3
On Language Growth and Change, Contact and Death
Throughout the preceding chapters, I have been employing the metaphor (or simile) that the Old Testament is (like) a language, and have been relating that idea analogically to various linguistic processes. It is now time to speak more directly and extensively about the linguistic side of this metaphor. Given my diagnosis—that the Old Testament, which is (like) a language, is dying—it will prove both illuminating and instructive to discuss the most important moments in the language life cycle, including how languages grow and change, how they atrophy, and ultimately, how they die. Although the death of a language is of special concern to my argument, the other moments in the life cycle are also crucial, and so deserve some treatment, even if that is relatively brief. In truth, each stage in a language’s life cycle is a large topic, and here I cannot do justice to any one stage, much less all of them. Even so, given the importance of pidgins and creoles (and the related processes of [re]pidginization and creolization), especially for the signs of the Old Testament’s morbidity that are on display in chapters 4–6, special attention is given to these topics.
Language Change and Language Contact
Like any other human artifact, languages change through time, especially via repeated and extensive use. The changes human languages experience are legion and can vary a good bit among different language groups because a large number of social, political, economic, and geographical factors (to name a few) play significant roles in linguistic change. That granted, the most basic principle of linguistic change is that languages do in fact change and do so through the course of time.1 As a closely related second principle, it can be asserted that, while language change comes about through a number of ways or is the result of a myriad of influences, much change comes about simply through repeated use. Such changes can simplify a language, as in the dropping of case endings, plural markers, or irregular verb forms; but they can also make a language more complex, as when languages develop new material even as they lose other material—indeed, both processes can happen within the same language through the course of time and repeated use.2 Languages can also expand by the internal development of grammatical rules or by external influence (e.g., the adoption of loanwords), even as they can contract in yet other ways (e.g., elimination of archaic forms or obsolete definitions).
Changes such as those mentioned above and many others have been carefully documented by linguists, especially those who work in historical and comparative linguistics. To give but one simple example of an apparently universal cause of language change, we cite the phenomenon of “lazy mouth” syndrome and its impact on phonology.3 Complicated phones are often simplified through the course of time as people stop bothering to pronounce them correctly. For example, one can frequently hear—even find the spelling—prolly for the word probably, simply because the former is easier to say and is acceptable in informal settings, even in certain informal written contexts (say, on the internet). The most ancient of languages, by contrast, are often marked by very complicated phonologies: the most famous examples are the so-called click languages of southern Africa (Nama, Xhosa, etc.).4 These languages are deemed the oldest still in existence because complicated phonological elements are typically dropped over time. The preservation of such in the click languages testifies to the antiquity of that complicated phonology. Be that as it may, whatever the cause of the specific linguistic change, phonological or otherwise, the fact that languages change through the course of time through repeated use means that each language encodes a history and has a memory; thus much can be learned by studying a language’s historical development, looking for traces of its past that are still remembered here and there, now and then.5
A third important principle of linguistic change is that languages often change through contact with other languages.6 Loanwords or loan phrases are an example of such contact. Without contact with French, there would never be an English speaker who said, after a hard day of work, “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess. C’est la vie.” In point of fact, English is a complex mishmash of other languages, replete with borrowed words and phrases but also other aspects of grammar, morphology, and syntax.7
Rare indeed are languages that exist in complete isolation from all others—not in the sense that they are unrelated to other well-established language families (i.e., linguistic isolates like Basque, Burushaski, and Sumerian, among others),8 but in the sense that their speakers have never encountered someone from another linguistic group. Moreover, even in those unusual instances when a newly discovered people group has never had contact with the “outside world,” that pristine situation is immediately despoiled, to some degree at least, at the moment of first contact. Contact with other people groups means contact with their languages, and language contact often brings with it linguistic change, not only in the borrowing and replacement of specific words (e.g., note the contemporary German preference for the loanword Telefon rather than the earlier Fernsprecher) but also in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, and so forth.9
The topic of linguistic change via language contact is a large one, but for reasons that will become clear momentarily, it is especially important for my diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying. So, for present purposes, despite the breadth of this topic, it suffices to focus on two particular examples of contact languages—pidgins and creoles—and the associated processes of pidginization (and repidginization) and creolization (and decreolization).
