Download formal equivalence

586 BCE and
After:
The World that
Created the Bible
What happened in 586 BCE?
• Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon
completed the conquest of
Israel by making Judah, the
southern half, a vassal state
• All priests, prophets, scribes,
and members of the royal
family were exiled throughout
the Babylonian empire
(Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Africa).
This dispersion is called the
Diaspora.
• Farmers & workers remained as
slaves. The religions they
practiced were an amalgam of
several forms of Judaism and
paganism.
What was Israel before?
• From 10th century (900’s) BCE to 586
BCE, Israel was a divided Kingdom. The
north, Israel, had ten tribal units, and the
south, Judah, had two. Each kingdom
had its own priests, scribes, kings, and its
own versions of the biblical narratives.
• While both kingdoms had fallen to the
Assyrians in the 721 BCE, the south,
where the Jerusalem temple housed
many important archives, had regained
its independence by 586, only to lose it
again.
• Most of the biblical story is told by
survivors of the Southern Kingdom.
• “Jew” and “Judaism” are named for the
southern Kingdom.
The Northern Kingdom’s Alternate
Judaism
• A northern sect of Judaism, called Samaritanism,
later compiled an alternate version of the Torah (the
first five books). It used northern landmarks,
mentions a northern capital (Gerizim), and rejects all
books other than its own Torah. It is written in a
different alphabet.
• The Samaritan Torah reflects political tensions, too.
The north did not join with the south in its resistance
to the Greek tyrant Antiochus IV.
• In Jesus’s time, Jews regarded Samaritans as
members of a different faith entirely. Although Jesus
himself embraced them, almost none of them
became Christians.
And before that?
• Before the 10th century, scholars believe Israel had a tribal
organization. The story of Jacob’s 12 sons is an etiological tale
that explains how the 12 tribes got their name.
• The people were Semitic or “Asiatic,” according to the Egyptians.
They probably migrated all over Mesopotamia and into Egypt
because of famine or conquest, but their base was Canaan, and
Israelites were indistinguishable from Canaanites.
This photo of an
Egyptian Wall painting shows Asiatic
workers making
bricks in Egypt in the
15th c. BCE.
Why Canaan?
• At some point, everyone
seems to have invaded this
region, which is the size of a
large American county.
• In the early Bronze age,
Canaan was settled by the
Akkadians and the
Egyptians. In biblical times,
it was sought by the
Philistines, the Phoenicians,
the Assyrians, and many
others.
• Why? Climate change was
common, but for much of
this time, most the
surrounding region was
desert.
Canaan was not only a maritime port,
but a habitable area of the Fertile
Crescent, a region fed by the Nile river
as well as the Tigris and Euphrates, the
site of the bible’s Garden of Eden.
Whom did the Canaanites worship?
• They worshipped various gods including El,
his wife Asherah, grain god Dagon, a sea
god Yam and his serpent ally Lotan, a
huntress Anath, a love goddess Quadeshtu,
and the storm god Baal Hadad, who
superseded El in the Canaanite Pantheon.
Baal, God of Thunder, became
a chief rival of Yahweh
Asherah was
worshipped
in hill shrines through
poles, teraphim,
etc. In 586, Jeremiah
complains
that Hebrew women
are still baking
Asherah cakes.
What happened?
• At some point, the Israelites began thinking of
themselves as separate from Canaanites. It may have
happened during a stay in Egypt.
• In Joshua, it says the Israelites conquered the
Canaanites, destroying them utterly.
• But Israelites and Canaanites actually lived side by
side for centuries, speaking the same language and
worshipping some of the same gods.
• After the exile, the Jews blamed this double identity
for all their suffering. At that time, they may have
edited older texts to emphasize the differences
between Israelite and Canaanite.
El = Yahweh?
• According to the Canaanite myths, El’s
marriage to Beirut (City) produced Heaven
and Earth.
• In the bible, when you see “God,” it is a
translation of one of many versions of El
(Elohim=sons of god, El Shaddai = God
almighty, El Roi = God of seeing, El Elyon =
God of the mountains).
• When you see “LORD,” it is a translation of
JHWH, probably pronounced “Yahweh,”
which means, “I am.” Jews may not
pronounce the Tetragrammaton or sacred
name of God.
• Though these names are often used
interchangeably, some think they were
originally two different gods, one Kenite (or
“Cainite”) and one Canaanite.
• These gods merged in the story of Exodus.
What else happened @ 586?
• Franks and Saxons inhabited the
Germanic region
• 1st limited democracy created in
Athens, Greece
• 1st great western philosopher,
Anaximenes, declared water the
basis of all matter
• The great mathematician,
Pythagoras, preached about the
“transmigration of souls.”
