in the Iliad threatens to be. And then listen to, and watch for the Greek (with the Greek word nómos [νόμος] bolded).

The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there
of every kind, the range of words is wide, and their variance.
The sort of thing you say is the thing that will be said to you.
But what have you and I to do with the need for squabbling
and hurling insults at each other, as if we were two wives
who when they have fallen upon a heart-perishing quarrel
go out in the street and say abusive things to each other,
much true, and much that is not, and it is their rage that drives them.

Men's tongues are glib, with various languages—
words can go here and there in all directions,
and the sorts of words one speaks will be
the sorts of words one has to listen to.
But what's the point? Why should the two of us
be squabbling here and fight by trading insults
back and forth, like two irritated women,
who, in some heart-wrenching raging spat,
go out into the street to scream at each other
with facts and lies, each one gripped by anger.

στρεπτὴ δὲ γλῶσσ' ἐστὶ βροτῶν, πολέες δ' ἔνι μῦθοι
παντοῖοι, ἐπέων δὲ πολὺς νομὸς ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα.
ὁπποῖόν κ' εἴπῃσθα ἔπος, τοῖόν κ' ἐπακούσαις.
ἀλλὰ τίη ἔριδας καὶ νείκεα νῶϊν ἀνάγκη
νεικεῖν ἀλλήλοισιν ἐναντίον ὥς τε γυναῖκας,
αἵ τε χολωσάμεναι ἔριδος πέρι θυμοβόροιο
νεικεῦσ' ἀλλήλῃσι μέσην ἐς ἄγυιαν ἰοῦσαι
πόλλ' ἐτεά τε καὶ οὐκί: χόλος δέ τε καὶ τὰ κελεύει

Now, go back and read Numbers 5 in the Greekish Jewish Old Testament called the Septuagint. Notice how the word torah [תּוֹרָה] has been rendered nómos [νόμος]. Notice it's association with women differently that it's associated with men. Consider all the other uses of the same Greek word in place of the same Hebrew word throughout what is known as the Penta-Teuch, those five boxed up books of Moses. Consider how the meanings are rather opened up and not so technically shut down.

We wonder then if our English translations need to make all the distinctions, as Aristotle distinguishes males from females and logic from rhetoric and his "original" meaning from Homer's various ones. Do we need to see "New" distinguished from the "Old" testament, or nómos [νόμος] from torah [תּוֹרָה], if we don't box the words as "teaching" and, separately, as "law"?

Who do you think one must be first: a womanist's question

2010-04-10T13:45:00.002-05:00

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"Who do you think one must read first in order to understand the Bible?" - this is John F. Hobbin's question at the end of his blogpost in which he gives his answer. He's said earlier and elsewhere, "My kids at their public high school get a taste of Shakespeare by a teacher who has no love for Shakespeare, who thinks Maya Angelou is better, which is still better than nothing, but NO Milton." He's quoted one of his teachers, saying, "I don’t think you can understand the Bible unless you’ve read Ovid, Milton, and Blake first." These men, white men of privilege, are his necessary "triad."

And all of this got me thinking, this morning, as I read the Greek (septuagint) translation of what we call Psalm 8. It got me thinking of how so much of the reception of the Bible is in terms of men, and of men of majority race, and of men of majority race and class.

When I was writing it, the person on my dissertation committee who is an expert on Greek language and who is also a scholar on Mediterranean household codes written in Greek is also a person who has often pointed out something strange about the bible. (She's a feminist but would acknowledge is not a womanist. Her name is Carolyn Osiek). The strange thing she's pointed out is this: the New Testament, written in Greek around the Mediterranean, has household codes that regulate women and slaves, as if women are not slaves and slaves are not women, and as if the two disparaged groups need separate instructions. So there's biblical silence on the rights and responsibilities or (shall we call them what they are?) the expectations of a person who is (1) a female and is of (2) a lower class of (3) a darker skin color and is, therefore also, a slave.

Now, that's a triad.

How would she read Κύριε ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν / Kurie ho kurios hemon/? "Master, that master of ours"

How could she read ἐκ στόματος νηπίων καὶ θηλαζόντων κατηρτίσω αἶνον /ek sotmatos nepion kai thelazonton katertiso ainon/? "out of the mouth of babes and those nursing their mothers is praise" for You

How should she read

τί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος, ὅτι μιμνῄσκῃ αὐτοῦ,
ἢ υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου, ὅτι ἐπισκέπτῃ αὐτόν;

/ti estin anthropos, hoti mimneske autou,
h hios anthropou, hoti episkepte auton/

"what is a mortal, that it's remembered by You,
or a Son of a human, that You visit Him?" ?

These are questions, her questions. They sound from outside, sound like Gayl Jones. She's not even a feminist, perhaps. She writes re-membering. She is visited, but it's like a haunting. She writes, remembering Corregidora. If you're Milton and not Maya Angelou, then there's nothing to explain. The apostle Paul read Psalm 8 in the Greek once, and he didn't have to give any explanation for it. Womanists (not sons, not white, not of a high class or race or gender) must answer, or must they?

My question is "Who do you think one must be first in order to understand the Bible?"

Who Says Homosexuality is a Sin?

2010-03-18T17:06:00.000-05:00

This is a question Joel Hoffman has asked. And the answer is: "The NLT does, right there in its 'translation' to Leviticus 18:22."

"Do not practice homosexuality; it is a detestable sin."

Hoffman goes on to say "that’s not what the Hebrew says" and explains how "what the NLT has here is an interpretation, not a translation."

I think how translator Robert Alter translates and how he explains is also useful:

With a male you shall not lie as one lies with a woman. It is an abhorrence.

The explicitness of this law–the Hebrew for ‘as one lies’ is the plural construct noun mishkevei, ‘bedding,’ used exclusively for sexual intercourse–suggests that it is a ban on intercourse and intercrural intercourse (the latter often practiced by the Greeks). Other forms of homosexual activity do not seem of urgent concern. The evident rationale for the prohibition is the wasting of seed in what the law appears to envisage as a kind of grotesque parody of heterosexual intercourse [i.e., for procreation primarily?]. (Lesbianism, which surely must have been known in the ancient Near East, is nowhere mentioned, perhaps because of no wasting of seed is involved, though the reason for the omission remains unclear). There is scant textual evidence to support the apologetic claim of some recent interpreters that the ban on homosexual congress is limited to the preceding list of incestuous unions. One may apply here the proposal of Mary Douglas that this is a culture that likes to keep lines of categorical distinction clear: no human-beast couplings are allowed (in contrast to the imaginative freedom on this topic of Greek myth), and any simulation of procreative heterosexual intercourse by the insertion of the male member in an orifice or fleshy crevice of another male is abhorrent.

Now, here's the Hebrew (at least it's the MT). And then with all that Greek talk, we might compare the Greek (remembering how Aristotle, or at least a pseudo-sound-alike Aristotle used the word βδελυροὶ to express his disgust when discussing the shapes of women's body parts when they are unshapely and when they compare by his objective standard, sometimes, to κίναιδοι, or "catamites"):

וְאֶת־זָכָר לֹא תִשְׁכַּב מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה תֹּועֵבָה הִוא׃

καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός βδέλυγμα γάρ ἐστιν

Is Alter's translation a myopic one? Is the Greek translation, if it's a translation, a myopic one? Isn't the NLT something else altogether (committing what Alter calls the "heresy of explanation" as if the explanation is a good one)?

I'm out of time for now, but as always am interested in what you see and how you feel about these sorts of things.

Of women and -μένη

2010-02-26T16:37:00.003-06:00

J. R. Daniel Kirk at Storied Theology posts on what "ἐνεργουμένη means" and how theology of the translators motivates their renderings. This has led to a number of other posts many of which Peter Kirk links to over at BBB here, where several still "are looking in particular at the Greek verb, actually a participle, energoumene, a present participle, feminine singular nominative, of the middle or passive voice of the verb energeo." The word seems odd, a neologism perhaps, because in our extant Greek texts it only appears twice used once a piece by two different authors. Where would they get this form from, and why?

Well, quite unrelated (probably) is the "present participle, feminine singular nominative, of the middle or passive voice of" two other Greek verbs I found. Each has the suffix -μένη.

I don't really have time to say much of what I think about this, but I'd certainly welcome any comments. The main thing to note, of course, is the wordplay here.

The Greek is a playful translating of Hebrew. And the Hebrew seems full of wordplay (if the Masoretic text is what was being translated). So here it is. Please tell me what you see, and I promise as time allows to come back to talk with you and to make of it anything else we might see together.

Leviticus 21:7 and 21:14 (ΛΕΥΕΙΤΟΚΟΝ / ויקרא)

γυναῖκα πόρνην καὶ βεβηλωμένην οὐ λήμψονται καὶ γυναῖκα ἐκβεβλημένην ἀπὸ ἀνδρὸς αὐτῆς ἅγιός ἐστιν τῷ κυρίῳ θεῷ αὐτοῦ

χήραν δὲ καὶ ἐκβεβλημένην καὶ βεβηλωμένην καὶ πόρνην ταύτας οὐ λήμψεται ἀλλ᾽ ἢ παρθένον ἐκ τοῦ γένους αὐτοῦ λήμψεται γυναῖκα

אִשָּׁה זֹנָה וַחֲלָלָה לֹא יִקָּחוּ וְאִשָּׁה גְּרוּשָׁה מֵאִישָׁהּ לֹא יִקָּחוּ כִּֽי־קָדֹשׁ הוּא לֵאלֹהָֽיו׃

אַלְמָנָה וּגְרוּשָׁה וַחֲלָלָה זֹנָה אֶת־אֵלֶּה לֹא יִקָּח כִּי אִם־בְּתוּלָה מֵעַמָּיו יִקַּח אִשָּֽׁה׃

Here's Lancelot Brenton's solo translation of the Greek into English followed by Julia E. Smith's solo translation of the Hebrew into English (both completed in the nineteenth century):

They shall not take a woman who is a harlot and profaned, or a woman put away from her husband; for he is holy to the Lord his God.

But a widow, or one that is put away, or profaned, or a harlot, these he shall not take; but he shall take for a wife a virgin of his own people.

They shall not take a woman, harlot, or profane; and they shall not take a wife driven away from her husband, for he is holy to his God.

A widow, and the driven away, and profane, and an harlot, these he shall not take: but a virgin of his people shall he take a wife.

Why these translations? What motivates the Hebrew, the Hellene translation? How do they mirror one another, and in what way do they play with interpretation and with performance and with playfulness in different ways?

.

Pentateuch as translation

2010-01-23T09:35:00.001-06:00

What's the Pentateuch? Transliteration (i.e., the foreign language spelling of the sounds of the original word) robs us of some of the wordplay, the gendered qualities of the word. It's the Hellene (or Greek) translation of the Hebrew חומש - which somebody's entry in the Encyclopedia of Judaism explains as "the ḥumash (from the root ḥ-m-sh, meaning 'five')." The reference is to the first five "books" of the Bible, aka "the five books of Moses." When the Jews in Alexandria Egypt translated these books, then they also translated the Hebrew word as Πεντάτευχος [Pentáteuchos], which is the phrase "πεντά τευχος." Πεντά is Hellene for "five." So what is the Hellene τευχος? Is it "books"?

In much of Greek literature, τευχος refers to "vessels" or "pitchers" or "containers." And most of the time, these vessels are related to women. An interesting word choice for translation, don't you think? Why not "Πεντάβιβλία [Pentabiblía]" (or literally "five books") for the Hebrew חומש referring to the "five books"?

Here's a couple of the Greek phrases (and English translations by a couple of translators):

I have heard that the maidens opened the vessel of the goddess.
ἤκουσα λῦσαι παρθένους τεῦχος θεᾶς

For no other woman, Hellene or barbarian,
gives birth to a white vessel of chicks,
in which they say Leda bore me to Zeus.
γυνὴ γὰρ οὔθ’ Ἑλληνὶς οὔτε βάρβαρος
τεῦχος νεοσσῶν λευκὸν ἐκλοχεύεται,
ἐν ᾧ με Λήδαν φασὶν ἐκ Διὸς τεκεῖν

Both the passages are from Euripides' plays. The first has Ion speaking in "Ion," and the second has Helen speaking in the play "Helen."

Of course, the Hellene word means other things not always related to women. And yet, the discussion around and after Suzanne's post Temple Vessels has me thinking about "women" and "vessels" and Jewish men's Greek word choices for them.

Wordplay of Ruth

2009-12-28T11:15:00.000-06:00

While pondering whether to blog here in 2010, I re-read the following towards the end of 2009.

וַתִּשֶּׂנָה קוֹלָן

וַתִּבְכֶּינָה עוֹד

וַתִּשַּׁק עָרְפָּה לַחֲמוֹתָהּ

וְרוּת דָּבְקָה בָּהּ

It's from מגילת רות, the "Scroll of Ruth" (chapter 1, verse 14). In the story, it's the second explicit mention of the names of the daughters-in-law of Naomi. The first mention, of course, has the two women named in relation to their men, their husbands (in verse 4). The men are Naomi's sons, who die and leave the two younger women alone as widows; Naomi cries that she cannot replace them because she's too old to bear more sons in her womb. The significance of the women, and their names perhaps, seems implicit in their need to conceive and to produce male babies. But in 14, the names have significance, feminine significances, beyond the men. There is a literary significance, a wordplay, to get at other realities for the women. It comes out also in the Hellene translation from the Hebrew, though the play is in different directions.

So let's come back to possible meanings of the names of the two younger women in Hebrew, and then look at how this plays in Greek (i.e., Hellene). The name "Orpah" (עָרְפָּה) seems to have significance in physical appearance and means something like "bangs" or "forelock" or "mane" - perhaps as a female deer or gazelle might have. The name "Ruth" (רוּת) seems to have significance physical appearance but may also have significance in character or relationship; the name, ambiguously, means something like "beauty" or "good looking" and also "friend." These are Hebrew words for foreign women, for non-Jews who are also females. When "translated" by Jewish men into Hellene, the words are simply transliterated, so that the Hebrew sounds are retained when you read the Greek: Ορφα and Ρουθ. If you are not a Hebrew speaking Jew who is a male, then the significance of the words, even their sounds, is lost in transliteration.

Now, if you go back to re-read verses 4 and 14 with the names actually translated (and not just transliterated), then it goes something like this in English:

4 And they took them wives of the women of Moab: the name of the one was "Doe with Bangs," and the name of the other "Good-looking Friend"; and they dwelt there about ten years.

14 And they lifted up their voice, and wept again; and "Doe with Bangs" kissed her mother-in-law; but "Good-looking Friend" cleaved unto her.

The significances (or the wordplay) in the names seem to come out strongly in verse 14. (By wordplay I mean not only playfulness but also interpretative play or wiggle room.) Doe-with-Bangs ("Orpah") kisses her mother-in-law. The kiss is reminiscent of what Naomi had already done to both young women in verse 9. There, the mother-in-law is not only comforting them in their grief but she is also giving them a patriarchal blessing. That is, Naomi is pronouncing God's kindness and rest on the widows provided they return to find men who will marry and impregnate them. They are to be fruitful and to multiply by bearing male babies, by giving birth to sons. When Doe-with-Bangs kisses her mother-in-law, she is signaling that she will return (perhaps as gracefully as a running deer to the young bucks at home).

But "Ruth," or Good-looking Friend, does something different, something unexpected. She does what a young nuptial will do. She leaves her home to cleave to a husband. This is reminiscent of Genesis 2:24, a pronouncement of the pattern of a man and a woman cleaving (דָּבַק) together as one flesh. The friendly thing this young woman does is to cleave to the mother of her dead husband. There is much more here. Much more is here theologically and racially and with respect to gender.

And in the Greek translation there's much more too. So let's leave the theology and the race question and the issues of sex to turn our focus to the translating.

The Hellene (i.e. Septuagint) rendering of verse 14 is as follows:

καὶ ἐπῆραν τὴν φωνὴν αὐτῶν
καὶ ἔκλαυσαν ἔτι

καὶ κατεφίλησεν Ορφα τὴν πενθερὰν αὐτῆς
καὶ ἐπέστρεψεν εἰς τὸν λαὸν αὐτῆς

Ρουθ δὲ ἠκολούθησεν αὐτῇ

Roughly, we could re-present that in English as follows:

And they raised up their voices
And they cried out continually

And Orpah like a friend kissed her mother-in-law
And returned to her people.

Ruth, however, followed after her

In Greek, the word used for "kissing" is a word that also signifies "friendship."

But the word used for "following after" smacks (*post-Aristotle) of a social hierarchy of wife under and after a husband, a kind of submissiveness. And the translators are using a very ironic Greek language to show how striking Ruth's decision in contrast to her sister's. These are, by the way, foreign females. The translators are also rendering the old Hebrew as very foreign (in Alexander-the-Great's city Alexandria). They're nearly reversing which sister is "the friend" but are retaining the striking idea that this "Ruth" is following after (as if cleaving to) a mother-in-law the way Hebrew women would normally cleave to Jewish men (so that more male children could be born).

(The New Testament represents Ruth as a foreign fore-mother of the Messiah, Joshua of Nazareth, as the "son" of David, who is the "son" of Ruth. The patrilineage to open Matthew's gospel is interrupted by Ruth. At the end of the gospel of Matthew, the "kiss" is used to signify the betrayal of this Joshua by Judah, who won't follow after this Messiah. In this way, the Greek translation of Ruth finds a parallel in the gospel of Matthew. Of course, it's not likely that Matthew writing meant for the parallel. What I'm noticing, nonetheless, and trying to suggest, is there are reversals and ironies and meanings made in the "Scrolls of Ruth" and its Hebrew-Hellene translation).

-----

*So, just to illustrate what Aristotle sets up as the "following after" hierarchy, here's a bit from his Politics (around 1035b, with H. Rackham translating into English) --

For a man's [or a husband's] acts can no longer be noble if he does not excel as greatly as a man excels a woman [or a husband excels a wife] or a father his children or a master his slaves, so that one who transgresses cannot afterwards achieve anything sufficient to rectify the lapse from virtue that he had already committed; because for equals the noble and just consists in their taking turns, since this is equal and alike, but for those that are equal to have an unequal share and those that are alike an unlike share is contrary to nature, and nothing contrary to nature is noble. Hence in case there is another person who is our superior in virtue and in practical capacity for the highest functions, him it is noble to follow [ἀκολουθεῖν] and him it is just to obey; though he must possess not only virtue but also capacity that will render him capable of action.

gender in Jeremiah: male mother(?)

2009-11-03T06:06:00.001-06:00

Our daily reading today is Jeremiah 30 - 31, first in Hebrew, then Greek, then English. It's stuff I read as the kid of evangelical Christian missionary parents, as presumable discussion (J 31) by God of the Old Testament (to his disappointing and disappointed exiled people, i.e., the Jews) about the New Testament. In South Vietnam for one annual mission meeting, each adult and child was given the name of a Bible character - and I was given the name Jeremiah for a week. Don't ask me who came up with that or how. But suffice it to say, that got me interested, as a 9-year-old, in what the text said, and in who Jeremiah was. So I read it with different curiosity. The adult Christian reading of chapter 31, of course, has focused on Matthew's quotation when telling the story of the historical context of Jesus coming into the world (the "voice is heard in Ramah") and verse 31 of chapter 31 is prooftext enough for the New Covenant, which Jesus brings.

What jumps out this morning, to me, after all these years and after finding myself further outside these scriptures, are these things:

ONE:

The two chapters are an interplay between literacy and orality. God tells Jeremiah to write things down, and there's constant quotation, lots of speaking, which Greeks called rhetoric, recaptured graphically from the divine Voice by the hand of a Man. It's a transposition, and the reminders of how the new is going to be a continuation of the old, which is a returning to the old in new ways. God will speak, and humans will get it down. So the Jews, mainly Jeremiah, are writing, and then there's the Septuagint translating, where the Hebrew is made into Hellene, in Egypt of all places.

"31 [38]:32 οὐ κατὰ τὴν διαθήκην, ἣν διεθέμην τοῖς πατράσιν αὐτῶν ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἐπιλαβομένου μου τῆς χειρὸς αὐτῶν ἐξαγαγεῖν αὐτοὺς ἐκ γῆς Αἰγύπτου, ὅτι αὐτοὶ οὐκ ἐνέμειναν ἐν τῇ διαθήκῃ μου, καὶ ἐγὼ ἠμέλησα αὐτῶν, φησὶν κύριος·

"31:32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord."

The Jews in Egypt translating omit "though I was their husband" and replace it with "καὶ ἐγὼ ἠμέλησα αὐτῶν" ("and I disregarded them myself").

TWO:

There are all the gendered allusions. I'm talking, yes, about the "fathers" in the verse above, and the omitted reference to God as husband in the Greek. And also all the references to mothers and virgins and trying to get God's people to identify with being women and wives and such.

THREE:

In addition to the orality /literacy turns and framing, the old and the new cycles here, there's something else. The jump out verse is 30:6 (or in Greek 37:6). Look at it, and look at it as a sort of literary and rhetorical (new and old) frame for these two chapters. Here it is:

שַׁאֲלוּ־נָא וּרְאוּ אִם־יֹלֵד זָכָר מַדּוּעַ רָאִיתִי כָל־גֶּבֶר יָדָיו עַל־חֲלָצָיו כַּיֹּולֵדָה וְנֶהֶפְכוּ כָל־פָּנִים לְיֵרָקֹֽון׃

ἐρωτήσατε καὶ ἴδετε
εἰ ἔτεκεν ἄρσεν καὶ περὶ φόβου
ἐν ᾧ καθέξουσιν ὀσφὺν καὶ σωτηρίαν
διότι ἑώρακα πάντα ἄνθρωπον
καὶ αἱ χεῖρες αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τῆς ὀσφύος αὐτοῦ
ἐστράφησαν πρόσωπα εἰς ἴκτερον

Clearly, the allusion is back to the previous verse, where God is announcing to Jeremiah that "HE" is saying something, starting with "WE," and it's about fearful things.