Pidgins and Creoles, Pidginization and Creolization
Although the etymology is debated, the term pidgin probably derives from Chinese pei tsin, “business,” which is what Canton traders named the language they used to communicate with English-speaking traders from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.10 Speaking generally, pidgins can be described as greatly abbreviated languages that facilitate the bare minimum of communication needs between people who do not share a common language but who must nevertheless interact for some reason—trade, for instance, or residence in highly traveled areas, military defeat, colonization, or the like.11 Pidgins are, therefore, contact languages.12 Linguists call the process by which a pidgin is created pidginization.
Pidgins emerge out of the interaction of two (or more) groups of people, each with their respective and native language(s) that contribute to the pidgin’s construction; nevertheless, pidgin languages are typically based primarily on just one of the two languages, that of the dominant group. The dominant language is called the superstrate and contributes the lion’s share of the material that makes up the pidgin; the language of the weaker group is called the substrate and contributes far less. John Holm explains this imbalance as due to the fact that “usually those with less power (speakers of substrate languages) are more accommodating and use words from the language of those with more power (the superstrate),” but, he continues, “the meaning, form, and use of these words may be influenced by the substrate languages.”13 So, while both the superstrate and substrate languages contribute to the construction of the pidgin—the former more so than the latter for sociolinguistic reasons14—both languages are changed in the process of pidginization, which creates a new language, the pidgin, out of two. Most important and pronounced above all of these changes is the fact that the superstrate and substrate languages undergo profound simplification—the former perhaps less so than the latter, since it predominates—to produce, as it were, a least common denominator that facilitates communication between the two language groups. The result is
a make-shift language to serve [the speakers’] needs, simplifying by dropping unnecessary complications such as inflections (e.g., two knives becomes two knife) and reducing the number of different words they use, but compensating by extending their meanings or using circumlocutions. By definition the resulting pidgin is restricted to a very limited domain such as trade, and it is no one’s native language.15
In addition to the Chinese-English Pei tsin, well-known pidgins include the Melanesian-English Tok Pisin (“talk pidgin”) used in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the Norwegian-Russian pidgin called Russenorsk, now extinct, which was used by Norwegian and Russian traders in the 1700s and 1800s. In terms of its lexicon, Russenorsk employed some three hundred words taken from Norwegian and Russian, a massive and stunning reduction of two rich and complicated languages. But the reduction was not restricted to vocabulary: Russenorsk lacked articles, gender, markers for tense and case, and verb conjugations. It had but one preposition (po) that was forced to do the work of all others.
While Russenorsk may seem to be an extreme example (though in truth it isn’t), it is no exaggeration; neither is it intended pejoratively to assert that, in the main, pidgins lack the nuanced vocabulary and complex grammar needed to render the most sophisticated speech, thinking, and writing.16 This is not to say that those who use pidgins are themselves incapable of the highest levels of speech, thinking, and/or writing—both superstrate and substrate languages are no doubt capable of such; it is simply the case that the contact language itself, the pidgin, is not. It would be impossible, for example, to execute the novels of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russenorsk! That granted, it should be emphasized that pidgins are not simply lists of random words strung together: they have at least some loose rules (e.g., the use of po in Russenorsk). Even more to this latter point, that pidgins are real languages is demonstrated by the fact that pidgins can grow.
In their most “pure” form, pidgins are constructed for particular communicative needs, thus have short life spans, and are specifically focused. Long-lasting pidgins like Tok Pisin in PNG are the exception, not the rule. Such exceptions are called “expanded pidgins” because they have outgrown their original, more reduced forms and have extended beyond their original purposes. Pidgins become expanded pidgins when they are used among speakers of different substrate languages over an extended period of time.17 When this happens, “the simpler structure of the earlier pidgin is elaborated to meet more demanding communicative needs.”18 This is precisely what has happened with Tok Pisin, which is spoken by many different people groups in PNG, where it functions as the language used in mass media and government contexts.19
It is not difficult to see that, with enough time, enough speakers, and enough expansion, a pidgin could become the dominant, if not only, language of a people group or area. In such a scenario, the language in question would no longer be called a pidgin, not even an expanded pidgin, but something else altogether, something new and different: a creole.20 The process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called depidginization or, more properly, creolization.21
In certain cases, then—but perhaps above all others when a pidgin survives long enough so that children born to pidgin-speaking parents acquire the pidgin as their first or primary language—pidgins can become creoles. A creole language
has a jargon or a pidgin in its ancestry; it is spoken natively by an entire speech community, often one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their original language and sociocultural identity were partly broken. Such social conditions were often the result of slavery.22
Since the preexisting pidgin now enjoys native speakers, it quickly takes on a life of its own and behaves like any other language, growing and changing as other languages do. Hence linguists describe this process as one in which the pidgin is depidginized and becomes an altogether new language, a creole, created via creolization. The creole develops new phonological rules (e.g., assimilation) and adds or creates (often via combination) more vocabulary items, because, unlike the earlier pidgin, it is now being used for all aspects of life, not just the specific and limited task the pidgin was originally created for (e.g., lumber trading).
