“Why do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?”
“When a house burns up why does it also burn down?”
“If the icecream man brings ice cream in the ice-cream truck, shouldn’t we fear the fireman in the fire truck?”
Wordplays like these—and many more like them—show us something important about how language works. We see that the most straightforward way to understand words and phrases just doesn’t work. It’s a mistake to think that a “parkway” must be a place for parking just because it includes the word “park.” (In fact, a “parkway” used to be a “way” that traversed a “park.”) It’s a mistake to conclude that just because “up” and “down” are opposites, “burn up” and “burn down” must also mean different things. And it’s a mistake to use “icecream truck” to figure out exactly what “fire truck” must mean.
Unfortunately, these sorts of basic errors mar many Bible translations and obscure the real meaning of the ancient text.
The first step in translating the Hebrew Bible is to understand the Hebrew words in which it was written. Starting right at the beginning, for example, we have the word breshit, usually translated “in the beginning.” How do we know what the word means?
Just a bit later in Genesis, Eve gets punished for eating from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” The usual translations are mostly right, but how do we know what the words mean? What about Eve’s punishment? According to the KJV, women for all time will experience “sorrow” in childbirth. Others translations give us “pain.” Which is it? Is childbirth sorrowful or painful?
In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan observes that childbirth is accompanied by actual physical pain. He claims that humans more than any other animal experience pain in childbirth, and that the source of this added pain is the disproportionately large size of a newborn’s head. Dr. Sagan then connects this scientific fact to the Genesis account. After all, why is the human head so large? Because people are so smart. Scientifically, human intelligence requires a large human head, which causes pain in childbirth. Biblically, eating from the tree of knowledge caused pain in childbirth. Science and the Bible match in this case, Dr. Sagan says, but only if the text really means “tree of knowledge,” and only if etzev (the Hebrew word here) means “pain” and not “sorrow.” How can we be sure what the words mean?
We find ourselves in the unfortunate situation that Dr. Sagan’s observation makes sense only if we are working from the right translation, even though he meant to bridge the gap between science and the Bible, not a particular translation of it.
Too frequently, Bible translators choose the straightforward but wrong approach that we saw at the beginning of the chapter, one that would make us think that a parkway is for parking on. This widespread fundamental mistake forces us to question almost everything we read in translation. Carl Sagan’s conclusion is still valid (probably), but, as we will see, others are not.
Perhaps surprisingly, modern translations are frequently worse in this regard than older ones. For example, Exodus 31 describes the Sabbath using two words for the seventh day: shabat and shabaton. The word shabaton looks a lot like shabat, but it is a mistake to conclude that the meaning of the longer word shabaton necessarily includes the meaning of the shorter word. Still, Everett Fox’s 1995 translation The Five Books of Moses gives us “Sabbath, Sabbath-Ceasing,” as though the English translation for shabaton must include the English translation for shabat. (In Modern Hebrew, shabaton is a sabbatical, the paid time off given to professors. In the Bible, it probably served to emphasize the word shabat.)
A couple of verses later, Fox translates “[on the seventh day, God] paused-for-breath” where most other translations prefer “was refreshed” or just “rested.” Fox thinks the verb is related to a noun that means “breath” (he may be right—we’ll have more to say about this very interesting word in Chapter 4), but then he wrongly concludes that the verb’s translation must be directly and simply related to the meaning of the noun. It does not. As we see in the English noun/verb pair “chair” (people sit on chairs, and someone chairs a meeting), nouns and verbs can be related in very complicated ways. And as we see with the noun and verb “count” (on Sesame Street, Count Von Count teaches children to count), nouns and verbs need not be directly related at all. “Paused-for-breath” happens to have the word “breath” in it, and the Hebrew words for “breath” and “rested” are related. But that coincidence does not make “paused-for-breath” the right translation. The Hebrew just means “rested.”
Though this sort of mistake creeps into the KJV less frequently, we still find it. For example, in Leviticus 13 we read of skin ailments and what to do about them. One of many maladies is something called in Hebrew a baheret. Because that word is related to one that means “clear” or “bright,” the KJV jumps to the conclusion that baheret means “bright spot.” The NIV uses that same translation, while the NRSV opts for the less specific but probably less wrong “spot.” The NAB gives us “blotch.” The text offers specific remedies for specific problems, one of these problems being the baheret. If we are to understand the text, it’s important to know whether it means “bright spot,” just any old “spot,” or, as the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation offers, “discoloration.” Technical words like this are exceedingly difficult to understand fully, so we don’t know for sure what the word means. For all we know, baheret is acne. Or it might not even be a real disease.
For our current purposes, though, we care less about the skin disease from the KJV, or the Sabbath and resting from Fox, and more about general techniques. That’s because there are, in fact, two questions: What does the Hebrew mean? And how do we figure out what the Hebrew means?
Before we can turn to the first question, we have to address the second. We have to have a sense of how we are going to go about recovering what the ancient Hebrew words meant.
In general, the most obvious way to understand what foreign words mean is to ask a native speaker, but, clearly, we don’t have that option for ancient Hebrew. Unfortunately, some of the methods that have commonly been used instead, while more practical, are also unreliable. And these unreliable approaches to figuring out what words mean have led to unreliable translations.
We also have to recognize that most people who care about the Bible already have a sense of what they want it to mean. Whether taking cues from the New Testament, later commentaries, religious leaders, childhood religious instruction, or personal spirituality, we all have baggage when it comes to the Bible. An honest inquiry demands that we leave that baggage behind.
So our next task is to forge a more sound way of investigating the past. Our first step will involve some general background about languages, starting with the question of whether all languages are the same.
As we move forward, we need to evaluate a variety of potential ways to understand Hebrew, decode its vocabulary, interpret its grammar, and so forth. We want to know which investigative techniques give us the most reliable information about ancient Hebrew. Unfortunately, the only truly sure way of knowing which theory is most accurate is already knowing the answer. If we knew what the Hebrew meant, we could compare different theories and see which one gave us the answer that we already know is right. (Though if we knew what the Hebrew meant we wouldn’t need the theory in the first place.)
But even though we don’t know what the Hebrew meant, because we can’t ask native speakers, we have much more information about modern languages. So our basic approach as we evaluate each bit of linguistic theory will be to apply the theory to modern languages, languages that we know much more about. If a particular theory gives us the wrong answer for modern languages, we conclude that the theory is unreliable. And if, by contrast, the theory always gives us the right answer for modern languages, we conclude that the theory is sound.
We tacitly adopted this approach at the beginning of the chapter. We used the English words “driveway” and “parkway” to show that words don’t always mean what their parts would suggest. We used the phrases “burn up” and “burn down” to show that phrases that look like opposites might mean the same thing, and so forth. In this section, we’re going to use some other modern languages, and in Chapter 3, when we test translation approaches, we’re going to use modern foreign languages a lot more.
If we have a guess about what an ancient Hebrew word means, in the end it will always be a guess. Hopefully it will be an educated guess—one in which we have a lot of confidence, one that is almost certainly correct—but as with any other endeavor, it’s hard to know with absolute certainty that we have not made a mistake. By contrast, if we have a guess about what an English word means, we can just ask one of the hundreds of millions of English speakers to see if we’re right.
So we can use English and other modern languages to test our theories about how to understand a language. If we think that words that rhyme—that is, words that sound almost the same—usually mean almost the same thing, all we have to do is look at English (say, “fate” and “gate”) to see that we’re wrong. If we think that two words that sound exactly the same must mean the same thing, again, English (“blue” and “blew”) demonstrates otherwise. Jumping ahead a little, if we think that two words in two different languages that sound the same must mean the same thing, we immediately see that we’re wrong. Modern Hebrew has a word that sounds like “dog”—that is, a word pronounced /dahg/—but it means “fish.”
