Committed Critic

From time to time I like to write up explanations for biblical words that I think get used in incorrect (yet interesting) ways. My previous posts have dealt with the words Calvary and helpmeet.

Here I’d like to discuss two proper names for deities in the Old Testament, and why I think English translations may obscure rather than clarify their sense. The names are Yahweh and Baal.

First I need to explain the distinction between a few Hebrew words. Several of them may be familiar. Note also that several of the words can function either as a common noun or as the proper name of a deity.

SOME HEBREW NAMES FOR GOD(S) AND LORD(S)

El is the Hebrew word for “god,” a cognate of the Arabic name Allah, used by Muslims. El could be a simple noun (similar to the lower-case god in English), but it was also the proper name of a Canaanite deity (similar to our upper-case use of the word God as a name). Hebrew has no upper or lower case letters, so the distinction must be determined from usage and context.

Elohim is, grammatically, just the plural of El, but it was used as another name for God. In the OT, Elohim is typically translated simply as “God,” such as in Genesis 1:1.

Yahweh is the primary name of the God of Israel. Other names such as Shaddai were used as well, but Yahweh was the most distinctive. In most English translations, Yahweh is translated “LORD” (see below), either in all capital letters or with small caps.

Adon is the Hebrew noun meaning “lord” or “master;” in the vast majority of cases it is used with a first person possessive prefix, spelled adonai (”my lord”). Either form could be a polite or submissive way of addressing either a human superior, or God.

Jehoveh is not a real Hebrew word at all, but rather is a later Christian misunderstanding of the name Yahweh. The reasons are complicated (maybe I’ll explain them in a later post), but the important point is that certain Hebrew letters can be transliterated into English in different ways, so that the Hebrew letter yod (spelled “jot” in Matt 5:18 in the KJV) shows up in English as either Y or J, and the Hebrew letter waw can be translated as either W or V. So then, the vowels of Yahweh were misunderstood by (much) later English translators as Yehowah, which they wrote as Jehovah. It works fine as a traditional name, but it isn’t really Hebrew.

Baal is a Hebrew word meaning owner, husband, or lord. It could also function as a proper noun referring to a Canaanite storm and fertility god: Baal was venerated for causing thunder and lightning, and for giving the rain that fertilized crops.

YAHWEH AND BAAL

What is interesting to me here is that Yahweh is at its core a proper name, whereas Baal was originally just a common noun (”lord” or “owner”) that came to be used as a proper name later in antiquity. Yet modern translations represent the Hebrew Yahweh with English LORD — a word that is not explicitly a proper noun — while they transliterate the Hebrew Baal as a word in English that appears to be only a proper name.

The result is an ironic swapping of the representation of the two names: in the Hebrew Yahweh is a proper noun and Baal comes from a common noun, yet the English translations suggest just the opposite.

Bruce Metzger, editor of the NRSV, explains one rationale behind the translation of Yahweh, writing in the preface of the NRSV:

The use of any proper name for the one and only God, as though there were other gods from whom the true God had to be distinguished, began to be discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church.

Now, in most cases, the NRSV (correctly, in my opinion) avoids altering the wording of OT passages to make them fit Christian interpretations. A famous example of this is Isa 7:14, where the NRSV translates “young woman” instead of “virgin,” since the former is more a accurate rendering of the Hebrew even though the latter is the meaning of the later Greek translations used especially by Christians.

It’s true that the early Christians used Greek translations of the OT that had the word “Lord” (Greek Kyrios) instead of the proper name “Yahweh,” yet modern translators should hardly feel bound to every convention that the ancients used — this is the whole point of going back to the original Hebrew, rather than just using the Greek Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate.

MAKING (NON)SENSE OF TEXTS

It seems to me that the position advocated by Metzger (who was actually somewhat of a conservative) leads readers to make assumptions that are basically what the ancient Israelites were opposing when they wrote the name Yahweh in their texts instead of just El or Adonai. This is not to idealize the Israelites, who committed plenty of idolatry. Yet Yahweh wasn’t used by other peoples, and the very use of the name served as a claim that the gods worshipped by surrounding nations weren’t the same.

Christians may prefer to worship God under the name “God,” a name that can be used by English-speaking adherents to any religion. Yet it is worth remembering that our Old Testament also uses a special name for God that cannot be universalized so readily.

In many places the OT text goes out of its way to emphasize God’s particular name. A good example is Psalm 18:31, which the NRSV translates, “For who is God except the LORD?” With this translation, the verse can come across as redundant or even virtually meaningless, especially when read out loud. One can still make sense of it, but it lacks the force that it has when translated more literally: “For who is God besides Yahweh?”

Metzger may be right that Christians should not imply that other gods are real, yet the rhetoric of Psalm 18:31 depends on the assumption that people who were around at that time generally assumed there were other gods. You have to be able to talk about other gods in order to insist that they aren’t real; if we obscure the language that allows for talk of other gods, then we present a text to English readers that obscures the argument the author was making.