Once they’ve been created, creoles—no less than any other language—participate fully in the language life cycle, growing, changing, and developing in terms of grammar, syntax, and lexicon,23 with one exception: since they are new, freshly created languages, creoles are marked by extreme grammatical regularity vis-à-vis their predecessors and other, older languages. In many ways, a creole is a language starting over again,24 almost as if (but not really) by scratch, and why would one start over with a host of difficult, irregular verb forms?25
Eventually, then, a creole will be indistinguishable from any other “full” language. Although they developed from pidgins, creoles are no longer reduced, abbreviated languages suitable only for momentary purposes. They are, rather, full languages, indeed new languages that are just beginning, and which, because of that, provide important information about what languages are like in their infancy and how they grow and develop.26 In any event, the only way to discern the difference between a creole and any other “full” language is to know the history of the creole’s development—namely, that somewhere in its past, there was a linguistic ancestor that was a pidgin.27
Even if a native creole speaker lacks such knowledge of their language, it remains the case that, both historically and descriptively, the creole in question is quite distinguishable and at a significant remove from the original languages that led to the construction of the pidgin, which was, in turn, the creole’s most immediate ancestor.28 Diagram 1 represents these processes of pidginization and creolization, demonstrating that the creole is at least two steps removed from the original languages that lie in its past. In truth, since pidginization is a process of massive reduction, and since creolization is a process of equally significant expansion by means of many new developments that are not necessarily based on either the pidgin or its two parents, the creole is actually very different from its predecessors, even though it often contains recognizable or recoverable traces of them, especially of the superstrate. The existence of such historical traces, or linguistic memories, is exactly what we would expect of a creole, since it is a new and full language and all languages preserve traces and memories of their pasts, largely because every language developed from one or more others.
Many pidgins and creoles are documented among the world’s languages, making clear that pidginization and creolization are not infrequent happenings but, instead, part and parcel of language growth and change, especially via language contact. Pidgins and creoles occur in various contexts (not just Louisiana), among various languages (not just French and English), and for various reasons, though most of the latter involve a limited range of historical, political, and economic realities (esp. trade, colonialism, and slavery).
Pidginization and creolization are no doubt intrinsically important and interesting, linguistically speaking, but both are also crucial for understanding the death of the Old Testament when that is seen via the linguistic analogy that the Old Testament is (like) a language. Pidginization is crucial because, when languages die, they tend to revert to pidgin-like forms in a process known as repidginization.29 When people first learn languages, they tend to learn pidgin-like versions. Further, while pidgins are usually birthed for specific reasons and thus have short life spans, it isn’t necessarily the case that every pidgin must die. Pidgins can expand, depidginize, and ultimately, creolize, whereby some pidgin languages survive and even thrive, though in new and distinct forms as creoles. In chapters 4–7 I will return to these various aspects of pidgins and creoles, pidginization and creolization, and their analogical application to the Old Testament. First, however, some discussion of the end of the language life cycle is in order.
Diagram 1
Linguists posit that there may have been as many as 150,000 languages throughout the course of human history; today there are about 6,000, give or take a few.30 This significant attrition indicates that it is by no means uncommon for languages to die.31 That granted, the crisis of language extinction seems to have reached new levels in recent years, if only due to the fact that, with fewer languages, each loss becomes more costly, or perhaps because the problem of endangered languages has finally reached general public awareness.32 Whatever the case, most linguists believe that languages are dying at an alarming rate, a minimum of one every two weeks, and it is even possible that (in an accelerated scenario), by the year 2100, only 600 of the 6,000 languages currently in existence will survive.33 That represents a net loss of 90 percent of the world’s languages in less than a century—a stunning and unprecedented tragedy.