This general approach assumes that to some extent all languages are the same. But are they?
The answer is very clearly yes. One of the most important results of modern linguistics has been the discovery that certain elements of all human languages work basically the same way. Even though literally thousands of details can differ—everything from what the words sound like to what order they go in—human language is fundamentally the same.
Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar is one way of understanding this similarity among languages. Chomsky’s position is that language is like other things for which humans are suited. Just as the human lung can breathe only air and not water, so too the human brain can learn only certain language patterns. Other researchers, like Hilary Putnam, explain the similarity among languages differently. But the debate tends to focus on why languages are the same, not whether they are the same.
This is good news for us, because it means that we can safely use modern languages like English or Modern Hebrew or even Swahili to help us probe various ways of understanding ancient Hebrew and, ultimately, to find a method that works well.
Words are the most fundamental unit of language. If we don’t understand the ancient Hebrew words, we have no hope of understanding anything more complicated, like sentences. Unfortunately, three common methods of understanding Hebrew are rampant among translators, and none of them works very well. The three methods are internal word structure, etymology, and cognate languages. Though these three approaches are ultimately unreliable, we learn about how language works (and how it doesn’t) by looking at them in detail and, in particular, by seeing examples of where they fail. So before we look at a fourth method that really does tell us what the Ancient Hebrew words mean, we turn to the wrong approaches.
Internal Word Structure
The first common but incorrect way to figure out what a word means is to look at its internal structure.
Again, using the methodology we agreed on earlier, we’ll look at modern languages to see if internal word structure is a good guide to what a word means, and we’ll see that it is not.
The “parkway” demonstration we just saw is weak, because in the end a “parkway” does have something to do with a “park,” even if the relationship isn’t as obvious as it first seems. It’s tricky to use the parts of that word to understand the full word, but we’d like clearer examples. Here’s one.
By definition, a “patent” in English is a “non-obvious art.” “Art” here is also used technically, and it refers to science as well as what most of us think of as “art.” The important part is the “non-obvious” provision. In fact, Section 103 of Title 35 of the U.S. Code, the part of U.S. law that deals with patents, specifically notes that “non-obvious subject matter” is a “condition for patentability.” Something that is obvious cannot be patented. (Or, at least, it shouldn’t be patentable. From time to time the patent office grants patents for things that seem obvious, as in patent #6360693, granted in March 2002 for “an apparatus for use as a toy by an animal, for example a dog, to either fetch, carry, or chew . . . formed of wood . . .” Someone practically patented the stick.)
The suffix “-ly” in English often marks an adverb. One might think, therefore, that “patently” would mean “in a patent-like way” or, perhaps, “in a non-obvious way.” But it does not. It means just the opposite. It means “obviously!” Even though the word “patently” is, well, patently made of the two parts “patent” and “-ly,” and even though a patent must be non-obvious, “patently” does not mean “non-obviously.”
We see another demonstration in the word “host,” someone who welcomes guests at a party, for example, or at an inn. Yet someone who is “hostile” is just the opposite. To be a “host” is to be warm and welcoming. To be “hostile” is not. Even though “infantile” means “like an infant,” “hostile” does not mean “like a host.”
Knowing what an intern is does not shed light on what internal means. A hospital is not necessarily a place where people are hospitable. Police officers don’t work in offices. Sweetbread is not sweet and it’s not bread. An old joke notes that “pro” is the opposite of “con,” and therefore asks what the opposite is of “progress.”
The point is that words don’t get their meanings from their parts. Language doesn’t work that way.
At least, language doesn’t always work that way, and that’s the catch. It is, of course, true that some words mean what we would expect based on their parts. “Calmly,” for example, means just what one would think based on the word “calm” and the suffix “-ly.” But only some words get their meaning from their parts. Unless we can figure out which words follow the pattern and which ones do not, we cannot use word structure to figure out what words mean.
Unfortunately, the nature of Hebrew makes this errant approach very appealing. To really understand the temptation to use internal word structure in Hebrew we have to know a little more about Hebrew. So we’ll spend a few pages looking at how Hebrew words are made. Hebrew internal word structure is as complicated as it gets, but the pages that follow will give you a basic introduction to it (and the Appendix has suggestions for where you can find more).
Hebrew Roots
Hebrew words usually have three parts: a root, consisting of two or three consonants; a pattern; and prefixes and suffixes. All three contribute to the meaning.
English has prefixes (like “pre-”) and suffixes (like “-ly” or “-s”), so these are the easiest part of Hebrew words for English speakers to understand. Parallel to the plural suffix “-s” in English we find the plural suffix -im in Hebrew. A migdal in Hebrew is a “tower,” and migdalim are “towers.”
But unlike English, the Hebrew word migdal can be broken down into smaller parts, specifically, a root and a pattern. The consonants G.D.L form the root. And the m and the vowels form the pattern, which, for convenience, we can mark as miXXaX. The X’s are placeholders for root consonants. If we change the root from G.D.L to K.D.Sh, we get mikdash, which is a temple. From Z.R.Ch we get mizrach, “east.”
So miXXaX is one pattern. Another pattern is XaXoX. Using the same three roots we just saw—G.D.L, K.D.Sh, and Z.R.Ch—we get gadol, kadosh, and zaroch. The first two mean “big” and “holy,” respectively, and the third isn’t a word.
If we use the pattern XaXaX, we get past-tense verbs: gadal (“grew”) and zarach (“shone”).
From this we see two things. First, not every root can pair with every pattern. Second, the patterns can be used to create nouns, adjectives, verbs, whatever.
The fun part is to find the connections between the various patterns and roots. For example, the first pattern we saw, miXXaX, frequently denotes a place, and the second pattern (XaXoX) an adjective. Mikdash is a “temple” and kadosh is “holy.” The connection is clear. A temple is a holy place. It looks like Q.D.Sh always has something to do with holiness. Similarly, migdal is a “tower,” gadol is “big,” and a tower is a big place. The sun shines (zarach is “shone”) in the east, which in Hebrew is mizrach. “Shone” and “east” share the root Z.R.Ch.
But not all words that share a root have a common meaning. For example, the pattern hiXXiX often has to do with making something happen. From the root K.T.N, we find katon, which means “small,” and hiktin, which means “to make something small” or, more colloquially, “to shrink.” The opposite of katon is gadol. It means “big,” and it comes from the root G.D.L. Not surprisingly, if we put the root G.D.L into the pattern hiXXiX and create the word higdil, we get the word for “enlarge.” Like katon/hiktin and gadol/higdil, we find rachok (from the root R.Ch.K) and karov (from K.R.V). Rachok means “far” and karov means “near.” So we follow the pattern and create two more words: hirchik and hikriv. The former, as we expect, does mean “make far away,” that is, “distance.” But the second one means “sacrifice”!
What happened? Nothing. It’s just a methodological error to think that internal word structure can tell us what words mean. That’s not how words work. (As it happens, there are two words hikriv in Biblical Hebrew, and one of them, the rarer of the two, does mean “make near.”)
However, the tempting nature of a simplistic system that would tell us what words mean leads many people down one of two wrong paths. The more obviously wrong path is to completely misunderstand what hikriv means, thinking that it means “make near”—no more and no less. With very common words like “sacrifice,” not a lot of people make this error. After all, the numerous and detailed descriptions of the sacrifices in the Old Testament are hardly compatible with “make near.” It’s hard to imagine a context in which a translator cannot tell if the slaughter and resulting guts and gore have to do with animal sacrifice or just moving things closer.
