So perhaps instead of “baptism” we should translate “washing.”

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

Greek Baptism

The Greek word for “baptize” is baptizo.

We know from passages like Mark 7:4 that the word can mean simply “wash”: “[The Pharisees and Jews] do not eat after returning from the marketplace unless they have washed [baptizo] … [Other traditions include] the washing [baptismos] of [various eating vessels].”

We see similar evidence in Luke 11:38: “The Pharisee was amazed to see that [Jesus] didn’t wash [baptizo] before the meal.”

We also see the verb in the OT, once in II Kings 5:14, where it’s the Greek translation of the Hebrew taval (“dip” or “immerse”), and once in Isaiah 21:4, where the word seems out of context.

Equally, we find the verb baptizo in non-Biblical Greek texts — more on this below. In those contexts, too, the verb seems to be a general one.

From all of these sources, it’s clear that baptizo is a common verb, and the specialized “baptize” in English misrepresents the original Greek.

“Baptize” in English

If “baptize” in English is a misrepresentation, the obvious question is: what is the right translation?

Reasonable options are “wash,” “dip,” “rinse,” “plunge,” “clean,” etc.

But deciding among these is particularly difficult.

In this context, one of the most widely cited sources on the Internet is a recipe by the 2nd-century BC writer Nicander. Do a quick search on “baptism,” and both his name and recipe will come up immediately, with language along the lines of the following: “A clear example that shows the meaning of baptizo is a text from the Greek poet and physician Nicander, who lived about 200 B.C. It is a recipe for making pickles. Nicander says that in order to make a pickle, the vegetable should first be ‘dipped’ (bapto) into boiling water and then ‘baptized’ (baptizo) in the vinegar solution.”

Then the question becomes how the (related) Greek word bapto is different than baptizo. The answer is usually that bapto is temporary while baptizo produces a permanent change.

But this approach is problematic.

First, Nicander wrote many decades before the NT was written. The meaning of the words could well have changed over that time.

Secondly, we only know about Nicander’s recipe because Athenaeus — writing hundreds of years later — quotes it in book 4 of his Deipnosophists (133D).* Athenaeus may have gotten the words wrong.

Thirdly, Nicander wrote in hexameter. For all we know, he chose bapto versus baptizo to make the meter work, or for other poetic reasons.

Finally, even ignoring the span of several hundred years, we expect words to cover a range of meanings. For example, we have an expression in English “[go for a] dip in the pool,” which means to swim. It can refer to completely immersing the body in water. Yet we do not want to conclude that “dip the chicken cutlet in the flour” necessarily means that the cutlet ends up completely submersed. (Also, “submerse” isn’t what happens with “flour.” I know.)

These four kinds of problems impact other ways we might learn the exact nuance of baptizo.

For example, the exact text of Mark 7:4 is in doubt. We don’t know for sure what taval means in II Kings. And so forth.

So even though the matter is of some theological importance, we can not definitively narrow down the meaning enough to decide unequivocally on an English verb.

Some Current Solutions

So what do common translations do?

For Mark 7:4, which represents one of the cases of ordinary washing, translations range from “wash” to “immerse” to — based on a different textual understanding — “purify.” (The NJB’s “they never eat without first sprinkling themselves,” seems particularly unfortunate to me.)

Translations generally agree on “wash” for Luke 11:38.

In Hebrews 9:10A, we find “washings” (KJV, ESV, etc.), “ritual washing(s)” (NAB, NLT), “ceremonial washings” (NIV), and “baptisms” (NRSV).

But almost every translation then uses only the specialized “baptize” for other cases of baptizo, misleading the English reader.

The Impact

Matthew 3:6 (equally, Mark 1:5) is a good example. The NRSV reads, “[people of the region] were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” Like most translations, the NRSV thus gives the reader the (wrong) impression that a specialized action, baptism, is connected to an extension of an ordinary one: confession. (This is not the modern notion of ritual confession.)

But a reader of the original Greek would understand something closer to, “they were submersed in the Jordan river as they confessed their sins.”

