7
Recommended Treatment
The language that is the Old Testament is in dire straits. It is very, very sick. Its death seems imminent. The coldest, hardest fact about language death is that once a language dies, it is virtually impossible to bring it back. This ups the ante significantly with regard to saving the Old Testament. If it is not saved while there is still time—while there are still some who can speak the language fluently, as it were—bringing it back will be nothing short of miraculous, perhaps impossible. For some linguistic communities, it may already be too late.
In this chapter I return to the linguistics side of the linguistic analogy in order to discuss some of the strategies that linguists adopt in their attempts to save dying languages. I then turn to what most consider to be the only victory in what is a history of failed attempts to do just that. The sole success story is Hebrew. How Hebrew was saved leads directly to a discussion of language learning, in terms of both learning a first language (as children do) or learning a new (but perhaps very old) language as a second tongue (as adults often do). The latter situation indicates that some attention should be paid to diglossia and bi-/multilingualism, which is when (respectively) a speech community or a particular language speaker operates in two or more dialects or languages.1 This, in turn, raises the issue of what linguists call code-switching, which is when (and why) a multilingual speaker switches from one language (or dialect) to another, often in midstream. Each of these linguistic phenomena, no less than the others explored to this point, has profound ramifications for the Old Testament understood analogically as (like) a language. Each will prove instrumental if that language is to be saved.
Thousands of the world’s languages have died out over the course of human history (see chap. 3). Language death continues to this day, with a large number of languages dying at what seems to be an unprecedented rate.2 Language death is thus a not uncommon part of the language life cycle, but it is not invariable: it need not take place and indeed will not take place as long as there are living speakers of a language who are actively teaching it to a younger generation that is actively learning it.
Numerous movements are underway to save contemporary languages that are dying or in danger of doing so. These include attempts to revive languages like Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Maori, and Hawaiian. While these efforts are laudable, some linguists are of the opinion that, once a revival movement for a language is launched, it is already too late for that language. That is largely because so many of the dying and endangered languages are old ones, which means they are especially complex and very hard to master, especially if a user (or would-be user) wasn’t raised in the language since childhood. It has been said, for example, that some especially difficult Algonquian (Native American) languages like Cree and Ojibwa (both endangered) are so complex that even children born into these languages are not deemed fully competent in them until the age of ten.3
Not only are so many dying languages archaic; they are also typically arcane, quite different from the other (often Western European) languages that dominate the globe.4 As McWhorter states, “Rare is the threatened language whose grammar requires only the effort that Spanish or Dutch would to master.”5 The most difficult languages are often the most complicated phonologically and grammatically. So, for example, there isn’t a single regular verb in Navajo.6
Chapter 3 has already noted the great losses that accompany the death of any human language. Two brief citations reinforce the point: “Just as the extinction of any animal species diminishes our world, so does the extinction of any language.”7 “With every language that dies, another precious source of data about the nature of the human language faculty is lost.”8 Alongside these sad truths is another: It is extremely unlikely that all of the world’s currently spoken 6,000 languages will survive. It seems equally unlikely that all will die save one, with humanity returning to a pre-Babel state, when “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1 NRSV). But saving the languages that can still be saved is hard work and must overcome a number of obstacles. These obstacles include the fact that many speakers of the non–top twenty languages think their native tongues are less significant, maybe even somehow less real—especially if they are exclusively spoken languages or, even if written, are not used widely in written form or in other “official” communication.9 Massive redistribution of people to urban contexts also complicates the survival of many languages if only because the children in these scenarios are typically required to speak the city’s lingua franca, which is usually one of the top twenty languages.10 These children may acquire their parents’ language as their first language (L1), but it is quite likely that they, with the linguistic pressure caused by the urbanization-cum-lingua-franca, will become underusers of L1 and increasingly expert in the second language (L2) of the city.11 Or they may only partially acquire their parents’ language, never achieving full, native fluency for the same reasons. Either way, the L1 will not be fully productive, and so whatever is passed along to the next generation will be even more deficient. This is nothing other than the way languages revert to pidginized forms as they die (see chap. 3). And if this repidginization process is too far along, the reclamation or revival efforts face insurmountable difficulties because key parts of the language may simply be irrecoverable.
What can be done? At a bare minimum it is possible to record a dying language before its last speaker dies, and many linguists spend their careers doing just that. Such an endeavor documents the language and thus “saves” it to some degree, but only on paper for posterity. Whether the published grammar of something like Ubuh,12 for example, will be read by anyone three hundred years from now is hard to say, but even if so, that grammar will not do full justice to the whole language or the speakers who once spoke it, though it probably earned the linguist in question tenure at a respectable university.