But many people make a more subtle mistake. They assume that even though hikriv means “sacrifice,” it still must have something to do with “make near.” Perhaps, they wrongly guess, the point of a sacrifice was to bring the sacrificer closer to God. Or perhaps the point was simply to make the sacrificed animal closer to God. Or to bring us closer to the animal. (I hope not.) One of these is a lovely idea, in my mind, and only the third is ridiculous, but all three are wrong. Or, at least, the reasoning is flawed, because as we have seen, words don’t get their meaning from their internal word structure. It’s just a mistake to think that Biblical sacrifice had more to do with nearness than modern sacrifice does.
How do we know that internal word structure doesn’t indicate shades of meaning? We’ve seen that internal word structure doesn’t dictate meaning, but maybe it influences nuance.
It does not. Once again, we can look at modern languages to understand the situation. In this case, we’ve already seen counterexamples. A “host” is not someone who “holds a party, but in a somewhat hostile way,” and someone who is “hostile” is not “combative, but in a way that reminds us of the people who held that party Saturday night.” “Host” and “hostile” just don’t mean the same thing, and using one to understand the other is a mistake.
Another wrong hypothesis is that Hebrew is fundamentally different than other languages, and that even though most languages don’t use internal word structure to add nuance to words, Hebrew, because of its root system, works differently.
To disprove this notion we only have to look at Modern Hebrew or Arabic.
Modern Hebrew, also called Israeli Hebrew, is the Hebrew spoken natively by most Israelis. Though it is based on the Hebrew of the Bible, it has been a spoken language for less than two hundred years. Because Hebrew wasn’t spoken for almost two thousand years and was then reborn in the nineteenth century, it has changed less than a language otherwise would over so much time. But also, because a conscious effort was made to get people to speak the language anew, Hebrew has changed in ways that are not entirely typical. Roughly speaking, Biblical Hebrew is to Modern Hebrew what Shakespearian English is to modern English.
(A thumbnail sketch of Hebrew goes something like this: The language was spoken in and around Jerusalem during the first millennium B.C. and for the first seventy years of the first millennium A.D., until the exile of the Jews from Jerusalem in the year 70. Aramaic and other languages quickly replaced Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews. Hebrew assumed a religious role, written and read but not generally spoken except during prayer services and ritual readings of Scripture. By A.D. 200, most Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century that people forced themselves to speak Hebrew again, and, when their kids started speaking Hebrew natively, the modern language was born. My book, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, listed in the Appendix, has much more detail.)
The word “Arabic,” too, is a short form for a variety of languages, including the highly stylized dialect in which the Quran is written, the formal language of discourse in the Arabic-speaking world, and a host of local dialects that are sometimes quite different from one another.
Modern Hebrew and Arabic are useful for our current purposes because, like Biblical Hebrew, they have a root system of the sort we saw starting on page 23.
It’s usually a mistake to use Modern Hebrew directly to understand Biblical Hebrew, because of the differences between the two, but we can nonetheless use the nature of Modern Hebrew to help us understand how root-based languages work.
At it happens, the four pairs “big”/“enlarge,” “small”/“shrink,” “far”/“distance,” and “near”/“sacrifice” exist in Modern Hebrew (though the pronunciations have changed) as well as in Biblical Hebrew, though the second meaning for hikriv—that is, “make near”—no longer exists in Modern Hebrew. The related kirev is used instead. This shows us that the root K.R.V is still used to create verbs having to do with “near.”
While animal sacrifice is illegal in Israel, the word hikriv has survived, and it’s a simple matter to ask Israelis whether that word implies some sort of nearness based on the root it shares with the word “near.” Israelis universally agree that it does not.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Languages are basically the same, and words don’t get their meanings from their internal structure.
Commentary
At least, internal word structure doesn’t tell us what the words originally meant. Religious communities, and particularly Jews, tend to read the text of the Bible on at least two levels.
We’re looking at one level here, the level of words in a language that are used to put sentences together. These words have meanings, and if we are to correctly translate the Bible we have to know what the words mean. And if we want our translation to help us retrieve the original meaning of the Bible, we have to know what the words originally meant.
But words can be used in many ways. One traditional way of reading the Bible relates not to what the original authors intended—that is, not to what the Hebrew words meant when they were penned—but rather to what they can be made to mean. We might call this a derived meaning, in that we derive a meaning from the original meaning of the words.
We care about this derived meaning because one way of making the religious leap from the original meaning to the derived meaning is to use internal word structure.
And again, we can look at modern language to see some examples.
We might suppose that one reason to “atone” for mistakes is to develop a sense of “oneness.” And we know it works, because “atonement” is also “at-one-ment.” This may or may not be interesting, and it may or may not tell us more about the human condition, but two things are certain:
First, even though this process tells us more about how (some) modern people think of atonement, it does not tell us what the word “atonement” means. That is, it may tell us more about the process, but it doesn’t tell us more about the word. Many people don’t bother to keep the two separate—and we’ll have more to say on this shortly—but it’s important. It’s possible that atonement has something to do with becoming one with yourself, but even if that’s true, it’s not because of what the word “atonement” looks like. In fact, we can’t even talk about the impact of atonement, how people do it, what it’s for, etc., until we know what the word means.
Second, and more importantly, something about this process of breaking up a word and looking at its parts resonates deeply with many people. When most people hear that “apologizing is important because it leads to a feeling of unity,” they evaluate the proposition with their head. Does it makes sense? Why? Who is making the claim? What is the evidence? By contrast, many people evaluate “atonement is at-one-ment” with their heart. It’s cool. It’s a neat wordplay. And, surprisingly, even rational thinkers sometimes give the statement more weight because of the wordplay.
Similarly, even the most rational people in modern society tend, unknowingly, to believe things that rhyme more than they otherwise would. “A stitch in time saves nine.” It (nearly) rhymes. It must be true. Even people who don’t know what it means think it’s probably accurate. (It means that mending clothing with one stitch before a small rip becomes worse will save more stitches later. Take care of things before they get out of hand.)
In the infamous O.J. Simpson trial, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran tried to put a glove on Mr. Simpson’s hand. The glove was too small. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” Cochran told the jury. “Fit.” “Aquit.” It rhymes, so it must be true. The strategy was incredibly effective, even though it mixed rational thought with, in this case, poetry.
In Matthew 16:2–3, Jesus offers some meteorological advice: “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening’ ” (NRSV). Well, maybe, maybe not, most people think. By contrast, an old bit of seafarers’ advice seems much more convincing: “Red sky at night is a sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning is a sailor’s sure warning.” It rhymes. And people, unknowingly, take it more seriously.(As it happens, where weather systems tend to move from west to east—a common pattern—the saying has some truth behind it.)
Bible interpretation frequently involves this sort of wordplay, so we should be careful to distinguish the scientific meaning of a word from its traditional religious meaning.
In 1040 a man named Solomon, son of Isaac, was born in Troyes, France. His Hebrew name forms the acronym Rashi, and it is by that one-word name that he is usually known. He left the province of his birth to study in Worms (now part of Germany) for a while, learning what was then the accumulated wisdom of nearly one thousand years of Jewish exile. By the time Rashi died in 1105, crusaders had destroyed the schools of his youth, leaving Rashi as one of the primary sources of knowledge about what had been taught there. For this and other reasons, Rashi is widely regarded in Jewish and some Christian circles as a preeminent Biblical commentator. (And because he wrote in Hebrew but sometimes referred to his native language of what we would now call Old French, Rashi is one key way French scholars learn about the history of French.)
Rashi, like other commentators, freely mixes what we might call the scientific meaning of words—what they originally meant to the people who wrote them—with interpretive, religious meaning.