Exodus 3:13-15 is practically ruined by the obscuring of the name Yahweh. When God (in the burning bush) sends Moses to Egypt, Moses worries that the elders of Israel may ask the name of the God who is sending him. God’s response, as the NRSV translates it, is:

Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you”: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

Here the translation “the LORD” makes the text almost unintelligible for those who aren’t paying close attention. Instead of the proper name Yahweh, we get the generic “The LORD,” even though the whole point is that Yahweh is a proper name. It would make far more sense in texts such as these to simply transliterate the name Yahweh.

THE PAYOFF

This may seem a small point, and I will admit that the stakes are relatively low. Yet my conviction is that we should let different biblical texts make their different points, rather than smoothing them over based on our theology. We may decide, especially from the New Testament, that we should use the generic names “God” or “the Lord” in our own prayers or sermons. But we have an enormous collection of texts in the Old Testament that use the proper name Yahweh, and I’m an advocate for translating texts so that their original sense is clear.

Granted, there are settings where Christians might avoid saying the divine name out loud in respect for Jews who are present. Yet the Jewish avoidance of speaking the name of Yahweh is not commanded in Scripture, and so I see no reason for Christians not to use the name Yahweh, just as we readily say the name Jesus — as long as we use both names with reverence.

Most English translations still use small caps to identify the divine name in the text, so it is not difficult to substitute the name Yahweh while reading OT texts aloud, for example in church.

And there is a theological payoff. The pluralistic leanings of Western society can lead us to assume that all peoples essentially worship the same God. No doubt this is at least partially true, yet the use of the name Yahweh reminds us that much of Scripture is not content with using a generic name for God — which is what Baal would have sounded like to ancients. Instead, Jews and Christians worship a particular god, who chose a particular people, and told them to call him by a particular name.

We may have reasons for disagreeing with the language used by the Scriptures, but if we are going to continue reading them, we should translate them in the sense their authors intended.

For more information on the names Yahweh and Baal, see their entries in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (now published as the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary), edited by David Noel Freedman.

A few weeks back I wrote about why the word “Calvary” isn’t actually in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

Here I want to look at another example of a nonsense word that gets used pretty frequently, again because of a misreading of the KJV’s archaic/awkward English. People, especially from conservative Protestant traditions, sometimes refer to a man’s helpmeet, with reference to the wife (Eve) that God created for Adam. The problem is that the word doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Genesis 2:18 explains why God decides to create Woman. It says something like,

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

This last phrase, “a helper that is suitable for him,” consists of two Hebrew words: ‘êzer ke-negdô. The first word means simply help or helper. The second word is actually a prepositional phrase, which would literally mean something like, “like that which corresponds to him.”

It’s pretty obvious that the text is trying to say that the Woman corresponded to the Man, or that she was appropriate for him (see Gen 2:20, which uses the same phrase ‘êzer ke-negdô), whereas the animals (2:18) were not. In other words, Eve was another human.

This is where the English of the KJV gets confusing. The KJV translators never used the words suitable or fitting, but they occasionally used the word meet, which had a similar meaning (see, e.g., Ex 8:26; Deut 3:18; Jud 5:30). As it turns out, the word is not particularly fitting or helpful for the modern reader, as Gen 2:18-20 demonstrates.

The KJV translates Gen 2:18,

And the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

A relative pronoun could have helped avoid misunderstanding (“I will make him a help that is meet for him”), but as the text stands it is easy to see why people have misread the phrase. The phrase “an help meet for him” doesn’t really make sense to modern readers, and so people have tended to combine help with meet to make a single term. Presumbably most people just assume that it’s an archaic word that people knew back when the KJV was translated, which of course is partly ironic because the original readers of the KJV (published in 1611) apparently would have understood it as two separate words.

Part of the blame for the misunderstanding goes back to the 17th century, where we have an author named John Dryden who used the two words as a hyphenated phrase (“help-meet”) to describe his wife in 1673. (These are the kinds of things you can find out in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Today, Webster’s simply lists it as a single word, helpmeet, which it notes is a combination of the noun and the adjective.

I probably shouldn’t talk about blame for the word, since in theory, any word is legitimate if it’s useful. If a man wants to refer to his wife using biblical language, helpmeet seems to get the job done.

But then, maybe it doesn’t work so well. My favorite part of all this is that the English language now also has the word helpmate. It’s possible that this word came about on its own, since its first known attestation (1715) refers to helpers in general rather that to a wife in particular. But in my copy of Webster’s, it’s listed simply as another way of writing helpmeet.

The convergence of these two words makes perfect sense considering that for the average person who hears the word helpmeet, the meaning of help is very clear, but the attached word meet doesn’t make any sense. So, people adjust the word (through an intuitive kind of folk etymology) to something that does make sense, and mate obviously fits when referring to one’s wife.