At best, then, documentation is an exercise in antiquarianism, not equivalent to (nor adequate for) preservation.13 Even so, documenting a dying language is not without significant merit, for it means that the language—or some version of it—could be taught and learned (again) in the future, even once it becomes completely extinct, with no productive speakers left and no revival possible. Some languages fit this description: functionally dead but preserved and taught regularly.14 Latin comes immediately to mind,15 but so do the many languages mentioned in chapter 1 that are pertinent to studying the Bible: everything from Akkadian to Sumerian to Ugaritic to Middle Egyptian, and so forth, not to mention the Koine Greek of the New Testament and the Classical Hebrew of the Old Testament. All of these languages are appropriately described as “dead”;16 they will never be spoken like safe and viable, robust and living languages.17 If spoken versions of these dead languages exist, they are only of the recorded-and-taught variety (e.g., Latin) or much, much later versions, which are often at significant remove from their ancestors, and as a result, for all intents and purposes, different languages.18
A language that is exclusively a taught one isn’t a living one precisely because it is no longer spoken by a living language community. It isn’t productive, and it can’t be practiced—not outside of very narrow bounds (like a classroom or a field of study like Classics). For a dying language to survive, it needs speakers—preferably a lot of them—and it needs good reasons for being spoken.
There is, however, one solitary success story in a history of failed attempts to revive dead languages. That sole exception is Hebrew. The story is not without controversy. Some people, not without reason, argue that Hebrew never fully died, and to some degree that seems accurate.19 Hebrew continued to be used in the synagogue and was the language of the Torah, specifically, and Tanakh (Scripture), more generally—not to mention some rabbinic literature. Hebrew was also sometimes used in secular writings in the mid-nineteenth century. But as Lewis Glinert notes, after Hebrew ceased to be spoken in the second or third century CE, it was “apparently never a mother tongue,” even though it continued to be used, particularly in written texts.20 It is the fact that Hebrew was no one’s native tongue, no one’s first language, that has led most linguists to say that Hebrew—at least of the classical, biblical variety—did die. Amazingly, it was reborn some seventeen or eighteen centuries later.21 This stunning turn of events was largely, though not exclusively, the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922).22
Ben-Yehuda and (Modern) Hebrew
Ben-Yehuda became obsessed with Hebrew and with making Hebrew a full language, the national language of the land of Israel and the spoken language of all Jews even beyond Israel. In a manner not unlike ancient child-language experiments,23 Ben-Yehuda and his wife raised their first child in a Hebrew-only environment—speaking no other language to him; he was, therefore, the first person in almost two thousand years to acquire Hebrew as his L1. This was no small feat, if only because the Hebrew the child learned was not yet extensively expanded but was still mostly a version of Biblical Hebrew, which lacks much of the vocabulary necessary for life in the modern world (e.g., “antibiotic,” “coffee,” “telephone,” “train,” “car”).
The circumstances that permitted the successful rebirth of Hebrew—its wide-scale adoption from one family to an entire nation and language community—are unique and should not be missed. At least four factors are crucial: (1) First, there was the newly constituted state of Israel, (2) along with a massive influx of Jewish immigrants from all over the world, even before 1948, who needed a lingua franca.24 (3) Hebrew had been richly and continuously preserved in written form, particularly in sacred writings and in liturgical contexts. Partly because of that, (4) the rebirth of Hebrew was associated with a strong religious impulse, though Ben-Yehuda himself was not observant and many Orthodox Jews resisted the use of Hebrew as a vernacular.25 These four items are not true for any of the many human languages that are dying today, but they are replicated in the case of the Old Testament. This serendipity is a positive piece of news amid a sea of bad news (see chaps. 2 and 4–6). Ultimately it should come as no great surprise, however, since the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew (and Aramaic) and in its Hebrew form played a direct role in several of the factors mentioned above. Even so, the “resurrection of Hebrew”26 is nevertheless a sign of hope for the possible resurrection of the Old Testament as a language.