For example, Exodus 25:18 describes two cherubs—Biblical angelic creatures—that are to adorn the Tabernacle. Rashi points out that the cherubs have “the image of a child’s face.” His reasoning? The Hebrew word for cherubs is kruvim, a word that happens to sound like the Aramaic word k’ravya. (The similarity is more pronounced in Hebrew than in the English transliterations here, because in Hebrew vowels are generally less important than they are in English.) The Aramaic prefix k- means “like,” and the word ravya means “child” or “apprentice.” So k’ravya means “like a child” in Aramaic. Rashi, basing his decision on the mid-first-millennium Babylonian Talmud, concludes that the kruvim must be k’ravya—that is, the cherubs must be “like a child.”
This type of reasoning is typical of Biblical interpretation.
By way of further example, we might look at Genesis 47:29. Describing Jacob’s final moments on Earth, the text reads: “When the time of Israel’s [that is, Jacob’s] death drew near . . .” (NRSV). Rashi points out that “time of death drawing near” is a phrase that’s used only for men who didn’t live as long as their father. (Jacob was 147. Isaac, his father, lived to be 180 years old.) While this is true—Rashi knew his Bible—it doesn’t follow that the phrase “time of death drew near” means “to live fewer years than one’s father.”
We will soon see that phrases are essentially the same as words. As with kruvim, Rashi assigns a meaning to a phrase here based on his religious bent, not scientific linguistics. Our point is not to deny Rashi (or others) their right to do this but rather to point out that they are engaged in interpretation, not translation.
In short, we see that internal word structure is interesting, and it has a solid foundation as a cool way to look at words. But it doesn’t tell us what words mean.
Etymology
The next popular but wrong way to figure out what ancient words mean is etymology.
Basically, etymology is “where a word comes from.” Etymology therefore often tells us what a word used to mean. But, as with internal word structure, etymology does not tell us what a word does mean. (In a lovely bit of irony that demonstrates our point, the word “etymology” comes from the Greek for “true meaning.”)
Once again, we look at English. A favorite example among linguists is the pair of words “glamour” and “grammar.” It turns out they come from the same source. But very few people (linguists excluded) would agree that grammar is glamorous. And even to the extent that there is glamour in grammar, it’s not because of those two words.
A slightly longer example involves medieval monks who were tasked with copying ancient religious manuscripts. The manuscripts had to be copied by hand because printing had yet to be invented, and the job had to be done by monks because most laypeople were illiterate.
So some monks would spend their days copying Greek and Latin manuscripts, preserving the ancient texts by writing them anew. It turns out that due to its architecture, the interior of the typical monastery is an ill-advised place to read and write. There’s not enough light. So the monks put tables just outside their dark buildings and used these tables as copying desks. Because these fixtures were immobile, they were called stationary booths.
As the general population in Europe grew more literate, more and more people needed writing supplies: paper or parchment, quill pens, blotters, and so forth. Before specialized stores arose to fill this consumer need, people had two choices: They could make their own supplies, or they could try to buy them.
Buying was easier, and the most convenient place to find writing supplies was one of the monks’ stationary booths. By association, then, the supplies themselves came to be called stationary supplies. (The technical name for this sort of expansion of meaning is “metonymy.” It will come up again later.) Only afterward did an arbitrary spelling decision assign the ending “-ary” to the word that means “immobile” and the ending “-ery” to “writing supplies.” Both words actually have the same etymology.
This true story demonstrates etymology perfectly. It is frequently interesting, but it does not tell us what words mean. In this case, knowing that “stationary” and “stationery” have a shared etymology would not help someone trying to decode English figure out what the words actually mean.
A third example comes from the word “wife”—that is, “female spouse.” As chance would have it, Old English, and Germanic languages in general, had two words for “woman,” one more complimentary than the other. The genteel word was frau. The less polite word was wyf. (The words may have had the same connotations that “woman” and “broad” do in some English dialects.) But it would be a terrible mistake to think that “wife” is a derogatory term just because it comes from what used to be a less-than-complimentary way of referring to a woman.
A bit of folk wisdom attributes “rule of thumb” to an ancient English law that allowed a man to hit his wife with a strap not bigger than his thumb. There’s no evidence to support this probably wrong etymology, but even if it’s true, people who use the phrase aren’t wife beaters.
Etymology in the Bible
Like internal word structure, etymology has intuitive appeal. It just seems obvious (even though it’s not true) that a word’s history ought to determine, or at least influence, its meaning.
Perhaps this is why the Bible itself has so much etymological detail. In fact, many of the stories seem to have been written to explain why a certain name exists. They end with “that is why the name of the place is called . . .” or “that is why he is called . . . ,” etc. (The translation “the name of the place is called” is wrong. More accurate would be simply, “the place is called . . .” or “the name of the place is. . . .”)
Genesis explains why Adam and Eve have the names that they do. Adam in Hebrew means “person,” and Chava, the Hebrew version of “Eve,” shares a root with “life.” Genesis 3:20 tells us, “Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (KJV). Adam and Eve’s names are both based on wordplay.
Isaac’s Hebrew name is Yitzchak, which means “he will laugh,” creating a wordplay with Abraham’s reaction when he hears that his ninety-year-old wife, Sarah, will conceive and bear Isaac: Abraham laughed. (The wordplay is closer in Hebrew, because “he will laugh” can also mean “he laughed.”) Isaac’s name is also based on wordplay.
Jacob’s Hebrew name is Ya’akov, which means “he will follow,” from the Hebrew root A.K.V, which also gives us the word ekev, “heel.” When Jacob and his twin, Esau, are born in Genesis 25:26, we read: “Afterward his [Esau’s] brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel [ekev]; so he was named Jacob [‘he will follow’]” (NRSV). Jacob’s name is a double pun, playing on “heel” and “he will follow.”
Jacob has a dream at a certain spot, and he calls the place Bethel, or, in Hebrew, Beit El.Beit means “house of ” and el means “God,” so Bethel means “House of God.” Jacob encounters God there and calls the place “house of God.”
The place called “Beersheba” (now the name of a town at the northern edge of the Negev desert in modern Israel and now sometimes spelled “Beersheba”) is composed of two words in Hebrew: be’er and sheva. The first word means “[water] well.” The second one sounds the same as the Hebrew word for “seven” (also pronounced sheva) but may mean “oath,” because the word for “seven” is the source of the word for “oath” in Hebrew. The verb for “to swear [an oath],” for example, comes from the root of the word “seven,” as does a more common word for oath, shvu’ah. (Numbers are commonly used to create other words. In Hebrew “armed” is literally “fived,” presumably because the metaphor in Hebrew comes not from the human arm but from the five-fingered hand. To “decimate” in English—that is, to “destroy most of ”—comes from the Latin decem, “ten.” It originally meant “to destroy one tenth of.”)
So Beersheba is either the “well of seven” or the “well of oath.” In Genesis 21, Abraham and Abimelech argue over a well. By the end of the chapter, they conclude a pact and swear an oath at a place that gets named Be’er Sheva. According to Genesis 21:30– 31: “[Abraham] said, ‘These seven ewe lambs you shall accept from my hand, in order that you may be a witness for me that I dug this well.’ Therefore that place was called Beer-sheba; because there both of them swore an oath” (NRSV). It’s a triple pun. The text connects the first half of the proper noun Beersheva to the Hebrew word be’er, “well.” It connects the second half of the proper noun both to “seven” and to “oath.”
Numbers 11:3 tells us, “So that place was called Taberah, because the fire of the LORD burned against them” (NRSV). The Hebrew for “burned” is ba’arah, from the same root (B.A.R) from which the name Taberah is formed.
In Joshua 5:9 we read of a place called Gilgal: “The LORD said to Joshua, ‘Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.’ And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.” Gilgal means “rolled.”