Or to think of it another way, the original text connects two worldly actions — washing and recognition — while the English translation “baptize” wrongly suggests one specifically religious action and only one worldly one.

Acts 22:16 similarly demonstrates. The NRSV reads, “…Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.”

Paul is connecting two worldly actions — washing [baptizo] and cleansing [apolouo] — with conversion. The English translation, again, substitutes a specifically religious action. (The verb apolouo is complicated and interesting in its own right.)

We see the same thing in Hebrews 6:2. The Greek lists four worldly things that take on heightened importance as part of Christ’s fundamental teaching: washing, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. Yet standard English translations (e.g., “baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment,” NRSV) leave the reader wrongly thinking that the first item in the list is different than the other three. Almost as wrong would be, “washing, epithesis, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.”

Summary

So the questioner on the About page is correct. The original Greek baptizo is not a technical term the way “baptize” is in English, and it’s usually a mistake use a technical term to translate a non-technical one.

Yet as early at the Vulgate, it was recognized that there was something special about baptism.

So what do you think: Should the translation reflect the original point or later tradition?

(*)Gulick in Volume II of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Deipnosophists translates:

But they also ate as an appetizer turnips done in vinegar and mustard, as Nicander plainly shows in the second book of the Georgics; for he says:

“…the turnip roots, you cut in thin slices, gently cleaning away the undried outer skin, and after drying them in the sun a little, either dip [bapto] a quantity of them in boiling water and soak them in strong brine; or again, put equal parts of white must and vinegar in a jar together, then plunge [baptizo] the slices in it, having dried them off with salt.”

At BBB, Wayne notes the oddity of the English phrase “give ear” for the Hebrew he’ezin.

I think it can be useful to look at what went wrong here.

The Root of the Problem

Hebrew has at least two words for “hear/listen.”

The first is shama. We find it, for example, in the imperative in the famous passage from Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear [shma], Israel…”

The second is he’ezin. As it happens, that verb shares a root with the word “ear,” ozen. Accordingly, some translators (wrongly, in my opinion) feel the need to translate the word into an English word or phrase that contains the word “ear.” That’s where we get, for example, the odd “give ear, O Shepherd of Israel” for Psalm 80:1 (a.k.a. 80:2) in the KJV and others.

The Reasoning

The reasoning is flawed.

English happens to have an expression “give ear” (or so I’m told — I know Shakespeare used it, but outside of Bible translations I don’t think I’ve heard or seen it recently), but the appearance of “ear” in the expression doesn’t make it the right translation for he’ezin.

Modern Hebrew also has a verb he’ezin, and everyone knows that it means “listen.” In fact, a radio announcer will frequently address an audience as ma’azinim — “listeners.” “Ear givers” is quite clearly wrong. (As it happens, as with “ladies and gentlemen,” the Modern Hebrew expression is frequently “ma’azinim and ma’azinot” — male and female listeners.)

In Biblical (and Modern) Hebrew, the word for “spy” (m’ragel) shares a root with the word “foot” (regel), yet no translation that I know of ventures into “foot soldier” (or “foot spy” or “footer” or “foot maker” or “foot giver”).

And in fact, even if we take the flawed reasoning seriously, we still might end up with “hear,” not “give ear.” After all, “hear” contains the word “ear.”

The Solution

Accordingly, many translations avoid the now archaic “give ear.” Returning to Psalm 80, we find “listen” or “hear” in the NAB, NIV, NJB, and NLT. (I was disappointed to see “give ear” in the NRSV.)

Parallelisms

We frequently find the verb he’ezin in parallel with shama, and this creates a little more complexity, because we need two different words to convey the parallelism.

For example, Moses’ great speech in Deuteronomy 32 opens with the double parallelism “he’ezin/heaven” and “shama/earth.” The KJV renders this as “give ear/heavens” and “hear/earth.” Other translations prefer “listen/heavens” and “hear/earth,” which I think works much better.