Admittedly, there is no one piece of geographical territory or a nation-state (factor 1) to speak of in terms of the language that is the Old Testament,27 but there is nevertheless a large community of faith that needs a lingua franca (factor 2),28 and there is the rich and continuous preservation of the Old Testament (and the Bible as a whole) in written form, if not also—at least in theory if not also occasional practice—in liturgical and devotional use (factor 3). There is also the long tradition that these books are important, authoritative, even sacred, and so there are good religious reasons (factor 4) to revive the Old Testament so that it is once again “spoken here,” and so it doesn’t remain a dying or altogether dead language that exists only in written form for antiquarian or academic purposes.29 Perhaps the Old Testament, like Hebrew itself, can come “back from the page,” if not actually back from the dead.
Despite the successful rebirth of Modern Hebrew, and the confluence of circumstances facilitating that success with circumstances suggesting the possible revival of the Old Testament, the task remains daunting. Both the initial testing of chapter 2 and the serious signs of morbidity in chapters 4–6 show just how sick the Old Testament is, how close it is to extinction. In some circles, it seems to be altogether too late; revival of the language appears impossible. Then again, those who still retain a bit of that ancient tongue know that nothing is impossible with God (Gen. 18:14; Job 10:13 LXX; 42:2; Zech. 8:6; cf. Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27; 14:36; Luke 1:37; 18:27), so perhaps the Old Testament, like the Hebrew language itself, can be resurrected, and not solely through human effort. Indeed, those who know the language know that resurrection does not depend on human effort at all.30 Here too is a contrast with the happiologists of chapter 6, whose creole posits that everything depends on anthropology, not theology.
The Hebrew Language and (Jewish/Christian) Identity
The importance of the Hebrew language, particularly its nature as the language of sacred texts like the Bible, and therefore also the significance of its resurrection for Jewish identity is a significant point that also pertains to the resurrection of the Old Testament. The following remarks by the celebrated Hebrew scholar E. Y. Kutscher are worth citing in full:
We can safely say that there would have been no Israel and no consciousness of Jewish-Israeli nationality without Modern Hebrew. For the Israeli, Hebrew is the language of the Bible, of the Mishna and other classical sources. It is this consciousness that creates the feeling of continuity between our generation and the previous generations, especially those who had lived in Eretz Israel and spoke Hebrew.
The Bible is a fundamental element of the consciousness of all Israeli Jews, believers and nonbelievers alike. . . . The very fact that an Israeli can go back to the Bible without having recourse to a translation creates a feeling of immediacy. Every reader can be his own interpreter. . . . This is possible only if we ensure that the linguistic chasm between BH [Biblical Hebrew] and IH [Israeli Hebrew] does not become unbridgeable. The day the Bible will have to be translated into IH will mark the end of the special attitude of the Israeli toward the Bible. . . . A native speaker of IH has practically no difficulty in reading the Bible, the Mishna and other creations thousands of years old, which is impossible in any other language. And it is this capability which creates the vital historical consciousness in the Israeli. The vast majority of Israeli Jews feels that it is essentially a member of the people which created this language, both within Israel as outside it, and which employed it as a sacred language especially during the past two thousand years.31
The (analogical) application of Kutscher’s sentiments to Christians and their Old Testament should be obvious, especially since his comments are replete with references to the Bible, which for him is the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (in Christian parlance) itself. After the tests and analyses found in chapters 2 and 4–6, we can, borrowing Kutscher’s words, “safely say that there would have been no” church “and no consciousness” of Christian identity without the Old Testament.32 For the Christian, the Old Testament “is the language” of Scripture (or the vast majority of it), the language of the Christian tradition, and the language of Christian theology, at least in theory. “It is this consciousness that creates the feeling of continuity” between present-day Christians and previous generations (the communion of saints), including those who lived in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and at the very ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8) and spoke the language of Scripture, if not natively, then certainly with greater fluency than is typically the case today. So it is that the Bible is—or should be—“a fundamental element of the consciousness” of all Christians, and the day when Christians can no longer understand the Bible for themselves but must have it “translated”—not in terms of Hebrew or Greek to English but in terms of it being refracted through (re)pidginized or (de)creolized forms—“will mark the end of the special attitude” of Christians toward the Bible. It will, among other things, mean that Christians will no longer have “a feeling of immediacy” or intimacy toward the Old Testament and will be unable to be their own interpreters thereof. To prevent that, we must “ensure that the linguistic chasm” between us and the Old Testament “does not become unbridgeable.” Other “languages” (esp. pidgins and creoles, in my analogy) will not suffice and are not the same thing as “a native speaker” understanding the Old Testament, the whole of Christian Scripture, or the massive edifice of Christian theology, which depends on all that. Native speakers have “practically no difficulty” in understanding such things, but understanding them natively is (by definition) “impossible in any other language” than the original. It is, then, this native linguistic capacity, dexterity, or fluency “which creates the vital historical” and theological “consciousness” of Christians such that they feel “essentially a member of the people which created this language . . . and which employed it as a sacred language especially during the past two thousand years.”
