1. Is it true that there was no blue in the Bible, and that the word “blue” in our modern versions is a mistranslation? and
2. How do we know what the Hebrew names of the colors represent?

The first question was prompted by a Radiolab episode that claims that the color blue is a relatively modern invention. The episode, like most of Radiolab, is fascinating, so before you keep reading, listen to it. (Or if you’re part of the multitasking generation, listen while you read.)

The answer to the second question is that there’s only one reliable way to know exactly what a color term represents, and that’s to have a sample to compare it to — either an actual sample, or a reference to something generic like “blood” whose color we know.

So just from the text we know that adom probably means “red,” based on II Kings 3:22 (“red like blood”). Similarly, yarok is probably “green.” The fact that these words have continued to mean “red” and “green” throughout Hebrew’s history bolsters these conclusions.

As the Radiolab episode points out, languages tend to follow patterns regarding color words, and one pattern in particular is that words for the primary colors enter a language before fancier colors. For example, if a language has a word for “pink,” it also has one for “red,” but not vice versa.

This means that the next words we should look for are “yellow” and “blue.” (The primary colors are actually pretty complicated, coming in two varieties: Red/Green/Blue and Red/Blue/Yellow. Look up “additive” and “subtractive” if you’re curious.)

We have a word tsahov in the Bible, and while there’s no textual evidence to tell us what it is, it always seems to have meant “yellow.” So that’s a goog guess.

And that leaves “blue.”

On the one hand, there’s a post-Biblical Hebrew word kachol that means “blue.” If it meant “blue” in the Bible, too, we have four candidates for primary colors that all look the same structurally (this is important in Hebrew), with an /a/ vowel then an /o/ vowel separating three consonants, though it’s a bit hard to see in English because the first consonant in adom is the Hebrew letter aleph (for which we don’t use a consonant in English) and both tzahov and kachol have consonants for which we use two letters in English.

So far it looks like we’ve understood the primary colors, and, indeed “blue” doesn’t appear in the Bible.

What does appear, though, is t’chelet. Tradition puts this as some shade of blue, and if we’re right that kachol is “blue,” t’chelet must be something else, probably a more specific blueish color. Furthermore, t’chelet often appears in lists with other seemingly non-primary colors like argaman and shani, and even zahav (which we know is “gold” and may also be “golden”).

All of this evidence points toward t’chelet meaning some blueish shade that isn’t blue. But because we don’t have any actual samples (the oldest sample of anything blueish is less than 2,000 year old, so it doesn’t help), we can’t narrow it down any further.

This doesn’t mean people haven’t tried, though, because it’s a matter of some religious importance. But I’m not convinced by any of the theories that claim to have determined the exact shade.

So it looks like there’s no pure blue in the text of the Bible, but there are other shades. I don’t think this means that they didn’t have blue back then, though. I suspect it just means they didn’t write about it.

Take a look. It’s interesting in its own right, and it highlights the kind of very specialized knowledge that’s sometimes required for translation.

Dear Mr. Morgan:

I believe you have been promoting bigotry and helping to perpetrate a fraud.

During both of your interviews with Pastor Joel Osteen on your CNN broadcast, you let the religious leader tell your audience that Scripture calls homosexuality a sin. But you didn’t ask him where the Bible says that.

It’s both an important point and an easy one to settle. You could have asked Pastor Osteen for the chapter and verse that he thinks calls homosexuality a sin. What you would have found is that he couldn’t provide it, because Pastor Osteen was expressing his personal opinion, not quoting the Bible. The Bible doesn’t say that homosexuality is a sin.

Read the rest…

But as I just pointed out, the names “Lo-ruhamah” and “Lo-ammi,” Hosea’s children, mean “unloved” and “not my people,” respectively. So what we really have here is this: “I will love [RiCHaM] Unloved [lo-RuCHaMa] and I will say to Not-My-People [lo-ammi], “You are My people” [ammi-atah], and he will say, “My God.” (I’ve put the consonants of the root R.Ch.M in upper case to highlight the close connection between the verb “loved” [RiCHaM] and the name “Unloved” [lo-RuCHaMa] in Hebrew, in which consonants are more important than vowels.)

In other words, Hosea 2:23 is a complete reversal. Whereas before we had “Unloved,” now we have “love.” Instead of “Not My People” we have “my people.” God has forgiven both of Hosea’s children (who represent all of God’s children — more on this soon, I hope), and it is then that God is called “my God.”

It’s an uplifting hope for redemption, an interesting theological position, and beautiful poetry. Unfortunately, it seems to me that in not translating the names, most translations hide the biblical message.

“The Apostle Paul did not Believe in the Historical Adam”

A debate has been raging about whether Adam was an historical figure. I think it’s important, because it represents a more general debate about how to live a modern religious life. I also think it highlights a fundamental misunderstanding.
keep reading…

Even though it’s slightly off-topic, I’m reposting the link, because I’d love feedback from readers here.