We don’t know whether these are the real origins of the names (that is, really etymology) or whether the names came first and the stories afterward (perhaps as puns), but either way, it’s clear that etymology of some sort is popular in the Bible itself. We must therefore be particularly careful about our position on etymology: Etymology is what a word used to mean or where a word comes from. It does not tell us what a word does mean—at least, not necessarily.
So as with the internal structure of words, we cannot use etymology to figure out what the ancient Hebrew words meant when the Bible was written.
Cognate Languages
The final popular but wrong way of trying to decode ancient Hebrew is cognate languages. Frequently, the same word will appear in two related languages. Sometimes a word will start in one language and then get used in another. In the first case, the word that appears in each language is called a cognate. The second case, really a subcase of the first, is called “borrowing” (even though the word is never given back).
It stands to reason but isn’t true that knowing what a word means in one language will tell us what it means in another.
Once again we look at modern languages to illustrate the point.
Once (then) French President François Mitterrand came to visit the United States, he declared, through a translator, that he demanded the U.S. president come visit France.
What happened?
The French president used the French verb demander when he wanted to invite his American counterpart to Paris. The French demander and the English “demand” are clearly cognate. (The -er ending in French, pronounced “ay,” marks an infinitive.) But unlike the English “demand,” which implies force, the French demander means “to ask,” and Mitterrand meant to “ask if the American president would come visit France.”
While clearly “ask” and “demand” have something in common, it would be a terrible mistake for English speakers to try to deduce the meaning of the French based on their own language, or vice versa. The words are different enough that confusion between them almost caused an international incident.
This French/English pair is representative of one of the ways that cognate words differ between languages. They can have very different nuances.
Equally, words change meaning when they travel (“get borrowed”) from one language to another. The English word “sombrero” means “Mexican hat,” but in Spanish it just means “hat.” A baseball cap in Spanish is a sombrero. In Modern Hebrew, the word kontzert, borrowed from the English “concert,” means “classical music concert.”
A particularly interesting case of borrowing and the risks of relying on cognate languages can be seen in the Modern Hebrew word ekspres, which refers to a type of bus route. The word was recently borrowed from the English word “express,” but, unlike the English, the Hebrew word ekspres means “local.” It’s the bus that stops at every station between two points.
What happened is this: Originally, the Israeli bus company had three kinds of bus routes. One stopped at every stop between two points—say, between the port city of Haifa and the northern Kiryat Shmona. Another stopped at only a few select stops. But a third route took the bus into almost every village between the two cities, stopping not only at all the main stops but also weaving through a variety of towns. This third route was called the m’asef—literally, “collector” route. In contrast to the collector, the first bus, which stopped at every stop, was called the ekspres—that is, “local.” The “express” bus was called mahir, “speedy.” (The Israeli bus company that created the terms, Egged, has since abandoned the term ekspres, fearing it might be confusing.)
This true story is yet another example of the dangers of using cognate languages to figure out what a word means. So we add cognate languages to etymology and internal word structure, completing our list of three ways that words do not get their meaning.
So if looking at internal word structure, etymology, and cognate languages doesn’t work, what does? How do scholars figure out what the ancient Hebrew words meant?
The most reliable way of determining what a word in a dead language means is to see how the word is used in context. Once again, we’ll look at some modern examples, where we can test the results, before we look at ancient Hebrew.
Suppose we want to know what “driveway” means, and we can’t ask an English speaker. If we can find enough sentences where “driveway” is used, we’ll learn that driveways are frequently paved (and that driveway-paving services frequently do the paving) and that they are used for parking on. “Park in the driveway” is one very common context for the word “driveway.” We almost never find the phrase “drive in the driveway.” We do find “drive up the driveway” and “drive into the driveway,” but again, in the context of then parking. Unlike internal word structure, which leads us in the wrong direction, context points immediately to the right answer.
“Ice-cream truck” and “fire truck” work the same way. A look at both words in context shows us that ice-cream trucks are vehicles where people buy ice cream, while fire trucks are summoned to put out fires.
We can look at the English word “opposite” for a slightly more complex example. A naive definition of the word “opposite” might be “completely unlike” or “altogether different.” Yet when asked for the opposite of “dog,” most people will suggest “cat,” even though cats and dogs are certainly not altogether different. If the naive definition of “opposite” were right, the opposite of “dog” might be “yesterday.” But context (“cat is the opposite of dog”) shows us that the word “opposite” is more nuanced. It can mean “completely unlike” but also “complementary” or “the other of a pair.”
Because context is so useful, Biblical scholars long ago got the idea of compiling what’s called a concordance—that is, a list of the contexts of every word in the Bible. In these days of computers and the Internet, finding every context of a word is a trivial matter, but it wasn’t always so. People spent their lives painstakingly recording every Hebrew word in the Bible and compiling a list of the contexts in which the word appeared. Shlomo Mandelkorn created such a compilation in the nineteenth century. More recently, others have created similar works. And today, the “search” function of most electronic editions of the Hebrew Bible does the same thing as a concordance.
Let’s look at a Hebrew example. One of the most common words in the Hebrew Bible is leimor. The word literally means “to say,” and it’s most commonly translated as “saying.” This is where we get (terrible) translations like, “God spoke unto Moses, saying . . .” Let’s look at the context of leimor and see if we can figure out what it really means.
The first thing we see about leimor is that it is indeed used for things that are said. It’s used for what people say, as in Genesis 27:6 (to pick one of many examples at random): “And Rebekah spake unto Jacob her son, saying [leimor], Behold, I heard thy father speak unto Esau thy brother, saying [leimor] . . .” (KJV) or, more colloquially (and accurately), “Rebekah said to her son Jacob, ‘I heard your father say to your brother Esau . . .’ ” (NRSV). The word is also used for what God says, as in Genesis 1:22: “And God blessed them, saying [leimor], Be fruitful, and multiply . . .” (KJV) or “God blessed them, saying [leimor], ‘Be fruitful . . .’ ” (NRSV and NAB).
But it’s also used for songs, as in Exodus 15:1: “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD, and spake, saying [leimor], I will sing . . .” (KJV). Here the KJV has a problem, because in English songs aren’t “said”; they’re sung. The NRSV and NAB do better: “Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD: ‘I will sing. . . .’ ”
The word is also used for questions, as in Genesis 37:15: “And the man asked him, saying [leimor], What seekest thou?” (KJV). Again the KJV has a problem, because in English one doesn’t say questions; one asks them.
But a picture begins to emerge. The word leimor is used for questions, statements, songs, blessings, commandments, etc. In fact, leimor is used for anything that involves direct quotation. Indeed, it introduces direct quotation. We don’t have a word like that in English, but we have something just as good. We have punctuation. The role of quotation marks is to mark direct quotations. This is why the NRSV correctly uses quotation marks where the KJV has the misleading (that is, wrong) translation “saying.” (Surprisingly, the authors of the NRSV, who seem to have understood leimor, still get it wrong sometimes in translation, as we just saw in Genesis 1:22.)
English quotation marks can be used for words of a speech, question, song, whatever. So, too, the Hebrew leimor was used for any direct quotation. So leimor doesn’t mean “saying . . .” at all. It means, “comma, quote. . . .” (In the next chapter we’ll take a more detailed look at how to transform our knowledge of ancient Hebrew words into successful translations.)
This quick look at how to use context has already shown us something important about ancient Hebrew, something that the authors of the KJV didn’t appreciate. The KJV translators looked at the internal structure of leimor and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
In this case, the wrong translation in the KJV just leaves the reader with the misimpression that songs were said, not sung. But in other cases with other words, the results are more fundamental.
Every so often, we are lucky enough to find a context that is particularly helpful. The most helpful context, of course, is one that defines a word. This is rare in the Bible.