The burden of the present book has been to describe how all of this is on the brink of being lost forever. That loss, if it happens, would be inestimable—devastating to virtually every part of what Christianity holds dear. It would be the end of Christianity as we know it. We have, sadly, already become witnesses to this death, this dismal end, in various ways in our own time.
Learning First, New, and Very Old Languages
The situation is dire, to be sure, but the resurrection of the Hebrew language offers a sliver of hope, perhaps even more than a sliver given the shared factors facilitating its revival and those that might permit the same for the Old Testament. While Hebrew remains the sole success story in the history of dead languages never to have returned, its revival was far from easy. Other languages were proffered as the possible lingua franca, and the battle was won, in no small measure, at the level of preschool instruction.33 This signals the importance of early language learning, among the very youngest speakers, and several important insights can be gained from first-language (L1) as well as second-language (L2) acquisition for the task of saving dying languages like that of the Old Testament.
Child Language Acquisition, or There Is Hope for a Pidgin (Less for a Creole)
Since the pioneering work of Noam Chomsky, many linguists believe that the human brain has some hardwiring for language acquisition if not, in fact, a built-in “universal grammar.”34 While universal grammar remains a hotly contested area, it is undeniable that children learn language initially and extensively from their caregivers, especially their primary caregiver, who, for most children, is their mother. Children go a long time before they are able to speak, though they learn to communicate in various ways long before they ever utter a word. Children also begin to understand communication and language, both verbal and nonverbal, before they begin to vocalize words for themselves.35
Children learn language from their caregivers by extensive exposure, repetition, and imitation, all typically within some sort of communal context (family unit, tribe, village, etc.).36 At first, children can say only the briefest of utterances, a word or two, but slowly over time they expand their vocabulary and the complexity of their syntax. Caregivers (and others in the language community) are crucial here because they often (and repeatedly) expand a child’s language via dialogue. The following exchange is typical:
Child: Go car.
Mother: Yes, Daddy’s going in his car.37
Caregivers also use special language with children. This special language, sometimes called “motherese” (or “Baby Talk Register”) by linguists, is marked by extensive amounts of repetition, frequent use of diminutive forms (doggy, bunny, kitty) and rhyme (itsy-bitsy), and comparatively short and simple sentences that are often constructed with recurrent frames (e.g., Where’s the doggy? Where’s the kitty? Where’s the . . . ? Yes, that’s a blanket, that’s a pillow, that’s a . . .) and that usually refer to the immediate context wherein the child and mother are interacting.38 As they begin to learn, children are not worrying about the future imperfect or past pluperfect tenses. Here and now suffices.
In many ways—and this is a most important point for the linguistic analogy—the initial states of a child’s language acquisition and thus aspects of the motherese used to facilitate that, resemble a pidgin language.39 Children can’t learn a language in toto, in one fell swoop, and so they first learn bits and pieces, very small, very fragmentary bits and pieces. Mothers accommodate themselves and their own knowledge of the language to the child’s stage of learning and ability with the express purpose of teaching the child the language.
A second point, equally as important as the preceding one, is that while children begin to learn languages by learning something akin to a pidgin—a significantly reduced form of the full language—caregivers are, as a rule, not content to leave things there. So it is that motherese also includes consistent and recurrent habits of clarification, the addition of information that would be unnecessary with an adult speaker, the expansion of the child’s speech (as in the example above), the paraphrasing of sentences, and the repetition of material over and over again, often very slowly and on more than one occasion. Finally, there is an affective or expressive quality to motherese, as seen already in the diminutive forms, but also in the special use of sound and tone (e.g., rounded lips or a high, wide pitch-range: Oooooo!!! What a good baby!!!). It is also evidenced in the frequent elicitation of feedback from the child, asking questions with high rising intonation (Okay, sweetie? Are you alright, honey?).
Once a child learns to speak, it becomes possible to next learn how to read and write. The most effective method for teaching children how to read has been the one developed by Siegfried Englemann and his Project Follow Through. This is the well-known system of phonics-based teaching methods that employs systematic drilling on what is being learned.40 In this process, the child speaks out loud what she reads on the page, until eventually the reading aloud can be dropped, replaced by silent reading.