On the other hand, Psalm 78 is a real challenge, because there he’ezin is in parallel with hatu oz’n'chem, literally “incline your ear.” To “incline the ear” is a Biblical Hebrew expression, but I don’t believe we have it in English, Bible translations notwithstanding.

So to translate Psalm 78, we need two words or phrases, one only tangentially related to the ear, the other more specifically about the ear. It’s true that the ESV’s solution accomplishes this dual goal with “Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth!” But I fear it does so at the expense of intelligibility.

Any suggestions for a better way of translating Psalm 78?

I’ll start with Rabbi Morton Kaplan, who asks simply, “What is the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton?”

I’ve already explained a bit of the background. I have more information in my Jerusalem Post article (which, unfortunately, lost most of its formatting when the Jerusalem Post migrated to a new website), and I have even more in Chapter 4 of my In the Beginning.

But that information — the bottom line is that I don’t think the tetragrammaton originally had a pronunciation — is all about the original pronunciation of the tetragrammaton, which may be different than the “correct” pronunciation.

That’s because I think “correct” has to take into account not only the original text, but also what has happened with it over — in this case — roughly 3,000 years. There’s a long-standing Jewish tradition that the tetragrammaton represents the long-lost not-to-be-pronounced name of God, and that adonai is used as a substitute. I see no reason that modern scholarship should change this ancient tradition. (Whether Christians want to adopt the Jewish tradition seems like a more complicated question.)

More generally — and this is why I like Rabbi Kaplan’s question — I think that “original” or “scientific” is only one way of being “correct.”

A short excerpt from a lecture I gave a while back. (A little off topic, but still….)

The answer dates back 1,000 years to Rashi. He notes that the usual word for “in the beginning” would be barishona. And he further notes that b’reishit is never used except preceding a noun to mean “at the beginning of.”

He therefore concludes that Genesis 1:1 does not say that creation took place “in the beginning,” but rather that it was “in the beginning of” creation that the first part of the story takes place. That is, the earth was in disarray when God began to create.

Rashi’s analysis gives us, “When God began to create,” or (as the translation in Artscroll’s Rashi edition has it) “In the beginning of God’s creating.”

Rashi’s analysis has at least two kinds of problems.

The first is a matter of detail. For his analysis to work, he needs the verb bara to be a participle, though it’s unclear how that’s possible. Secondly, he needs the “and” of “and the earth was…” to mean “when.” That one is possible, though unlikely.

The second kind of problem, though, is methodological.

Rashi is right that b’reishit is never used except before a noun, but there are only four other times the word is used, all of them in Jeremiah, and all of them before words having to do with “kingdom” or “reign.” This is hardly a large enough sample to deduce what b’reishit means. (The same reasoning would force bara to mean something about kingdoms.)

Rashi’s point is actually more generally about reishit. (The b- prefix means “in/when/at/etc.”) But here, too, he runs into problems, wrongly assuming that a word is the sum of its parts.

Furthermore, while Rashi is correct that barishona means “at first,” that doesn’t really have much bearing on what b’reishit means. Perhaps the two words are nearly synonymous, for example. Or maybe barishona means “at first” in the sense of “the first time around” while b’reishit means “at first” in the sense of “the first and only time around.” (I just met someone who introduces his wife as his “first wife.” She is his first, only, and last wife.)

All of which is to say that Rashi’s commentary here is interesting — and it explains the JPS translation — but I don’t think it helps figure out what the first words of the Bible originally meant.

I have more on Genesis 1:1 here, here, and here.

Rashi’s travels and the timing of the Crusades catapulted him to the forefront of Jewish scholarship. Rashi left his birthplace of Troyes to study in Worms (now part of Germany), which was then a major center of Jewish scholarship. While there, he learned the accumulated wisdom of nearly 1,000 years of Jewish exile. Then he went back home to Troyes.

By the time of his death, Crusaders had ransacked Worms, killing Rashi’s teachers and destroying the schools of his youth. But Rashi remained safe in Troyes. He therefore became one of the sole repositories of nearly a millennium of collected Jewish scholarship.

So many people read Rashi alongside the Bible because in so doing they incorporate the first 1,000 years of post-exilic Bible scholarship.