But as we will see in the next chapter, Biblical poetry often consisted of putting synonyms in parallel. These synonyms are one of the best ways of making sure that we have correctly understood the ancient Hebrew words. For example, we find the word rozen half a dozen times in the Bible, and it’s never defined. But Proverbs 31:4 is typical of how the word is used. Kings and rozens should drink wine, the verse tells us in poetry. In our modern context, we would expect that rozens are very different than kings, because we are supposed to eschew redundancy, particularly in poetry. But ancient poetry worked differently. Good poetry frequently consisted of finding synonyms. Because rozen is almost always used in parallel with “king,” we have good reason to believe that rozen means something like “king.”
When in Isaiah 40:23 we further see that rozen is used in parallel with “judges,” we learn more about rozens and about judges. From other sources, we know a lot about kings and judges. Isaiah 40:23 shows us that all three have something in common. Very roughly, they were related in the way that “senators” and “governors” are in the modern United States. They were both important parts of the government of ancient Israel. (We go into much more depth about “kings” in Chapter 5.)
Though we know less about what a rozen was—“prince” is a typical translation—we know that he was someone in a high position, like a king and like a judge. We don’t have an exact word for that (or, really, for “king” and “judge,” again as we’ll see in Chapter 5), and the word isn’t important enough to warrant more discussion here, but it still serves to demonstrate the general point that the parallelisms common in Biblical poetry are particularly helpful in decoding words. Even though it didn’t help us understand rozen perfectly, we have a good sense of the approximate meaning of the word.
Everything that we have seen about words applies to combinations of words, too. Just as we cannot use internal structure, etymology, or cognate languages to understand a single word, we shouldn’t use these three methods with combinations of words. We’ve already seen one example. Knowing what “fire,” “truck,” and “fire truck” mean won’t help us know what “ice-cream truck” means.
A more detailed example highlights the issue. English has a verb “pick” and two words “on” and “up” that can be added to verbs. “Pick” (as in “pick a lock”) means “open stealthily without a key.” “Up” means “away from gravity,” and “on” means “touching and located in the direction of open space.” (All of these definitions are approximate.) This knowledge, however, doesn’t explain why “pick on” means “annoy,” “pick up” means “increase” (as in, “pick up the tempo”), and “pick up on” means “discern.”
For that matter, “serving on the faculty at Harvard” is a prestigious appointment, while the seemingly similar but very different “serving the faculty at Harvard” is a description of a waiter. Yet even though the word “on” indicates an academic position versus a menial one with the word “serve,” it has just the opposite role in the phrase “to wait on.” This is true even though the waiter is the server.
A severe example is the common modern American phrase “I could care less,” which, it turns out, means the same thing as “I couldn’t care less.”
These demonstrate that phrases, just like words, don’t get their meanings from their internal structure. This means that even once we’ve understood two words, we may not understand what they mean when they are used together.
Once again, the only reliable way to understand phrases is to look at context.
By way of further demonstration, let’s look at the phrase “tree of the field” in the Bible and try to figure out what it means. For example, Isaiah 55:12 offers a beautiful image of celebration: “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (NRSV).
But a field is an odd place for a tree. (And clapping hands is an odd thing for a tree to do, but we assume that that’s part of Isaiah’s poetic imagery.) The literal translation “trees of the field” is wrong.
So we look at context. Curious readers may wish to look at the complete list of where the phrase “tree(s) of the field” appears: Exodus 9:25; Leviticus 26:4; Isaiah 55:12; Jeremiah 7:20; Ezekiel 17:24, 31:4, 31:5, 31:15, and 34:27; and Joel 1:12 and 1:19. Based on this, what does “trees of the field” really mean?
The book of Joel (in verse 1:12) offers some initial help: “The vine withers, the fig tree droops. Pomegranate, palm, and apple—all the trees of the field are dried up; surely, joy withers away among the people” (NRSV). It seems that the phrase “trees of the field” summarizes “grape vines, fig trees, pomegranate trees, palm trees, and apple trees” (except that “apple” is probably wrong as a translation, too).
Leviticus 26:4 gives us more help: “I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit” (NRSV).
Jeremiah 7:20 warns that God’s wrath “will be poured out on this place, on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground” (NRSV).
All of these contexts point in the same direction. A “tree of the field” was a fruit-bearing tree. At first glance, the suggestion seems preposterous. After all, the phrase “tree of the field” has the word “field” right in it. Surely it must have something to do with fields, right? Wrong. We’ve learned in this chapter that phrases don’t get their meanings from the words used to make them. There’s nothing odd about “field” indicating “fruit” in this context.
“Strawberries” don’t grow in straw. “Wild animals” can be calm. And in Hebrew, as we just learned from context, “field trees” are fruit trees.
So far, we’ve skipped over the really important question of what it means for a word to mean something. Sources for more detailed answers appear in the Appendix, but for now we need to consider two aspects of “meaning”: Words can mean more than one thing, and the meaning of a word can be extended. We’ll start with the first one.
Homonyms
Homonyms are words that are spelled the same way but mean different things. (The term is also used for words that are spelled differently but still sound the same.) We have to be aware of homonyms when using the context method to figure out what a word means.
For example, if we want to figure out what the English word “bank” means, and if a search of how the word is used in context tells us that “money is kept in a bank” and “a bank is where a river meets the shore,” we have to be careful to recognize that “bank” means two completely different things. In the case of “financial institution” and “riverside,” it’s pretty easy to figure out that we have two words that just happen to sound the same. But other cases are more difficult.
In the first Gulf War, the United States sent some 500,000 troops to the Middle East. A reasonable but wrong conclusion would have been that those troops contained several million individual soldiers. After all, a boy-scout troop, a girl-scout troop, or, for that matter, the F-Troop (from the television series) usually has more than a dozen members. The confusion comes because the word “troop” at once means “group of people” and “person.” Without external supporting evidence, it might be difficult for a researcher in several hundred years to figure out when the word means what.
We have to be careful not to make the same mistake when we look at ancient Hebrew. For example, the word elef pretty clearly means “thousand.” The book of Numbers, among other things, deals with a census of the Israelite people. (That’s why it’s called “Numbers” in English.) It describes the populations of each tribe in thousands (elef), hundreds, and tens. It then gives a grand total, also in thousands, hundreds, and tens. The math works only if elef means “thousand.”
But then in Numbers 31:4–6, we find the word elef in reference to what would be a military delegation. Each tribe must send one elef. While the word may mean “thousand” there, the phrasing would be odd. In Numbers 31:5 we read in the NRSV: “So out of the thousands [elef ] of Israel, a thousand [elef ] from each tribe were conscripted, twelve thousand [elef ] armed for battle.” Why would the text mention “the thousands of Israel” rather than any number of much more reasonable choices: “people of Israel,” “sons of Israel,” “soldiers,” “fighters,” etc.? One good possibility is that elef means more than one thing. It means “thousand,” but it also means “fighting unit.”
But here’s the thing. The other possibility is that elef always means “thousand,” and the text in Numbers 31:4–6 is either purposely oblique or it’s normal text and there’s something else about ancient Hebrew that we’ve misunderstood. Sometimes, even our best investigation leads only to a pretty good guess.
There are lots of ways a word might have two meanings.
The meanings might reflect two completely unrelated words (like the two words “bank”). It’s usually pretty easy to identify this scenario, especially if the word is used often, because one of the word’s meanings won’t make any sense when the word is used in its second sense. It’s hard to imagine a plausible scenario where “financial institution” and “riverside” might be confused.
Or there might be two related words (like “troop”). This case is harder to identify, because when the words are related, there’s a greater chance that the wrong meaning will seem plausible. Only a detailed analysis of the first Gulf War could distinguish the two meanings, teasing apart “500,000 people” and “several million people.”