There is nothing particularly earth-shattering about the above: it seems rather commonsensical for the most part, though the experience of watching one’s own children learn to speak, then develop greater language facility, and finally learn how to read and write are sources of perennial parental wonder and delight. Be that as it may, when seen within our linguistic analogy, we might say that, in a very real sense, it is not so bad if people speak a pidgin version of the Old Testament or Bible as a whole as long as they don’t stay there. Motherese and a child’s baby talk are similar to pidgins, but the key difference is that the caregivers know the full language and intend to take their children all the way to full fluency. The pidgin-like form is a step toward that but is certainly not the final stage in the child’s journey toward full fluency and linguistic dexterity. “Go car” is cute in a toddler’s mouth, but it will not inspire much confidence when uttered by a teenager in a job interview in response to the question “How will you be getting to work?”
Still, there is hope for a pidgin (cf. chaps. 4–5) as long as these pidgins are employed as steps toward mastery of the full (original) language. Language learners who go no further than the pidgin form are, in this light, little more than baby-talkers, stuck in a highly abbreviated linguistic stage that will simply be inadequate if they wish to “grow up” into the full riches, insight, and uses of the language. A similar point can be made for the “mothers” (and “fathers”!) who speak such pidgins to various groups. Put more directly, insofar as some happiologists speak a pidgin, even an expanded pidgin, it is possible that what they are preaching may be of great use as long as the language instruction doesn’t stop there, but instead uses the abbreviated form as a step toward full fluency. If so, then there is hope that the pidgin-like language learning might grow into something far larger and far better. It could be even better than that: the abbreviated presentation could be an intentional and highly effective pedagogical device to move “children” (that is, people, whatever their age, who are learning a language like the Old Testament) to full fluency. Of course it is far from clear that most happiologists view their “product” (I use the term intentionally) as but a first step in the larger project of biblical fluency. I very much doubt it. It is even possible that happiologists and their “clientele” (again, I use the term intentionally) are completely innocent of the fact that the language they speak is not coterminous with the original. In many instances, they speak a new language (a creole) and are blissfully unaware of its distance from the old one. At least Marcion and the New Atheists are up front about their pidginization (see chaps. 4–5).
What, then, about the creoles? Here too I am not particularly sanguine. Creoles are, after all, at even further remove from the original (substrate) language than is a pidgin. There is no straight line from a creole back to that original, and so, unlike less creolized forms, one can’t build on (or from) a creole so as to learn that original. So, while there is hope for a pidgin, there is far less hope for a creole. The extent to which happiologists like Osteen speak a pidgin-turned-creole will have direct bearing on whether or not their flocks can learn the original, full language of Scripture or not. In the worst-case scenario—perhaps even in the best—most people will have to start all over from scratch.41
Either way, pidgin or creole, whatever hope might exist quickly evaporates if the language learners stop moving forward in their learning. At that point the case is one of arrested development, the equivalent of saying “Go car” at a job interview.42 The same judgment obtains for those language teachers who refuse to speak anything but the most basic motherese to their “children.” Teachers (or preachers!) who are content to teach only baby talk infantilize those who are depending on them to provide instruction in the full language.43
To make the point as clear as possible: baby talk is okay for a time—for example, when one is actually, biologically a child or, to quote Paul, when people are “infants in Christ” (1 Cor. 3:1 NRSV) and, according to Hebrews, they need to learn “the basic elements of the oracles of God” (Heb. 5:12 NRSV)—but there comes a time when childish things must be put away (1 Cor. 13:11), when milk is insufficient and one must mature and move on to solid food (Heb. 5:14; cf. 1 Pet. 2:2). Hebrews indicates that such maturity, the solid food that comes after breast milk, is marked by the ability to distinguish good from evil—and, one might add, a pidgin/creole from the full language—with the goal being to leave basic teaching behind, moving on to a more advanced curriculum (see Heb. 5:14–6:3). One example of basic teaching, of a childish thing that must be put away, is infantile, baby-talk pidgin languages. There may be hope for a pidgin, but a pidgin will not do. That is, it will not do for long if one wants to reach “God’s goal . . . for us,” which is “to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13 CEB). And “one crucial way that we grow up into the full stature of Christ,” according to Carolyn Sharp, is precisely through “the spiritual process of wrestling with God’s Holy Word.”44
By now it should be clear that, when seen through the linguistic analogy, the phenomena of motherese and pidgin-like child language acquisition raise important issues to consider with regard to the Christian education of children. Among other things, these suggest that repetition, affective communication, and so on are highly useful strategies to introduce children to the language of the Old Testament (and the Bible as a whole). All that is well and good and seems to be widely known and practiced. The idea of recurrent frames also seems particularly important. This is where children learn, via repeated framing devices, that, for example, at the end of the sentence “There’s a . . .” will be an animal of some sort (rabbit, bear, monkey, elephant)—at least when they are looking at a book about mammals that Daddy is reading to them.