Not unrelated to the fact of language death is, for lack of a better term, language concentration. Some 96 percent of the world’s population speaks one or more of the top twenty most spoken languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, French, Punjabi, Javanese, Bihari, Italian, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Vietnamese.34 A corollary to the growth and success of these large-scale languages is the failure and death of the smaller ones.
The loss of any language is not simply a loss to professional linguists (data, for instance, for some general theory of grammar); it is far more a profound cultural loss since languages abound in information about the world, history, human culture, even medicine and science.35 Great effort is now being exerted in preserving if not reviving dying languages, or at the very least documenting them before they become fully extinct. In chapter 7 I will return to attempts at language preservation and the documentation of dying languages; in what follows here I offer further remarks on how languages die, why they die, and what is lost when they do so.
How Languages Die
The answer to the question of how languages die would seem rather simple: they die when the last living speaker of the language dies, but in truth the death in question can be a long and protracted process. Moreover, as with any other death, especially one that is drawn out over the course of many years, the precise moment of death is preceded by many other moribund moments along the way. In terms of language death, the most telling and deadly of these—indeed, the moment that eventually produces the situation where only one speaker survives—is when a generation of speakers stops communicating its language on a regular basis to its children. At this crucial juncture the language is no longer a productive, spoken language. Any language learning that is done after this moment—whether by the second, third, or fourth generation (if the language lasts that long)—is minimal at best and seriously incomplete. The same judgment obviously holds true for any language learning that is done after the final speaker dies: there will be pockets of the language, some quite large, that will simply be irrecoverable without a living speaker.
As a language dies, it goes through a process of repidginization. It reverts to a pidgin-like form as it undergoes massive simplification and reduction, losing complicated inflections, huge swaths of vocabulary, and virtually all other nuances that mark a vibrant language as a full-orbed, living, and productive tongue, and not just a pidgin.36 Once the language in question is not communicated extensively and regularly—that is, productively—to the next generation, the result is that any language learning done by that generation (and all subsequent ones) is not really “learning the language” at all, but at best learning only bits and pieces, maybe just an isolated word or phrase here and there—in other words, a (re)pidginized form of the language.37 But, in contrast to the pidgins that are born through language contact, repidginized languages are on their way to death. Since they are no longer productive languages, they will not be spoken to subsequent generations, because they cannot be spoken: there is no longer anyone left with sufficient facility to generate sentences.38 At most, then, a few stock phrases or lexical items will be passed on to the third generation and beyond: speakers of those generations might be able to identify themselves and their names in the language or ask a simple question or two (probably by rote memorization), perhaps be able to utter a few random words, but they will be unable to carry on a conversation (active knowledge of the language) or understand much of anything else (passive knowledge). The telltale sign in language morbidity, then, is when only the elderly speak a language, but no middle-aged persons of childbearing years regularly employ it or teach it to their children. At that point the language is severely endangered and is in threat of total extinction. Much hangs, then, on the children. In the words of David Wheeler, child speakers are “an essential factor in any language’s survival.”39
Why Languages Die
The question of why languages die also seems to have a fairly straightforward answer: they die because no one speaks them. But why a language should want for speakers is a more complicated question, admitting of several responses. All of the speakers might have been killed in war, for instance. More often than not, however, the situation is not the result of a military defeat; neither does it depend on total annihilation of the speaking population. Instead, the “defeat” (or linguistic end) is due to sociopolitical and socioeconomic reasons: a less powerful group adopts a more powerful group’s language—again, for a whole host of reasons. The processes of pidginization and creolization, as described above, can take place in such a scenario, via language contact, but that need not be the case. The subordinate group might just abandon their native tongue altogether and switch to the dominant language. If so, the first generation would obviously retain knowledge of their original language, but it would be lost almost immediately and in toto by all others. Usually language death isn’t quite so abrupt, though once a language is not spoken by children, it can die as quickly as one generation, perhaps about twenty years.40
Again, why a language would lack for young learners is a complicated question. Second and third generations do not speak their ancestors’ language for a host of complex political-cultural and socioeconomic reasons. Younger generations might feel ashamed of their parents’ language: it might seem backwater or somehow less official, especially if it is exclusively oral and lacks a written form.41 In today’s world, much of the dynamic of language death is caught up in larger economic processes, including that of urbanization, globalization, and so on. Indeed, these latter factors lie behind the phenomenon of language concentration, mentioned above, which in turn relates directly to the death of smaller languages.42 John McWhorter puts it directly and poignantly: many next-generation individuals do not want to continue with the old language, because it proves to be “a lesser option than the world of tall buildings,” ultimately “incompatible with the upward mobility they seek.”43
What Is Lost When Languages Die
Every language “has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.”44 When a language dies, a great deal is thus lost—and on more than one level. Languages are repositories of life: “They . . . contain our history.”45 “The stakes are not low,” writes Claude Hagège. “It is the cultures built by human societies that are in danger of being lost forever” whenever a language dies.46
To begin with, then, large amounts of raw information are lost when a language perishes. Among a virtually endless list of things, this information might concern, say, the medicinal qualities of vegetation in a region. Those medicinal qualities will persist in the plants, of course, but without native speakers to direct others to the right plants for the right reasons and at the right times, it would be an incredibly costly and time-consuming process of trial and error to determine such things, even if one has access to the latest testing facilities.