Another possibility is that a word might have different meanings in different dialects.
A British high-school student came to an American summer camp. One evening during a group discussion about war, he and an American learned that they disagreed vehemently about the appropriate use of military force. One student thought the military was a good thing; the other was shocked even to hear such a suggestion. After a bitter exchange of words, the British kid and the American found themselves walking side by side. The Brit asked the American if he wanted “to work things out.” The American, glad to have a peaceful conclusion to the tension, quickly agreed. So the British kid hit him.
What went wrong? In America, “work things out” usually means “talk things out.” In England it usually means “fight things out.”
Another British/American example is more subtle and, therefore, more likely to cause confusion. American author John Steinbeck’s book Of Mice and Men takes its name from a line in a poem by Robert Burns. Many Americans are familiar with the quotation: “The best laid plans of mice and men [often go awry].” But that’s not actually the original. The poem really reads, “the best laid schemes of mice and men. . . .” The problem is that in Scottish English, a “scheme” is any old plan, while in American English it’s a plan to do something wrong or illegal. (Consider a “scheme to get money” versus a “plan to get money.”)
In America, “tabling” an issue at a meeting means agreeing not to vote on the issue. In England, it means the opposite.
Certainly the Bible contains more than one dialect of Hebrew. For example, essentially the same passage appears in I Kings 8 and II Chronicles 6. But even though the meaning is the same, minor differences in the Hebrew grammar reflect different dialects. (The dialect in Chronicles is commonly called “Late Biblical Hebrew,” but the term “Biblical Hebrew,” rather than “Early Biblical Hebrew,” is usually employed for the more widely used dialect in Kings.) In I Kings 8, a verb has two parts and no subject, while in II Chronicles 6 the same meaning is conveyed with a one-part verb in conjunction with a subject. Details about both grammatical constructions are complicated, so we won’t analyze them here, but it is still important to see that the Hebrew is different.
Frequently, as in the difference between Kings and Chronicles that we just saw, scholars can identify and isolate the various dialects, at least warning translators when more work is needed—but not always. So when we look at a word in context, we must remember that even context can be misleading if we’re not careful.
In addition to cases like these, another major way a word can mean more than one thing is through various systematic extensions of a word’s meaning, as we see next.
Extensions
When a captain shouts, “All hands on deck,” presumably he wants his sailors in their entirety, not just their hands, on the deck. Are we to conclude, based on this, that “hand” also means “person”? Not necessarily, because languages have a variety of ways in which the meanings of words can be extended.
The extension we’ve just seen is technically called metonymy—that is, using a word to refer to something related to that word. It’s widespread in English and, in general, across the languages of the world. Similarly, if a man wearing a sombrero (in the English sense) arrives at a baseball game, people might comment, “Get a load of the sombrero,” meaning, “Get a load of the guy wearing the sombrero.” That’s metonymy. So is “the White House denied accusations that . . .” when the point is “the accusations were denied by someone in the White House.” Similarly, if a guy at a restaurant orders a corned-beef sandwich and then asks for a glass of milk, his waitress might remark: “The corned-beef sandwich in the back needs more milk.” In an example we’ll come back to in Chapter 4, the sentence “Not a soul was left in the room” doesn’t mean that the room contained a bunch of corpses. Rather, “soul” is used metonymically to mean “human being that has a soul.”
It’s important to keep track of these things, because we don’t want to get confused when we look at how a word is used in context. For example, we wouldn’t want to think that “corned-beef sandwich” means “person eating a sandwich.” Equally, once we know what a word means, we want to understand how it is used. (On the other hand, a full description of English would have to include the fact that “hand” usually means “person” in reference to workers on a ship. We’ll return to that point shortly.)
For example, the Hebrew word eretz means “land,” and, just like its English counterpart, the word refers at once to the physical earth and to the area under control of a ruler. So in Genesis 1:10, God calls the dry land “eretz.” The word means the soil itself. But later on, the “eretz of Egypt” will refer not to the soil but to the region under the control of Egypt. Because our English word “land” works just as well in both cases, it’s a bit tricky to see both meanings.
As an example that doesn’t work so well in English, we can consider the words negev and teiman, literally “Negev (region)” and “Yemen.” But in the Bible, they frequently just mean “south.” “Toward the Negev” (negba) is the opposite of “toward the north.” Again, we see metonymy.
Metonymy is just one of a variety of ways words assume nonliteral meaning. Similes, metaphors, and other poetic devices all extend the meanings of words. For convenience, we can call all of these—including metonymy—poetic, but that doesn’t mean that they are used only in poetry. In fact, they are just as common in ordinary prose.
Color words are a good way to get a sense of what’s going on.
The German word blau means “blue.” So a “blue sky” in German is “blau.” But here’s the problem. A blaumark in German—literally, a “blue letter”—is not a “blue letter” at all in English. A blaumark in German is the letter that a school sends home to parents when their child misses school. The German blaumachen—literally, “to make blue” or “to do blue”—means “to skip school.” In general, blau in German refers to truancy.
But in English, “blue” most often refers to sorrow. We don’t have an expression “to make blue” or “to do blue,” but we can “feel blue”—that is, “be sad.”
It’s not hard to imagine translators with only a partial knowledge of German or, perhaps, with a knowledge of academic German but not colloquial German, going through the following steps: They come across the phrase blaumachen. They translate it literally as “make blue.” They know that “make blue” isn’t good English, so they tweak it a bit and end up with “feel blue,” congratulating themselves on having avoided a stilted literal translation and coming up with something modern and colloquial while still capturing the essence of the original. They are completely wrong.
Similarly, “to be blue” in modern Russian means “to be gay.”
In Modern Hebrew a “blue movie” is a pornographic film. Apparently, “blue movie” means the same thing in some dialects of English, too. But in English we also have “blue laws,” which have (almost) nothing to do with pornography. They are regulations about commerce on the Sabbath, forbidding the sale of alcohol, requiring stores to close in some municipalities, and even in some places invalidating personal checks written on Sunday. In addition, we have blue (and red) states, which have nothing to do with sorrow (“feeling blue”), keeping the Sabbath (“blue laws”), or pornography (“blue movies”). Blue states are states that tend to vote Democratic. Then there’s “blue blood,” which is associated with nobility, notwithstanding the anatomical fact that everyone’s blood is blue when it returns to the heart, and “blue blood” literally is blood with no oxygen. A candle that “burns blue” is an omen of death. And “blueberries” are actually purple.
In English, “green” is associated with envy (“green with envy”), but also inexperience (“greenhorn”), nature (“green thumb”), and conservationism (“going green”). Paradoxically, when “green” applies to plants, it can mean both “unripe” and its opposite, “flourishing.” In at least one instance, “green” is the same as “blue.” “Green in the face,” as in “shouting until you’re green in the face,” is the same as “shouting until you’re blue in the face.” Like “blue,” “green” is used to refer to things that are not green. Similarly, we use other color words for some things that are actually typically green, like blackboards.
The description of the Tabernacle in Exodus includes what the King James Version translates as “rams’ skins dyed red.” That description may be right. But the NRSV translation, “tanned rams’ skins,” is more likely. “Red” (adom in Hebrew, or, as a verb, m’odam) here may not literally mean “red.” Just as the Engish “tan” is both a color and a process, “red” in Hebrew means more than just a color.
In Genesis 25:30, Esau begs his brother Jacob for “that same red pottage” (KJV). The Hebrew word adom (“red”) appears twice (and the word “pottage” is implied but doesn’t appear in the Hebrew—the Hebrew refers simply to something red). The KJV uses “that same” in an attempt to capture the double word. But, like the hypothetical translators of German who think that blaumachen means “to feel blue,” have the translators of the KJV missed the whole point? Does “red” imply something in Hebrew that it does not in English?