• 35-yr old Nepalese aristocrat
Siddhartha Gautama founded
Buddhism
• Confucius was active in China.
Why 586? Literacy
• The exile and the post-exile Persian
and Greek (or “Second Temple”)
period was when most of the bible
was written in final form. By 586,
Israel employed many scribes and
priests.
• The exiled author Ezekiel was one of
the first to have his own story written
down, and Lamentations was set
down soon after composition.
• Before 586, the temple had archives,
records, collections of sayings, but
most stories in the bible we know
now were oral legends and folktales
existing in several different versions.
586: The Impact of Exile
• When Solomon’s Temple was destroyed,
most records were lost too. In exile,
priests and scribes reconstructed old
stories, invented others, and saw the
importance of a permanent canon. But
the canon had many more books than the
Hebrew bible has today, and was not
finally closed until 1st century CE.
• Because most texts were composed or
finished post-exile, they reflect post-exile
concerns:
• a permanent sense of homelessness
• a covenant that is indefinitely
postponed
• an identify defined by exclusion,
separation, and ethnic and cultural
purity.
586: Impact of other cultures on Israel
• During the Babylonian, Persian, and
Hellenistic (Greek) periods that
followed, Israel (also called Palestine
after Greek invaders that once lived
there) joined a large, vibrant empire.
• The bible’s writers were influenced by
religious and literary traditions from
Egypt, Persia (Iran), Babylon (Iraq),
Greece, Assyria, Ethiopia, and parts of
India.
• They borrowed keys concepts (Devil,
heaven/hell, guardian angels, demons)
from Persia, and their creation, flood,
and law stories could have been
influenced by other cultures as well.
Alexander’s Empire
What is the bible, anyway?
• “Bible” is a Greek word meaning “little
books.” No single bible exists, because the
canon of each group is different. Our bible
has three main parts:
• The Hebrew bible, written mostly in
Hebrew
• The Apocrypha, written mostly in Greek
• The New Testament, written mostly in
Greek
The Hebrew Bible?
• The Hebrew Bible or TNK (Torah,
Prophets, Writings) is similar to what
Christians call the Old Testament, but
in a different order.
• It is written mostly in Hebrew but
also in Aramaic (the common
language of the Persian empire).
• The last book accepted in the
Hebrew bible was Daniel, which they
took because it was set in the time of
exile (but actually written around
165 BCE).
• Our bible uses the Christian order of
texts, but our rental uses the Jewish
order.
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
• The Apocrypha is a collection of later Jewish books, written
mostly in Greek. These were known by first century CE Jews
like Jesus, Paul, and the authors of the gospels, but were
excluded from the final Jewish canon as being too new.
Most are “pseudonymous,” meaning they are attributed to
famous people but not written by them. They are in the
Catholic and Greek canons, but not the Protestant canon.
• The Apocrypha contains Greek additions to Esther, Daniel,
and Esther, as well as many other texts.
• A huge number of texts did not make it into any canon.
These are sometimes called the Pseudepigrapha. Some, like
the Testament of Solomon and the Book of Enoch, had a
strong impact on the Catholic church and our notions of
hell, Satan, original sin, and purgatory.
The New Testament?
• The NT was written in Greek in the Roman Empire, mostly by Jews,
mostly after the destruction of Jerusalem’s second temple in 70 CE.
Its authors, except for Paul, were anonymous or pseudonymous,
but probably none knew Jesus or spoke his language.
• Its main character, Jesus, existed in many versions that synthesized
many spiritual traditions and practices: Rabbinical Judaism; Greek
philosophy; Roman mystery rites that practiced ritual cannibalism
and believed in purification by death, resurrection, and baptism;
Zoroastrianism; and perhaps others.
• The final Catholic canon, fixed around the 4th c. CE, also excluded
many books and traditions about Jesus.
• While the NT was being composed, Rabbinical Jews were closing
the written canon of the Hebrew bible but beginning a vast
interpretive tradition called the Talmud and the Midrash. These
works are also “canonical” in Jewish tradition.
Was Jesus a Christian?
• No. Jesus was a Jew. He
probably lived in Galilee
but worked with his
father in a Roman
business center called
Sepphoris.
• Jesus’s name was Jeshua
or Joshua, not Jesus.
• The first “Christians”
were his disciples, led by
his brother James. Paul
created a variant version
of this “Jesus
movement,” and his
version caught on.
Above: a zodiac wheel in a Jewish
synagogue in Sepphoris.
No Christian existed before 36 CE, so
the audience for the Hebrew Bible
contained no Christians.
How did the bible get into English? Latin 1st
• The bible was translated into Latin by
way of Greek by Jeremiah. For
centuries, it was the only version of
the bible available, and it was a crime
to translate it, so most Europeans
knew the bible only through paintings
and street plays.