In many cases the information contained by a language encodes significant cultural aspects of its speakers (and vice versa). K. David Harrison describes Tuvan, a language spoken in Siberia that encodes an extensive “landscape awareness” in its verbs of motion:
It turned out that learning to say “go” in Tuvan is much more complex than I’d imagined. It requires not only an internal compass but also an acute awareness of the local landscape, even parts of it that may not be visible. . . . I was amazed to find that my hosts always seemed to know the exact locations of migrating friends and relatives many miles distant. . . . People would answer me with absolute confidence anytime I inquired as to the location or migration date of almost any member of the community.47
This impressive ability on the part of the Tuvans is made still more amazing by how their verbs of motion work:
Tuvans live in a land where level spaces are unusual. Nearly every patch of ground slopes in one direction or another. This provides a framework for orientation—the directions of watersheds and river currents. Though Tuvan does have a general word for go, it is less often used. Most of the time, Tuvans use, as appropriate, verbs meaning “go upstream” (còkta), “go downstream” (bàt), or “go cross-stream” (kes). You’d rarely hear, “I’m going to Mugur-Aksy” (the nearest town to the Mongush family camp), but rather “I’m upstreaming [or downstreaming] to Mugur-Aksy.” Being a visitor rather than a lifelong resident, I was clueless as to what rivers were nearby and in which directions they flowed, so I could never confidently select the correct “go” verb. The Mongushes, on the other hand, could not explain to me the invisible orientation framework that was all around them and underfoot. No one ever said to me, “To say ‘go,’ you must locate the nearest river, ascertain its direction of flow, then locate your path relative to the current.” They simply knew all this information without knowing that they did.48
Things are even more complex since Tuvan speakers can refer to different rivers that flow in different directions! Competent communication thus depends in no small degree on intimate knowledge of the local landscape and all its rivers and streams.
Tuvan is not alone in thus encoding local knowledge within language, even in verbs of motion. The larger point here, however, is not how various languages orient movement from a speaker’s perspective, but how all such encoded knowledge is immediately lost when a language dies. Dying with that knowledge are a particular culture’s ways of viewing, seeing, and living in the world. In the case of Tuvan, an unparalleled knowledge of the geography of the region would be lost if it were to perish.
This type of information loss comes at a high price: beyond the things already mentioned, the loss of information means a loss of problem-solving ability—whether that concerns the medicinal qualities of certain plants or navigation of the local countryside. In the Old Testament, the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9), while ultimately about the multiplication of languages, shows that when one (common) language is lost, information processing and problem solving shut down . . . definitively.
The Babel story also touches on another problem of language death: when a language starts to die, specifically when it begins to repidginize, ease of communication and communication efficacy are impeded simply because the full language is no longer known or fully operative. Imagine for a moment that “mechanic-ese” was a language (and it is certainly a kind of trade jargon) that was dying out and repidginizing in the process. Next, imagine that the word “carburetor” and several other technical terms relating thereto were no longer known, not having been transmitted to the current generation of speakers. Imagine, finally, how complicated it would be for a mechanic to communicate to an assistant (or a customer) what was wrong with a vehicle, what needed to be fixed, and so forth. This information could be eventually communicated through circumlocutions of various sorts, long descriptions, pointing and gesturing, but things would be a whole lot simpler and quicker if the mechanic could simply say, “The carburetor needs fixing,” and if the assistant (or customer) immediately understood what he was talking about. Barring effective and efficient communication, the broken carburetor may not get fixed at all or (equally bad) fixed incorrectly—all because of the dying of language.