So, is it meet for us to judge a word like this? My tendency is to say yes: I think it should be phased out of use. Even though the word is useful for alluding quickly to Genesis, language should help us communicate clearly, and the alternative use of the word helpmate shows that for most people, this word is confusing. People who don’t know what meet originally meant in the KJV are likely to have a vague sense that it should be mate instead, and people who do know what it meant aren’t likely to use it at all.

Fields of academic study are typically named using a Greek word related to the field combined with the Greek root logos, which means word or reason. So for example, biology is the study of life (Greek bios).

When it came to the study of words, however, whoever decides these things apparently decided against the redundant logology, opting instead for philology, which literally means love of words. Whatever the reason for the choice, I think it’s appropriate, since I can’t imagine anyone ever studying the development of words simply because they thought it was useful. To get into something that technical, I think you have to love it.

And in this sense (as well as professionally, to an extent), I consider myself a philologist, which I suppose is the only possible explanation for this post.

An English transliteration of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a place

Because Christians are constantly dealing with texts that have been translated from other languages, words and names from Scripture are frequently misunderstood or distorted as the tradition is passed along. Here I’ll deal with one that I find interesting: Calvary.

Believe it or not, this word––used so often in Christian sermons, songs, and church names––is not in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

It had bothered me for awhile that I couldn’t think where I had seen the word in Scripture, so finally I looked in my Greek concordance (where I would expect it to look something like Kaluaria) and found that it wasn’t there. A computer search of the KJV, however, turned up the word in Luke 23:33: “And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”

(Brief, important definitions: to translate something is of course to write what it means in another language. To transliterate is to just take the letters of the original word and write them, in the same order, in a different language or with a different alphabet. As an example, hallelujah is the English transliteration of a common Hebrew phrase; its translation would be Praise the Lord.)

What’s odd about the KJV reading of Calvary is that when you look at Luke 23:33 in Greek (the original language), the name of the place is Kranion, which means skull. In the three other Gospels (Matt 27:33, Mark 15:22, and John 19:17), when this same Greek word shows up at the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the KJV translates it accordingly, as skull.

But even though they were supposed to be working from the original Greek, the KJV translators let their Latin creep into the process: it turns out that the Latin translation of Kranion is Calvaria, which is surely where the KJV translators got the name Calvary. Problem is, the original New Testament was wasn’t written in Latin, so there’s no reason a word transliterated from Latin should end up in any English translation.

There is at least a plausible explanation for why the KJV translators didn’t make this same mistake in the other Gospels, and this is where the situation gets (more) complex. In Matthew, Mark, and John, the name of the hill is identified as Golgotha, which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word Gulgoleth. The transliteration into Greek at this point makes sense, since Gulgoleth is probably the actual name that native speakers called the place near Jerusalem.

The authors of Matthew, Mark, and John wanted their audiences to know both the name of the place and what it meant, so all three of them included both Golgotha (the transliteration of the name from Hebrew) and Kranion (a translation of the Hebrew word that their Greek-speaking readers/hearers would understand).

It’s easy to see why the KJV translators didn’t make the mistake of using Calvary in these three passages like they did in Luke, since it would have made little sense for the text to say, “Golgotha, which means Kranion” or “Golgotha, which means Calvary.” English readers wouldn’t have understood what Kranion or Calvary meant, so instead the KJV refers to Golgotha and place of the skull.

But Luke never gives us the name Golgotha. He only writes, “they came to the place called Kranion,” which might suggest to a Greek reader that Kranion was the actual proper name of the place. In this case, the translators from Greek to Latin were quick enough to realize (probably from knowing the parallels in the other Gospels) that Kranion was just a translation of the name, so they translated it also, to the Latin Calvaria.

But the KJV translators, who probably knew the Latin translation of the Bible quite well, seem to have let the familiar reading affect their work. And so instead of translating the name (i.e., as Skull), they inserted the Latin transliteration and passed it along.

Great, so what?

I’m actually not sure what I’m contributing here; everyone knows that Calvary refers to where Jesus was crucified, so there should be no problem with going on using it.

I do suppose that I’m potentially ruining a bunch of pretty Christian songs for some people (think: “Jesus keep me near the cross: There a precious fountain / Free to all, a healing stream / Flows from Skull’s mountain”).

What is worth considering is how religious language functions for us. The frequency with which the word Calvary is used, coupled with the fact that I’ve never heard anyone question where exactly it comes from, suggests that the root meaning of a word need not have anything to do with its meaning for real people who participate in a religious tradition.

At the very least, the word points to how useful it is to have certain words that function as shorthand. You can say to any Bible-belt Christian, “Remember Calvary,” and they’ll probably know what you’re talking about. The Cross has a similar function.

Perhaps we like Calvary because it is a pretty word that fits well in names like Calvary Baptist Church, whereas the darker Golgotha, or the morbid Skull, might put people off. Of course, I suppose that if we can make crosses of gold, we could also knock the rough edges off the word skull if we wanted to.