Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Textual Emendation in Isaiah 49:7

    The JPS Tanakh of Isaiah 49:7 reads, in part:

    Thus said the LORD,
    The Redeemer of Israel, his Holy One,
    b-To the despised one,
    To the abhorred nations,-b . . .

    Note b reads: Meaning of Heb. uncertain. Emendation yields “Whose being is despised / Whose body is detested”; cf. 51.23.

    I noticed this first when I read this in Hebrew, and found that I was not able to produce a translation that I found satisfactory. I remained in doubt. So I looked it up in a few translations. Note also that the reading adopted in the JPS text is itself an emendation.

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  • Why do you Believe . . .

    . . . the things that you do believe? I’m not talking here about religious faith, though this could impact some aspects of faith. I’m talking about just about any topic on which you choose to believe one source over another.

    I’ve seen a number of cases recently on blogs, in the mainstream media, in church, and in my daily life in which people have expressed very decided opinions that one person is right and another is wrong. In some cases, I believe the people knew where they had gotten their information and had made some judgment as to whether it was right or not. That doesn’t necessarily mean they agree with me. It does mean that their viewpoint was thoughtful. Others simply repeated what they had heard from a source they felt was credible.

    But why do we feel certain sources are credible while others are not? Unfortunately, this is frequently not something we think about seriously. We just find ourselves believing what is written in periodicals we like, on blogs we like, or in books written by authors we like, and we haven’t really considered the reasons. I am not certain how one could survey this. The survey questions would be self-defeating. But I suspect that for many of us the choice is made based on whether the source agrees with our own opinions most of the time. That is likely the main, unconscious reason. (If you’re someone who carefully checks sources, this doesn’t apply to you!)

    I believe we also tend to believe people who share our religious or political beliefs. We check our opponents out much more carefully than our friends. Finally, we tend to develop feelings based on who we associate with on a regular basis. I have observed this in many political campaigns. People who associated regularly with people who supported a particular candidate or party tended to believe their candidate or party would win despite all other evidence. They would remember polls that favored their candidates and forget those opposed.

    Election season is a good time to ask yourself just how reliable your sources are. I’m not trying to tell you what or who to believe. I’m just suggesting that you make that choice conscious. Find the most objective data possible and evaluate who you listen to. Learn a bit more about learning.

    It’s a good goal for election season.

  • Tools: A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament

    I have blogged previously just a little bit about the A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, and also made some negative comments about the use of interlinears, especially for Greek or Hebrew students.

    I recommend this lexicon for use in reading rapidly in order to encounter a large body of text in Biblical Hebrew. It does have a small portion of the problems of an interlinear. It presents you with a gloss that is likely appropriate, according to the authors, for the passage in question. It’s easy to bypass the context in that case, and just accept their gloss as it is. That is something you should avoid.

    I used this in doing some reading in Isaiah today myself. It has been a couple of years since I last used it. It is very convenient, because it does not include those words used 50 or more times in the Hebrew Bible, and then lists all other vocabulary items by verse. I found that the selected gloss was a good starting point. I’m not going to be making a habit of it, however, because generally if I find a word that I don’t know I want more information than that before I go on. But I can read text in this fashion if I want to.

    I’m spoiled a bit by Logos, because there I can have my keylink hooked up to HALOT, and thus get a much more substantial rundown on any particular word. In addition, I have the invaluable lemma report which allows me to see how that word is used throughout the Hebrew scriptures. But in the absence of such tools, fast reading could be facilitated by use of the Reader’s Lexicon.

    Some people question the value of such reading. Here’s why I recommend it as part, not all, of your reading in Biblical languages. There are at least two levels of “knowing” a vocabulary item from a language other than your native one. First, you may know a gloss, or a set of glosses that might be applied based on context. This is what is provided by normal vocabulary memorization, provided you memorize alternate options. You will build that type of vocabulary best by taking time to carefully study each word. The second is when you come to feel the range of a word’s meaning in it’s own language, because you have seen or heard it many times in many contexts, and you can select the range of meaning for the current context almost automatically.

    When you deal with translation and exegesis, both are useful. You will only develop the second by reading large quantities of text or hearing large amounts of the language spoken. With a dead language, hearing is difficult, and you must substitute reading. Then when you encounter a word, you will remember having seen it in many contexts. This is one of the major values of rapid reading.

    But there

  • Updating my Bible Version Info

    I still have my Bible version selection tool active, and I’ve just added a directory of recent blog entries on the various versions to my Bible version detail pages. This substantially expands the amount of information available on each version page.

  • Making the World Make Itself

    PamBG quotes a letter that using some wonderful phraseology with regard to the process of creation, but also related to theodicy. I can’t access the letter itself due to a subscription requirement, but the part Pam quotes is quite good.

    I like these two sentences particularly well:

    Suppose instead that he made the world make itself.

    . . .

    Be the incarnation suggests that, in Jesus, God knew by experience, not just observation, what it was to be rejected, and hunted down; . . .

    Yes!

  • For Us to Fulfill All Righteouness

    I noticed something in my reading time this morning that has presumably been staring me in the face through many readings of the passage. In fact, this is the 14th morning in a row that I’ve read this as part of this week’s lectionary, so I’ve had plenty of opportunity. The passage is Matthew 3:13-17, and specifically verse 15.

    But suddenly as I was thinking about just why it was that Jesus should get baptized it occurred to me first that if it was his Father’s will that he get baptized, even though he had no sin in need of forgiveness, and then didn’t get baptized, well, obviously that would have been sin. But I thought that was just a tricky way of stating what was obvious from the start.