• It was a good translation, but it made
many errors. For example, the
character Lucifer is a Latin mistranslation of “sons of light,” or
Babylonians. Though the King James
Bible retains this error and others like
it, no character Lucifer is actually
mentioned in the Bible.
What’s the King James Bible?
• In the 14th and 15th centuries, people
suffered great persecution to
translate the bible into their spoken
languages.
• The King James bible was a
translation authorized by the King of
England in 1611. It followed other
great translations such as the Wycliffe
bible, the Coverdale bible, and the
Geneva bible.
• The Geneva bible and the King James
bible went back to the original Greek
and Hebrew sources, so they were
good, but their translators knew less
about biblical Hebrew than we know
today.
Why are we using the NRSV translation?
• Currency: the King James bible was written in
Shakespeare’s time by poets. It was beautiful, but
hard for ordinary people to understand, then as
now.
• Accuracy: The NRSV translation not only reflects
the latest scholarship about Hebrew and biblical
studies, but it incorporates some variations used
by different versions of these texts, versions
discovered in the 1940’s among the Dead Sea
Scrolls in Qumran.
Why this translation– continued…
• Principles of translation: because ancient Hebrew
is so different from English, translators choose
either Dynamic equivalence (expresses the main
idea, sometimes to the point of reinterpretation),
formal equivalence (expresses the literal
meaning, even if it doesn’t make sense), or a
balance between the two.
• The New Revised Standard Version uses an
excellent balance, and our version provides
footnotes whenever an alternate literal reading is
possible. Because this “balanced” translation isn’t
associated with a denomination or sect, it is more
trustworthy than some others.
Three approaches: examples
Formal Equivalence Balanced Approach Extensive Dynamic
Equivalence
•American Standard
Version of 1901
•New American
Standard Bible
•King James Version
(formal equivalence,
albeit to 17th-century
English)
•New King James
Version
•English Standard
Version
•Revised Standard
Version
•Douay-Rheims
American Version
•Green's Literal
Translation
•Holman Christian
Standard Bible called
"optimal" equivalence
•New Revised
Standard Version
•New American Bible
•New English
Translation
•Murdock's
Translation
•Modern Language
Bible
•New International
Version
•Today's New
International
Version[5]
•New Jerusalem Bible
•Revised English Bible
•Good News Bible
(formerly "Today's
English Version")
•Complete Jewish
Bible
•New Living
Translation
•The Living Bible
•Phillips Modern
English
•The Message
What difference does the translation
make? The Case of Leviticus
• This passage from Leviticus 18:22
is used by many fundamentalist
Christians and Jews to make laws
against same sex behavior:
“You shall not lie with a male as with
a woman; it is an abomination.”
(NRSV)
But what does Leviticus really
mean? That depends…..
•
Temple Prostitution and the “Sacred
Marriage”
Many ancient pagan cultures had a sacred
fertility practice called heiros gamos or
sacred marriage, and because the bible
refers to temple prostitutes, some think
heiros gamos was part of ancient Hebrew
temple ritual.
• Leviticus deals with proper temple
worship and prohibits the fertility worship
practices found in early Pagan cultures;
ritual same-sex behavior in Pagan temples
was one such practice, so some think Lev
18:22 refers only to “temple sex.”
• So how does one translate and interpret
this passage? These translations show a
wide variation, depending on how you
read the surrounding passages.
Leviticus 18:22 – some translations
• RSV: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an
abomination.
• Good News: Never have sexual intercourse with a man as
with a woman. It is disgusting.
• NLT: (New Living Translation): "Do not practice
homosexuality; it is a detestable sin." (“homosexual”
coined in the 19th c.)
• New International Reader’s Version: “'Do not have sex with
a man as you would have sex with a woman. I hate that.”
• These translations differ not only in their reading of “lie
with” but in their interpretation of “Towebah” or
abomination.
• Who hates this “lying,” God or priests? Is it only in the
temple, or everywhere? Does it apply to women too?
And does it apply to all acts, or just certain kinds?
• Too often, translations reflect the religious beliefs of
translators. We can’t know for sure what the writers
meant or what conditions motivated them.
No Bible has the “Last Word”
• Not only do many canons exist, but we now know
each text existed in multiple versions
• The Hebrew Bible was transmitted orally, then
copied, changed, edited, harmonized, and recopied.
Exile communities possessed many variants.
• The New Testament gospels were written long after
Jesus died; not only don’t the gospels themselves
agree, but variant texts and gospels existed all over
the empire.
• Translation shapes how we read texts, so we should
look at as many as we can. When possible, we should
look at the original meaning in the original language.