And Then There Was The Word...

I grew up a Christian (Protestant, First Baptist) and so naturally scripture was a big part of my reading growing up. As I’ve become more disengaged from the church in the last ten years or so I haven’t really been reading much of the Bible. But in a weird coincidence I’m currently reading three things that have taken me back to my church days but also have me thinking more critically about the Bible. How it has been assembled from myriad sources, how much translation is more art than science and how much historical context can affect interpretation of the texts, especially one written over hundreds of years.

In The Impossible Will Take A Little While, there’s an essay by Walter Wink, Jesus and Alinksy, in which he parallels Christ with the famous community organizer, Saul Alinsky. He argues that Christ’s instructions of passiveness, when examined in the context of the harsh Roman occupation of Judea at the time and common social norms, can be interpreted as instructing people to non-violently resist imperial authority through the assertion of dignity rather than meekly to submit to their earthly conditions in hope of a glorious after-life. Wink takes a closer look at three famous examples to make his case.

To Wink, the oft-referenced example of turning the other the cheek (especially cited when Christianity is being criticized for its role in colonizing people) does not mean that you are to be repeatedly pummeled in a fight between equals. It’s instead a dignified response to a very specific situation of a backhanded slap to your right cheek by someone who has complete power over you. In Jesus’ time, one could only hit the right cheek with the back of the right hand because the left hand was only to be used for unclean tasks. Wink argues that Jesus’ audience would have recognized the unequal power dynamic of the right cheek slap and understood his instruction of offering the other cheek to be an assertion of dignity (any other kind of protest in that situation would have been unthinkable) and a non-violent, but obvious message of protest.

Another example is Jesus’ instruction to carry a Roman soldier’s equipment for two miles if asked carry them one. Roman soldiers were actually not allowed to ask anyone to carry their things for more than one mile and this was well known. To try to exceed that limit would have been recognized as an attempt to diminish the dignity of the occupying soldier and assert your own. The third example Wink offers is the offering of your clothes in a debtor’s court to the point of nudity. Wink points out that nakedness was such a taboo that shame would have fallen not “on the naked party but the person viewing or causing the nakedness.” In a situation of complete powerlessness (destitution) Wink’s argument is that Jesus is teaching his audience how to assert power where there seems to be none available.

James Wood, in his review of Richard Alter’s new Translation of the Book of Psalms, looks closely at how Alter has tried to stay more faithful to the rhythm and brevity in the original Hebrew sources and how the King James Version [KJV] translation may have taken some liberties in translation to ensure a more docile people.

Wood compares Alter’s compact translation to the KJV:

He [Alter] is particularly alive to formal aspects of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose such as repetition, internal rhythm, and parallelism (in which a phrase amplifies and almost repeats a preceding phrase, as in “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth,” from Psalm 72). Because the Psalms are poems, he wants to preserve in English what he calls the “rhythmic compactness” of the originals, “something one could scarcely guess from the existing English versions.” His helpful introduction is more polemical than the exegeses he has provided for his other translations: he argues that even the King James translators, whom he, like everyone else, has always admired, pad out their versions with filler.

Later on, he looks at particular aspects of Hebrew syntax that Alter tries to remain faithful to such as the fact that in many Hebrew sentences the subject of a verb in a sentence is often left unstated and simply referred by the conjugation of the verb (I found this interesting because it’s actually similar to Korean sentences which almost always leave the subject unspoken, but assumed by conjugation and context).

Besides trying to staying faithful to Hebrew structure, Alter tries to clean the Psalms of their ‘Christianization’ and some of the liberties that the KJV translators must have made to align the mercurial, vengeful God of the Old Testament with the forgiving salvation-offering God of the New:

…he is determined to remind his readers that they are reading ancient texts with hybrid origins, not Christian prayers with dedicated destinations. The Psalms (like the Book of Job) were relentlessly Christianized by the King James translators.

Alter also makes the focus less on the after life and more on the current one:

Suddenly, in a world without Heaven, Hell, the soul, and eternal salvation or redemption, the theological stakes seem more local and temporal: “So teach us to number our days.” Psalm 23, again, is greatly refreshed by translation.

The K.J.V. has the last half line of the psalm as “and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.” Alter slaps a term limit on the eternal, and suggests “And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD / for many long days.” Again, a footnote anchors the decision: “The viewpoint of the poem is in and of the here and now and is in no way eschatological. The speaker hopes for a happy fate all his born days.”

Lynne Truss, in the hysterical Eats, Shoots and Leaves, looks at how the choice of one comma placement can lead to “huge doctrinal differences.”

“Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shallt be with me in Paradise”

“Verily, I say unto thee this day, Thou shallt be with me in Paradise”

The first being the Protestant interpretation that takes the crucified thief next to Jesus “straight to Heaven.” The second sentence is the Catholic interpretation, which leads to Purgatory. (“You’ll be with me in Heaven but I’m not saying when you’ll get there”).

These three articles/books are really helping to me look at something intimately familiar to me with fresh eyes. As much I’d like to think of myself as a critical reader, I was taught to accept the Bible as one unified book with one author (God working through the writings of various men) rather then a collection of writings and translations that are the products of incredibly diverse people and social and historical contexts.