Read the whole thing here: “The Apostle Paul did not Believe in the Historical Adam.”

The answer is that the second two Hebrew names are actually phrases that mean “not loved” and “not my people,” respectively. The Greek translates the meaning of the words, rather than preserving the sounds. Ouk-Ileimeni means “not-loved” and Ou-Laos-Mou means “not-people-mine.” The first name, Jezreel in English, is taken from the disaster at the Jezreel valley — vaguely similar would be living in New Orleans and calling your daughter “Katrina” — and because that’s a place, not just a word, the Greek transliterates the sounds.

English translations, though, usually ignore what the words mean, as in the NRSV’s Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, and Lo-ammi. The CEB and others take a different route, with Jezreel, No Compassion, and Not My People.

Some translations walk a middle ground, as in the latest NIV, which gives us, “Lo-Ruhamah (which means ‘not loved’)” and “Lo-Ammi (which means ‘not my people’),” explaining things for the English reader.

Though this is perhaps the most extreme example of names that are words or phrases, it’s not the only one. The famous passage in Isaiah 7:14 has a kid whose name is emmanuel, which means “God is with us.” When the name appears in Isaiah, it remains untranslated in English, though many versions provide a footnote with an explanation of the name. But when Matthew (in 1:23) cites the verse, he adds, “…which translates as ‘God is with us.’”

What should we do with these names in English translations? Certainly a story about “Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, and Lo-ammi” paints a markedly different picture than one about, say, “Disaster, Unloved, and Unwanted.” Does it do the narrative justice if we strip it of the jarring names “Unloved” and “Unwanted”?

Is turning “Jezreel” into “Disaster” going too far? What about a translation that calls yizrael “Gettysburg,” which, like the Valley of Jezreel, was the site of bloodshed? Should we respect the fact that Hosea has one kid named after a place and two with phrases for names?

And what about Emmanuel? If we translate lo-ruchamma as “Unloved,” shouldn’t Emmanuel be “God-Is-With-Us?”

What do you think? How would you translate Hosea’s kids, Isaiah 7:14, and Matthew 1:23?

My first repair attempt went like this:

1. Boot Windows XP from the Installation CD.
2. Windows: “Windows is examining your hardware … Press ‘R’ to repair Windows.”
3. Me: “R”
4. Windows: “Insert repair disk into floppy drive.”

I don’t have a floppy drive. Good job examining the hardware, Windows.

On one hand, I’m lucky, because I use a different computer for writing, so I didn’t lose anything important. I only use the laptop for three things: to connect to my main computer when I travel; for Bibleworks, which is an indispensable Bible research tool; and for Web-intensive applications, like WordPress. But when the virus hit, I lost those three.

In spite of a background in Computer Science (from my year doing graduate work at the Technion in Israel), I didn’t have the inclination or the patience to reinstall Windows, but I was left with little choice, because I need Windows XP (which they don’t sell any more) and I didn’t want to give up the unlimited data plan that comes with my internal Verizon data card.

Fortunately, I have the installation disks, including the Windows CD and Dell’s supplemental disks.

Unfortunately, simply following the instructions doesn’t work. (It never does.)
One particularly frustrating moment came when the newly installed Windows couldn’t find the Ethernet driver. “Do you want to connect to the Internet to find a driver?” Windows asked.

At any rate, the computer mostly works now. It still gives an error message every time it boots. Oddly, I can’t view PDF files, because installation of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader fails with a “general error.” And there are other quirks. But it works.

Still, between a crippled computer, lots of travel, and even more writing, I’ve been away from this blog for too long. I’m back now, for a bit, on and off, until things calm down.

At issue is the Greek verb andrizomai. That word contains the root andr, which also gives us the word aner, “man.” (The “d” drops in and out, in accordance with Greek grammar. Aner is a “man,” and adres are “men,” for example.)

But the leap from the root andr to the translation “act like men” makes three mistakes.

The first is the wrong assumption that internal structure tells you what a word means. (I have more here: “Five Ways Your Bible Translation Distorts the Original Meaning of the Text.”) Relatedly, the root actually means “person,” not “man,” which we see from words like androphonos in 1 Timithy 1:9. The word phonos means “murder,” but androphonos means “murderer,” not “murderer of men.” (Similarly, “manslaughter” in English doesn’t only mean “slaughtering men.”) So we have methodological and factual errors.

More importantly, though, even if the word meant “be a man” in Greek, it’s not clear that “be a man” would be the right translation in English, because the very notion of what it means to be a man depends on culture. This is particularly relevant in light of John Piper’s talk advocating a masculine ministry, and similar propositions supposedly founded in the text.