But this following verse talks (in Greek especially) about a male having children with hands on his loins. The Greek isn't asking a question about this as the Hebrew does. And the Greek doesn't compare the man explicitly to a woman in childbirth pain (ילד) as the Hebrew does. The Greek seems much more factual is the metaphor, in the identity of a male human doing things a male human usually cannot do. God is speaking, man is writing, the new and the old, the Hebrew to Hellene, a fatherless birthing man in translation.

---

I don't have more time for a 15 minute post. The readings could, I suppose, take a lifetime.

and to update this quickly. Here's the RSV English translation of the Hebrew then Brenton's English on the Greek (for that verse above):

"Ask now, and see, can a man bear a child? Why then do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labour? Why has every face turned pale?"

"Enquire, and see
if a male has born a child? and [ask] concerning the fear,
wherein they shall hold their loins, and [look for] safety:
for I have seen every man,
and his hands are on his loins;
[their] faces are turned to paleness."

(womanly) wordplay in Genesis 38

2009-10-29T16:22:00.001-05:00

I was blogging elsewhere today, re-read the Septuagint translation of Genesis 38:9 and 10, and saw wordplay I'd overlooked. Here's how it plays in my English.

What do you think? Notice the Greek plays on Knowing as Birthing as Woman as Earth? I've bolded for comparisons:

9 γνοὺς δὲ Αυναν ὅτι οὐκ αὐτῷ ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα ἐγίνετο ὅταν εἰσήρχετο πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐξέχεεν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν τοῦ μὴ δοῦναι σπέρμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ

9 But Onan had birthed knowledge that the sperm-semen seedwould not be born to him. So whenever he went in to his brother’sbirthing wombman he would waste it on the ground of birth, so as not to give the sperm-semen seed to his brother.

10 πονηρὸν δὲ ἐφάνη ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ, ὅτι ἐποίησεν τοῦτο,
καὶ ἐθανάτωσεν καὶ τοῦτον

10 It was wicked, in fact, appearing in the face of God, this mess that was created,
and so he put him to death and so that was that.

Julia E. Smith's (outsider) translating

2009-10-16T06:40:00.001-05:00

Here's some translating by Julia E. Smith:

PSALM CXXXI

SONG of ascensions to David. O Jehovah, my heart was not lifted up, and mine eyes were not exalted, and I went not in great things, and in wonders above me.
2 If I did not place and rest my soul as a child weaned of his mother: my soul as a weaned child.
3 Israel shall hope for Jehovah from now and even to forever.

She is translating all alone - not welcome on any Bible translation team of men of the late 19th century. Those men revising the KJV (without a woman or a Jew on their teams of American and British experts) differently-rendered the Hebrew psalm this way:

1 A Song of Ascents; of David. LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too wonderful for me.
2 Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with his mother, my soul is with me like a weaned child.
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.

What fascinates me is how the Smith translating and the Revised Version compare with the Jews' own translating from their Hebrew into their Hellene back in Egypt, in Alexandria, that namesake city of Alexander the Great (student of Aristotle) so far from Jerusalem. Here's that Jewish-Hellene translation that defies Greek imperialism:

1 ᾠδὴ τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν τῷ Δαυιδ κύριε οὐχ ὑψώθη μου ἡ καρδία οὐδὲ ἐμετεωρίσθησαν οἱ ὀφθαλμοί μου οὐδὲ ἐπορεύθην ἐν μεγάλοις οὐδὲ ἐν θαυμασίοις ὑπὲρ ἐμέ
2 εἰ μὴ ἐταπεινοφρόνουν ἀλλὰ ὕψωσα τὴν ψυχήν μου ὡς τὸ ἀπογεγαλακτισμένον ἐπὶ τὴν μητέρα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἀνταπόδοσις ἐπὶ τὴν ψυχήν μου
3 ἐλπισάτω Ισραηλ ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν καὶ ἕως τοῦ αἰῶνος

While there might be some dispute whether the Hebrew that the Jews in Alexandria were translating from and the Hebrew that the nineteenth century Brits and Americans were translating from was the same, there can be no argument over something else.

Notice how the Septuagint translators and Smith start verse 2 with the conditional. She says, "If I did not..."; and they say "εἰ μὴ."

Notice how Smith's and the outsider-Jews' own translation is a big departure from most other translations, including the Revised Version translation.

What does a woman know that most men don't? What do Jews far from home under a king in Egypt no less see in a Psalm of David and of his mother that other and otherwise "independent" men won't or can't?

Don't we get how central the relationship of a psalmist, as a baby, to his mother must be?

Mother Eve, Anthropos

2009-09-22T21:22:00.000-05:00

καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον,

κατ' εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν,

ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς

Αδαμ δὲ ἔγνω Ευαν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ,

καὶ συλλαβοῦσα

ἔτεκεν τὸν Καιν

καὶ εἶπεν

Ἑκτησάμην ἄνθρωπον

διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ.

I don't know if you can hear the beauty of the poetry above. We all, nonetheless, can see it.

In translation to English, it goes something like this. We all know it goes nothing like this:

And he it created: the god made the mortal human

According to God's likeness, he it created: that person

boy and girl, he them created: those persons

So Adam knew Eve, that wombman of his

and taking it together she

birthed offspring, that Cain,

and said,

I've gotten out a mortal human

through that God

My point in translating into English is to show how foreign the familiar can sound. And yet it's not really strange at all, to conceive of a mother as conceiving another mortal human being and giving it birth. There's hardly anything less foreign, except the mystery of it all, than our human mothers giving us life. It's a translation like no other!

----

The Jewish translators of their Hebrew scriptures chose their words carefully. When back in Egypt around 250BC, their choice for which Hellene to use was pronounced. They were living in the city Alexandria, set up as the great Greek metropolis of Alexander the Great. Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle, and Aristotle by Plato, and Plato by Socrates who had been unjustly condemned. Here was the new patriarchy. The new Greek empire had arisen with the philosopher king to reign long, wide, and supreme.

The Hellene of the day in Alexandria was politically correct. That is, it was the Hellene of philosophy, of science, of ethics, of politics. It was not the Hellene of myth and muses, of rhetoric and sophistry, of epic poetry and fancy, of barbarism and dissoi logoi. But the Jews chose the latter.

When we read the Torah in Jewish Greek, we get the idea. When we read "Genesis" (the translation of the first Hebrew book of Moses into Hellene), we get the idea. We feel like we're reading the ancient Homer, or Sappho, or Hesiod. The first four chapters of Genesis reminds us much of Hesiod's "Theo-Gony."

We think of "the common conception and birth shared by immortals and mortals" (ὡς ὁμόθεν γεγάασι θεοὶ θνητοί τ ἄνθρωποι)

We think of the mother earth giving birth to the skies (the heavens) before the gods θεοὶ and humans ἄνθρωποι were born.

We think of Hecate, καὶ μουνογενὴς ἐκ μητρὸς (kai mouno-genes echs metros, "even the only-born of her mother").

We think of the end of Theo-Gony resembling the beginnings of Gen-Esis:

αὗται μὲν θνητοῖσι παρ' ἀνδράσιν εὐνηθεῖσαι
ἀθάναται γείναντο θεοῖς ἐπιείκελα τέκνα.
νῦν δὲ γυναικῶν φῦλον ἀείσατε, ἡδυέπειαι
Μοῦσαι Ὀλυμπιάδες, κοῦραι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο.

While Glenn W. Most reminds us how these very last two lines are also those first two of the Catalogue of Women, Richmond Lattimore translates these four final lines as follows:

__These went to bed with mortal men and,
themselves immortal,
bore to them children in the likeness
__of the immortals.

But now, O sweet-spoken Muses of Olympos,
__daughters
of Zeus of the aegis,
__sing out the generation of women.

Like her . . . or like her . . . or like her
__who . . .

Ancient (Divine & Gendered) Radical Translating

2009-07-02T16:46:00.006-05:00

Too much is going on not to blog (and I have some time today, and today only perhaps).

There was this radical suggestion made at this blog, once upon a time, that the name "Moses" is not an original Hebrew name, even as Moses himself might have written it. Rather, a woman (unnamed herself) who is Egyptian gave him the name that makes us all think of our own Mamas.

Today, as we're trying not to bother with gender and other radical stuff in texts, I'm making a similar suggestion. That an Egyptian woman actually plays with the words that name the Hebrew God. It's my English translating (unless noted otherwise):

וְשָׂרַי אֵשֶׁת אַבְרָם לֹא יָלְדָה לֹו

. . . . וְלָהּ שִׁפְחָה מִצְרִית וּשְׁמָהּ הָגָר׃

וַתִּקְרָא שֵׁם־יְהוָה הַדֹּבֵר אֵלֶיהָ אַתָּה אֵל רֳאִי

כִּי אָמְרָה הֲגַם הֲלֹם רָאִיתִי אַחֲרֵי רֹאִי׃

And Princess, the wOmbman of Father Exalted, bore no babe.

And she had a slave-girl, an Egyptian, named Fly-Away. . . .

And she called the name of Yes-He-Was-Here (who spoke to her) “God sees.”

because she said “'I see him here following him seeing me.”

--------

"Genesis" 16.1 And Sarai, Abram's wife, brought not forth to him; and to her a maid servant, an Egyptian, and her name Нagar. . . . 16.13 And she will call the name of Jehovah, having spoken to her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Here also I looked after him seeing me.

(Julia E. Smith's translating).

-------

Σαρα δὲ ἡ γυνὴ Αβραμ οὐκ ἔτικτεν αὐτῷ.

ἦν δὲ αὐτῇ παιδίσκη Αἰγυπτία, ᾗ ὄνομα Αγαρ. . . .

καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αγαρ τὸ ὄνομα κυρίου τοῦ λαλοῦντος πρὸς αὐτήν Σὺ ὁ θεὸς ὁ ἐπιδών με·

ὅτι εἶπεν Καὶ γὰρ ἐνώπιον εἶδον ὀφθέντα μοι.

(The Greek by Jews translating back in Egypt, where Egyptian women are all around. Imagine.)

Sara, however, the bride of Abram did not deliver for him.

There was, however, her girl-servant, with the name Hagar. . . .

And Hagar called called the name of Master (who is speaking to her) “You’re the God who Says things to me”

because she said, “And, in fact, in front of my eyes I have seen.”

--------

And Sara the wife of Abram bore him no children; and she had an Egyptian maid, whose name was Agar. . . . And she called the name of the Lord God who spoke to her, Thou art God who seest me; for she said, For I have openly seen him that appeared to me.

(Lancelot Brenton translating the Greek into English)

-----
JUST FOR GRINS, EARLIER IN "GENESIS," GOD GETS IN ON THE TRANSLATING HIMSELF (and isn't that just like a woman ~~from Egypt~~?) Here's some of that:

וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאֹור יֹום

וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה

וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב

וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר

יֹום אֶחָד׃ ף

And the God-Divinities called the light Day

And the darkness he called Night.

And let there be evening,

And let there be morning,

One day.

---

1.5 And God will call to the light day, and to the darkness he called night: and the evening shall be, and the morning shall be one day.

(Julia E. Smith's translating)

----

καὶ ἐκάλεσεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ἡμέραν
καὶ τὸ σκότος ἐκάλεσεν νύκτα.
καὶ ἐγένετο ἑσπέρα

καὶ ἐγένετο πρωί,
ἡμέρα μία.

(The Greek by Jews translating back in Egypt, where Egyptian women are all around. Imagine.)

And the god called the light “day”.

And the darkness he called “night,”

and an evening was born,

and an early dawn was born.

One day.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night, and there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

(Lancelot Brenton translating the Greek into English)

I'm Only Leaving the Posts Public: Not Blogging

2009-06-22T20:05:00.004-05:00

"any way you can close comments but leave the posts public? That's a real bummer for people that are trying to access older posts. . . .

[T]he flesh and blood people we live and work with are more important than the online friendships and discussions. But. . . ."

--via email conversation, one of my online friends has persuaded me, but I'm only leaving the posts public (not blogging).

fyi

2009-06-19T15:43:00.004-05:00

The blogs Aristotle's Feminist Subject
and The womBman's bible
will shut down tomorrow morning (June 20, 2009).

Please feel free to access any open posts or files there until then. Afterwards, you'll have to access things by emailing

Please also feel free to remove, if you're one of the few who have still them, any links in your blogrolls and such.

(Out) Here I Stand (with You): Profoundly Close

2009-06-16T05:35:00.021-05:00

I don't know about for you, but for me one of my favorite lines of the Bible goes like this:

ודבר יהוה אל־משה פנים אל־פנים כאשר ידבר איש אל־רעהו ושב אל־המחנה ומשרתו יהושע בן־נון נער לא ימיש מתוך האהל׃ ס

We all know these words as "Exodus 33:11." They are amazing and wonderful words to me for far too many reasons to enumerate here. Let me discuss just one. And eventually narrow the discussion to just one word.

It is not that this particular Bible verse casts aspersions on all its translations. It's not, I'm suggesting, that this bit of text is glorious in some way that will, as my fellow blogger John Hobbins insists, absolutely "show you that you have no chance of understanding the fine grain of the biblical text unless you know the original languages, and know them well." Nor is there any hint of some categorical insistence, as is that insistence of John's, that "All extant translations of the Bible fall short of the glory of the original."

Rather, one reason these very words are incredible is that they themselves are a translating and an invitation to further translating.

Don't they render as rather rough "the fine grain" of "understanding" and of "knowing well"? Don't they point to distance for any "original" observer of Moses or of God? Don't they highlight the unobtained vantage of every "original" reader of anything Moses ostensibly ever wrote? Even more here and now, don't they point to the fact that John and I (and even you) stand outside those Hebrew scriptures of so long ago and far away as we read them (- as you MUST read them - John would have no trouble quickly adding, as a human might quickly command a sitting dog to "Sit!", though not necessarily intending the ironic ambiguity of his imperative command)?

An approximate insider to this verse will humbly add this kind of footnote:

"11. And the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his fellow. These two idioms for direct communication cannot be literally true because the burden of what follows in this chapter is that no man, not even Moses, can see God's face. The hyperbole is in all likelihood a continuation of the visual perspective of the people so clearly marked in verses 8-10; as it appears to the Israelites from their vantage point in front of their tents, Moses conversing with the pillar of cloud is speaking to God as a man speaks to his fellow.

Joshua son of Nun, a lad. . . . the Hebrew na'ar here reflects its not infrequent sense of someone in a subaltern position. . . ." (page 503)

The near insider who writes such a note is Robert Alter, a Jewish translator of and commenter on The Five Books of Moses. There are plenty of places where Alter finds a translation more compelling than the traditional (i.e., closest to the "original") text. For example, in one note, he adds:

"The [Hebrew] Masoretic Text is not really intelligible at this point, and this English version [i.e., the English of Alter] follows the Septuagint [Greek translation] for the first part of the verse, which has the double virtue of coherence and of resembling several similar parallel locutions elsewhere in biblical poetry." (page 289)

Now, I do recognize that many Jews have trouble with the Septuagint principally because it's a translation of the Hebrew. For instance, former blogger Iyov (whom some of us miss very much for, among other things, reminding us of our goyish perspectives on things Jewish) once started a post this way:

"Biblical translations are often a cause for great sorrow. Famously, the Rabbis compared the completion of the Septuagint to the making of the Golden Calf (see minor Talmudic tractates, Sefer Torah and Soferim. The Talmudic view speaks only of the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, since other books of Tanach in Greek are not considered to be the Septuagint, see the Letter of Aristeas, or Megilla 9A. The latter reference is particularly interesting since it enumerates many flaws in the Septuagint.) Soferim 1:5 explicitly declares, 'The Torah cannot be perfectly translated.'

Indeed, the Septuagint as we have it today goes to great length to point out that translations are not to be relied upon -- thus we read in the prologue to Sirachus (Ben Sira):

'What was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this book, but even the Law itself, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.' (NRSV)"

I'm not really trying to go back and forth between disputing practices or views. However, I do want to get back to those Hebrew words at the top of this post. And, I'd like us to consider them and how they open up translating. Alter reads them as "hyperbole." And he rushes us readers (whoever we are) forward to Exodus 33:23, which he in part translates and comments on as follows:

"23. you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely natural for ancient monotheists: this God had, or at least could assume, a concrete manifestation which had front and rear, face and back, and that face man was forbidden to see. But such concreteness does not imply conceptual naïveté. Through it the Hebrew writer suggests and idea that makes good sense from later theological perspectives: that God's intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes--His 'goodness,' the directional pitch of His ethical intentions, the afterglow of the effulgence of His presence--can be glimpsed by humankind."

Never mind that Alter can't seem to restrain himself from using words like "effulgence" or from the merely male sense of God and humanity made, male and female, in the divine likeness. Alter has to imagine not only the Hebrew words of Moses but also his translation - Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his fellow - as hyperbole. The original language, like its translation, must be hyperbole: "These two idioms for direct communication cannot be literally true because the burden of what follows in this chapter is that no man, not even Moses, can see God's face."

What the Hebrew words focus on is how יהוה spoke with משה. When Moses or his narrator wrote this in Hebrew, there was immediately a transposition. But more there was a rendering. What, really, is the original?

Once we allow that it's not just Joshua or the other Israelites watching who are getting these words in translation, then Pandora's box has opened. Why can't the Jews back in Egypt (Alexandria, Egypt, that is), why can't they translate as beautifully the fine grain of this speaking?

And they do. The original Jewish rendering of their Hebrew into their Greek as Exodus 33:11 goes something like this:

καὶ ἐλάλησεν κύριος
πρὸς Μωυσῆν ἐνώπιος ἐνωπίῳ
ὡς εἴ τις λαλήσει
πρὸς τὸν ἑαυτοῦ φίλον
καὶ ἀπελύετο
εἰς τὴν παρεμβολήν
ὁ δὲ θεράπων
Ἰησοῦς υἱὸς Ναυη
νέος
οὐκ ἐξεπορεύετο
ἐκ τῆς σκηνῆς

(Brenton makes that into English as this:

"And the Lord spoke
to Moses face to face,
as if one should speak
to his friend;
and he retired
into the camp:
but his servant
Joshua the son of Naue,
a young man,
departed not forth
from the tabernacle.")

What is incredibly important here in this Torah translating is that the translators aren't just rendering the unspeakable יהוה as κύριος but, rather, that neither the Hebrew nor the Jewish Greek fills in the silences. (Anne Carson won't fill in Homer's μῶλυ, his "language of the gods," either.) The outsiders, the lurkers and eavesdroppers, are left to do all that.

What is incredibly important here in this Torah translating is that the translators aren't just avoiding words with rhetorical erotical political correctness. (Although they do plenty of that).

What is incredibly important to me is the word φίλον instead of πλησίον. Suzanne McCarthy's already noted that the latter doesn't have to mean "neighbor" as in Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. And she's added that it can mean "mate," "companion," and "fellow human."

The LXX translators rather consistently translate the Hebrew word רע (rea`) as πλησίον. Alter consistently translates the Hebrew word as "his fellow" and as "fellow man."

But here is φίλον. It's as familiar, as intimate, as a Greek kiss. And is equally as womanly as manly. Not suitable, in fact, only for "fellow men."

Listen to Plato's tenth muse, the lyric poet Sappho (as translated by Edwin Marion Cox):

she speaks of Helen's "dear parents"

[φίλ]ων το[κ]ήων

parents from whom Helen "was led astray
by love,"

παράγαγ᾽ αὔταν
πῆλε φίλει]σαν,

And to a man, perhaps a handsome man,
perhaps her dear brother, she says

"Face me, my dear one...
and unveil the grace in thine eyes."

Στᾶθι κἄντα φίλος,....
καὶ τὰν ἔπ᾽ ὄσσοις ἀμπέτασον χάριν.

She declares,
"Lato [the mother of Apollo and Artemis]
and Niobe [the Theban woman murdered by Apollo and Artemis]
were most dear friends."

Λάτω
καὶ Νιόβα
μάλα μὲν φίλαι ἦσαν ἔταιραι

And she wonders,
and offers:

"For if thou lovest us,
choose another and a younger spouse,
for I will not endure to live with thee,
old woman with young man."

᾽Αλλ᾽ ἔων φίλος ἄμμιν [ἄλλο]
λέχος ἄρνυσω νεώτερον
οὐ γὰρ τλάσομ᾽ ἔγω ξυνοίκην
νεῳ γ᾽ ἔσσα γεραιτερα.

She expresses longings:

"I love refinement and for me Love has the splendour and beauty of the sun."

Ἕγω δὲ φίλημ᾽ ἀβροσύναν, καὶ μοι τὸ λάμπρον
ἔρος ἀελίω καὶ τὸ κάλον λέλογχεν

She asks him, the beloved betrothed:

"To what may I liken thee, dear bridegroom?"

Τίῳ, σ᾽, ὦ φίλε γάμβρε, κάλως ἔικάσω;

And in her Hymn to Aphrodite, there are these three last(ing) stanzas, a reply from the goddess about another lover (with Anne Carson translating):

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.

κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι
μαινόλᾳ θύμῳ, τίνα δηὖτε πείθω
μαῖς ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα τίς τ, ὦ
Πσάπφ᾽, ἀδίκηει;

καὶ γάρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ ἀλλά δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει ταχέως φιλήσει,
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.

ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλεπᾶν δὲ λῦσον
ἐκ μερίμναν ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι
θῦμος ἰμμέρρει τέλεσον, σὐ δ᾽ αὔτα
σύμμαχος ἔσσο

So there's God speaking, the one with the unspeakable name, the invisible one appearing, to Moses. We overhear, eavesdropping. We look from a distance, lurking. The translation Moses leaves them is רע rea` - as an intimate familiar lover. The grain is not any less refined for the inexpert readers, hearing φίλον.

We might call this as much "interlation" as "translation." We might "know" it as much as an "untranslating," the way Ruth Behar's editor declares (in English only): "Ruth's classic ethnography, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story, has just been untranslated into Spanish as Cuéntame algo aunque sea una mentira: Las historias de la comadre Esperanza with Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico."

In either translating (whether Hebrew or Hellene), the "knowing" may not necessarily be "understanding" - but is nonetheless a profound and a profoundly close "knowing" of those who love.

Somebody Else's Reading: So Don't Panic

2009-06-03T16:21:00.004-05:00

I hope to come back to the translated text called Septuagint soon. This post is just to reassure us that we're not alone, that other people actually read this stuff.

The "don't panic" logo above is from Kevutim, the writings of James R. Getz, Jr. and his Biblical Studies Carnival XLII. If you've stumbled upon this blog but not yet upon his, you might want to hear what the conversation about this blog has been. Here's more than you want to read (and you might find other responses at my other blog, which Getz ignores so I will too):

In Hebrew Bible, J. K. Gayle of The WOMBman’s Bible translated LXX Num 5.11-31 and compared the water ordeal of the sotah to waterboarding. John Hobbins responded that it is important for feminist interpreters “to respect the alterity of the texts” for those to whom the Bible is their “light, mirror, and compass,” if their interpretations are to gain an wider audience. Julia M. O’Brien’s post The F-word the P-word and bell hooks, though independent of the foregoing discussion might nonetheless be relevant. Steering clear of all such discussions, Douglass Mangum of Biblia Hebraic posted on the message of Malachi. Dr Claude Mariottini posted on the question of Who Was King Lemuel?

PS: and for the past few months here have been other, sometimes kinder, comments:

I’m dying for a translation of God’s fiery words that commits a violent work of art! I can’t even understand a blog like WombMan’s Bible (http://wombmansbible.blogspot.com/), but as I taste the issues in passing he makes me want to cry. I’ll gladly struggle through awkward phrasings and heavy-handed restructurings if someone will give me the passion.
--from codepoke

I have almost almost given up writing about translation because there has been little to stimulate new thoughts and approaches. Mostly rehashing the same old thing. But here is a new blog called The WOMBman's Bible. In this post, there are several very striking observations about worldplay in the Greek translation of the first few chapters of Genesis.
--from Suzanne's Bookshelf with a nice comment also from Jane Stranz.

Also returning is J.K. Gayle, on The WOMBman’s Bible (looking at those wacky Greek translations of the Jewish scriptures) and Aristotle’s Feminist Subject (looking at many things, but always looking at them a little askew).
--from those kind reporters of the Top Bibliobloggers
who had noticed when I'd returned to blogging (after a hiatus) for all kinds of wacky reasons.

Lest We Cared What She'd Say

2009-06-03T12:01:00.005-05:00

Today the Sotah ritual is long gone. A spouse who suspects infidelity has different resources at her or his disposal. But I think this week's Torah portion hints at emotional truths that still resonate even so. Maybe the story of the Sotah can help us face jealousy's capacity to damage our relationships, and can give us insight into the necessary journey (both personal and partnered) between accusation and resolution.
--Rachel Barenblat, Velveteen Rabbi, "Bread and bitter water (Radical Torah repost)"

As men make and execute the laws, prescribe and administer the punishment, "trials by a jury or ordeal" for women though seemingly fair, are never based on principles of equity. The one remarkable fact in all these social transgressions in the early periods as well as in our modern civilization is that the penalties whether moral or material all fall on woman. Verily the darkest page in human history is the slavery of women!
--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective

Numbers 5: It is written, It's the law (but, Oh dear, what if that were something else?)

2009-05-28T16:27:00.011-05:00

.
Here below, I've continued translating Numbers 5. And have gotten to The End.

When you go there, do notice the Greek "It is written, It is the Law" in verses 23, 29. See the formation of canon ספר cepher כתב kathab - the poetic antistrophe of γράψει [εἰς] βιβλίον grapsei eis Biblion - The justice of Scripture - with the poetic justice of translation. Hear תורה Torah as πάντα τὸν νόμον panta ton nomon - The comprehensive Rule of Law. Period.

And when you get there, you'll also see I've substituted Brenton's and Flint's fine English translations (of the Jews' Greek translating of the Hebrew) for more translating (from their Greek into my English) by me. Oh dear. Dear me, it's some flipped perspective, the Bible as mirror (or light or compass, my friends).

On your way there, would you please also do something else? Maybe something even more important than getting with finality to The End? Would you read of women who write differently?

Would you read Helene Cixous replying and Michelle Baliff asking something (in Baliff's "Re/Dressing Histories; Or, On Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze," Rhetoric Society Quarterly, v22 n1 p91-98)? In part, she says:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle.... Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves.... But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What... if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? .... What if Truth were a Woman... what then? Cixous replies, Then all stories would have to be told differently....

And would you read Rachel Barenblat making women count before Numbers 5? Here's her poem:

HEAD BY HEAD (BAMIDBAR)

Take a census
family by family
listing the names
every female, head by head

record them in their groups
all those in the community
who can weave wool
and spin tales

do this with women
alongside you, each one
the recognized head
of her ancestral house

count each girl and woman
able to plant seed
and nurture new growth
to turn grain into bread

each one who can teach
the ways of her mothers
imagine if our Torah said this
how different our story would be

Now The End.

Numbers 5: Sexist Waterboarding

2009-05-13T17:01:00.004-05:00

Below is my feminist rhetorical translating of a few paragraphs of the Jewish translation of Hebrew scriptures into Hellene. I'm trying to draw attention to several things:

that the Jews rendering their holy scriptures into Greek have been playful, have taken advantage of the Homeric paradigm (which contrasts greatly to Plato's idealism - which Noam Chomsky uses for "Language" and which Eugene Nida uses for "dynamic equivalence" translation; the Homer style of language also contrasts greatly with Aristotle's binary - which Chomsky uses for "language features" and which Ernst-August Gutt uses for "Relevance Theory")
that the Jewish Greek allows much play in English (and by word play I mean both interpretive wiggle room and playfulness).
that the text's painful sexism doesn't need either to marginalize the body of the woman (the wife suspected and accused by her husband of unfaithfulness) or to leave the Male roles in the passage un-marked, as if they were the central and default and natural roles.
that this is the Bible (the book that so many in Western culture appropriate so selectively when justifying the silencing of women and the kinds of things they must cover their bodies and their head with and when they can speak and when they must disrobe for men.)

You'll likely find other things in the translatings (both the Greek of the Hebrew and my English of the Greek). And do notice the Greek please, even if you think you don't "know" it. I've formatted and color coded and highlighted and bolded some of the Greek text. You should be able, then, to track the interlation - the translating back and forth - between Hellene and English. It's literary, it's oral-visual, it's sensory. And why wouldn't a text dealing with bodies and sex be?

For other things to notice, for more contrasts, I've included both Brenton's and Flint's translations again [Flint's with his footnotes right in the text for you].

I'd be absolutely thrilled if you'd like to make a comment or two. But then these sorts of sordid, torturous texts (about waterboarding-like sexism in the bible) are not always the things we talk about, are they?

Numbers 5: Men talk

2009-04-25T12:44:00.005-05:00

I said in the previous post that I'd offer commentary on the translation of the first four verses of Numbers 5. What I started then and continue below is a rephrasing in English that shows some of the sexism in the Greek words in other contexts. It's word play on the order of Mary Daly's play with English, with gyn/ecology. Readers at first, especially reading Hebrew, may doubt that woman is put down in and by the text. After all, every culture, relative to itself, exists and thrives for reasons, for exigencies that sometimes make life difficult - more difficult especially for the outsider looking in. I'm not trying to pretend insiderness or objectivity, even with the Greek. So when the greek has a word for the idea of the camp of the sons and daughters of Israel in the desert outside of Egypt, then I'm interested in how that reads in Alexandria Egypt, back inside Egypt, when there's a military camp nearby by that same Greek name (men only in the army) - translated into English it can be something in rhetoric analogous to a parenthesis in writing. Parembole. But it's slightly phallic, isn't it this rigid insertion? Which makes us English and Western readers think of Freud and Oedipus and the like.

So when God speaks the second time to Moses, as below, he tells him to speak to the sons. Perhaps, this in Greek (and Hebrew) is inclusive, inclusive of the daughters as well. Perhaps. So I'm translating the Greek word usually translated "sins" as "messy misses" - in English - both to commit the classic meaning of a missed target in archery but also to enact a play on the words "mess" and "misses" and "Mrs." as in words that may easily collocate in a gynophobic society. There's more you may find there. I have color coded some of the words to show Greeky structure (and have taken away some of the accent marks and similar aids of punctuation). And you'll find Brenton's and Flint's translations also to compare (with my formatting of paragraphs as if to aid the comparisons). Hope it's more fun than tedious, more serious in a helpful way than pedantic.

Numbers 5 (translation): before it gets extremely sexist

2009-04-08T17:03:00.005-05:00

Below are the first four verses of Numbers 5, as translated into the imperial linguafranca, Greek, in the kingdom of Egypt established by Alexander the Great - a translation by Jews from their Hebrew (written by Moses outside of Egypt, as received from God in some language, maybe Egyptian, maybe Hebrew).

And the verses are further translated into English by three of us: Sir Lancelot Brenton, Peter W. Flint (for the NETS Septuagint), and me. I'll give more commentary later and elsewhere (which I'll link to here); let me just say this:

Before Numbers 5 gets into the really sexist part, these first four verses are not necessarily as benign to women and girls as they might seem. There are interesting differences between the Hebrew and the Greek, the latter bringing to light perhaps the phallogocentrism of the empire. My English works within the play in the words to show the possibilities of sexist language and attitudes of the text. That's enough for now. Here it is:

Numbers 5: ORDER!

2009-04-04T12:21:00.004-05:00

The first thing that Master says to Moses in Numbers 5 is this:

Πρόσταξον τοῖς υἱοῖς Ισραηλ

This is the Greek translation by Jews (in Egypt) of what Moses (once outside of Egypt) wrote that God (aka יהוה) told him. In Hebrew that's this:

צַו אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

As I'm re-viewing my first attempt at a word-play translating into English (of both the Greek and Hebrew), I'm struck by the first word of God. Does he really speak Hebrew to Moses? What if they're speaking Egyptian (Moses's "mother tongue") and Moses is just translating it צוה (tsavah) for the Jews in the desert?! What he must be getting exactly right -- as far as a literary or a dynamic equivalence goes -- is that this is God's command and his imperative to the sons (the offspring) of Isra El. So the sons of Israel in Alexandria Egypt render the word into Greek as an imperative command with a direct object (the sons of Isra El): Πρόσταξον.

Already there's wordplay. The word is reflexive. Its original audience becomes its speaker. Its original Speaker becomes an audience. Its original implied subject is a member of the direct audience. Its direct object becomes its subject. Its insiders become outsiders and vice versa. It's the stuff linguists spend hours on and sociolinguists speculate about and anthropologists fill ethnographies with and rhetoricians delight in. Theologians and lexicographers and etymologists and philologists pontificate about this stuff.

The thing that amazes me in the word is that it's tough to deny the wordplay. I don't care if you're Aristotle. I don't care if you have your orderly logic and your systematic syllogism well ordered. I don't care if you have written a scholarly treatise called Oieko-Nom-icks (Economics, or Household-Rules) in which masters and slaves and men and their womb-wives know their place. Just as soon as you try to lock down πρόσταξον, you find it escaping to all sorts of unintended places.

For example, πρόσταξον broadens out from the Hebrew word (meaning more "command") and ambiguously suggests a different kind of "order," an ordering of sorts. So, in Greek, it's hardly just "the giving of an order" but it's also "the very putting to order," or "arranging according to an order" that is suggested.

And alongside ὑποτάσσεσθε, another imperative, it reintroduces class and gender. When one reads Numbers 5 in Greek alongside Ephesians 5 in Greek, then one sees the ordering of social rank by social position and by sex. The sons of Isra El are ordered. Their women-wives have a different rank. And the now-free sons of Isra El, now free from slavery in Egypt, may actually enslave women and men. The social order must be explicit. Men over women-wives, and Masters over slaves. The lower are commanded, are ordered, by ὑποτάσσεσθε.

John Chrysostom, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, sees that both words (with his third one, σύστασιν) are important when passing through Ephesians 5 and coming to Ephesians 6. Otherwise, there is no order. Chrysostom writes (commenting on verses 5-8 of chapter 6) to give household rules (reminiscent of Aristotle's):

Ὥστε οὐκ ἀνὴρ μόνον, οὔτε γυνὴ, οὔτε παιδία, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἰκετῶν ἀρετὴ συντελεῖ εἰς σύστασιν καὶ πρόστασιν οἰκίας. Διὰ τοῦτο ὁ μακάριος Παῦλος οὐδὲ τούτου τοῦ μέρους ἠμέλησεν· ἀλλ’ ἔρχεται μὲν ἔσχατον ἐπ’ αὐτὸ, ἐπειδὴ καὶ ἔσχατον κεῖται τῷ ἀξιώματι. . . .

"Οἱ δοῦλοι," φησὶν, "ὑπακούετε τοῖς κυρίοις κατὰ σάρκα."

Εὐθέως τὴν λελυπημένην ἀνέστησε ψυχὴν, εὐθέως παρεμυθήσατο. Μὴ ἄλγει,
φησὶν, ὅτι ἔλαττον ἔχεις καὶ τῆς γυναικὸς, καὶ τῶν παίδων· ὄνομα δουλείας ἐστὶ μόνον· κατὰ σάρκα ἐστὶν ἡ δεσποτεία, πρόσκαιρος καὶ βραχεῖα· ὅπερ γὰρ ἂν ἦ σαρκικὸν, ἐπίκηρόν ἐστι.

"Μετὰ φόβου," φησὶ, "καὶ τρόμου."

Ὁρᾷς ὅτι οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν ἀπαιτεῖ παρὰ γυναικὸς καὶ δούλων φόβον; Ἐκεῖ μὲν γὰρ ἁπλῶς εἶπεν·

"Ἡ δὲ γυνὴ, ἵνα φοβῆται τὸν ἄνδρα·"

ἐνταῦθα δὲ μετ’ ἐπιτάσεως,

"Μετὰ φόβου," φησὶ, "καὶ τρόμου. Ἐν ἁπλότητι τῆς καρδίας ὑμῶν, ὡς τῷ Χριστῷ."

Συνεχῶς τοῦτό φησι. Τί λέγεις, ὦ μακάριε Παῦλε; ἀδελφός ἐστι, τῶν αὐτῶν ἀπέλαυσεν, εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ σῶμα τελεῖ· μᾶλλον δὲ ἀδελφὸς ἐγένετο οὐ τοῦ κυρίου τοῦ ἑαυτοῦ, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦ Υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ, τῶν αὐτῶν ἀπολαύει πάντων, καὶ λέγεις,

"Ὑπακούετε τοῖς κατὰ σάρκα κυρίοις μετὰ φόβου καὶ τρόμου;"

Διὰ γὰρ τοῦτο, φησὶ, φημί. Εἰ γὰρ τοὺς ἐλευθέρους ἀλλήλοις ὑποτάσσεσθαι κελεύω διὰ τὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ φόβον, καθάπερ ἀνωτέρω ἔλεγεν·

"Ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Θεοῦ·"

εἰ γὰρ τὴν γυναῖκα προστάσσω φοβεῖσθαι τὸν ἄνδρα, καίτοι αὕτη καὶ ὁμότιμός ἐστι· πολλῷ μᾶλλον τὸν οἰκέτην. Οὐ γὰρ δυσγένεια τὸ πρᾶγμά ἐστιν, ἀλλ’ ἡ πρώτη εὐγένεια, τὸ εἰδέναι ἐλαττοῦσθαι, καὶ μετριάζειν, καὶ εἴκειν τῷ πλησίον. Καὶ ἐλεύθεροι ἐλευθέροις μετὰ πολλοῦ φόβου καὶ τρόμου ἐδούλευον.

Thus then it is not husband only, nor wife, nor children, but virtuous [slave] servants also that contribute to the [ordered] organization and [ordered] protection of a house. Therefore the blessed Paul has not overlooked this department even. He comes to it, however, in the last place, because it is last in dignity and rank. . . .

“S[lave s]ervants,” saith he, “be obedient to them that, according to the flesh, are your masters.”

Thus at once he raises up, at once soothes the wounded soul. Be not grieved, he seems to say, that you are inferior to the wife and the children. Slavery is nothing but a name. The mastership is “according to the flesh,” brief and temporary; for whatever is of the flesh is the flesh, is transitory.

“With fear,” he adds, “and trembling.”

Thou seest that he does not require the same fear from slaves as from wives: for in that case he simply said,

“and let the wife see that she fear her husband”;

whereas in this case he heightens the expression,

“with fear,” he saith, “and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”

This is what he constantly says. What meanest thou, blessed Paul? He is a brother, or rather he has become a brother, he enjoys the same privileges, he belongs to the same body. Yea, more, he is the brother, not of his own master only, but also of the Son of God, he is partaker of all the same privileges; yet sayest thou,

“obey your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling”?

Yes, for this very reason, he would say, I say it. For if I charge free men to submit themselves one to another in the fear of God,—as he said above,

“submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ”;

—if I charge moreover the wife to fear and reverence her husband, although she is his equal; much more must I so speak to the [slave] servant. It is no sign of low birth, rather it is the truest nobility, to understand how to lower ourselves, to be modest and unassuming, and to give way to our neighbor. And the free have served the free with much fear and trembling.

[--Philip Schaff translating, with my bolding and formatting to show correspondences]

Now, just to summarize. Translation by insiders, such as the Jews in Egypt using the lingua franca of the Greek empire for the Hebrew of Jews outside of Egypt using Hebrew for the words of God and the Egyptians, can open things up. If Aristotle, or Paul, or John Chrysostom, or Moses, or God, or any of us, would suggest a word can Order in an invariable way one human over another, then think again. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is exploded by words. The "necessary" binary, the A and NOT A, the A is over B, the algebra -- all exploded by words, by translation, by the polysemous dimensions of rhetorics and feminisms. A word, a necessary translation, opens up meanings in freeing ways. Words, because of humans and their Creator, actually allow word play. This is playfulness and also wiggle room - wordplay, ambiguity. And this play allows an ordering, but a re-ordering, a Πρόσ-ταξον.

Numbers 5: first try at a wordplay for wordplay translation

2009-03-19T15:39:00.005-05:00

Below, I think you can just click on the image of a page to enlarge and read it. It's my first try at a wordplay for wordplay translation of Numbers 5. I'm working from both a Hebrew (masoret) text and a Hellene (Greek Septuagint) text, following the latter primarily.

The goal is to have an English text I can work with as I comment on "Numbers 5" over at Aristotle's Feminist Subject (another blog of mine). I started a series of commentary there but need a more focused reference. (The first post just mentioned a one-word wordplay that I'll come back to now - the post? "Like Waterboarding for Chocolate"). I've been looking at Julia Smith's and Robert Alter's more literal translations of the Hebrew and Lancelot Brenton's and Peter Flint's more or less literal translations of the Greek.

The only thing by way of commentary here I should note is that I've [CAPPED AND PUT IN BRACKETS] any translation of the wordplay of Hebrew. The rest is my translating of the Septuagint translators' translating of some Hebrew (whether it's the masoretic text show or some other).

Mothers of Moses

2009-01-23T09:01:00.015-06:00

First, read Suzanne's post. Now you know how what's she's saying there has prompted me to say something more here. (No, I'm not blogging any more; just today).

See how Suzanne gets to the importance of gendered language? The insertion of male-only metaphors closes down a text and the translation of that text. Pay attention to the ironic examples she gives from one text of Creation (aka Sefer Yetsira or ספר יצירה) and from another text of Creation (aka Sefer Ma'aseh Be-Réshit or בְּרֵאשִׁית and Genesis or Γένεσις). The examples are ironic when the "creation" text uses "tongue" only (but not "lips"), so un-creatively, so de-creatively. Allowing men only to translate (in masculinist ways, or by abstract phallogocentric methods alone) kills creation. Suzanne starts by showing the womanly translation of Julia Smith, who (she says in her next post) is one of "the heroes of transparency and word for word translation. . . [with] a sense of the sound and flow of the language. . . not just translating meaning, but metaphor and imagery, alliteration and assonance." (Notice how Smith is not the only one who so heroically translates. Suzanne names two men as such heroic translators as well).

Womanly translation, which is like the "écriture féminine" espoused by Hélène Cixious, is plural. And is inclusive, of not only male but also female genders. Nancy Mairs describes such as "feminine discourse," as "not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy." Just to be clear, Aristotle, the father of masculinist language (i.e., Greek male-only logic), observed females in nature as the opposite of males. Biologically, the procreative organs and genitals of females are, Aristotle says, both the counterpart to and the inverse of the male procreative genital. He adds that females are inferior to males, are actually opposite and botched mutilations of males. Thus, the very vocalized sounds of females are inferior to male voices. Females in opposition to males, according to Aristotle, are "directly translational." But Mairs shows that one example of feminine discourse (as translational and plural as such can be) actually "blows to smithereens" the dominant male-only example of a "cultural paradigm" in the West (i.e., the Baconian "essay" not the Montaignian "essais"); Mairs's speaks of the richness of Alice Walker's personal, bodily, inclusive translation or reworking of the essay.

