I'm Only Leaving the Posts Public: Not Blogging

"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

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.

Somebody Else's Reading: So Don't Panic

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.

ex-plaining

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.

this blog: the womBman's Bible

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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."