Could the mechanic simply make up a new word for the carburetor? Certainly. It doesn’t matter what the carburetor is called, but the likelihood that the mechanic would create a new word, should the old one be lost, is simply proof of the point that effective and efficient communication is facilitated by speakers knowing the (same) language and that, should pieces or the entirety of a language die, serious problems result. The fact that carburetors are now things of the past, having been replaced by fuel injectors, is equally germane: if enough time passes and this portion of “mechanic-ese” dies out, there may be no one left who knows what a carburetor does, how it works, or how to fix it. And this is a rather simpleminded example about one straightforward word. Imagine if the “word” that is lost is not so straightforward but a complex metaphor, like the connection of anger and patience to the nose in Biblical Hebrew (see chap. 1), or, to return to Tuvan, how verbs of motion relate to the surrounding countryside.49
If we come back to the linguistic analogy of the Old Testament as (like) a language, it is clear that the matter is obviously not one of medicinal qualities of plant life, or of motion verbs and direction, or of fixing mechanical parts. Even so, when “the Bible is no longer venerated, a massive religious resource has been lost.”50 That massive religious resource encodes a massive amount of (religious) cultural information, as does any language. And so, should that information be lost, it would lead directly to an incapacity for problem solving—a point that is on display in the signs of morbidity discussed in chapters 4–6. Or, as another example, consider the process of repidginization, which leads to a loss of nuance and efficiency in talking about Scripture. Sure, people can still talk about Scripture with a reduced linguistic inventory, but it will be significantly harder, it will take far longer, and the likelihood of misunderstanding is greatly increased.51 Finally, as in the case of any language death, if the Old Testament dies, it would mean the loss of a particular (religious) culture’s ways of viewing, seeing, and living in the world (cf. chap. 1).
Three citations demonstrate what is riding on the death of scriptural language. The first is from Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline; it is one of the testimonia of the present book (see also chap. 1). Barth writes that biblical language is essential for the proper and precise expression of key aspects of Christian faith, many of which “can be uttered directly in this language alone.” He continues:
One thing is certain, that where the Christian Church does not venture to confess in its own language, it usually does not confess at all. Then it becomes the fellowship of the quiet, whereby it is much to be hoped that it does not become a community of dumb dogs.52
If Barth is right—and such confession is often, in his terms, “bitterly necessary” but only possible in the language of Scripture53—then the loss of that language would mean no confession at all, “the fellowship of the quiet,” and finally, “a community of dumb dogs.” The stakes, in Barth’s time, were high, with much riding on confessing (or not). He knew what it meant to confess (or not) in Nazi Germany (see chap. 5). To not confess, in the language of Scripture, was equivalent to the death of the church’s way of life—its ways of viewing, seeing, and living in the world—which is to say, it was the death of the gospel.54
Second, Robert W. Jenson, in his Systematic Theology, has pithily captured the varied understanding(s) of the atonement in Scripture in one paragraph:
Christ’s death was our “ransom” from sin; it was a sacrifice, more explicitly of Passover or to seal covenant or for atonement; Christ “bore our sins,” somehow instead of us; the death was a victory over the powers that maintain the wall of alienation. As with central trinitarian and christological matters, none of this becomes a problem requiring theoretical resolution until the mission moves into a world whose discourse is not shaped by the Scriptures.55
Jenson’s concern is the meaning(s) of Christ’s death, specifically the various theories of atonement that have been offered in Christian theology across the centuries. What Jenson observes is that several different perspectives on the atonement are found in Scripture, where they coexist happily, inform one another mutually, and, taken together, are greater than the sum of their individual parts. This linguistic complexity is not a problem for the native speakers of Scripture, but it becomes problematic exactly when that scriptural language encounters (which is to say, comes into linguistic contact with) another language that operates with a fundamentally different grammar—one not shaped by Scripture. Suddenly there are communication problems, ones that require “theoretical resolution” of whatever sort—typically a reduction by means of favoring one or another aspect of the atonement to the neglect (functional death) of all others. If the language of Scripture dies in this moment of language contact, or somehow becomes pidginized in the process (whether as superstrate or substrate need not concern us right now), the loss is profound: a great host of understandings, metaphors, and meanings of the central event in Christian faith will be lost, presumably forever. Large swaths of the vocabulary would suddenly become unintelligible, such as the entire book of Hebrews and its dependence on Leviticus or, more specifically, 2 Cor. 5:21: “God caused the one who didn’t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God” (CEB). What would such books and verses mean without an understanding of the larger linguistic system?