I suppose the previous paragraph will run off all readers who have little tolerance for anything feminist. And yet, Suzanne's post moves me forward to talk about what the text we've come to know as Exodus includes.

There are two things I want to discuss here.

One, do you notice how the name Moses comes from a woman, an Egyptian female? How she bends down and pulls the little baby out of the Nile River? And she says, "Let's call him Pulled Out"? And how she's speaking Egyptian, of course!? But how the Hebrew translators of her words put them in, well, in Hebrew, of course!? Or is the ambiguous claim of the "original" Hebrew text that "she" is the "sister" of the one pulled out of the Nile by the Egyptian daughter? Look for yourself! Listen to the wordplay:

וַיִגְדַּל הַיֶּלֶד וַתְּבִאֵהוּ לְבַת־פַּרְעֹה וַיְהִי־לָהּ לְבֵן וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמֹו מֹשֶׁה וַתֹּאמֶר כִּי מִן־הַמַּיִם מְשִׁיתִהוּ׃

משה (Mosheh aka "Moses")
משה (mashah aka "draw out")
מים (mayim aka "[from] water(s)")

There are the bi-labial sounds of אם ('em), the universal cry for "ma" for "ma ma" for "mother." These are the first sounds on the lips of Moses, the baby, as his mother nurses him. Two lips are needed, for the nursing, for the creative, voiced name "Ma" and אם ('--m).

And the Egyptian daughter understands the sounds so well.

Two, I want to look at how Exodus 2 further disrupts the male-only line (i.e., the masculine genealogy, the patriarchy) of these Hebrews. Notice how the mother of Moses, the biological mother, is an unnamed daughter. This is significant. She is only named in reference to the "son" of Israel named Levi, and to one of the "sons" of this "son" named Levi. HE is איש ('iysh). But she is not named as his opposite, as coming from "man" (i.e., she's not called in this text אשה ['ishshah]). And she is not called a womb-man by the Jewish men translating the Hebrew into Greek (i.e., she is not translated as ἡ γυνὴ). Nonetheless, as we keep reading in both Hebrew and in Hellene, she is a mother, the mother who conceives and bears and hides the one to be called Moses [i.e., the One Pulled out by a mother who gives him back to his mother from whom he's pulled out, from whose breasts he nurses, whom he first and also calls אם ('--m, or "ma").

Remember how this same Moses later complains, in Hebrew, not only, "I being heavy of mouth, and heavy of tongue" but also "I of uncircumcised lips"?! (See Exodus 4:10 but then 6:12). Both the tongue and (for this man Moses) the lips are impediments to pulling the people out of slavery under a dominant man (i.e. Pharaoh) in Egypt.

This patriarchy of males cannot do without girls, without daughters, without mothers. And these girls and mothers and daughters are translational. They are equal with boys, with sons, with fathers, in the image of the god (i.e. of God) who created both genders. ("Let us create. . . boy and girl he created them"). I'm using "girl" and "sister" and "mother" as I write in English because they are gendered terms not dependent on some opposite. They are not like "female" which depends on "male" and "woman" which depends on "man." Equality, in originality, in creativity, in the Beginning, does not classify one sex as secondary to or as below the other sex. Don't misunderstand what I'm trying to say: female and woman are good English words--but they are terms that are marked as aberrant forms of their unmarked (i.e., default) male and man counterparts.

The story teller of what we know as Exodus 2 seems to get the disruption of the Hebrew patriarchy by girls, by mothers, by daughters not only of Hebrews but also of Egyptians. The translators translating in Egypt, using Homeric Hellene for their Hebrew, seem to get this too.

So let's focus now on just one "verse" of Exodus 2. We hear in verse 3 some of the most incredible echos of mothers desperate to protect and to preserve their progeny. Look and listen:

Here's the Hebrew.

וְלֹא־יָכְלָה עֹוד הַצְּפִינֹו וַתִּקַּח־לֹו תֵּבַת גֹּמֶא וַתַּחְמְרָה בַחֵמָר וּבַזָּפֶת וַתָּשֶׂם בָּהּ אֶת־הַיֶּלֶד וַתָּשֶׂם בַּסּוּף עַל־שְׂפַת הַיְאֹר׃

Now here's Julia Smith's English.

"And she will not be able any more to hide him, and she will take for him an ark of bulrush, and will pitch it with bitumen and with pitch, and she will put in it the child, and will put in the sedge by the lip of the river."

Do you see and hear? There's the return to Babel (i.e., "pitch it with bitumen and with pitch"), the repetition of "lip" (as is heard in the originally story of Babel). Now in Exodus, the Hebrew and the English, of the original story teller and of the translator, give this to readers. Why? What's so important about the re-collection of "bitumen" and "pitch"? It's what humans used to try to build a city state and a tower to get to the god (i.e., God). Now a mother is using the same materials to try to get her baby away from the man who would kill Hebrew males only. What's so important about the "lip" metaphor, instead of say a "bank" for the river? Some will say that a gendered reading of "lip" here as feminine discourse is "reading into the text." But why not another Hebrew metaphor, why not another English word? Don't these suggest other possibilities for a male only text? Don't they (allow us, boy and girl, to) disrupt the patriarchy? Isn't the disallowing of "lip" more than a "loss in translation"? Isn't the refusal to use "lip" (as an ambiguous, opened-up metaphor) an enactment of masculinist (i.e., phallogocentric) translation, in which the usually-male translator gets on his high horse and decides that "lip" is not "fit" for the nature of his "natural" English? Isn't "field-testing" (again in a "male" dominant select group of "native speakers") just a smoke screen for excluding the possibilities of alternative interpretations?

So let's turn to the Hellene translation by the Hebrews living in Egypt (and immediately then to Lancelot Brenton's and Larry Perkins's respective English "translations" of the Greek).

ἐπεὶ δὲ οὐκ ἠδύναντο αὐτὸ ἔτι κρύπτειν, ἔλαβεν αὐτῷ ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ θῖβιν καὶ κατέχρισεν αὐτὴν ἀσφαλτοπίσσῃ καὶ ἐνέβαλεν τὸ παιδίον εἰς αὐτὴν καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὴν εἰς τὸ ἕλος παρὰ τὸν ποταμόν.

"And when they could no longer hide him, his mother took for him an ark, and besmeared it with bitumen, and cast the child into it, and put it in the ooze by the river." - Brenton

"But when they could hide it no longer, its mother took a basket and plastered it with a mixture of pitch and tar, and she put the child in it and placed it in the marsh beside the river." - Perkins

What do you see? Or, rather, what do you neither see nor hear in the Greek? No "lip" of the river where the one (Hebrew) mother of Moses hides him to be delivered out of the river by the other (Egyptian) mother of Moses. This "delivery" by the translators using Greek fails to convey all that it does by the story teller using Hebrew, using "lip."

Suzanne has already noted something similar earlier in the Greek-translated Hebrew text:

"But the Greeks [i.e., the males reading and translating in Greek] would have none of that. The translators of the Septuagint could not write that Moses was of 'uncircumcised lips.' They clearly found this kind of formal equivalence to be impossible and refused to accept such a foreign notion in this case. In Greek the ears could literally be 'uncircumcised' and the heart, as well. This leads me to believe that the Greek translators did, indeed, associate the 'lips' with the female pudenda, and deliberately rejected the possibility that 'lips' could be circumcised."

So the translators are translating in a way that robs the text of feminine gender with respect to the female body in metaphor (i.e., a conception of and a carrying of meanings to full term towards the birth of new meanings, as in the playful name of Moses). The Hebrew senses are lost in translation into Greek.

And yet, there is something found in the Greek that's not in Hebrew. What's found is found in the Hellene feminine again. Did you see it?

I'm talking about the verb, κατέχρισεν (kate-chris-en). Brenton only puts that in English as "besmeared"; and Perkins only as "plastered."

Perhaps the English translators of the Greek (i.e., Brenton and Perkins) are looking not at the Greek but at the Hebrew: חמר (chamar). Most English translators have made this Hebrew something like "daubed" or "covered." Most have, that is, in this context only. In every other context, the English translators of the Hebrew tend translate this Hebrew word negatively. For instance, in Job 16:16, weeping "fouled" [not "covered" or "daubed" or "plastered"] his face; in Lamentations 1:20 and 2:11, bowels are "troubled" [not "covered"]; in Psalms 46:3, it's water that is "troubled" and in Psalms 75:8, it's wine that is made "red" and bad.

Is such negativity what the Greek translators are after in Exodus 2:3 by rendering חמר (chamar) as κατέχρισεν (kate-chris-en)?

Yes, I think these translators in Egypt recognize how troubling the Hebrew word. And so they turn to a troubling context in Greek: the agency of women and their washings and anointings. Four times in Homer's Odus-ssey (the proto Ex-Odus) there are these lines:

τὰρ ἐπεὶ λοῦσέν τε καὶ ἔχρισεν λίπ’ ἐλαίῳ,
ἀμφὶ δέ μιν φᾶρος καλὸν βάλεν ἠδὲ χιτῶνα,

First, beautiful Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor Neleides, is bathing Telemachus. "Then after she bathes him she slathers oil on him; and she wraps him in a well-formed coat and tunic" (in Book 3, lines 466-467). Second, Telemachus (again) and (this time) with Nestor's son get the exact same treatment from the slave women (in Book 10 lines 364). Third, Circe bathes and oils up and clothes the buddies of Odysseus (Book 10 continued).

Fourth, but earlier in the story, Helen herself, "born of Zeus," is the one speaking. She's borrowed helpful potions from an Egyptian woman, Thonus' wife Polydamna. And here she uses them. (See translator-scholar Suzanne Jill Lavine's comment on potions, on the pun of pharmakon.) Yes, here's a Greek heroine getting help from an Egyptian heroine. Helen then tells of bathing Odysseus, the one journeying on the Way, and it is he, this central Greek hero of the story, whom she ἔχρισεν has anointed with oil. (Book 4, lines 252-253)

The translators of Hebrew Ex-Odus into Greek are surely aware of Homer and the Odus-ssey. It seems the story of Moses being pulled out of the Egyptian river by an Egyptian daughter in some ways reminds them of the story of Odysseus and his Wayfaring. In particular, they remember the Greek verb ἔχρισεν (e-chris-en) as they look to translate the consistently troubling Hebrew verb חמר (chamar). No doubt they remember also the logic of female pollution, according to some Greek men; for example, Hesiod warns, "Let a man not clean his skin in water that a woman has washed in. For a hard penalty follows on that for a long time." (Op. 753-55). In Exodus 2:3, there's a group of daughters, Egyptians too, who bathe in the river and gather at it's lip. A daughter of Levi who couples with a son of Levi finds herself putting a circumcised Hebrew male baby down in this ooze (i.e., τὸ ἕλος, or helos).

Notice how ἕλος (or the troubled yucky female-polluted water for the Greek men) ambiguously plays on Hellene, on Helen. Notice how ἔχρισεν (e-chris-en) plays on Homer's women anointing men after their bathing them. Notice how apt this term for the Hebrew men translating their mother tongue without the lip into Hellene.

Notice how χρισ (Chris) is used later for משיח (mashiyach, aka Messiah aka "Christ"). The first "anointed" is the basket of Moses by the Hebrew mother in Egypt (translated in Egypt into Hellene). See and hear how meanings can be found (rather than lost) in translation.

---

One last little playful note. David creates these "psalms" he calls cyber psalms. Others now have been singing them aloud. Yesterday, I so badly wanted to translate Cyber Psalm 29 from his English into a Zimbabwe woman's Fanagalo. Alas, I only found Brazilian Portuguese available for our play with words. I know my friend studied his Portuguese in Portugal, and uses it even to teach in Mozambique, so I figured the American version was distant enough. There is play I say. "They bilk the bank," sings the psalmist in his original. And he adds, "They snatch the bread," to the same line. So she sings back with added alliteration and idiomatic idiom: "Eles pilhar porquinho de poupança. Eles pegam o pão." She's not a "native speaker" so he does note that her grammar is non-native. No, her lips speak Fanagalo, and perhaps some non-native English and a little Portuguese. Look, listen. (And call me crazy for overhearing all that. Bon voyage, friend. We're glad you're going to be blogging again.)

Some Parting Notes on Genesis & the Way Out

2009-01-12T12:36:00.006-06:00

Today, our spring semester began and, after getting everyone in class working away, I'm sitting down to leave my office today. In just a few minutes, the computer tech will arrive to install the latest version of the OS on this machine. I'm looking over the last of my highlights and handwritten notes on the Greek translation of Genesis by the Jews back in Egypt under the Greeks some two hundred and fifty years before the Greek new "covenant" was written. This is likely to be my last post, for several reasons I'll not enumerate. Don't know if I'll blog again. I do hope some of what is here has been in some small way helpful to someone. The comments each one of you has made here, or the encouragement some of you have given me at your own blogs, are profoundly valuable to me! I cherish the interactions, and I'm always amazed by what you see and what you say and how you say it!

Genesis 33
In Greek, the tricky Jacob says to his tricked brother Esau:

Ἵνα εὕρῃ ὁ παῖς σου χάριν ἐναντίον σου, κύριε.

"I [Jacob] your slave-child wanna find χάριν (favor, grace) when in front of ἐναντίον (in-against) you, master."

Notice he calls him "master" and himself "slave-child." Notice how the male translators have called men and the god "master" but only women and certain deprecated men "slave-children."

Notice also the χάρις (favor) thing. Notice how the male Christian bible translators have made this a god-only thing. But here a human, a male sibling, is requesting it be found from his brother.

Now, Dina, the daughter of Leah, in Genesis 34. I think the Hebrews describe her matrilineally because of the different mothers in their patriarchy. But without getting into any of that, we see that Shechem (in Greek translated in Egypt) suggests this "grace" or "favor" thing:

εἶπεν δὲ Συχεμ πρὸς τὸν πατέρα αὐτῆς καὶ πρὸς τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς αὐτῆς Εὕροιμι χάριν ἐναντίον ὑμῶν, καὶ ὃ ἐὰν εἴπητε, δώσομεν.

The reaction? They answer the offer of "grace" with "deception."

The sons of Jacob answer the men of Shechem with δόλου. Now δόλος is exactly what Homer's Odysseus answers the Cyclops with. It's scheming deceit. Odysseus kills the Cyclops with a searing stick in the eye, after he deceives him with word play. (Some English translators and their readers do get it). The sons of Jacob kill Shechem and his men with swords, after they deceive them with word play that gets them agreeing to having their grown goy groins circumcised. (This is before the god says to Jacob: ἔθνη καὶ συναγωγαὶ ἐθνῶν ἔσονται ἐκ σοῦ, καὶ βασιλεῖς ἐκ τῆς ὀσφύος σου ἐξελεύσονται. In Christian biblish, this is something like "for nations [or Gentiles] and gatherings of nations [or Gentiles] shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins.")

ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ, ὅτε ἦσαν ἐν τῷ πόνῳ,
(on the third day, that most significant day, when all pain is pressing), two of the sons of Jacob more than kill Shechem: in addition, they take all the womb-wives -- all the bodies -- and all the other property for themselves: καὶ πάντα τὰ σώματα αὐτῶν καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν ἀποσκευὴν αὐτῶν καὶ τὰς γυναῖκας αὐτῶν ᾐχμαλώτευσαν, καὶ διήρπασαν ὅσα τε ἦν ἐν τῇ πόλει καὶ ὅσα ἦν ἐν ταῖς οἰκίαις. They justified their actions because:

οἱ δὲ εἶπαν Ἀλλ' ὡσεὶ πόρνῃ χρήσωνται τῇ ἀδελφῇ ἡμῶν;
(they said, Will those foreigners treat our sister like a porn prostitute?

I don't have time to go on. But I do want to say that Genesis 35 begins the story of Joseph, who reminds Christian Bible translators (or he ought to remind them anyway) of another Joseph. The Christian Bible translators haven't seemed very reminded of Jacob, or his 12 sons, Ἦσαν δὲ οἱ υἱοὶ Ιακωβ δώδεκα -- especially when they've come to another Jacob. You know: "Jacob - of god and master Joshua salved - a slave, writing to the twelve tribes in the dispersion," or Ἰάκωβος - θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ - δοῦλος, ταῖς δώδεκα φυλαῖς ταῖς ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ.

In the Hebrew bible, translated into Hellene, the Jews agree that Ιακωβ δὲ ἠγάπα τὸν Ιωσηφ παρὰ πάντας τοὺς υἱοὺς αὐτοῦ, ὅτι υἱὸς γήρους ἦν αὐτῷ· In other words, Jacob loved Joseph (with that Godly Christian Agape Love) more than he loved his other sons, because he was the son of his old age. What hardly anyone stops to say is that there's absolutely no word of love from father Jacob for any daughter, no even one. The brothers are just jealous of the love for the brother for the father, and in Greek they can't say Shalom: ἰδόντες δὲ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ ὅτι αὐτὸν ὁ πατὴρ φιλεῖ ἐκ πάντων τῶν υἱῶν αὐτοῦ, ἐμίσησαν αὐτὸν καὶ οὐκ ἐδύναντο λαλεῖν αὐτῷ οὐδὲν εἰρηνικόν.

And translators, then, come to their first Judas: Ιουδας. If he were just in Hebrew, he'd remain Judah. But when Jesus comes along, then because of the tribe of Judah, he's Judah again, and the other Judas comes into play. These are plays on the word, Jew. Or in Martin Luther's and Adolf Hitler's bibles, the name is Judas . . . welcher ihn verriet.

So before they all go to Egypt the first time, this one Ιουδας treats his own daughter Θαμαρ (aka Tamar) as a πόρνην (aka a pornish prostitute), which she although a widow, pretended to be. Some angel of a messenger then comes by to tell him his daughter's been knocked up when playing the prostitute: Ἑγένετο δὲ μετὰ τρίμηνον ἀπηγγέλη τῷ Ιουδα λέγοντες Ἑκπεπόρνευκεν Θαμαρ ἡ νύμφη σου καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχει ἐκ πορνείας. He wants her burned. It's a real life parable. Play acting. Hypocrisy. All turned into facts. The scarlet thread of the prostitute Rahab comes back into the story. This is all before the Jew we call Matthew writes his genealogy of Joseph, that includes this Jacob and this Judas and this Tamar and that Rahab.

By Genesis 39, that Joseph is in Egypt, where the translators of his story into Greek are now. His master is an Egyptian, a man of course: κυρίῳ τῷ Αἰγυπτίῳ. But there's his master's womb-wife woman too: ἡ γυνὴ τοῦ κυρίου αὐτοῦ. He hangs out with her long enough that she starts saying, εἰσήγαγεν ἡμῖν παῖδα Εβραῖον ἐμπαίζειν ἡμῖν. Notice, for the very very first time, the Hellene bible has a Hebrew. Abram was a just a passer, Αβραμ τῷ περάτῃ, remember? Well, this Joseph is here to stay in Egypt, and the Jews in Egypt translating let him stay a Hebrew child-slave. Notice the other thing, what they say she says he does: ἐμπαίζειν. He's a sporter, an erotic player, she says (at least they say in Greek that that's what she says). And who would trust her, speaking Greek in Egypt, a woman no less?

The story plays on until the family comes together again and the father (Jacob) tells the story again at the end. At one point, he's sure to note:

παρὰ θεοῦ τοῦ πατρός σου,
καὶ ἐβοήθησέν σοι ὁ θεὸς ὁ ἐμὸς
καὶ εὐλόγησέν σε εὐλογίαν οὐρανοῦ ἄνωθεν
καὶ εὐλογίαν γῆς ἐχούσης πάντα·
ἕνεκεν εὐλογίας μαστῶν καὶ μήτρας,

from your god of fathers of your patrilineage,
the god's a woman-like help-meet to you, that one of mine,
he's stated a blessed statement on you from the sky above (where Jesus tells Nicodemus he had to be born from),
a blessed statement also from the birthing ground having all--
because of a blessed statement of breasts and also of mother.
(Genesis 49:25)

So I'm overtranslating the Greek into English as they overtranslated their Hebrew into their Greek, in Egypt all over again. The last chapter closes ἐν τῇ σορῷ ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ (in the coffin in Egypt).

But they waste no time. Just as the Jew named Luke translates the story of that later Joshua being translated on his way out, so these Jews in Alexandria Egypt translate the story of The Way Out.

Luke writes of Jesus's transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36), and he says (Luke 9:31) the Moses out of Egypt shows up to talk with Jesus about his "departure" from Jerusalem: οἳ ὀφθέντες ἐν δόξῃ ἔλεγον τὴν ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ ἣν ἤμελλεν πληροῦν ἐν Ἰερουσαλήμ. Of course, the Christian departure in Greek is The Way Out (ἔξοδος), as if Moses knows something about that.

Homer, and the Jews translating their own stories into Greek in the Homeric Tradition, also know something about The Way Out, or at least the Way-farer Odysseus's Ex-Odus-sey. I think the translators had no problem reading the Greek Odyssey side by side with the Hebrew Ex-Odys. And Luke has no problem writing of Joshua's and of Moses's and of Elijah's Jewish conversation in Greek. To read the one is to help translate the other. There is no Christian irony in it of opening the story up to the whole world but closing down the words to the world of Christians.

My own memory of Exodus is after my mother helped me read Odyssey. We read the Odyssey quite mutually when I was a little boy living in a war zone where father tended to be absent or worse abusive. But by the time the war was over, I was in puberty and into atheism and hedonism. Mother at the time made me read Exodus in RSV after Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments, a filmy transposition. I had no idea this story of Exodus, with its God and gods, was anything connected to the Greek of the Jews. And I thought men should be over women. It's taken a little more reading, in English, in Greek, and in Hebrew, to see how that all has needed translating.

