God Didn't Say That

Who is the Prince of Peace?

Two questions from the About page ask about Isaiah 9:5 (9:6), “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (NRSV).

The final phrase of this child’s name (“Prince of Peace”) are probably the most famous, so we’ll start there.

The Hebrew is sar shalom, that is, sar of shalom. While the English “Prince of Peace” has a nice alliterative ring to it, there’s little support for translating sar as “prince,” and even “peace” for shalom is a bit misleading.

Sar

The Hebrew sar is generally someone in charge of something. For example, we find in Genesis (21:22, 21:32, etc.) that Phicol is in charge of Abimelech’s army; Phicol there is the sar of the army. Later in Genesis, Potiphar is sar of the tabachim (this is probably an expression, perhaps “chief steward”). There’s a sar of the jail (“jailkeeper”), of drink (“cupbearer”) and baked goods (“chief baker”).

In Exodus 2:14 the term is used generically when a Hebrew challenges Moses with the rhetorical question, “who made you sar and judge over us?” In Numbers 16:13, a verbal form of the noun is used to mean “rule over us.”

Joshua has a vision of a sar of the Lord’s army, and throughout the books of Samuel and Kings we find various sars over various armies.

In Jeremiah 39:3 we find a variety of Babylonian names with the word sar in them.

In short, it looks like a sar was a leader of some sort, but not necessarily royalty. For me, “prince” implies royalty, so I’m not happy with the translation. (Also, the English word “prince” is more often used for the Hebrew word nasi.)

We have at least two expressions in English that I can think of — “lord over us” and the ironic “who died and made you king?” — that show the connection between royalty and leadership, but in modern Western cultures the two are not the same. Some royalty are powerless figureheads, and some leaders (most, in fact) are not royalty.

So to the extent that “prince” implies anything more than “leader,” I think it’s misleading. I would prefer, “leader,” “director,” or “ruler.”

Peace

The word shalom is even harder. While it does mean “peace,” its general implication — at least in its original context — matches only partially with what the English word “peace” implies.

A particularly telling passage comes from Psalm 29:11: “The Lord will grant strength [oz] … and peace [shalom]” to the people Israel. Why would they need strength if there’s going to be peace?

The answer lies in two different conceptions of peace. Both of them involve lack of war, but they differ in how to achieve that peaceful state.

The “peace” we are most familiar with now — at least in my culture — involves, at least as a goal, coexistence. The state of peace between the U.S. and Canada, for example, means that they exist side by side.

Another way of looking at peace is perhaps most familiar from the pax Romana, the “Roman peace.” That term doesn’t mean that all of the different cultures in the Roman empire existed side by side. Rather, it means that Rome conquered the other cultures, assimilating them into the empire. The defeated cultures couldn’t fight back, so there was pax, “peace.”

(We see something similar in the American “secretary of war” who became the “secretary of defense” without — to my knowledge — any change of the job description.)

The original Hebrew word shalom is closer in what it implies to the pax of the pax Romana than to the English word “peace.” (I should be clear: this is in its original context. It didn’t take long for the term to be revised to mean what the English “peace” does.) This is not to say that shalom didn’t describe what we now call “peace,” any more than in Modern English we use “peace” even when one side has destroyed the other. But the implications of shalom were different than what’s implied by “peace.”

It’s always difficult to know what to do when you have a translation that means the right thing but implies the wrong thing.

In our case, the original sar shalom was probably in charge of keeping order — perhaps by preventing war, but also perhaps by winning it. “Peace” to me seems to exclude the latter, but I don’t think we have a better translation available to us.

The sar of shalom

Regarding the combination, I don’t think the word shalom describes what the sar was, but rather (as elsewhere) what the sar oversaw. So the sar shalom wasn’t the “peaceful ruler,” but rather the “ruler in charge of shalom.” And as we’ve seen, that’s a tricky concept to convey in Modern English.

Finally, this note from The Jewish Study Bible is helpful:

This long sentence is the throne name of the royal child. Semitic names often consist of sentences that describe God[…] In Akkadian, the name of the Babylonian king Merodach-baladan (Isa. 39:1) means “the god Marduk has provided an heir.” These names do not describe that person who holds them but the god whom the parents worship.

So it looks like the child is named sar shalom, but God is the sar shalom.

January 22, 2010 - Posted by Joel H. | translation practice | Bible, Bible translation, Isaiah 9:5, Isaiah 9:6, Prince of Peace, translation