Reading a translation is still better than reading an interlinear, and news flash, the same scholars who brought you the translations you despise wrote the lexicons and grammars people use to “read the original languages.” So you aren’t escaping “bias” by relying on a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek that you only have access to through the same academic disciplines that prepared the translators.
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Appreciate the reply. Explain how a translation is better than an interlinear? Are all translations equal? Does an interlinear serve the same purpose as a translation? The intended suggestion was that the Hebrew names/words translated as LORD, Lord, God, gods, etc. could use or include a transliteration. I’m surprised my post reads alliteration. Auto correct spelling I suppose. I have never thought about there being an interlinear using transliterations rather than Greek and Hebrew alphabets.
My “despise of translators” you concluded describes my position about “inadequate translations” rather than translators. Do you deny that editors and translators have social and theological agendas that have an influence on translations? I don’t despise but fret that English translations can mislead serious Bible students. The “casual” or less than serious Bible student is unaware of any issues, and Christian faith works just fine for this level of Bible study.
Allow this. Write the word “earth” on a 3X5 card and ask twenty people to make a sentence using the word on the card. Keep a tally of the number of replies that use “earth” as a planet and a tally of those who use “earth” as soil/land/territory and get back with me. In the meantime, you might try to figure out when the word “earth” with lower case letters came into the vernacular to mean planet Earth. No published English Bible translator has done this for it would have changed his translation – unless there is an agenda.
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If I remember correctly, Asherah was Ba’al’s (whichever one) consort, and Astarte (modified to Ashteroth) was his father El’s (again, whichever one).
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Communication is far more than the sum of denotations of words and grammatical structures. Linguists estimate that over half of meaning is implicit. Translations bring out meaning that would have been inferred by original hearers based on the shared context with a speaker. Most idioms and figures of speech are completely opaque in an interlinear. Plus, words have semantic ranges and there are rarely one-to-one correspondences when it comes to the semantic range of a word in one language compared to a word in another. Hebrew words don’t really “mean” English words. Hebrew words triggered concepts and cognitive images for Hebrew speakers and a translators job is to figure out how to trigger similar concepts and cognitive images for English speakers using English words.
No, some are better than others and some are better for some purposes than others. And they do indeed have agendas, and they do indeed have translation philosophies and intended audiences. That’s why the best way to understand is to read in multiple translations or even multiple languages if you can. It will give you the fullest possible picture of the range of possibilities there was for understanding the passage.
Nope. But I don’t think anyone can produce a translation without picking a lane on some things. All translators will have to make a huge number of translation decisions that could be second-guessed, it’s a very hard and messy sausage-making process. I just don’t think this automatically means the translations are inadequate and it definitely doesn’t mean that the average person would understand the intended meaning better by looking at a gloss of the original languages.
In my experience, the average “serious Bible student” has a limited understanding of how languages and translation actually works and puts way too much faith in isolated word studies and things like etymology. Plus the resources they are using to do their “serious study” are generally put out by white, Reformed, males with the same theological “agendas” and Western worldview biases as are seen in the translations.
Spoken English doesn’t have capitalization, that is an orthographical convention. Earth has a semantic range in English and can be used as a proper name and as a common noun. (Technically, it’s only considered a proper name in sentences without articles like “Earth is X miles from Mars.” In a sentence like “The first plane to fly around the earth…” it’s not being used as a proper name. Sentences like “the earth in that region is high in clay content” (soil) or “he sank to the earth in despair” (ground) or “there is no one on earth she would rather meet” (in the world) show that earth has a wider semantic range in English than the Hebrew word erets. This is a fact of English and a limitation of translation, it’s not an example of a translation error. The ancient Hebrew concept of the whole earth triggered by their word erets is different than the concept of the whole earth triggered by the English phrase in our modern time. That doesn’t mean ‘earth’ is a bad translation, it means that modern English speakers need to be taught what the ancient concept was. Just like they need to be taught that “marriage” and “worship” were different in that context too and you can’t just overlay all your modern, English-triggered concepts onto the ancient world.
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Origins of Yaweh?
Moses is mentioned but not the story.
Exodus 3
13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[a] And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord,[b] the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.
I always thought the point of this name was that God was never one of many to need a name at all, except in the mind of the the Israelites exposed to pagan cultures. Thus Monolatry and Henotheism was NOT the teaching of the Hebrew religion. They did not believe in other deities but were only aware that other people worshipped other deities. I don’t see how such an awareness changes their belief/religion from monotheism to something else. All that really has been established above is a way of speaking in the context of such an awareness NOT an actual belief in other gods.
You can find such a tool online for free at BibleHub: Interlinear Bible: Greek, Hebrew, Transliterated, English, Strong's
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Good point!
In the OT originally the words were written with consonants only. Vowels are not written as letters, but as marks. The Name of God was written YHWH in Hebrew letters, but because the Name is sacred it was not spoken. Instead the word Adonai or Lord was spoken.
When the scribed added the vowels they kept the consonants for YHWH and added the vowels for Adonai. Pronounced together they got J(Y)ehov(w)ah. There is no such Name in the Bible. It is a corrupt form of YHWH We think it should be pronounced YAHWEH.
Jesus/Yeshua is a form of YHWH. YHWH gave Abram AND Sarai a portion of God’s Name to conform the covenant between them.
I would also point out that the sacred Name of God YHWH is not just a name like other names, but is based on a phrase HAYAH HAYAH, I AM WHO I AM, which subtly depicts God’s sovereign power. It uses a form of the word to be when the verb to be is not used in Hebrew. In the Greek the verb to be is used everywhere.
You didn’t list options 2-4 previously, you offered more complex combinations I don’t recognise. Islamic monotheism is closest to Jewish which predates it by over a thousand years, Muhammad knew Jews. His 13th ‘wife’ was Christian. Sikhism is Hinduism filtered through Islam. And so on. As happened in history.
It always seemed more likely to me that polytheism developed from monotheism as each group brought and clung to their own ideas of deity when they became a part of a larger culture.
Islamic monotheism is closest to the God of the philosophers.
All this is an attempt to solve the puzzle of the One And the Many, which only Christianity has done.
I envy you your education in this area but thanks for passing it on.
Anyway I first heard it from you that all language is metaphor ultimately and I’m reading that again in my McGilchrist book. Same goes for the primacy of the implicit. We think we can learn to communicate more and more exactly what we mean to say. As an undergrad philosophy major I would say that is what I got out of that. My wife says I was always talking in metaphors before I did that. Now I realize the metaphorical thinking was more foundational for becoming clearer on what matters to me. But when we carefully pin down what we say so no one can take it any other way, it is very easy to denude something implicitly richer and end up thinking the world is much less than it is. Clear communication is a good thing but it isn’t worth fooling ourselves into mistaking sign posts for the things themselves.
Great post!
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No. Muslims worship the God of Abraham, just as most of us here do.
Then they do not worship the God of the Quran.
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By profession and claim only, not reality.
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You could very well say that about a lot of Christians and Jews also. Look up “Abrahamic religions”
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I was under the impression that the god of philosophers was distant, like that of Anthony Flew or Aristotle?
Do we worship the god of the Quran?
The latter two series I listed earlier are rarer ones that came to mind then, specifically the cases of Iran (polytheism to Zoroastrian to Islam) and some groups in central Asia (polytheism/shamanism/animism to Buddhism to Islam). This time I was trying to pick which series were most common, to my knowledge.
No, we worship the God of Abraham. Moses, and Elijah.