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"?

Lest We Cared What She'd Say

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?)

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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

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:

1. 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")
2. that the Jewish Greek allows much play in English (and by word play I mean both interpretive wiggle room and playfulness).
3. 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.
4. 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

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

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: first try at a wordplay for wordplay translation

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).