Rashi’s most well-known work takes the form of running commentary to (parts of) the Bible. In general, he offers three kinds of commentary:

1. Consistency.
   
2. Theology.
   
3. Linguistics.

Consistency was important to Rashi. He had, apparently, memorized the entire Bible, and he wanted all of it to be consistent. When he found passages that seemed not to be, he offered commentary to explain why the passages were consistent after all.

Rashi also cared deeply about what he saw as Jewish values and beliefs, and he used the Bible homiletically to make various points.

Thirdly, Rashi tried to analyze the Hebrew language of the Bible.

(Though he didn’t know he was doing it, we can add a fourth accomplishment: he helped preserve middle French by using Hebrew transliterations of French to refer to words in his native language.)

Unfortunately, while Rashi proved extraordinary at the first two goals, he lived nearly 1,000 years before modern linguistics, and his linguistic analyses, therefore, are not usually on a par with his other work. To compound matters, Rashi didn’t distinguish among his various goals. So readers must figure out for themselves when Rashi is making a Jewish point that is only loosely based on the text and when he is explaining what the text originally meant.

This background can be helpful for understanding how Rashi’s work influenced Bible translation and scholarship.

I have an example next.

For example, a passage in the (mid-first-millennium) Talmud explains the Hebrew word sechvi. The story, in the part of the Talmud known as Rosh Hashanah 26a, explains that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish went traveling, and on his travels he heard people using the word sechvi to mean “rooster.” And that’s how we know that the word sechvi — a hapax legomenon appearing only in the book of Job — means “rooster.”

The story is unlikely to be true. It’s unlikely that it was meant to be true. The story is set in a time long after people stopped speaking Hebrew. And normally when an opinion is important enough to consider it is cited along with the person who said it.

Yet to this day, the official Jewish assumption is that this unnamed, anonymous, unlikely-to-be-informed source from the Talmud was right. Accordingly, when Jewish prayer books quote the line as part of the daily liturgy, the translation “rooster” accompanies the text. The NAB, The Message, and others translate the word as “rooster” as well.

I think what we see is a reflection of a different approach to translation.

In the days of the Talmud (not long after the NT was canonized), they didn’t care if the translation was what we would now call accurate, because it’s a modern approach that focuses on what the text originally meant.

It used to be that the focus was on what the text could be made to mean.

Many, many parts of the Bible have been set to music, and the options for any single passage usually range considerably. So people get to choose, for example, if they want Isaiah to be majestic or meditative, or if they want the Lord’s Prayer to be glorious, powerful, or pensive.

And most people — myself included — don’t see any problem with this. We should be able to choose how we want our religious music to sound.

But most people also agree — and again, I’m one of them — that we don’t get to choose what our religious texts mean, or, at least, that the options are more constrained.

So it seems to me that another way of looking of the question of choosing a Bible translation is this: Should a Bible translation be more like a melody (where everything is fair game), or more like a mirror (where accuracy is paramount)?

One interesting (though entirely predictable) result was that some people prefer more than one translation: the NLT for “readability,” for example, but the NET for “accuracy,” or the NASB for use in formal settings.

Even people who only have one preferred translation usually like the translation for similar kinds of reasons.

The upshot of this, though, is that people are deciding for themselves what the Bible is.

You can decide to have a formal Bible, a chatty Bible, an accessible Bible, or an esoteric Bible. You can opt for a Christian OT or a Jewish OT (even though it’s the same text).

Do you think this is okay? Do you think it’s okay that people get to choose what the Bible is (for them)?

I hear this sort of thing all the time — in comments on this blog, in discussions on similar blogs, via e-mail, in books, and from people who attend my lectures — and there are lots of reasons people like a particular translation.

But I’m surprised that the sentence almost never ends “…because it is accurate.”

Rather, I hear that people like a translation because it’s familiar, formal, chatty, accessible, entertaining, modern, gender-neutral, inclusive, etc.

I’ll post some more thoughts on this soon.

For now: Which translation do you prefer? And why?