To be sure, the significance of Christ’s death, the importance of the cross, an understanding(s) of the atonement—all these would still be possible and communicable without the full range of images and metaphors Jenson catalogues, but without the full language of Scripture everything is considerably thinned down, as if a language speaker woke up and could suddenly use only present tense verbs, having lost all other tenses. The person could continue speaking, but that language would never again be the same. On this point, it is sobering to realize that the “other world” (or language) that Jenson speaks of—the one not shaped by Scripture—is now our world. Worse still, that other world is now the church itself, if my diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying is accurate.
Finally, Luis Alonso Schökel has conducted an intriguing thought experiment:
Let us imagine these two possibilities: A community of monks knows all the Psalms by heart and recites them every day; then during a persecution, they are deprived of any written exemplar of the Psalter. A Christian has a lovely bound copy of the Psalms in a deluxe edition, but he never reads it. In the first instance, the inspired words are not lost; in the second, they never existed.56
This passage is not exactly about language death proper, but it is nevertheless applicable to the linguistic analogy and the death of the Old Testament. In Alonso Schökel’s scenario, it is precisely the generative power of a living language—knowing it “by heart,” using it “every day”—that secures its survival (cf. chap. 2). The never-opened book, on the other hand, is effectively already dead. It is revealing that the most frequently encountered icon of the Bible is, in fact, that of a closed black leather-bound book.57 That closed book, like a closed casket, may symbolize the death of the language of Scripture, with all that means for its raw information, for its encoded cultural knowledge, for the ability to problem-solve by means of it, and for the capacity to communicate effectively and efficiently while using it.
Although much more could be said about the topics touched on above, this chapter may already include more from linguistics than the reader cares for! Yet it should be clear, especially from the immediately preceding paragraphs, that the specific items I have focused on here have direct bearing on the language of the Old Testament—or better, the languages (plural) of the Old Testament. We might begin with the observation that the Old Testament is itself bilingual, including both Hebrew and Aramaic. Moreover, scholars have detected different dialects within Biblical Hebrew,58 including, perhaps, differences between the written Hebrew of the Bible and the Hebrew apparently spoken on the ground, with some scholars going so far as to argue that Biblical Hebrew is a made-up language—something like Esperanto.59 While that is certainly going too far, it is nevertheless clear that the Hebrew language has a history and that some of that history is already reflected in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.60 Hebrew has changed such that, regardless of ongoing debates about chronology or dialectology, most scholars agree that the language of something like Exodus 15 is quite different from that of Ecclesiastes.
Hebrew also changed via contact with other languages. Biblical Hebrew knows of Akkadian loanwords, Aramaic loanwords, Persian loanwords, and Greek loanwords.61 Beyond loanwords, Aramaic has left its trace on Biblical Hebrew in several ways, and not solely in those parts of Genesis, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezra that are composed in Aramaic.62 Biblical Hebrew, in turn, has influenced other biblical languages like Biblical Aramaic,63 or via substrate interference, the Greek of certain books of the Septuagint and its revisions (e.g., the translation of Ecclesiastes)64 as well as certain passages in the New Testament (perhaps most famously in the infancy narrative in Luke).65 Or, to jump to the modern period, mention could be made of the role various pidgins or creoles have played in Bible translation,66 or, even further afield, the way knowledge of Biblical Hebrew (though often in a pidgin-like form) played a role in early America, including the selection of many place names, the adoption of Hebrew loanwords and phrases, and so forth.67 Then, too, there is the role of Biblical Hebrew in the resurrection of Modern Hebrew (see chap. 7), which in turn continues to develop through (among other things) language contact.68
Although all of that is quite interesting and not altogether off the subject, it is not why I’ve spent time presenting the linguistic material of this chapter. Instead, the primary point is that these insights from linguistics are pertinent to the Old Testament when it is understood analogically as (like) a language. While this chapter has focused on the linguistic side of the analogy in order to flesh it out further, the ramifications of the linguistic insights should be obvious not only for the Old Testament specifically but also for the entire Bible more generally. Indeed, I have not hesitated to make the connections explicit in the preceding pages. Even so, for the sake of clarity, the most important points may be summarized as follows:
1. If the Old Testament is (like) a language, then, like any language, it can be learned and spoken, or, conversely, can be forgotten and die.
