How to translate the word torah?

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 associated with women differently than 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"?

Julia E. Smith's (outsider) translating

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

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 . . .