Messengers of Wordplay

2009-01-12T06:38:00.002-06:00

The Jews translating Genesis 32 keep in the Hellene the intertextuality of the Hebrew. For example, in the first sentence and in a subsequent one, there's noun מלאך (mal'ak) repeated. In all of the "best" English translations, the repeated noun changes meaning because it seems English translators think the first applies to "God" while the second applies to "Jacob." Thus, we get this oddity in English:

"God's angels" or "the angels of God"
and then "Jacob sent messengers"

But Jewish translators make it as follows:

οἱ ἄγγελοι τοῦ θεοῦ
and then Ἀπέστειλεν δὲ Ιακωβ ἀγγέλους

Notice that all the English translators (whether the translators of KJV, the ESV, the NASB, the HCSV, the TNIV, the NLT, the Message) do not really translate the first מלאך (mal'ak) into English at all! Rather, these Christian bible translators "transliterate" the Jewish translators' Greek ἄγγελοι as "angels." This is something Aristotle would insist on. Do not translate from the Greek. No. Transliterate if you have to. Keep it in pure Hellene, even if only you must keep just the sounds. Let the word NOT be other than what it is in itself. Allow no inter-subjectivity, absolute no variance because of context. When it is τοῦ θεοῦ (i.e. of the god or Rather "of God"), then the Christian translators get as Aristotelian as they can. "Everyone knows," they rationalize, "that 'angels of God' cannot be by nature the same thing as 'angels of Jacob'!"

The Christian bible translators never stop to recognize that the Jews, translating their own Scriptures into Greek, have not parsed up the lexicon. They have not worried about "concordance," about "formal equivalence," or "dynamic equivalence" or such platonic and aristotelian notions of certain women-fearing, female-hating Greek men (and namely Plato and Aristotle).

If the Jews translating into Greek (in Alexandria in the shadow of Aristotle's student Alexander the Great) were to translate into German the same ways (in say Vienna in the shadow of Adolf Hitler), then how would they translate? Would they have followed the Christian Martin Luther who hates Aristotle's misogyny but practices his sexism and his logic in translation anyway? Luther has this:

Engel Gottes

Jakob aber schickte Boten

I think the Jews would make them "Boten Gottes." And in their English (in the shadow of the Church of England and the myriad churchs of America), the Jews would open up the translating. (They'd never need to make Ἀπέστειλεν "Apostle" even if it was something "God" does in the "New Testament" in Greek only with now no שלח [shalach] in sight.) And they would have something like "messengers of the god."

And even when Jacob is expressing his fear aloud, especially as they put the Hellene mother tongue in his mouth, they understand from their own history of body enslavement and of physical torture and slaughter the suffering and pain and utter grief of his sentence:

μήποτε ἐλθὼν πατάξῃ με καὶ μητέρα ἐπὶ τέκνοις

(it's a very subjective, intensely personal "lest he comes to strike me -- mother on children." Where then is father? Where then is the patriarchy giving its blessing of perpetuation for ever?)

Notice that Jacob finds himself alone (μόνος) even though it is not good for a human to be left alone says the god at the beginning of Genesis. The Jewish Jacob then wrestles in Greek with an ἄνθρωπος, a mortal who may or may not be male and may or may not be circumcised, whose own hip will stay in tact though Jacob's will not so that he will become Israel of οἱ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ (the sons of Israel with eating restrictions in Egypt). The point in Hellene is that this wrestler who breaks Jacob's loneliness (or aloneness) is a human and is not clearly the god though is likely one of the messengers of this god. The mortal human asks this Jacob (i.e., this circumcised male patriarch of the twelve eventually) to Ἀπόστειλόν με ("send me away" like a Christian English translator's Apostle). But this one with the curious name says to the human: Οὐ μή σε ἀποστείλω, ἐὰν μή με εὐλογήσῃς.

The Jewish translators (against the Greek Aristotle and much more like the Greek Homer) know how important names and wordplay must be. They keep open the translating.

N. T. Wrong Targets Biblical Feminism

2009-01-10T05:46:00.006-06:00

I almost entitled this post, "N. T. Wrong Is a biblical feminist (because Anne Carson is also one of his 'Favourite' poets)." But I realized we might get into discussions about the proper spelling of favorite and whether eats shoots & leaves is really on target at all for the conversation. That realization (which my British English teacher in high school insists is a "realisation") is not too far from what N. T. is asking. Who gets to define these things? Are we stuck with Illinois Republican Representative Henry Hyde's decade-plus-old statement as he sought to target President Bill Clinton for impeachment? I guess you have to list and litanize and catalogue every possible circumstance to have standards for due process. It's like pornography. You know it when you see it.

N. T., Thank you for asking me in such kind and thoughtful ways:

" 'the reclaim-the-Bible type of feminist criticism' . . . feminist

What do you mean by this?"

How can I give you a rigid, straightforward answer? What if instead I replied, "What do you mean by sexism?" Or by Aristotle's phallogocentric binary? Or by what a feminist biblical scholar has called "perpetrators of androcentric patriarchy [which certainly] applies to feminists as well, especially to those who by race and class are caught in the double web of being both oppressed and oppressor"?

If I only replied to you that way, then I might only be playing the postmodernism game of winning against modernism. (The death of postmodernism comes when modernism dies. Pomo depends on modernism. The leech cannot survive except as a parasite. Why would it?)

But feminisms tend not to be dependent (entirely) on bad men or on oppression by the world of men. Translation, by analogy, does not entirely depend on what the "original" text says or on what the "author" intended once upon a time. So we're closing in on the "target" as if stalking and hunting something wild. I'm playing with you.

"Simply put," bell hooks defines feminism in contrast to sexism. Black men, likewise, can and do define themselves in relation to sexism too. Nancy Mairs says best why feminisms are not a binary, with her ironic feminist binary; notice her NOT: Aristotle's binary "is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it." I've complained that (we) feminists have to "undefine definition as something more than mere opposition and binary." This has implications for blogging and essaying and publication in biblical journals, suggests Alice Walker. And biblical scholar Carolyn Osiek has outlined biblical feminismS, at least five of them, punctuating her whole list with her own subjective perspective, another alternative(?).

Maybe an initial analogy is simpler. Sometimes I ask the ESL teachers I work with to define the "letter A" in English. They protest further, "What do you mean by..." So I try to put a bulls-eye on the target: "Okay, how do you describe the 'shape' of the 'letter a'." I'm trying to get them to essentialize (or essentialise) something that they are long-time insiders to. Something that many of their students, even adults who have never had the 'English letter A' in language, may struggle with when trying to write with a pen by hand. The teachers begin listing features of the shape. They try contrasting it with the shapes of the other 4 vowel letters or all of the other 25 letters. They admit to uppercase and to lower case, saying those two cases are "different" shapes for the very "same" letter. Somehow they see "A" and "a" as the same shape. And when an indefinite article in English, the the sonic shape has to include nasalization (or nasalisation): "an". But when we bring in the cursive hand writing, and then the type print, we have to talk of fonts and various shapes. Infinity creeps in on our defining. When does the difference stop? "And what if," I ask, "the keyboard has a broken key -- the letter A is missing or sticking or something? Could you use a substitute, say a "*" or a "^" or an "@"? Don't young native English speakers text the letter A this way?"

The principles from the analogy of the shape(S) of the letter A include these:

Those who are unfortunate insiders to the experiences of sexism, and Western Aristotelian binarying, and phallogocentric patriarchy begin to get not only the shapes but also the value(S) of feminisms. One of the values is this kind of dialectic (a back-and-forth method too often only attributed to father Socrates by father Plato though disparaged by father Aristotle who would supplant dialectic with pure 'logic'; shhh: the secret is that probably dialectic is invented by the woman Aspasia -- a prostitute or a cultured non-Greek concubine or some other such creature with the scent of a woman taught both -- who taught the method to Pericles her lover and Socrates too). Dialectic opens up convers-ation into things very personal. The personal recognizes insiderness and outsiderness, where one has come from and where you are going too. It's hard to say you and you and nothing more. That a thing is a thing in itself. That you or that thing (i.e., "biblical feminism" or "sexism in the bible") cannot or will never ever change.

So I end with a complicated quotation of Nancy Mairs. She's published a paragraph on publication. I think the "shapeS" of "publication" are analogous to the "shapeS" of "biblical feminisms" and "lexiconS". Aristotle, and many men (and some phallogocentric women), resist these kinds of insider-outsider very-PERSONally dependent transformations:

"Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act, 'I' having no reason to speak aloud unless I posit 'you' there listening; but your presence is especially vital if I am seeking not to disclose the economic benefits of fish farming in Zäire, or to recount the imaginary tribulations of an adulterous doctor's wife in nineteenth-century France, but to reconnect myself—now so utterly transformed by events unlike any I've experienced before as to seem a stranger even to myself—to the human community....lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse."
--Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

Generation of Animals & Alexandrian Idol

2009-01-09T15:58:00.003-06:00

Genesis 30 as translated into Greek (by the Hebrews of Alexander's Great City in Egypt) is reminiscent of another text: Aristotle's Generation of Animals. You know, it's the text in which he writes with scientific certainty:

Ἔοικε δὲ καὶ τὴν μορφὴν γυναικὶ παῖς, καὶ ἔστιν ἡ γυνὴ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἄγονον· ἀδυναμίᾳ γάρ τινι τὸ θῆλύ ἐστι τῷ μὴ δύνασθαι πέττειν ἐκ τῆς τροφῆς σπέρμα τῆς ὑστάτης

(Now a boy is like a woman or wife in form, and the woman or wife is, as it were, a childless impotent male; for it is through a certain lack of ability that the female is female, being unable to concoct the nourishment in its last stage into seed or semen.)

ὥσπερ γὰρ καὶ ἐκ πεπηρωμένων ὁτὲ μὲν γίγνεται πεπηρωμένα ὁτὲ δ’ οὔ, οὕτω καὶ ἐκθήλεος ὁτὲ μὲν θῆλυ ὁτὲ δ’ οὒ ἀλλ’ ἄρρεν. τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ πεπηρωμένον·

(Just as the young of mutilated parents are sometimes born mutilated and sometimes not, so also the young born of a female are sometimes female and sometimes male instead. The female is, in fact, a mutilated male.)

τὰ δὲ καὶ δύο ἔχοντα αἰδοῖα, τὸ μὲν ἄρρενος τὸ δὲ θήλεος, καὶ ἐν ἀνθρώποις καὶ μάλιστα περὶ τὰς αἶγας. γίγνονται γὰρ ἃς καλοῦσι τραγαίνας διὰ τὸ θήλεος καὶ ἄρρενος ἔχειν αἰδοῖον—ἤδη δὲ καὶ κέρας αἲξ ἔχουσα ἐγένετο πρὸς τῷ σκέλει

(Again, they may have the body parts doubled, both male and female; this is known in humans and especially in she-goats. For birthed babies called ‘billy goats’ are such because they have both male and female procreative birth parts; there is even a case of a she-goat being born with a horn upon its leg.)

Listen now to Genesis 30:41:

ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν τῷ καιρῷ, ᾧ ἐνεκίσσησεν τὰ πρόβατα ἐν γαστρὶ λαμβάνοντα, ἔθηκεν Ιακωβ τὰς ῥάβδους ἐναντίον τῶν προβάτων ἐν ταῖς ληνοῖς τοῦ ἐγκισσῆσαι αὐτὰ κατὰ τὰς ῥάβδους·

(And in time, here's what was birthed: the sheep received in the belly a craved conception, and when they did Jacob put the rods in front of the sheep in the troughs -- the cravings for their conceptions according to the rods.)

And listen more:

30:4-5:

καὶ ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ Βαλλαν τὴν παιδίσκην αὐτῆς αὐτῷ γυναῖκα· εἰσῆλθεν δὲ πρὸς αὐτὴν Ιακωβ. καὶ συνέλαβεν Βαλλα ἡ παιδίσκη Ραχηλ καὶ ἔτεκεν τῷ Ιακωβ υἱόν.

(She gave him Balla her female-child-slave, his wife-womb-woman. Entering into her is Jacob himself. Together, Balla the female-child-slave of Rachel, takes him in and conceives, birthing a babe to Jacob, a son to him.)

And this goes on and on. Female after female, bearing male after male. The Greek adding verbs of conception where in Hebrew they aren't always needed. And the sons are named. Once, a translation is added (in Genesis 30:18):

καὶ ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ισσαχαρ, ὅ ἐστιν Μισθός.
(She calls his name Is'sachar -- pssst, it means "Reward.")

So in Greek, the possessions, the wages, females, child-slaves and sheep and goats and the like, are claimed as μισθός. And one of the boys of the sperm-father has "mandrakes": τῶν μανδραγορῶν τοῦ υἱοῦ σου, which buy an evening, for the generation of more than animals.

---

For Genesis 31, I'm running out of time for this post. Maybe I'll come back to it. Maybe not. There's the interesting thing of the idol, the gods. τὰ εἴδωλα, τοὺς θεούς. And of Rachel sitting on them after the manner of womb-women, and saying publicly that she can't be strip searched. τὸ κατ' ἐθισμὸν τῶν γυναικῶν.

So Laban just wishes he could have sent them off singing songs and such, sort of like American Idol in Alexandria, Egypt (Genesis 31:27) :

καὶ εἰ ἀνήγγειλάς μοι, ἐξαπέστειλα ἄν σε μετ' εὐφροσύνης καὶ μετὰ μουσικῶν, τυμπάνων καὶ κιθάρας.

(If you'd just been more angelic to me and told me first, then I'd have sent you away with blessed, joyful music, strings, drums, a big bang, and the whole she-bang.)

Who is Judas? Who can say?

2009-01-09T05:18:00.003-06:00

In Genesis 27 to 29, we outsiders read of the family that has become known by the name of the son יהודה (Yĕhuwdah). They tell us that means "Praised." Late translators in this same family of his call him Ιουδα, in Greek, when living in Egypt again, after Egypt had been conquered by the ethnics called Greeks. In English, the name has variations, especially for Christian Bible translators for whom the Aristotelian distinctions are most important: Jew, Judean, Jude, Judas, and Judah.

I could digress a bit to say that Christian Bible translators seem to distinguish these names as if there are (a) theological reasons to keep them separate; or (b) "natural English" equivalents (field tested ones of course) for each different person (as similar names really don't matter); or (c) presumptions by the translators about "what was [surely] meant" so as now in English translation to force on readers precisely and only now "what is said." But if I did so digress, then I might end up suggesting that (a) theo-logic is often dogma; that (b) dynamic (or even formal) equivalence is often propaganda; and that (c) the main relevance is the message of the translator himself. One self-proclaimed Christian once proclaimed that "“Es ist immer der gleiche Jude. . . ist freilich auch selbstverständlich.” And his American DE translator said, only focusing on the text, that that's equal to “He is always the same Jew. . . is also a self-evident and natural fact.” We shouldn't digress. On to the text. . .

Instead of making my pronouncements, don't I have to ask questions?

Why does Jacob love Esau? Why does he love Rachel and not Leah? Why does Leah think that having Judah (and her other boys) will make Jacob love Leah?
Why does Jacob love hunted-game meat?

Why do the Jewish translators using Hellene use ἠγάπησεν (AGAPE verb) and then φιλεῖ (PHILEO verb) so differently? Or do they use them in the same ways interchangeably?

(See 27:4, 9, 14 and 29:32 and so forth for the "contrasts").

Why do the Jewish translators use φίλησό* for loving "kiss"?

Why do the Jewish translators use different Greek words for the family sons, words with no Hebrew dynamic or formal equivalents? Words like υἱοῦ but τέκνον, and different discriptive words like τὸν ἐλάσσω but τὸν νεώτερον, but self-proclaiming notions like ὁ πρωτότοκος for something lost (as if in translation) like πρωτοτόκιά?

Such dys-function in this family. Such dys-function in this translation. Shall we (outsiders) make it our own (as if we can "fix" it in a "loving" Christian way, and thereby make it our own)?

The Greeks want villians to make the play work, to show the epic conflict between gods and humans. Aristotle says it's mere rhetoric, trickery. And with Rebekka and Jakob and Laban and Rachel (speaking Greek) is there that? What are the translators avoiding, as if to keep us ethnics, especially Greeks like Plato, his Socrates, his student Aristotle, and Aristotle's student Alexander out of this story?

Dare we push our way in, we Westerners with German or with English? with a cross in our hands? and a villian in our story? Our contemporary Jewish translator Willis Barnstone asks "But which of Jesus' associates should retain his association with the Jews?" And he answers what he overhears as our answer: "The traitor Judas Iscariot, of course."

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Some time back, Suzanne asked what the Jewish writer John was doing in translating a dialogue between two Jews (i.e., Yeshua or Joshua, and the one he named Rock); was it his different words, or was it the conversants two words? I think we then looked at Homer's Odyssey and Richmond Lattimore's fine translation:

τίπτε δέ τοι, φίλε τέκνον, ἐνὶ φρεσὶ τοῦτο νόημα
ἔπλετο; πῇ δ' ἐθέλεις ἰέναι πολλὴν ἐπὶ γαῖαν
μοῦνος ἐὼν ἀγαπητός;

Why, my beloved child, has this intention come into
your mind? Why do you wish to wander over much country,
you, an only and loved son?

Now, in John 21, neither Lattimore nor Barnstone have a difference between AGAPEO and PHILEO in their English translations. Nor does literal translator Julia E. Smith. But both Katharine D. Sakenfeld and Ann Nyland show differences. Why? How? What do you say?

Rebekah Speaks (Greek): Playful Words of Love

2009-01-08T11:08:00.006-06:00

Looks like I have 2 things to do in this post on the Greek translation called Genesis 24:28 - 26.

First, there's much to say about Rebekah speaking Greek. The Jewish translators add Greek phrases (why?). They are playful with the Hellene. Second, after writing what I did about Eugene Nida's translation theory as Aristotelian yesterday, I needed to fact check.

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1. Rebekah has voice and agency in translation, in Hellene. First, however, she is anticipated rather objectively by men, as an object by Abraham and by his unnamed ὁ παῖς (lowly servant, seen at the level of a child, in this case a male): they are looking for Abraham's son Isaac a γυνὴ (a wife, a womb-woman, once in Hebrew אשה ['ishshah]). When the lowly servant addresses the deity for help, the translators have him say κύριε ὁ θεὸς τοῦ κυρίου μου Αβρααμ (Master, the god of my master Abraham). The hierarchy is very determined in Greek: the lowly servant is under his master who is under his own master, the god. The lowly servant is looking at αἱ θυγατέρες (the daughters, which the Jewish translators welcomed from the Hebrew בת [bath]). And the lowly servant is asking the god to direct him exactly to ἡ παρθένος (the right virgin, which in Hebrew is more like maiden: נערה [na`arah]).

The narrator, now translator, interjects as the lowly servant sees her:

ἡ δὲ παρθένος ἦν καλὴ τῇ ὄψει σφόδρα· παρθένος ἦν, ἀνὴρ οὐκ ἔγνω αὐτήν. (The virgin has a very eye-catchingly good form. A man hasn't "known" her. -- which was וְהַנַּעֲרָ טֹבַת מַרְאֶה מְאֹד בְּתוּלָה וְאִישׁ לֹא יְדָעָהּ ). The narrator-translator has already named her Ρεβεκκα Rebekah and has explained that she's been birthed the child of Bethu'el, who's the son of Milcah, who's the womb-wife of Nahor, who's Abraham's brother.

The lowly servant asks for water that she's drawn from the well.

And she speaks (Greek):

Πίε, κύριε.
Καὶ ταῖς καμήλοις σου ὑδρεύσομαι, ἕως ἂν πᾶσαι πίωσιν.

She calls this lowly male servant what he calls Abraham, which is what Abraham calls the god, in Greek: κύριε (master, which was אדון ['adown]). Yes, she says, and offers to slake the thirst of his camels too.

In the Greek especially, there's hierarchy. The would-be γυνὴ is to be ἀνὴρ ἔγνω (i.e., the womb-wife is to be man-known). She is a θυγάτηρ (a daughter) of a man, a father, but she's ἡ παρθένος (the virgin) to be ἀνὴρ ἔγνω by another man, and if καλὴ τῇ ὄψει σφόδρα (a real good looker in terms of "figure," then all the better for the man over her, who will know her).

She tells the male servant her father's name first, then his mother's name. The lowly servant, now identified as ὁ ἄνθρωπος (the human) does not answer her but προσεκύνησεν κυρίῳ ("bows to master," i.e., the god).

But I want to interject here for a second. I want to say that Rebekah gets her voices (even her Hebrew and her Hellene voices). The narrator speaking Hebrew, and the translator writing Greek, give voices. The male narrator and translator are insiders to this male story. But they then come into the story as outsider, letting this girl express agency.

I'm reminded of how Willis Barnstone, a Jew, a male, a translator, comes to a similar story, the story of the male Jew writer-translator John that becomes the story of a woman, a woman speaking. Barnstone says:

"The poems in John [i.e., the gospel writer-translator] stand alone, or connect in strings, sometimes in strings of three- and four-line-related but separate poems (like strings of Japanese tankas), or they inform dramatic dialogue. In John 4.21-26, Yeshua tells the Samaritan woman [you know, that woman at the well, like Rebekah] that salvation is from the Jews and the hour is coming. Now we can hear Yeshua and the woman as poets, and so distinguish between the opening authorial voice of John and the recorded voice of Yeshua. Because we know no one's name for certain, we have the absolute problem, an impossible but pleasant problem of distinguishing between the unnamed authorial voice and his created or recorded lines of the poet Yeshua [and, I say also, of this woman]. Where one starts and the other ends is the instant where a drop joins the sea."