2. As languages near death, the only fluent speakers left are the elderly. At this point the dying language reverts to a pidgin-like form since the younger, nonfluent people who know anything of the endangered language know precious little of it, having picked up only bits and pieces, and/or have forgotten the rest.69 In terms of the Old Testament, this scenario helps to explain not only why so many Christians know so little of it in the first place (because it is an endangered language), but also why they typically “mispronounce” the few parts that they do know, whether those parts are especially bright and happy or particularly dark and brutal. It also explains why so many Christians cannot “carry on a conversation” by using the language of the Old Testament. Their language facility is no longer active; at best it is passive, and often far less than that. At most they may know only a few words of “Old Testament”; the capacity to generate new and accurate sentences is impossible once those fluent in the language are no longer around (or once the next generation is unwilling to learn).
3. Pidgins can become creoles, so a language that is pidginized (or repidginizing) could reverse direction and become creolized instead, whereby the greatly reduced pidgin version of the Old Testament (or Bible) would become an entirely new language—one related to, but distinct from, the earlier pidgin, which in turn is related to, but distinct from, the Old Testament itself.70 Whether this creole is for weal or for woe (or about weal or about woe) matters little: either exclusive option reveals itself to be deficient precisely because of its overly dichotomized all-or-nothing nature. A crucial point, regardless, is that this new language (or perhaps better, set of new languages, since one suspects a host of new creoles) contains a large number of linguistic elements, which, due to the nature of the language as a creole, were not part of its immediate biblical predecessor, which wasn’t the Old Testament anyway, but only a pidginized form of the Old Testament. Still further, given the way the pidginization process works, it can be seen that the underlying pidgin, too, was based not solely on the Old Testament but on another language (or languages) as well, even though it remains to be seen what that other language is and which language—the creole, the pidgin, or the Old Testament—is dominant (the superstrate) and which is subordinate (the substrate). In either case, it is clear that both the Old Testament-as-pidgin and Old Testament-as-creole are far indeed from the “original language” and the “native speakers” who once spoke the Old Testament fluently.
Chapters 4–6 will have more to say about how pidgins, creoles, “mispronunciations,” and the like relate to the Old Testament as (like) a language. But before turning to those subjects, it is instructive to consider the question of cause: why is the Old Testament dying in the first place? Or, to put it more strongly in terms familiar from the many Old Testament despisers (not all of them cultured): Isn’t it the case that there are good reasons why the Old Testament is dying? “Isn’t the Old Testament dying, in no small measure”—so the logic might run—“because of the many and major problems it poses to modern sensibilities, whether those sensibilities are specifically Christian, more broadly ‘religious,’ or even none of the above?”71 One thinks immediately of the problems that priestly law, violence and war, the wrath and judgment of God, and the issue of cursing one’s enemies (a stand-in for problematic ethics writ large) pose for contemporary minds, not to mention specifically Christian reflection.72 None of these four issues are easily addressed, and many more could be added to the list. In light of significant problems like these, some might say that the death of the Old Testament is well deserved and, if anything, should be accelerated if at all possible. Call it canonical-linguistic euthanasia.
Such an argument has been advanced by a number of people—both ancient and modern—who have asserted that it is high time for the Old Testament to be permanently retired. That these arguments are not insignificant is demonstrated by the fact that more than a few people have made them over the years, and many more than a few have agreed. But, when seen via our linguistic analogy, these arguments can be seen as deeply flawed, reflecting serious deficiencies in language facility if not, in fact, the presence of (re)pidginization. Indeed, the next two chapters will argue that most of these anti–Old Testament arguments are thoroughly pidginized insofar as they reflect and argue against what is at best a pidgin Old Testament. Chapter 6 will then consider creolized versions of the Old Testament (and Bible as a whole). Both the pidgins that give rise to pidginized critiques and the creolized versions are, each in their own ways, on the road to language death. This is more immediately apparent in the pidgin forms than the creoles (though they, too, depend on pidginization), if only because languages revert to pidgin-like forms as they die. And yet, while the creole versions may still be spoken and are thus productive, their drastic differences from the original language may actually make them a more insidious threat to the survival of the Old Testament than the pidginized forms.73 They are, after all and by definition, new languages.