    Then I thought. “appropriate for us.” Who is “us?” John and Jesus? Jesus and the crowd around who didn’t participate? What about everybody, us, including me? In the sense that we are all called to be baptized, surely that’s true. But then it occurred to me that Jesus is here identifying himself with us in our baptism. When we are then baptized, we identify with him in ours. He’s so much a part of us that he does everything that we’re doing.

    It struck me that one of the difficulties I see in intercessory prayer on behalf of a congregation is that often our 21st century psyches don’t really identify with the congregation. We do “identificational repentance” without really identifying with the ones we pray for. When Daniel prays for Israel in Daniel 9, it is clear that he is part of Israel, and repents for sins for which he feels the guilt as part of his people. When we pray for our churches or nations, it is often with a sense of praying for their sins, because we haven’t (in our view) contributed.

    It was there all the time, but this morning I received a new blessing of feeling just how much Jesus identifies with us lowly folk way down here. At the same time I was challenged to identify more with my brothers and sisters in prayer, thought, and action.

  • Nelson Study Bible Note Problems

    I’m not going to link to a specific edition on this, because there is no ISBN in the edition from which I’m working. It appears to be a match for this item on Amazon.com, and to be essentially the same notes as this item, though I cannot be absolutely certain. If you have a similar version, you can simply check your notes to see if they say the same thing as mine.

    First, of course, I’m a bit prejudiced because I think the NKJV is one of the less useful translations. It is literal, but less readable than the ESV or the HCSB. I don’t call any of the major modern versions bad Bibles, but the NKJV is fairly low on my list.

    What I want to comment on today, however, is the notes, part of Nelson’s Complete Study System. I used this Bible today for my lectionary reading. Each morning I read both the current week’s lectionary passages and the next week’s, thus giving me 14 opportunities to meditate on them. I use different Bible versions and also read the notes if I’m using an edition that has notes.

    In my reading on Isaiah 42:1-9 today, I noticed this note in a “wordfocus” block:

    . . .While ‘ebed can mean slave (Gen. 43:18), slavery in Israel was different than in most places in the ancient Middle East. Slavery was regulated by the Law of Moses, which prohibited indefinite slavery and required that slaves be freed on the Sabbath (seventh) year (Ex. 21:2)–and the Year of Jubilee–the fiftieth year (Lev. 25:25-28). . . .

    Now there is certainly value in pointing out the slavery laws in Israel, and comparing them to those in the ancient near east. Notice, however, that if one reads on in Leviticus 25, there is something that is not mentioned in this little note, and it is significant.

    44But as for your male slave or your female slave who are yours, from among the nations who are around you you may acquire both male slave and female slave. 45And also from among those who are [foreigners] living in your land and from those who are sojourning among you you may acquire them and from their clan that is with them which they bring forth in your land, and they will be your possession, 46and you may leave them to your sons after you to possess; they may enslave them permanently. Only with your brethren, the children of Israel, each person must not make his brother labor harshly.

    The problem here is that the note implies that somehow Israel’s form of slavery was entirely benign, without mentioning the exception to the rule. Anyone from the nations around or from foreigners who were in their land could be bought and possessed permanently.

    This is important because there are two ways of handling slavery passages in the Bible. The first is to try to deny the similarity between the slavery practices in the Bible and that in other countries or in more recent times, such as slavery in the United States. The second is to view the rules of slavery as a cultural accommodation, i.e. slavery was not good, but was not yet forbidden.

    I take the second approach. My point about this note is that that the editors of these notes presumably take the opposite one, but that they gloss over a substantial element of the Israelite rules for slavery. This is one of the ways in which study notes can be deceptive, even unintentionally.

    The second note comes on Psalm 40:1, in which it discusses the words translated “waited patiently” in the NKJV:

    The Hebrew translated I waited patiently is literally “waiting I waited.” The emphasis of this phrase is not really on patience but on the fact that David waited solely on the Lord. . . .

    I have to wonder where they got this interpretation. The phrase “waiting I waited” is simply not good English. It is formally equivalent to the Hebrew, but this is one of those cases where the literal translation does not suggest the right set of options to English ears. It is a Hebrew idiom of intensification. I WAITED! Now you may think of a few options, such as the intensity of the expectation, or the length of the wait, but the verbal structure itself does not specify who is waited on, or anything about how this person is the sole person on whom the Psalmist waits.

    The context suggests that YHWH was the sole one in whom the Psalmist placed his hope, but the verb form suggests only the intensity of the experience. For modern American English, I don’t even like the word “waited” here, though the REB and the NRSV both use “waited patiently.” I would prefer the JPS Tanakh’s “I put my hope in the LORD.” They lose the intensification, but I think they catch the essence of the verb more clearly.

    What I would hope to show from these examples is the danger of depending on notes, along with the value of looking at more than one translation. Looking at more than one set of notes is also a valuable hedge against incomplete or misleading notes.

  • Praying for your Enemies

    Rev. John Shuck of First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethton, TN, would like people to stop praying for him.

    That should be a provocative enough opening line! What’s more, I think a few of those people at least should do just that. More importantly, they should quit talking about praying for him.

    I’m guessing that they start from something like this:

    But I say to you, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” — Matthew 5:44

    OK, so what am I, a Bible teacher, doing telling people not to do something Jesus commanded them to do. I obviously must not be a REAL CHRISTIANTM.* Well, not so fast. Let’s take this just a little bit further before we consider it settled.

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  • Emotions, Momentum Shifts, and Margins of Error

    This CQPolitics article is a good read on New Hampshire, I think. Along with emotions, one needs to remember that polls come with margins of error [Wikipedia], and that even those are within a certain confidence percentage.

  • Scientists Use Random Design Principles

    . . . or so it appears to me, to design a more efficient plant–for their purposes. Check out this MSNBC article to see how it was done.