The answer is almost certainly “yes.” “Red” in ancient Hebrew was connected to the ground. Even the words are similar. “Red” is adom and “ground” is adama. Esau was born “red” (Genesis 25:25—where the Hebrew word is the related admoni, perhaps “reddish”), and he is a man of the field (Genesis 25:27). Clearly, Esau wasn’t literally “red.” Though he may have had a red tint to his skin, more likely the point of the passage is to make a connection between Esau’s complexion and the nature of his character. Like an American baby born green who grew up to be jealous, Esau was born red and grew up to work the field. The connection between “red” and “field” is as obvious in Hebrew as in the English pair “green” and “envy.” In fact, the Hebrew words are even more closely related. Their meanings overlap, and, in addition, they share the root A.D.M. The standard English translation “red”/“field” misses the entire wordplay.
When Esau asks for his brother’s “red,” and, in particular, when the text doesn’t explicitly indicate what red thing Esau wants, the scene transcends its seemingly mundane content of a man asking his brother for food that just happens to be red. It is instead a symbol-laden image of thinking you have what you need but, in fact, not having it at all. Esau, a hunter—seemingly able to fend for himself, born “red” and working “red” (images that work in Hebrew but not English)—suddenly finds himself not having enough “red” and having therefore to rely on his seemingly less powerful brother Jacob.
The original story is about the limits of physical power (Esau) and the power of God (Jacob). The reader gets a hint of the theme when Jacob and Esau are still in their mother Rebekkah’s womb, and God tells her that she will give birth to two peoples, and “the mighty will serve the younger.” Esau is the mighty one, but his seemingly weaker brother really has the power. The meek shall inherit the earth, some might say.
In this case, the text even contains a clue about the poetic nature of the Hebrew word “red.” The continuation of Genesis 25:30 tells us, “Therefore he [Esau] was called Edom” (NRSV). Notice the similarity of sound. “Red” is adom, and Esau is edom. The Edomites are the “Red People.” And Esau is their father (Genesis 36:9, e.g.).
All of this complexity, beauty, and imagery is lost in the seemingly obvious translations: “feed me [ . . . ] with that same red pottage” (KJV) or “let me eat some of that red stuff” (NRSV).
The same word “red” shows up in the erotic poetry of Song of Songs, where “my beloved” (Song of Songs 5:10) is called adom. The KJV and most later translations choose “ruddy” for adom here, precisely because “my beloved is red” doesn’t make any sense in English. But, in fact, hedging and using “ruddy” doesn’t help matters. We have no Hallmark cards for “my ruddy one.”
The translators ought to have noticed that something was amiss because the first part of the line reads, in English, “My beloved is white,” giving us the silly “my beloved is white and red,” more reminiscent of a children’s riddle about a newspaper than of romance. We will leave “white”—tzach in Hebrew—for another time, noting now that we don’t have a good word in English for it. (There’s another word in Hebrew, lavan, which means simply “white.” The Hebrew word we see here is more poetic. Other English translations range from “radiant” to “dazzling” to “clear-skinned,” and these are closer.) But we want to focus on “red,” which, we now understand, has little to do with color here and everything to do with earthiness.
Adom is a good thing, perhaps along the lines of “rugged” in English, an image destroyed by “red” and “ruddy,” neither of which is generally considered desirable in English. We know that adom is a positive trait because it is just the first in a litany of beautiful images. Many of the words are even more difficult to translate than adom, but the point is that “my beloved” is better than everyone else, a once-in-a-lifetime find, precious and rare like gold with jet-black hair and lips begging to be kissed. “Red” has no place on this list in English. Unfortunately, we don’t have a really good translation option here.
It’s not just colors that are used “poetically.” For example, “sweet” has a variety of very different meanings in English: sugary, kind, etc.; and as we saw earlier, “sweet” even turns “bread” into “sweetbread”—that is, animal brains. In Hebrew, “sweet” modifies water to mean what we call in English “freshwater,” so in Hebrew the opposite of “saltwater” is “sweet water.” (Surprisingly, the KJV translates “sweet water” literally in James 3:11, even though it correctly gives us “freshwater” just one verse later.)
The English word “great” represents positive traits, usually meaning “better than just good.” A great idea, for example, is better than just a good idea. Yet the Great Depression was not better than any good depression; it wasn’t good at all.
The technique that we used earlier—looking at a word in context—will help us understand not just the core meaning of a word but also the broader ways in which it is used. We just have to be careful not to jump to conclusions about a Hebrew word. It would be easy to stop investigating once we learn that adom means “red,” but it would be a mistake. This mistake, perhaps more than any other, contributes to the faulty translations so widely available.
Two Kinds of Extension
The careful reader may have noticed that at this point we’re actually talking about two things at once.
On the one hand, as we just saw, words mean more than what they might at first appear. “Green” in English sometimes invokes “envy,” sometimes “inexperience,” plus many more concepts that, in the end, don’t have much to do with the actual color green. “Hands,” to the captain of a ship, means “workers.”
And on the other hand, a word or phrase can be used inventively to give it a meaning it doesn’t normally have. “Corned-beef sandwich,” instead of “the person eating that corned-beef sandwich,” is an example. So is the first time that “hands” was used for “workers,” or “stationary supplies” for “supplies that I plan to get from the stationary booth.”
Over time, extensions can actually create new words and phrases, so words and phrases can migrate from the second category to the first. Even though “stationery” started off as a case of metonymy, now it’s a whole new word.
When this process applies to phrases, we call them “idioms.”
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
It’s an interesting expression. It means not just that there’s more than one way of doing things; it means that there’s more than one good way of doing things. But more to the point, it has nothing to do with cats, skinned or otherwise.
We might imagine an ancient cat-worshipping Egyptian trying to make sense of this line if it were translated into Egyptian. It would be like an American reading, say, that “There’s more than one way to burn a church”—only it would be even worse for the Egyptian. Egyptians worshipped cats, making cats not only symbols of God but living instantiations of God.
Still, we can use the parallel of “There’s more than one way to burn a church” as a potential English translation of something. Is there anything we could do to get past the churchness and burningness of the expression? Probably not. Any expression in English that seems to involve church-burning, not surprisingly, does form an association with burning churches in the minds of the people who hear the phrase.
Surprisingly, though, there’s a similar two-word expression in English: barn burner. What’s surprising is that it has nothing to do with burning barns. The word connotes something impressive or successful, which is why when then-CEO of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca, wanted to warn that sales figures for his car company would not be impressive, he cautioned that the upcoming month “will not be any barn burner.”
Going back to “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” we might compare that expression to a phrase that someone makes up, say, “It would be like skinning a cat.” What’s important is that “like skinning a cat” is a comparison, not an expression. (It’s an odd comparision, but that isn’t the point.) As speakers of English, we automatically know that the expression has nothing to do with cats, and the comparison has everything to do with cats.
Augmenting our examples just a bit, we have five potential English sentences:
1. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
2. There’s more than one way to burn a church.
3. The party Saturday night was a real barn burner.
4. At the party Saturday night the frat boys burned a barn.
5. It’s a felony to skin a live cat.
The problem is that (1) and (2) look like they’re almost the same thing. So do (1) and (5), (2) and (3), and (3) and (4). But it would quite obviously be a mistake to translate (4) as (3) or to mix up any of the other pairs.
When we look at the Hebrew of the Bible, we want to make sure we avoid that kind of error. We don’t want Hebrew that essentially means “There’s more than one way to skin a cat” to end up in translation as anything other than what it really is. So far we’ve seen that the first step to producing a good translation is figuring out what the ancient Hebrew words mean. In the next chapter, we’ll see how to turn those words into an accurate translation.