Whose voice equals whose? Narration, and narration translated, opens up meanings, and the making of meanings. Careful listening is required. For her or him who has ears to hear. Interpretation. Parable. Someone else's story overheard by me, the listener, who hears also my own story. We're changed.

Now on to Rebekah (whose voice is the translator's, is the narrator's, is yours and mine too, if we listen, from outside, overhearing):

Καὶ δραμοῦσα ἡ παῖς
ἀπήγγειλεν
εἰς τὸν οἶκον τῆς μητρὸς αὐτῆς
κατὰ τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα.

And running, the child [now equal to the lowly servant by the pen of the translator]
speaks [like an angel, a messenger]
to her mother's household [we're not surprised a girl speaks in the matriarchy, but it IS the matriarchy inserting itself here in this patriarchal tale]
these words [and notice how intentional - these words chosen τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα are not slimy rhetor-ic]

One language in this household politely hosts its guest, the other language:

וַתָּרָץ הַנַּעֲרָ וַתַּגֵּד לְבֵית אִמָּהּ כַּדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה׃

Then, when the Hebrew narrator has Rebekah as only a maiden in this family ( נערה [na`arah]), the Jewish translator has her with other voices:

εἶπαν δὲ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτῆς καὶ ἡ μήτηρ Μεινάτω ἡ παρθένος μεθ' ἡμῶν ἡμέρας ὡσεὶ δέκα, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἀπελεύσεται.

(Her brothers, those siblings of hers, and her mother are saying, "The virgin should stay with us for about ten days, and then she can go away with you.")

οἱ δὲ εἶπαν Καλέσωμεν τὴν παῖδα καὶ ἐρωτήσωμεν τὸ στόμα αὐτῆς.

(And they are saying, "Call the lowly servant child, and ask to hear it from her mouth.")

καὶ ἐκάλεσαν Ρεβεκκαν καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῇ Πορεύσῃ μετὰ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τούτου;

(And they're calling Rebekah and saying to her, "Are you going to go with this human?")

ἡ δὲ εἶπεν Πορεύσομαι.

She, indeed, says, "I am going to go."

.... Now let's fast forward:

εἶδεν τὸν Ισαακ παίζοντα μετὰ Ρεβεκκας τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ.

Isaak is seen playing ("sporting") with Rebekka, his womb-woman. She is not his sister as they had lied that she was--A sister and a brother would never do that?

How'd that kind of playful relationship get started?

εἰσῆλθεν δὲ Ισαακ εἰς τὸν οἶκον τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ
καὶ ἔλαβεν τὴν Ρεβεκκαν,
καὶ ἐγένετο αὐτοῦ γυνή,
καὶ ἠγάπησεν αὐτήν·
καὶ παρεκλήθη Ισαακ περὶ Σαρρας τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ.

Isaak goes into the household of his mother,
takes Rebekka,
knows her his womb-wife,
loves her.
Isaak is comforted around [the loss] of Sarra his mother.

Right in the middle of Isaac's mother issue, this whole ἀγαπή (love) thing comes into play -- Is it really equal dynamically or formally to אהב ('ahab)? The Jewish translators don't like explicit erotic (love) at least not in their Greek. Does it remind them of Eros, Sappho's bitter sweet, the one always at his mother's side, a mama's boy like Isaac, and then like Rebekah's Jacob?

ἠγάπησεν δὲ Ισαακ τὸν Ησαυ,
Ρεβεκκα δὲ ἠγάπα τὸν Ιακωβ.

Isaak really loved Esau. . .
Rebekka loved Jacob.

Now, this is Christian agape love we're talking about, in Christian-English bible translation anyway, where there is to be modern dynamic equivalence to the original languages. Where the translator inserts himself as the insider. Where the man is over the woman like a master is over a slave--except he is to "love" her (not erotically, not sporting with her like an equal, and not like a mama loves her mama's boy either). (Oh, and in the New Testament, Jacob becomes James that name equal to the King who commissions the famous English translation in his own name).

If we had time, we'd look together at how the Jewish translator feel free to play with the Hebrew text hosting its Hellene guest (not trying to make the one dynamically or formally equal to the other). They're giving voice, with the narrator, with the people in the narrative, to what it is to be-come part of this Jewish patriarchy (sometime matriarchy).

With personal purpose they add σήμερον [this day], which is not in the Hebrew (Genesis 25:31, 33) -- Jacob speaking to his unequal twin (in emphatic Hellene). The translator of Joshua, named Matthew, has the famous prayer use the same word. What did Jesus not say in his Hebrew Aramaic prayer?

With personal purpose they add the particular detail τὸ σπήλαιον [the cave], which is not in the Hebrew (Genesis 25:10). They let Isaac play with Hellene words in different ways from how he plays with Hebrew words, for instance in naming the wells Ἀδικία· ἠδίκησαν γὰρ αὐτόν and Ὅρκος· διὰ τοῦτο ὄνομα τῇ πόλει Φρέαρ ὅρκου. But they (and he) aren't bound always, invariably, to be as playful: as in the wells named Ἑχθρία and Εὐρυχωρία in Greek. Why? Is the translator just a bad translator? By whose standards? By the standards of Western translation-studies experts who are the Insiders to such logic?

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2. Eugene Nida makes clear that he understands and doesn't wholesale embrace either Aristotle's use of logic in particular or a Western culture worldview in general. But Nida's translation theory called "dynamic equivalence" (unwittingly) operates by the assumptions and principles of Aristotle. DE presumes "meaning" in language just as Aristotle's logic presumes "Nature" (or physics). The force of this goes beyond Western "idealism" to Western "realism," which allows Nida to go beyond Chomsky just as Aristotle went beyond Plato. Hence, DE is very "modern" in its construct. Just as soon as somebody like Kenneth Pike introduces etics and emics and the idea that the observer and the observed all change in the observing, then the construct begins to deconstruct. And when non-Western women (such as Lydia Liu and Jacqueline Jones Royster) suggest that translation need not be metaphorically imagined in terms of "equivalence" and that there's insider-outsider politeness (i.e., subjectivity vs. objectivity) to consider, well . . . you get the idea. Royster has entitled one of her essays, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own," to suggest that appropriations of one's own insider tradition by outsiders do not make it "equal," dynamically or formally or in any way. Likewise, to Jewish translator Willis Barnstone, "Every page of the annotated Hebrew Bible in translation [by outsider Christian translators] carried explanations to make it into a Christian document. . . . Thus, the Hebrew Bible became a preface to the [Christian tradition] in which the true God appeared" hardly equal dynamically or formally to the God of the Jews. The emic metaphors, the insider imagery, gets stripped by such a Western vehicle called dynamic (or formal) "equivalence."

The Jews translating their own scriptures use "radical relativism within rigid restraints" (to quote Pike paraphrasing Nelson Goodman). They will have none of Aristotle. They radically allow to women agency and insiderness and voice and generative meaning makings in ways that the Greek men would not. And they rather rigidly resist the impersonal abstraction of Aristotle's reductive language of logic (only slipping a couple of times perhaps intentionally).

Defined Differently for Christian translators and for Jews

2009-01-07T12:54:00.006-06:00

"The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others."
--Anne Carson

There are celebrated Greek phrases that have had to be defined differently for the New Testament and for the old scriptures of the Jews (as they themselves have translated their scriptures into Greek), . . . so maintain many (mostly-male) Christian Bible translators.

Let's look first at the Christianizing translations as if Christian readers of English are the insiders to the phrases (and pardon my quick transliterations). If you keep scrolling down, then, you'll get back to this same Hellene rendered by Jewish translators and how the Christians say their definitions must be different (i.e., less special):

1) καὶ ἀνέῳξεν ὁ θεὸς τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτῆς
kai aneozen ho theo tous ophthalmous autes
And God helped her see

2)ὕδατος ζῶντος
hydatos zontos
Living water

3) διαθήκην
diatheke
testament (as in "New Testament")

4) τὸν υἱόν σου τὸν ἀγαπητόν, ὃν ἠγάπησας
ton hion sou ton agapeton, hon egapesas
Your beloved Son, Whom You love

5) ἀναστὰς
anastas
Resurrection

6) ξύλα εἰς ὁλοκάρπωσιν ἀναστὰς ἐπορεύθη καὶ ἦλθεν
skyla eis holokarposin anastas eporeuthe kai helthen
wood for the Whole Sacrifice. Resurrection. Goes away to come again.

7) τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ
te hemera te trite
on the Third Day

8) τὴν μάχαιραν
ten machairan
the Sword

9) Ὁ θεὸς ὄψεται ἑαυτῷ πρόβατον
ho theos opsetai heauto probaton
the Lamb of God

10) καὶ οὐκ ἐφείσω τοῦ υἱοῦ σου τοῦ ἀγαπητοῦ
kai ouk epheiso tou hiou sou tou agapetou
and You have not spared Your Beloved Son

11) πρωτότοκον
prototokon
First-born Son

12) καὶ ἀνέστη . . . ἀπὸ τοῦ νεκροῦ αὐτοῦ
kai aneste . . . apo tou nekrou autou
and [He . . .] Resurrected from the Dead

13) πάροικος καὶ παρεπίδημος ἐγώ εἰμι μεθ' ὑμῶν
paroikos kai parepidemos ego eimi meth' humon
The Son of Man has no place to lay His head

14) κτῆσιν τάφου . . . καὶ θάψω τὸν νεκρόν
ktesin taphou . . . kai thapso ton nekron
ἐν τοῖς ἐκλεκτοῖς μνημείοις ἡμῶν θάψον τὸν νεκρόν σου
en tois eklektois mnemeiois hmon thapson ton nekron sou
there's a Sepulcher for Your Dead

15) τοῦ ἀγροῦ αὐτοῦ· ἀργυρίου τοῦ ἀξίου δότω
tou agrou autou arguriou tou aksiou doto
γῆ . . . διδράχμων ἀργυρίου
ye. . . didrachmon arguriou
his field for the worth of silver pieces given
the land . . . [is worth several] Drachmas of silver

16) παρθένος ἦν, ἀνὴρ οὐκ ἔγνω αὐτήν.
parthenos en, aner ouk egno auten.
She was a Virgin, with whom no man had had sexual relations.

Now doesn't this sound like you're reading right out of one of the "gospels" of "Jesus"? Note how specialized some of the Christian Bible translating is: Sepulcher, Resurrection, and capital letters on Son and Lamb and Living and the like.

But, in fact, these phrases come right out of the Hellene translation of Genesis (21:19 to 24:27). It's the Greek version of these stories by the first Jews themselves:

1) & 2) "Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away [after God opens her eyes and shows her a well of water that's alive],"

3) "Abraham's Covenant [not New Testament] with Abimelech,"

4), 5), 6), 7), 8), 9), & 10) "The Sacrifice of Isaac [and check out an English translator's version of this story from a woman's vantage: Rachel Barenblat's poem 'SILENCE (VAYERA)'],"

11) "Rebekah's family"

12), 13), 14), & 15) "Sarah's burial"

16) "A wife [womb-woman] for Isaac"

Note how specialized some of the Christian Bible translating is: Sepulcher, Resurrection, and capital letters on Son and Lamb and Living and the like.

Like Aristotle, many Christian Bible translators find special, elite, abstract meanings for the Greek words and phrases. They define the words differently because they think they know what the proto-typical meaning must be. And that proto-typical meaning applies to them as insiders of the language. Never mind the second meanings. Never mind that the stories of others are just as special to those others.

The Christian Bible translators, like the man Aristotle wanting a male definition for him-self, want the definitions all to themselves. I'm not saying they want to be bound by theo-logic or by biblish. I am saying they want their "natural English" to define the metaphors of the Hebrew bible (even when its translated into Hellene). I'm saying that they follow Eugene Nida religiously, which is to follow Aristotle's logic: there's dynamic equivalence or there's formal equivalence, and the former in their own field tested language is to reign supreme. I'm saying they follow Ernst-August Gutt, which is to follow Aristotle's logic again: "relevance theory" is the vogue but is a bit of a misnomer; it's not about what's relevant to insiders or to outsiders at all. It's about how anyone (in the platonic abstract, which means the linguist himself) gets "what is meant" from "what is said." It is not, at first, a translation theory at all; but rather a kind of "communications" theory aka a "pragmatics" theory. Most Christian Bible translators today have rejected the emic-etic perspectives of the Pikes (i.e., Kenneth, Evelyn, and Eunice), who did not have to reject Heraclitus (as Plato and Aristotle and Noam Chomsky had to). I don't think the Septuagint translators rejected Heraclitus either, or Aspasia or Sappho or any of the poets who allowed for what may be seen now, differently, as womanly word play (and do note that if a man plays with words then wordplay must be defined differently, Aristotle maintains).

Thankfully, natural English language is changing to be nothing special for any one group, nothing different for the authorities: males or Christian bible translators. Here's a report from blogger Melissa McEwan, "Change I Can Believe In."

Judging (Gay) Men & the Manner of Women

2009-01-06T13:32:00.005-06:00

I'm reading a big swath of text (especially in Hebrew, then Greek, then Englishes). There's much I can't say in just 15 minutes (on the Greek only).

So here's an overview of that big swath: the section headers of the HCSB English translation, because I like those headers, more or less. Where I think the Greek emphasizes something else, I strike the HCSB header and offer my own:

Genesis 18:9 - 21:21
--Sarah Laughs,
--Abraham's Plea for Sodom,
~~--The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah~~
Lot Offers his unnamed Daughters to the Sodomite Men, who'd rather have the Visiting Men,
~~--The Origin of Moab and Ammon~~
Lot's unnamed Daughters "Sleep" with Him to get "Sperm-Seed",
~~--Sarah Rescued from Abimelech~~

Abraham Lies Again About Sarah Being His Sister not His Womb-Wife which Closes Up -- Really Closes Up -- all of the wombs of the women of Abimelech,
~~--The Birth of Isaac~~
Sarah Laughs Again and this time she gets to ask the rhetorical question,
--Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away)

SO ON TO THE COMMENTARY:

By the homophobic and the homophilic alike, this passage may be one of the most commented on texts of the bible. The former use it as a prooftext against gays in Judaism and in Christianity. The later use the text to respond.

If you're looking at the Greek text of Genesis 18:9 - 21:21 for prohibitions against or for permissions to engage in certain sexual behaviors, then I'd say several things. First, there are lots of different sorts of sexual relations described in this particular passage that do and do not typify the varieties of sexual mores of the Greeks in their literatures. Second, since some readers are insistent on regulating sex in marriage between one heterosexual man and one heterosexual woman by Sarah's and Abraham's example in this Bible, then this couple's dysfunctions sometimes do seem fairly aberrant even compared to Greek behaviors. Third, if you're looking for some definitive gay or anti-gay prooftext of some sort in the Greek bible, then I'd recommend looking at Ann Nyland's translation work and commentary. What Nyland does, that few other English bible translators have done, is to consider the Greek words in the New Testament in light of their uses in many other extra-biblical contexts. On page 22 of her NT translation, for example, Nyland mentions that she's looked through "all Greek literature, as well as the Septuagint" for a particular use of a particular Hellene word. Fourth, when you get the time, you might look at the various Greek verbs in this big section of Genesis to see how the men and the women and the narrator(s) who are the translators describe the sexual behaviors. Fifth, among the horrors of Sodom and Gomorra and of its destruction and of incestuous relations and the like, there's some very funny stuff, laughable (such as the different ways the text views the unbelieving laughter of Abraham and of Sarah, who gets the last laugh in her son, whom she names). This is the women who in Greek calls Abraham what he calls the god: "Master" (i.e., κύριος). What's funny about that is the New Testament writers, using Greek, notice.

Today, I'm only going to look at how the Jews translating Genesis into Greek decided to duplicate barbarous wordplay. I'm interested in this here for a couple of reasons. First, there are three repeated words in this relatively tight context. Aristotle would accuse the Hebrews of duplicating their Bar-Bar-isms into Hellene. (He didn't care much for those who sounding to him like they were saying bar bar bar, and he followed the Greek practice of disparaging foreigners by calling them barbarians (οἱ βάρβαροι).

Second, Hebrew and Arabic poetry seems to key in on the repetitive, to play off of it, even in Greek translation. These non-Greeks may sound to the ancient Greeks as if they've stammered. Moses stammer twice when complaining about having to speak in Egypt.

"Perhaps the repetition [in the complaint of Moses that he had 'uncircumcised lips'] signifies that the phrase has more than one meaning," suggests Dan Judson. In addition, Suzanne gives some compelling reasons why "The translators of the Septuagint could not write that Moses was of 'uncircumcised lips'." Perhaps they didn't want their translation, as barbaric as it sounds in Genesis, also to sound so weirdly feminine in their Greek Exodus (i.e., where Moses in translation speaks Hellene). Repetition, especially around a man claiming to have uncircumcised lips, signifies many suggestive meanings.

The men of sodom repeat a phrase. So the Jewish (heterosexual male?) translators have them repeating the phrase in Greek too.

The narrator repeats a phrase to show a problem for the women of Abimelech. So the Jewish men translation repeat the phrase in Greek too.

And when the translating men want to describe Sarah's menopause, they repeat a Greek phrase for women. This they do without much help from the original Hebrew narrator of the story.

Here's the barbarous stammering, the doubling of words for doubling of meanings:

וַיִּשְׁפֹּט שָׁפֹוט

κρίσιν κρίνειν

Is this man (Lot) here to judge to judge us? ask the men of sodom (19:9)

עָצֹר עָצַר

συγκλείων συνέκλεισεν

God shut up, he shut up the wombs of the women of Abimelech (20:18)

Αβρααμ δὲ καὶ Σαρρα πρεσβύτεροι προβεβηκότες ἡμερῶν,
ἐξέλιπεν δὲ Σαρρα γίνεσθαι τὰ γυναικεῖα.

Abraham and Sarah were old, old, in days,
Gone out of Sarah birthed her wombly-womanly-ness

וְאַבְרָהָם וְשָׂרָה זְקֵנִים בָּאִים בַּיָּמִים חָדַל לִהְיֹות לְשָׂרָה אֹרַח כַּנָּשִׁים׃

(18:11)

A Circumcised Pen is Translation of Men

2009-01-05T09:04:00.008-06:00

Please pardon my pun. I'm not asking you to pardon the fact that the title of this post is an intentional punning. Rather, I want you to forgive me for having to talk about the male body part as the Bible does. :)

As if the tower of Babel (with it's tongues and lips) is not full enough of phallic symbolism, the story of Genesis moves on to male circumcision to establish the Jewish patriarchy. I'll look at that with you, right after this paragraph and its three related bullet points below. My interest is in how the Jews first translated their own Hebrew stories into Hellene--and what that means to us outsiders. But other bloggers have some broader if also very related posts:

Suzanne McCarthy has begun an incredibly intelligent series on Genesis 11, looking at not only gender issues and not only at Greek translation features but also at the choices of Pagnini and Jerome for their Latin translations. In addition, Suzanne brings in the works of Bnei Akiva of Los Angeles, of Rabbi Leslie Bergson and Mary Baron, of David Stein, of Robert Alter, of the old Sefer Yetsira, and of the brand new translating of Martin Shields. Her series is the "babble from Babel" with part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 so far.

Martin Shields is going beyond the modern translation debate between Dynamic Equivalence / Literal [Functional] Equivalence to "a foreignising translation of genesis 1." He explains, "With the growing awareness of the distance between modern western readers of the Bible and the original context of the text’s composition comes a growing awareness of the manner in which most translations of either type allow the reader to domesticate the text by permitting the reader to impose upon the text their own cultural ideals and norms simply because the translations employ concepts sufficiently vague to allow them such freedom." Martin has a theoretical discussion in Part I and begins his translating in part II. (HT John Hobbins)

Rich Rhodes has another post in which he argues, among other things, that "Taking figurative language literally is a problem in thinking about translation." As an example, he reviews a "theologically loaded term, like ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ ‘the word of God’" to try to begin to show in English what's "Lost in translation." Rich argues pointedly (as he has in the past, with his first-order "ouch,") in favor of Dynamic Equivalence translation of the Bible. He slams alternative approaches (i.e., both Functional Equivalence and the sort of Foreignness translation that Martin is beginning and that Suzanne is discussing in various ways).

My interest is in how the Jews first translated their own Hebrew stories into foreign Hellene--and what that means to us outsiders. Their translation methods are extremely important to me as I reflect on them at this blog (and translate their Greek into my English elsewhere).

Curiously, from Genesis 14:13 to 18:8, the Hebrew translators do exactly what Rich Rhodes says a better bible translator ought not to do. They make foreign their language that is familiar. Or they render as literal their language that is figural.

There are three notable examples. Again, I'm just looking at Genesis 14:13 to 18:8.

First, the Jewish translators into Greek make the very first mention of the proper noun "Hebrew" a common noun. It's from Genesis 14:13.

Here's their original language, penned by some author as passed down presumably through the oral tradition:

לְאַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי

Now, our usual English translation of their Hebrew is "Abram the Hebrew." But here's their own Greek translation:

Αβραμ τῷ περάτῃ

This is very odd translating indeed. To call it Dynamic Equivalence is to speculate that the Jewish translators want to take the literal meaning of their identifying proper-noun name "Hebrew" and to put that into Greek as a dynamically equivalent common noun, which means something like "the passer through." Or would that be Functional Equivalence? No, it's neither.

Rather, the Jewish translators (living under the Greek empire under the Egyptian kingdom there in Alexandria) are doing something very personal. They are foreignizing their own text. They are turning emics into etics. They are distancing outsiders from their own text by translating the name "Hebrew" for their patriarch Abram rather descriptively as an outsider.