For example, we have a huge divide in the West between those cultures that adopted chivalry (mostly Western Europe) and those that did not (in the East). In my own life, for example, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that my instinctive reaction when a boy kicks a girl is more severe than when a girl kicks a boy. That’s because I’m still influenced by chivalry. This is also, I believe, why America has yet to have a female president even though places ranging from Israel to Pakistan (hardly a trailblazer for equal rights) have had female prime ministers. Similarly, women were rulers in antiquity, as in the case of Cleopatra VII, who ruled Egypt until a few decades before Jesus was born. So for (some) Americans, “be a man” might deal with being chivalrous or even having presidential qualities, while the same was not true in antiquity.

Similarly, in English, “do your job as a man and marry her” makes sense in certain circumstances, yet surely Paul wasn’t telling people to go out and marry. I know that in some cultures, it is the man’s responsibility to execute honor killings, but, again, Paul certainly wasn’t advocating vengeance. And as yet another example, it has frequently been noted that masculinity is often associated with excess alcohol consumption, a goal Paul obviously wasn’t promoting.

Likewise, Yiddish has an expression to “be a mensch,” and mostly it means to be kind and honest. It has little to do with physical prowess and everything to do with integrity. Though mensch is better translated “person” than “man,” it demonstrates the same point that words convey different symbolic meanings in different cultures.

Though the verb andrizomai appears only once in the NT, we find it with more regularity in the LXX, frequently as the translation for the Hebrew “be strong” in the expression “be strong and courageous.” This is why translations tend to run along the lines of “be brave,” “have courage,” etc.

But we should be clear. This may or may not have had anything to do with masculinity. (Dr. Bill Mounce draws a similar conclusion.)

And, more generally, I think that when we transport charged words like “man” across millennia and cultures we have to be careful not to read our modern understandings into the ancient texts.

1. The problem, though, is that “show the door” in English means “ask to leave.” Is “showed his guests the door” still the right translation?

2. Equally, in England, to “table a motion” at a meeting means to decide to vote on it, while in the U.S. those same words mean to decide not to vote on it. If a British essay says, “he wanted to table to the motion,” is that how an American translation should read?

3. In Japan, the word for “yes” is sometimes to used in polite situations to mean “no.” In these situations, should the translator render the Japanese hai (“yes”) as “yes” or as “no” in English?

4. In Arabic, ahalan comes from the word for “family,” but it means “welcome.” Does the English rendition of that Arabic word have to include the word “family”?

5. In China, the “dragon” is a symbol of beneficent, graceful, royal power. If a Chinese story says that, “her grandfather was always the dragon in her life,” should the English translation use the word “dragon,” even though “dragon” in English conveys a whole different set of images?

These cases are all examples of how the right word can convey the wrong thing, sometimes because English has a specific meaning for what could be a general phrase (1); sometimes because both the foreign language and English have specific meanings, and they don’t match (2); sometimes because the meaning of the foreign word changes depending on context in ways that the English word doesn’t (3); sometimes because the foreign language assigns imagery to a word but English doesn’t (4); and sometimes because the foreign language assigns imagery to a word but English has different imagery (5).

What these have in common is that they all strike me as cases where the English translation must avoid the literal words of the foreign language.

Similar cases in Bible translation keep popping up:

1. Most recently, regarding the translation of the Greek for “son” in Arabic, because Arabic might use the word “son” for different imagery than Greek did.

2. Regarding “heart” in Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27 (levav and kardia), because the Hebrew and Greek words conveyed different things than the English does.

3. Regarding shepherds, and, in particular Psalm 23, because in Hebrew shepherds were fierce, regal, and romantic, while the same is not true in English.

among many others.

The more general lesson, it seems to me, is that translating the words can mean mistranslating the text.

Comments?

My question is this. Should the American version of the book be called, What Happened on September 11?

I don’t think so, because even though September 11 is ten days before the end of summer in English, too, the phrase “September 11″ has local overtones — the terrorist attacks, the wars that followed, etc. — that override the simple meaning of the phrase.

This is one way that a good translation of the words can be a bad translation of the text.

What this has to do with the Trinity is that the claim has surfaced that in Arabic, “father” and “son” wrongly imply sex, so they’re not good translations for what we know in English as the Father and the Son.

Facts to support this claim about Arabic (and other languages of the Middle East) have been frustratingly difficult to come by, but even the theoretical issue, it seems to me, has been misunderstood.

Some people have claimed that getting rid of “Son” in Arabic is pandering, or wrongly changing the Bible to placate an audience, or giving up on theology, etc. Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe “son” in Arabic is like “September 11″ in English. It has a plain meaning, but it also has overtones that destroy the original point of the text.

Other people have claimed simply that the job of the translator is to translate the words. In spite of the hugely intuitive appeal of such an approach, it doesn’t work very well, because sometimes the words convey the wrong thing.

So even before we get a good factual answer about Arabic, I think it’s important to understand the fundamental point that it’s certainly possible for the literal equivalent of “son” and “father” to be the wrong way to translate the Trinity.