They know that περάτῃ is a very uncommon Hellene word. It is used exclusively of one particularly tough evening for the goddess Athena, the virgin patron of Athens. Homer's Odyssey (at 23.243) says this of her:

νύκτα μὲν ἐν περάτῃ δολιχὴν σχέθεν

She checked the long night in its passage
(which is James Huddleston's English).

Why περάτῃ? What doesn't help at all is that neither the Septuagint translators nor Homer or the other Greek poets ever use that word again. Elsewhere, starting in Genesis 39, the Jewish translators will transliterate the word we know as "Hebrew" as the Greek "Εβραῖος." The transliteration practice is something the letter-writing Jew named "Saul" then "Paul" will use. He writes in Greek to Greek readers to call himself a Ἑβραῖος ἐξ Ἑβραίων (a Hebrew born of Hebrews).

All the NET Bible commentary can add is that "The meaning of the word 'Hebrew' has proved elusive. It may be related to the verb 'to cross over,' perhaps meaning 'immigrant.' Or it might be derived from the name of Abram’s ancestor Eber."

What this commentary shows is none of the word play. The context of the story here shows that Abram is failing as a father. He's just "passing" on God's promise, if I may pun further. He needs an extreme makeover. He needs a significant name change. He needs a very personal, very painful change in his generative abilities, indeed, in his genitals. It's like that long passing night of the goddess Athena, nothing comfortable at all, something extremely memorable for this Hebrew-patriarchal-passer.

So we come to that second example of foreignizing translation in this passage from the pen of Hebrew men. Abram is complaining to God (calling him Δέσποτα, or in Greek a "master who's a despot"), saying that a foreign-born slave-woman's son (υἱὸς . . . τῆς οἰκογενοῦς) is going to outdo him in the fathering business. This is after the "word of the LORD" (or Master's speech, as ῥῆμα κυρίου) comes to him. So God has to speak another word (φωνὴ κυρίου, or Master's voice speaks). Abram listens (and this is well before his mistake, ha, of listening obediently to the voice of his wife-wombman Sara, whom he'd failed to get pregnant: ὑπήκουσεν δὲ Αβραμ τῆς φωνῆς Σαρας, Genesis 16:2). So then, there's the famous line that Christians, including the Jewish Paul, have quoted so much (Genesis 15:6):

καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Αβραμ τῷ θεῷ,
καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην.
(and Abram by this rhetorical proof believed the god,
and it was stated in legal terms to him as Justice.)

My Englishing of the Greek is to get at some of the legalese here, at much of Aristotle's judicial-rhetorical theorizing. But I'm also getting at the unintended Hellene theo-logic, in the result: δικαιοσύνην. So much has already been said about this particular Jew-to-Christian passage that I won't say anything more than just to suggest again that English "righteousness" - which may be more the Hebrew sense - hardly gets at the goddess Dike (i.e., Δίκας or Justice), whom the Jewish translators' Greek invokes.

So many more different Greek words could have been chosen. (Paul uses many Greek synonyms in what's now the New Testament). But this foreign Hellene goddess word was the one the Hebrew translators chose: they chose it to highlight the "belief/ faith" reward of the god of the passer-father named Abram.

Finally, in this passage, there is the foreign-literal translation of a third Hebrew phrase. Well, here's a complete sentence with the whole thing pretty well summarized (Genesis 17:23):

וַיִּקַּח אַבְרָהָם אֶת־יִשְׁמָעֵאל בְּנֹו וְאֵת כָּל־יְלִידֵי בֵיתֹו וְאֵת כָּל־מִקְנַת כַּסְפֹּו כָּל־זָכָר בְּאַנְשֵׁי בֵּית אַבְרָהָם וַיָּמָל אֶת־בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתָם בְּעֶצֶם הַיֹּום הַזֶּה כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר אִתֹּו אֱלֹהִים׃

The translators of King James rendered that this way:

Then Abraham took Ish'mael his son and all the slaves born in his house or bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham's house, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day, as God had said to him.

The translators of "Today's New International Version" (TNIV) put that this way:

On that very day Abraham took his son Ishmael and all those born in his household or bought with his money, every male in his household, and circumcised them, as God told him.

The Hebrews of Alexandria Egypt put their own language into Greek this way:

Καὶ ἔλαβεν Αβρααμ Ισμαηλ τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ πάντας τοὺς οἰκογενεῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ πάντας τοὺς ἀργυρωνήτους καὶ πᾶν ἄρσεν τῶν ἀνδρῶν τῶν ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ Αβρααμ καὶ περιέτεμεν τὰς ἀκροβυστίας αὐτῶν ἐν τῷ καιρῷ τῆς ἡμέρας ἐκείνης, καθὰ ἐλάλησεν αὐτῷ ὁ θεός.

What is most interesting here are the translation decisions. The KJV uses the FE method, offering latinized and middle english phases to make a literal translation. The TNIV uses the DE approach, which assumes that natural international English of readers is best the excised phrase "circumcised" (i.e., without any redundant references to "flesh" or to "foreskin" as per the full ancient Hebrew phrase).

But the Jews in Alexandria, Egypt do something completely different. They do use a literal translating into Hellene, but they also truncate the literal phrase. In other words, περι-έτεμεν literally mirrors the first word of the Hebrew and ἀκρο-βυστίας mirrors the last word of the phrase. But the middle word (e.g., literally σάρκα, as in Genesis 17:11) is cut out.

And the two literal Greek words (meaning respectively "cut-around" and "full-tip") are fairly uncommon, to say the least. For the exact common words, there's a relatively recent collection of them in Frederick M. Hodges' article, "The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme." The literal then sounds fairly foreign when used this way.

It's almost as if the Hebrew translators using Hellene are flaunting their own circumcisions. They knew the Greek and Egyptian attitudes towards circumcision. (Read 1 Maccabees for the ongoing and later resentments between the various groups, on this very topic. And Gerald A. Larue's lecture, "Religious Traditions and Circumcision," gives an overview of some of the history.) Were they personally trying to sound foreign here by being literal? Were they ignorant, or were they playing with words in translation to add meanings? To suggest that their Abram passing through foreign lands as now passing-father Abraham became "cut-around the bulk of his tip"? Did you picture that literally? Now, I'm trying to sound like an ESL student with my English, on purpose.

A native speaker of Greek, an eloquent one, would use the words differently, maybe not so painfully anatomically but rather metaphorically. Plato, for example, in his Hippias Major (304a.5), uses the Greek word "cut-around" (i.e., the word the Jewish translators use) in a much different context. The writer has his character Hippias saying the following:

ἀλλὰ δή γ’, ὦ Σώκρατες, τί οἴει ταῦτα εἶναι συνάπαντα; κνήσματά τοί ἐστι καὶ περιτμήματα τῶν λόγων, ὅπερ ἄρτι ἔλεγον, κατὰ βραχὺ διῃρημένα

(But now, Socrates, what do you think all this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and circumcisions [lit. cut-arounds] of the statement, as I stated a while ago, divided into bits.)

As mentioned, the Maccabees Jewish translation into Greek addresses the Hebrew resentments of Alexander's conquest and the Hellene male resentments of the Hebrew male circumcisions. The Maccabean translators use the same words as the Genesis translators: the literal, foreign-sounding words. This practice continues with the Jew Saul-Paul, who begins to distance himself in new ways from his "pharisee" tradition. He talks of his own heritage (writing to those in Macedonia, Greece - the fatherland of Alexander):

περιτομῇ ὀκταήμερος ἐκ γένους Ἰσραήλ φυλῆς Βενιαμίν Ἑβραῖος ἐξ Ἑβραίων κατὰ νόμον Φαρισαῖος
(I'm a "cut-around" born of Israel's tribe of Benyamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, according to Law a Pharisee).

And writing, Paul plays with words. He calls the Legalist proponents of male circumcision (or "cut-around") those who "cut-off" or κατατομή. When writing to Greeks in Galatia (Galatians 6:15), he says:

οὔτε γὰρ περιτομή τί ἐστιν οὔτε ἀκροβυστία ἀλλὰ καινὴ κτίσις.

(There are, in fact, neither "cut-arounds" nor "spongy-tips" but rather there are new makings)

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It's rather funny to think of male circumcision in the context of the Bible. Suzanne wrote a funny visual post on this not long ago, and some time back I found the Greek word περι-τομή to be a particularly playful one.

And I think Martin is on to something in translating as a foreigner, something we can learn from the Jews who translated as insider-outsiders of Greek in Egypt. A DE translation of Genesis, such as the TNIV, can miss more than Rich thinks it does. For example, there's much lost by the "dynamically equivalent" TNIV even in its reduction of the phrase of 17:23: "every male in his household," which the FE KJV makes "every male among the men of Abraham's house" and the first translators literally kept the Hebrew redundancies "πᾶν ἄρσεν τῶν ἀνδρῶν τῶν ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ Αβρααμ." When the foreigners come visiting Abraham's house (in 18:1,2), it becomes clear (in both Hebrew and in Greek and in the English KJV -- because of those redundancies (i.e., "every male among the men") that the outsiders are "male" because they are "men" (i.e., ἄνδρες).

This raises the question, doesn't it, whether these three outsider men have had their "male" "spongy-tips" "cut-around"? Otherwise, writers of commentaries make these "men" less physical, more like angels, which perhaps they are. And yet, the Jewish male translator's personal pen is painfully more akin to the sharpened-father Abraham's passing Hebrew. (Huh? that's what I say. To pretend to know all that the Hebrew text must mean, or only what it means, is not to allow translators and translation to be foreign.)

Sister-Sibling Sara // the exceedingly well-figured womb-wife

2009-01-03T23:34:00.000-06:00

My comments today are on the Greek translation of the text of Hebrew scripture from Genesis 11:10 to 14:13. Seems to me, the translating is fairly concordant here.

The translators living in Alexandria, Egypt do seem to want the Greek rendering to punctuate the death of the fathers who fathered sons and daughters. The translators tend to say καὶ ἐγέννησεν υἱοὺς καὶ θυγατέρας (and he birthed sons and daughters); then the translators add something not explicit in the Hebrew: καὶ ἀπέθανεν (and he died). If the Hellene word order is anything, there's this syntactic sequential joke (of course not likely intended): "he fathered sons . . . then daughters and died" as if having girls, for the patriarchy, somehow leads to mortality.

Anyways, when "women" are mentioned again as "womb-men" and as wives, the Greek emphasizes what the Hebrew does: Abram's woman-wife was barren, as if bearing children is her worth.

In the Hellene mother tongue, nonetheless, there are some interesting connotations and contrasts around Sara, the wombman-wedded to Abram. In 12:11, the would-be father "knows" his wife-woman-womb in a different way than the sexual, procreative way: "εἶπεν Αβραμ Σαρα τῇ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ Γινώσκω ἐγὼ ὅτι γυνὴ εὐπρόσωπος εἶ·" ("Abram said to Sara, 'I've given birth to the knowledge that a blessed-faced wombman you are'.") So Abram, in Egypt, wants Sara to tell the men, the princes, of Egypt that she is not his wife-woman-birther but rather that she is something else to him.

Sara is Abram's Ἀδελφὴ, his sister. He doesn't want other men thinking he can't "know" his own woman and can't father children. She's not to be seen as his womb-woman but as his female sibling. Besides, this wife of Abram's is seen this way: καλὴ ἦν σφόδρα (she has exceedingly-dangerously good form).

The story has many dimensions and turns at this point. But I want to fast forward a bit to a contrast.

Lot (who is properly Abram's nephew) is by the Greek text something else to Abram. As Abram puts it (in the Hellene mother tongue): "ἄνθρωποι ἀδελφοὶ ἡμεῖς ἐσμεν" ("We are human brothers.") Of course, this Greek word ἀδελφοὶ is ambiguous, meaning both "siblings" and possibly "brothers" (in contrast to "sisters.") Other than pointing out the ambiguity, I want to highlight the fact that the masculine Greek noun here serves as the unmarked "siblings." When Abram asks his woman-wife Sara to lie for him, then the marked feminine "sister" or Ἀδελφὴ is used.

In a similar way, ἄνθρωποι or "mortal humans" is the unmarked masculine word that may also ambiguously refer to "men" (in contrast to "women").

So just after the text tells a bit of the story of Abram and his "brothers" (i.e., Lot and his men), the narrative describes other men. Here the Hebrew translators render some of that into Hellene as follows: "οἱ δὲ ἄνθρωποι οἱ ἐν Σοδομοις πονηροὶ καὶ ἁμαρτωλοὶ ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ σφόδρα." ("The humans - those in Sodom - were exceedingly-dangerously wicked and transgressive in reference to the god.")

The contrasts in Greek are fairly stark. Abram's wife-wombman is to be seen as his sister because of her exceedingly-dangerously good form. Abram's nephew - a man-human - is seen as his brother-sibling, but the man-humans in Sodom are the god's exceedingly-dangerously awful ones, wicked and transgressive. Greeks reading the Hellene version without any knowledge of the Hebrew would likely find the differences sharp between Abram's womb-wife and his fellow human-men. How Greek marks the females and the feminine (but leaves unmarked the males and the masculine) accounts for these differences.

----
I'm not trying to suggest that Hellene writers were forced by the language to mark wo-men and fe-males. There are these famous lines that betray no default to the male:

Στᾶθι κἄντα φίλος,....
καὶ τὰν ἔπ᾽ ὄσσοις ἀμπέτασον χάριν.

You may recognize them as written by a woman, by Sappho. And Athenaeus writes to suggest that this fragment of her poem is written to a man, perhaps to her brother. But except for Athenaeus's comment, how would we ever know that?

Face me, my dear one...
and unveil in your eyes your favor.

Couldn't the translators of Genesis have allowed Sara more of her own agency, not marked always in relation to a would-be fathering man, as one who speaks as Sappho does?

translating "Babel": Hellene wordplay

2009-01-03T08:39:00.000-06:00

The translation of the Hebrew first book into the Hellene mother tongue is fascinating. No passage is more curious than Genesis 8 through Genesis 11:9.

The Jews, in the continuing story of Noah's ark and the building of Babel, seem to fully masculinize the narrative. They introduce the notion of the goyim, the plurality of nations not following G-d. But the narrative builds on men, specifically named men, without now any continued reference to "male AND female."

Furthermore, in the Hellene translation, two things suggest profound interaction with the Greek world of men. First, there are slight changes in names and metaphors. Second, there is the translation of the word-play in the Babel story. The seeming liberties taken with the translating appear to be statements against the nation of Egypt that had enslaved the Jews and against the Republic brought about by the Greek patriarchy from Plato to Aristotle to Alexander.

The translators are translating in Egypt, where the Jews were slaves. So when the sons of Ham are listed in 10:6 (וּבְנֵי חָם כּוּשׁ וּמִצְרַיִם וּפוּט וּכְנָעַן׃), and Egypt is named in the Hebrew, one would expect Egypt to be named in the Greek as well: instead there's this: Υἱοὶ δὲ Χαμ· Χους καὶ Μεσραιμ, Φουδ καὶ Χανααν.

Nimrod (in 10:9) is no longer just a mighty hunter, but he is a "giant" (γίγας ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς) and a giant hunter. The translators invoke the references to such creatures by Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and Isocrates -- the rhetorical Greek playwrights and poets and sophists -- because these men speak of these so-called "giants."

But in 9:25, where the story has Noah cursing Ham's son Canaan, the references to the Greek Republic start. There's the reference to natural born (or at least patriarchy-established) slavery. The allusion is to the Spartans, who went naked as men -- were as naked as Noah -- and who enslaved their own kind.

From (וַיֹּאמֶר אָרוּר כְּנָעַן עֶבֶד עֲבָדִים יִהְיֶה לְאֶחָיו׃), here's the translation:

καὶ εἶπεν Ἑπικατάρατος Χανααν· παῖς οἰκέτης ἔσται τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς αὐτοῦ.

Notice how this is not δοῦλος ("doulos" slave) but a household male-servant.

And in his Republic, Plato makes clear the character of such slave-servants (as males low in the hierarchy like women in the households):

"And again, the mob of motley appetites and pleasures and pains one would find chiefly in man-servants and women and household-slaves and in the base rabble of those who are freemen in name."

καὶ μὴν καὶ τάς γε πολλὰς καὶ παντοδαπὰς ἐπιθυμίας καὶ ἡδονάς τε καὶ λύπας ἐν παισὶ μάλιστα ἄν τις εὕροι καὶ γυναιξὶ καὶ οἰκέταις καὶ τῶν ἐλευθέρων λεγομένων ἐν τοῖς πολλοῖς τε καὶ φαύλοις.

And finally, notably, in Genesis 11:1-9, the story of the City and Tower of Babel (Babylon) itself, there are new plays on words. Here G-d is now κύριος ("master," i.e., of male slaves of one's own kind). The climatic punning verse 9 (עַל־כֵּן קָרָא שְׁמָהּ בָּבֶל כִּי־שָׁם בָּלַל יְהוָה שְׂפַת כָּל־הָאָרֶץ וּמִשָּׁם הֱפִיצָם יְהוָה עַל־פְּנֵי כָּל־הָאָרֶץ׃ ף) becomes:

διὰ τοῦτο ἐκλήθη τὸ ὄνομα αὐτῆς Σύγχυσις, ὅτι ἐκεῖ συνέχεεν κύριος τὰ χείλη πάσης τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν διέσπειρεν αὐτοὺς κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἐπὶ πρόσωπον πάσης τῆς γῆς.

Sir Lancelot Brenton translates the Greek into his English as follows:

On this account its name was called Confusion, because there the Lord confounded the languages of all the earth, and thence the Lord scattered them upon the face of all the earth.

Likewise, Robert J. V. Hiebert translates the Greek into his English this way:

Therefore its name was called Confusion, because there the Lord confused the lips of all the earth, and from there the Lord God scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Now, anyone familiar with Plato's Republic will know the allusion, the wordplay borrowed from the Greek teacher. Plato is disparaging the poets, and he's championing the ideal city-state, like the City of Babel being built (i.e., the "Polis," οἰκοδομοῦντες τὴν πόλιν καὶ τὸν πύργον). Such a place is where the household-male-slaves and the women, under men, belong.

Plato writes:

“Then,” said I, “we must not accept from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error as this about the gods when he says Two urns stand on the floor of the palace of Zeus and are filled with Dooms he allots, one of blessings, the other of gifts that are evil,

and to whomsoever Zeus gives of both commingled— Now upon evil he chances and now again good is his portion,

but the man for whom he does not blend the lots, but to whom he gives unmixed evil— Hunger devouring drives him, a wanderer over the wide world,

nor will we tolerate the saying that Zeus is dispenser alike of good and of evil to mortals.

οὐδ’ ὡς ταμίας ἡμῖν Ζεὺς— ἀγαθῶν τε κακῶν τε τέτυκται.
τὴν δὲ τῶν ὅρκων καὶ σπονδῶν σύγχυσιν, ἣν ὁ Πάνδαρος συνέχεεν,

But as to the confusion of the oaths and the confounding by Pandarus, if anyone affirms it to have been brought about by the action of Athena and Zeus, we will not approve, nor that the strife and contention of the gods was the doing of Themis and Zeus; nor again must we permit our youth to hear what Aeschylus says— A god implants the guilty cause in men When he would utterly destroy a house,. . . . "

The interplay between Σύγχυσις and συνέχεεν in the Jewish translation into Greek seems to be a direct loan from Plato. Except, it appears the translators are not favoring Plato's Babylon at all. Rather, it seems the Hebrews are trying to show that Plato, in disparaging Homer and the poets for his ideal Republic, instead babbles (or word-plays) himself, just as the poets do.

Hence, given the translator choices in Genesis 8 - 11:9, there seems to be the use of the imperial mother tongue to resist both Egypt and the Greek City-State Republic under Alexander.

The Box of Birthings

2009-01-02T09:17:00.000-06:00

The Box of Birthings (or "Noah's Ark of Genesis")

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Please know that I cannot be exhaustive in my commentary -- only 15 minutes a post. On Genesis 1-3, in a quarter of an hour, there's so much I couldn't say. Didn't you see the additional punning? Of course, there's a 7th Ἡμέρη /a day of respite for the god, the creative poetic maker who birthed so much after "it's own kind" and "in our image, male and ~~female~~ girl he made them.

καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον,
κατ' εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν,
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς"

The god and the human, the god-ikon as the creative-poetry, the male and fe-male in three poetic lines (and English fails with "fe" as "male").

What I'm saying I missed in my commentary on the first Jewish translation of Genesis 1-3 is this: how the Hellene helps the translators with the blurring of strict divisions, of separate logical categories. This is the Hebrew story; but in Greek translation, it's a coup, a validation of human and divine and gendered generative generation and ongoing generationS. Even the repeated/ repeating verb ἐγένετο (to continue the story) continues the wordplay on the womanly birthing-being called τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ (called "his womb-man"). And many of the various, creatively-made animals (all with "souls" or "psyches" from the beginning καὶ πᾶσαν ψυχὴν ζῴων) are birthed from the birthing-ground according to their own birth-families: τῆς γῆς κατὰ γένος. This is very different from Aristotle's biologies, which emphasize separation and static natural difference and male ABOVE the "mutation" he coldly observes as lesser fe-male.
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Now to Genesis 4-7 into Greek from the Hebrew:

So the story takes a turn with the first human birthed, with the woman being known by the man. Here's the lines:

Αδαμ δὲ ἔγνω Ευαν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ,
καὶ συλλαβοῦσα ἔτεκεν τὸν Καιν
καὶ εἶπεν Ἑκτησάμην ἄνθρωπον διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ.

Notice the final phrase, Eve's sentence: "and she said, 'I've gotten a human through the god'" - the very first mother's very first magnificant. And yet the merging of this very Hebrew notion with the Hellene mother tongue gives birth to a kind of womanly participation in the divine that is precedented in Greek culture although praised only very little among the Greeks or among any culture of men (i.e., of males). The story, and it's translation into the poetic language of Greeks, re-creates a beginning in which wo-men were once more equal with men, and humans more with the god who creates.

How quickly this story turns from matriarchy, from divinity, to patriarchy of men. Men only and their sons only are named. The Hebrew story teller and the Jewish translators of Greek write what seems to be resistance to this re-gendering in the male-only direction; the story pauses to reflect prosaicly:

Αὕτη ἡ βίβλος γενέσεως ἀνθρώπων·
ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν Αδαμ,
κατ' εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν·

This is the book of the birthings of humans
the day the god made the 'adam
according to a god-ikon he made it.

And the poetry picks up:

ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτοὺς
καὶ εὐλόγησεν αὐτούς.
καὶ ἐπωνόμασεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτῶν Αδαμ,
ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς.

male and girl he made them
and he stated a blessing on them
and he named his name 'Adam
that day he made them

But the god has an enthymeme, a deep passion within. (See at the end of an earlier post, I mentioned how huge this term enthymeme is for Greek rhetoric. For Aristotle teaching his Rhetoric to his elite male students in the Greek only Academy, "enthymeme" is the incarnation of rhetorical "proofs." For most expert rhetoricians today, this is the most theorized concept -- overdetermined as a "mutated" or "truncated" logical syllogism with a missing or an audience-supplied premise. The Hebrew translators supply the god with the very first enthymeme.)

Around this place in the story, the humans (i.e., the men now) are giving birth to daughters. (The daughters, unlike the sons, are typically unnamed girls). The lore supplies the fathers of these daughters, and in the translation the Jews translating render that this way: οἱ δὲ γίγαντες ἦσαν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις. See the pun on the wombman and the birthing ground again? And Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and Isocrates -- the rhetorical Greek playwrights and poets and sophists -- speak of these so-called "giants." What are the Hebrew translators suggesting with this wordplay?

The story continues. The god finds "favor" (i.e., χάριν) with a human (and with his wombman and their sons and their wombmen). Is this favor one of the Graces, one of the goddess representing female beauty and charm? What are the Jewish translators doing by making this the god's response to this human?

The god tells the man to creatively make a "box" (i.e. an "ark") of wood: ποίησον οὖν σεαυτῷ κιβωτὸν ἐκ ξύλων. For Aristophanes in the Knights, such a wooden box made contains the female oracles and in the Wasps it is a coffin. For Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, the wooden box is an illustration of natural causes and natural species of essential substances in Nature:

For there are two senses in which X comes from Y; either because X will be found further on than Y in the process of development, or because X is produced when Y is analyzed into its original constituents. And different things can be generated by the moving cause when the matter is one and the same, e.g. a chest and a bed from wood. But some different things must necessarily have different matter; e.g., a saw cannot be generated from wood, nor does this lie in the power of the moving cause, for it cannot make a saw of wool or wood.

For Aristotle in his biologies, the box is illustrative of male parent power:

For neither will that which exists potentially be made except by that moving agent which possesses the actuality, nor will that which possesses the actuality make anything whatever; the carpenter would not make a box except out of wood, nor will a box be made out of the wood without the carpenter. The heat exists in the seminal
secretion, and the movement and activity in it is sufficient in kind and in quantity to correspond to each of the parts. In so far as there is any deficiency or excess, the resulting product is in worse condition or physically defective, in like manner as in the case of external substances which are thickened by boiling that they may be more palatable or for any other purpose. But in the latter case it is we who apply the heat in due measure for the motion required; in the former it is the nature of the male parent that gives it, or with animals spontaneously generated it is the movement and heat imparted by the right season of the year that it is the cause.

Towards the end of the Hebrew story in the Hellene mother tongue, the box gives birth to something more, a covenant:
καὶ στήσω τὴν διαθήκην μου πρὸς σέ· εἰσελεύσῃ δὲ εἰς τὴν κιβωτόν

And the god leaves the humans alone:
καὶ κατελείφθη μόνος Νωε καὶ οἱ μετ' αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ κιβωτῷ.

This is a trope, a Greek poetic antistrophos, from the earlier statement of the god concerning the only-lonely human:
Καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ὁ θεός
Οὐ καλὸν εἶναι τὸν ἄνθρωπον μόνον·
ποιήσωμεν αὐτῷ βοηθὸν κατ' αὐτόν.

In summary, the Hebrew translators weaving their birth story into the Hellene mother tongue are not simply categorizing concepts and propositions. They are not boxing in notions, and species, one against another, one over the other. Their story generates much more, something more like what Nancy Mairs calls "feminine discourse": "Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy." (The Hellene language is much like feminine discourse -- until Aristotle comes along to put it in his male-above-female box. But then the story of babel comes soon enough).

Birthing Genesis

2009-01-01T06:34:00.000-06:00

This year (happy new year btw), my blogging is going to be a series of what we "expert compositionists" (you know, people with the high-fallutin' degrees in comp studies and rhetoric) call "zero drafts." The posts are also going to be hard to understand because I'm disciplining myself to write in 15 minute bursts. Then I hit "publish post."

Now, let's get to what we call in English "Genesis." I suspect the first Jews to translate the first book (i.e., בְּרֵאשִׁית) made a very careful decision to call it, in Greek, Γένεσις. I doubt they were limiting themselves to 15 minutes -- although the story goes that the translating was miraculously quick. The Greek word suggests Birthings.

This first translation of the first book looks very much like an engagement with the Hellene creation stories. There's both the people and the place of the translating. And there's the seeming awareness of the Greek traditionS.

Historian Sylvie Honigman (in reviewing her fellow Jewish history of Aristeas) suggests that the Jews in Alexandria, Egypt were working in a "Homeric paradigm" as they translated. Looking at the Greek text, I think the translators were acutely aware of the various "paradigms." Here they are in a polytheistic state (the one where they'd been enslaved as a people for so long) and that state was dominated further by another polytheistic state where the central city was named after the conquerer, Alexander. Alexander had imposed (through his great domination of the world); Plato and his Socrates had transposed (through dialectic what poets and playwrights and sophists had woven into the cultural literacy of the Greeks); and Aristotle had proposed a more factual Truth altogether. I imagine (from our best histories and from looking at the translational choices) that the Jewish translators knew what Aristotle was trying to do when he read, through his lens of Logic, what Hesiod said about beginnings. In Metaphysics (984b.20 and following), Aristotle distorts what Hesiod has written by himself writing:

ὑποπτεύσειε δ’ ἄν τις Ἡσίοδον πρῶτον ζητῆσαι τὸ τοιοῦτον, κἂν εἴ τις ἄλλος ἔρωτα ἢ ἐπιθυμίαν ἐν τοῖς οὖσιν ἔθηκεν ὡς ἀρχήν, οἷον καὶ Παρμενίδης· καὶ γὰρ οὗτος κατασκευάζων τὴν τοῦ παντὸς γένεσιν πρώτιστον μέν (φησιν) ἔρωτα θεῶν μητίσατο πάντων, Ἡσίοδος δὲ πάντων μὲν πρώτιστα χάος γένετ’, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
γαῖ’ εὐρύστερνος . . .
ἠδ’ ἔρος, ὃς πάντεσσι μεταπρέπει ἀθανάτοισιν, ὡς δέον ἐν τοῖς οὖσιν ὑπάρχειν τιν’ αἰτίαν ἥτις κινήσει καὶ συνάξει τὰ πράγματα. τούτους μὲν οὖν πῶς χρὴ διανεῖμαι περὶ τοῦ τίς πρῶτος, ἐξέστω κρίνειν ὕστερον· ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ τἀναντία τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἐνόντα ἐφαίνετο ἐν τῇ φύσει, καὶ οὐ μόνον τάξις καὶ τὸ καλὸν ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀταξία καὶ τὸ αἰσχρόν, καὶ πλείω τὰ κακὰ τῶν ἀγαθῶν καὶ τὰ φαῦλα τῶν καλῶν, οὕτως ἄλλος τις φιλίαν εἰσήνεγκε καὶ νεῖκος, ἑκάτερον ἑκατέρων αἴτιον τούτων.

It might be inferred that the first person to consider this question was Hesiod, or indeed anyone else who assumed Love or Desire as a first principle in things; e.g. Parmenides. For he says, where he is describing the creation of the universe, Love she created first of all the gods . . .
And Hesiod says, First of all things was Chaos made, and then/Broad-bosomed Earth . . ./And Love, the foremost of immortal beings, thus implying that there must be in the world some cause to move things and combine them.

The question of arranging these thinkers in order of priority may be decided later. Now since it was apparent that nature also contains the opposite of what is good, i.e. not only order and beauty, but disorder and ugliness.

Without getting too diverted by Aristotle, isn't it important to read Hesiod's Theo-Gony alongside the Septuagint translators' Genesis?

Look at the play with the phrase Ἑν ἀρχῇ ("Right at the start") and with the phrase ὁ θεὸς "the god." (This god has yet no name, but in Greek has written vowels). The backdrop is polytheism in the beginning, with a definite god figuring. Then there are the plays with ἡμέρα, not the personified Ἡμέρη of Hesiod (i.e., "Day") but the six "days" of the birthings, of the poetic creative ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς.

(In Hesiod: "Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Love, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day [Ἡμέρη], whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself. . . .")

Even more interesting to me are the perhaps unintended Hebrew-now-Hellene interplays between A) Γένεσις and B) τὴν γῆν and C) τῷ ποταμῷ τῷ δευτέρῳ Γηων and D) γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν and E) γυναῖκα / γυνή. Here, in Greek (not Hebrew) there are rhymes --puns made between A) the title of the book "Birthings" and B) the "birthing ground" which the god made and C) the second River transliterated (in contrast to the first river transliterated to sound like the Greek word for snake) and D) the "birthing knowledge of good form and evil (see Aristotle's notes above).....and E) the womb-man for birthing. (Homer and the lovers of his epics played with words in this way--which is something Plato and Aristotle even more despised and disparaged).

It's also fascinating that Adam is transliterated while "Eve" is translated, at first: καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αδαμ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή, ὅτι αὕτη μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων (Genesis 3:20). It's not until some point later in the text that Adam's wombman, his woman, his wife is called by the Hebrew sounding name meaning "life" or "Ζωή": Αδαμ δὲ ἔγνω Ευαν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ (Genesis 4:1) -- which might be understood in Greek as "and Adam committed birthing knowledge on Eve, his birthing woman" -- but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself into the traditional chapter 4.

To sum up, the Jewish translators made Greek choices, knowing the various traditions of the Hellenes. They seem defiant and rebellious in working against Aristotelianism and perhaps Platonism. The prefer the wordplays, the puns, the creativity, the novelties in sound tradition, the pluralities within which to re-cast their mono-theism. These are the things of Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, even of Sappho, and especially of mother Helen (μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων of pan-Hellenism).

ex-plaining

2008-12-31T11:40:00.001-06:00

Somehow I feel this obligation to explain to you what I mean by this blog. I wonder, always, what you mean by it. Can we make it plain?

Explanation comes in four sorts. The ancient Greeks say so, and so does Jesus. (I'm bringing this up because a blogger friend, John Hobbins, has boxed me into one position of only two possible positions on "translation [method]"; and a blogger friend, Henry Neufeld, has now rightly written of his problem with John's "division of the types of translations" and how that too may mis-type him. Henry also notes in passing how he doesn't "claim to completely understand" this blog of mine.)

So back to the four sorts. First, men tend to reduce explaining to proposition. Second, when listeners or readers don't "get it," then men tend to explain by imposition. Third, more clever men tend to explain by transposition. And, lastly, even fewer men will find answers in apposition.

What's that mean? Well, appositions may help us here. In other words, we may have to use other words. We may best paraphrase. We might put one story beside another to see how that helps us interpret better.

Historian Bettany Hughes remembers how one Greek man gave this parable (i.e., one story thrown alongside another), as a joke:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

Why would this woman ever leave the Greek men to join an enemy, a Trojan? In short, Gorgias said Helen was obedient to a command (i.e., a proposition of the gods), was forced by might (through imposition by Trojan men), or was conned by words (i.e., a kind of transposing "If you go with us, then we'll give you this and that and such"). Or, she might have been in love, her story voluntarily put in position right beside her so-called abductor's story.

Mark's Rabbi told a parable (the parable to explain all parables) that is similar. Actually, Mark "translated" what this Joshua (aka Jesus) spoke into another language -- two languages side by side. Wow, this is hard to claim to understand completely. Joshua said (and Mark said Jesus said) that there are four positions for sown seed to find itself in. First, seed falls along the wayside (like a proposition falls without being understood). Second, seed falls into shallow soil where rocks and sun force it to die (like an imposition forces a reduced understanding of a statement). Third, seed falls among other plants to engage with them (but like Hegel's synthesis of a thesis with an antithesis, the thesis dies). Fourth, seed falls and dies but in good soil without rocks or too much sun or the choking of other plants comes up multiply, after its own kind but different that way too (like a parable or an appositive or Helen's love beside her lover's love).

What I'm wondering is whether the first Jewish translation of their scripture is like this fourth sort of ex-plain-ing. The translators put Hebrew into Hellene, and they put themselves into it. It's very personal. It changes them and their Greek and Jewish readers in exponential ways.

Tomorrow, I'll try to begin with the Jewish story of the Beginning. In Greek, it is a parable, a throwing of one story alongside another. The story dies but comes up something different, something more, something still after its own kind.

Sucking the Body right out of Translation

2008-12-30T09:29:00.000-06:00

Just so you know, I'm limiting my composing on this blog to 15 minutes a post.

Now, here's the thesis statement today:

We western men suck the personal right out of translating.

This isn't what women tend to do. Nor is it how the Jews translating their own scriptures translate.

Let me try to explain the thesis. We westerners, mostly us men, mostly us non-Jews, have mostly translated "the Bible." But rather than translate by the methods that the Hebrews used, at least in legend, to translate what we know as the Septuagint and as the New Testament -- we western men (and some women) have chosen Western methodologies.

"Dynamic equivalence," "formal equivalence," "literary equivalence," and "relevance theory" are the King methodologies in the Western world today. To be sure, missionary Bible translators are exporting these methods as if they're straight from God himself, as "infallible" as the text of the "Word of God" surely must be.

When a woman such as Karen H. Jobes comes along to suggest that translation really is better conceived as "simultaneous interpretation," then the Western men (and some women) get all excited to consider the "new" idea. But then they return to what they've always been doing: using Aristotelian and Platonic (i.e., Greek women-hating male) theories of language and of language translation. Some time back I read an article about how the translators for the U.S. military in Iraq jeopardize their own person, their own families even, when they are simultaneous translators. The enemies of America don't take too kindly to such translators. There's personal risk. Jobes knows that too.

When a family such as Kenneth L. Pike, Evelyn Pike, and Eunice Pike come along to suggest that translators are outsiders looking in, then the Bible translation establishments that they work for get all excited to consider the "new" idea. But then they "progress" to "relevance theory" leaving the Pikes behind. Ken Pike named outsiderness "etics" and insiderness "emics" -- and this got the attention of scholars in twenty-five different academic disciplines because it was so useful. I say it's pretty humble too.

Pike used to say to some of us his students that some languages don't have much of a mathematics and no formal Aristotle logic and nothing of Plato's idealism (as in Chomsky's syntactic theory). Pike also used to do this language translation on the spot -- something he called "monolingual demonstration." He'd play the "etic" outsider and let another "friendly person" he'd never met nor talked with in her language play the "emic" insider. The "monolingual" part was her language, not his. But this outsider, etic role of Pike's was always personal. He'd ask us, "Aren't etics a kind of emics"? In other words, "Even if I play the outsider, aren't I coming from my own personal perspectives? Can I ever be totally objective? Don't the data observed and the person observed and the person observing all change in the observation?"

Alright, I'm into my 14th minute so just have to end by saying this:

I'm reading along in Genesis this morning that part about God changing his mind about having ever made human beings in the first place. The Jews translating the original Hebrew into Greek use these loaded terms: καὶ ἐνεθυμήθη ὁ θεὸς. Somewhat literally in English that is: "and the god enthymemed."

"Enthymemed?" Yep, that's English in our western academics we call "Rhetoric." It's a loaded, personal term for the Greeks, even for Aristotle and Plato -- both of whom theorized "rhetoric" as something changy and slimy and womany and what the "sophistas" did with language. Aristotle goes on right at the start of his book Around Rhetoric to say that the "enthymeme" is the "body" of "beliefs" or of "proofs," as in mathematical proofs. Now, that notion of the "body" is a feminist one. "Beliefs" and "change" really are things that our mothers do, when they conceive us and carry us to full term and then nurture us through life. Sort of like translating. (Which reminds me too of reading something the Jew named Mark said the Rabbi Joshua aka "Jesus" would teach: μετανοεῖτε καὶ πιστεύετε, quite literally "change your minds and believe." Kinda personal stuff, huh? Which makes me wonder whether Mark changed and believed any? Whether most western men translating the bible by their Western methods do at all. Whether instead they tend to suck the incarnation, the personal, right out of their translations.)

this blog: the womBman's Bible

2008-12-29T09:58:00.000-06:00

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This blog is to be my ongoing commentary on the Bible. I'm trying to encourage myself and my family members to read it again this year. My daughters and my son and my wife are going to help me translate it into English. They're mainly going to read it in English. I'm mainly making it into English from Greek.

We're outsiders to this Jewish text. None of us is a Jew (or speaks Hebrew, Aramaic, or Yiddish although I "read" some of the ancient stuff). And my daughters and my wife are even more "etic" (or more "outsider") than my son and I are because the text is written and canonized exclusively by men, to men, and for men.

I'm focusing on the woman's perspective of the Greek versions of the Bible. That's my focus (or those are my focuses) for at least two reasons: 1) translating opens up the text to outsiders, and 2) translations into the Hellene mother tongue have helped highlight the inherent male sexism of, in, and through the Bible.

My blog title is a play on the title of an earlier commentary of the Hebrew (and Christian) scriptures in America: The Woman's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several of her colleagues from around the world.

My "womBman" is a play on our English language word woman. Sheldon Vanauken, one of the first English speakers to coin the word sexism, also said:

A man defines himself primarily in terms of brain, a thinking--creature. Hand and brain, hence overlordship of earth. But he defines woman, despite her equal brain and deft hands, primarily as a biological creature - a vagina and a womb. -He does not expect or want from her anything much more. Consider for a moment the connotations of the word 'woman' with its sound of 'womb' combined with 'man'. Or the word 'female'. Compare the ring of "Here is a man" to "Here is a woman". The former suggests all that a man is: the proud thinker, the brave warrior, the creative artist, the builder, and, of course, the lover. But 'woman' and 'female' alike suggest no more than the biological roles - the wife or mistress or mother of man. Somehow the word 'girl' seems a bit freer of exclusively biological connotations, partly perhaps because it's an independent word, not a feminine variant on the masculine stem, but most!" because of what a girl is -free. Comparatively free, anyway. But regardless of words, to define woman as a biological creature is to err. If all men were stricken by some incapacitating disease, she could take over and run the world. It might even be a more peaceful world. She, too, is homo sapiens with the brain that will take man to the stars. What has happened here?

It is men who over the centuries have defined her as vagina and womb, Because of greater physical strength, and by means of that strength, men reduced her and limited her to her secondary and biological role, just as they also enslaved other men. But physical strength is of virtually no importance, in a world of machinery and brain power is all-important. It is time for a change. It is time to stop wasting half the brain power of the world in kitchen and nursery and secondary jobs -secretaries but never bosses with half the average income of men.

"Oh, but listen" -the cries go up- "this is what girls want. They could change it if they really wanted to; they have the vote. They want to be secondary, they want to lean on men, they want kids. Consider the material instinct! The nesting instinct! It's basic, man! Ask the chicks. Anyway, what about the sacred American home? Wow, we can't break up the home' Men need somebody to take care of them and build them up. That's what a woman is made for, that and kids. Sure the blacks and the Vietnamese (males, of course) have got to be free, but women are already as free as they want to be. They may have brains, but with them instinct is stronger, a whole lot stronger. They've got to have a home and kids or they're not fulfilled. Unmarried women aren't real women."

A myth. A myth like the racist myths we're all too familiar with, designed to explain and perpetuate the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. But the sexist myth is the greatest and most pervasive myth the world has ever told itself- at once explaining, condoning, and perpetuating male superiority and female inferiority, meanwhile denying -craftiest touch of all! - that to be secondary in everything is at all inferior.

Cady Stanton published her comments on the Bible starting in around 1895 AD.

Vanauken published his comments (those comments above) in 1968 AD.

Jewish men began translating their Hebrew text into the Hellene mother tongue in Alexander the Great's Alexandria, Egypt in around 246BCE.

In many fascinating ways, this act of translating into Hellene opens up the text. It opens the text up into the debates over how Greek males (such as Alexander's teacher Aristotle) may control the Greek language for elite educated men of the Academy. The language control was to exclude not only women but also sophists, rhetoricians, ancient epic poets, more contemporary poets, colonists such as those in Soli who committed "solecisms" in writing, and BarBarians who spoke in foreign barbarisms.

The intended or unintended wordplay in the newly-translated Greek Jewish Bible (or ἡ βίβλος), and how such translatings allow women, or wombmen, to overhear the text as outsiders, are some of the focuses of this blog. In this blog, I'm also going to look at the New Testament (or new covenant) written by Jewish men using the Hellene mother tongue as their male text.

So it's "The womBman's Bible: an outsider's perspective on the Hebrew male's Hellene book."