Recurrent frames of a certain sort seem to be employed widely in Christian education, especially for the young. This is why—to use an old joke—church kids know that the answer to the question “What is furry and grayish brown, climbs trees, and eats nuts?” is “Jesus” even if, by all other lights, it would seem to be a squirrel! The frame that has been learned in this case is that every “sentence” somehow ends with (or points toward) Jesus or God.
More seriously, the recurrent frames children learn with regard to the Old Testament seem to stem primarily from the biblical stories that are most colorful and memorable: Noah and the flood, Daniel in the lions’ den, David and Goliath, and the like. These “sentences” tend to be carefully framed such that the stories children learn are almost always accompanied by some sort of moral, which is (no surprise here) almost always simplistically moralistic. “Noah was righteous” (never mind all the drowned bodies), “Daniel survived” (never mind the enemies who are devoured by the lions), “David beat Goliath” (don’t pay attention to the beheading). Insofar as abbreviation, simplification, recurrent frames, and so forth are part of pidgin-like child language acquisition, this is all fine and good, but only for four-, five-, and six-year-olds, maybe ten- and eleven-year-olds. But by middle-school and high-school age (not to speak of college and adulthood), and for some children even before that, such devices are no longer adequate. The phrases “Go car” or “Noah righteous,” while not entirely incorrect, are both in need of appropriate development. More syntax, more vocabulary, more nuance is necessary.45 The same is true for the sentence “God is love” (1 John 4:16) or, for that matter, “God is mean” (esp. in the OT; cf. chaps. 4–5 above).
Unfortunately, many Christians—whatever their age—appear to experience arrested development at precisely these points. Without further language training, practice, and instruction, such individuals are left with a primary-school-level capacity to engage with the Old Testament, including its moral dilemmas. Obviously, this will not suffice in the adult world wherein they must eventually live (we hope). With such a limited capacity, they are easily convinced by Dawkins’s and others’ intellectual critiques. For inspiration and moral engagement, they eventually look to places other than the Bible. Practically any television show or movie or song will provide more substantive engagement with the full reality of life than recurrent frames learned in second-grade Sunday school. The end results are finite in number (three), but altogether predictable. Lacking any training in higher levels of the language, stunted language learners: (1) leave faith behind altogether; (2) remain Christian but, for all intents and purposes, look elsewhere for the “authoritative literature” to live their lives by (see below); or (3) balkanize in communities that prefer to speak only baby talk—a pidgin-like form of the Old Testament and Bible as a whole—or, still worse, some sort of creole. As I have argued throughout the preceding pages, these three results are not entirely unrelated but exist on a continuum or sliding scale.46 But whichever option is chosen, the invariable end is that the language of Scripture dies.
Second-Language Acquisition (SLA), or Practice Makes Perfect
Acquiring the language that is Christian Scripture is difficult because it is no one’s mother tongue. Recall Stanley Hauerwas’s remark, cited in chapter 1, that “to learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.”47 What that means is that, for many people, they must acquire this second language as adults, if they do so at all.
Adult acquisition of a second language (L2) differs from a child’s acquisition of a first language (L1), because the adult is no longer a child and already has (at least) one language in place.48 Even so, there are some striking similarities.49 While there is usually no biological mother present speaking motherese to the adult who is acquiring a second language (that would be embarrassing for all concerned), L2 learners nevertheless also acquire their new language in bits and pieces, just as children do with their first languages. Adults too begin to learn the L2 in a pidgin-like form. Once again the crucial point is that L2 learners are not content to stay in the pidgin-like stage but are intent on mastering the full language. The same holds true for their L2 instructors, who, while not caregivers proper, do speak a kind of motherese when teaching. So, according to David Crystal, “To facilitate learning, in the early stages, teachers need to keep their input relatively simple, interesting, comprehensible, relevant to the learning task, sufficiently repetitive to enable patterns to be perceived, and capable of providing appropriate feedback.”50 Several of these strategies sound like nothing so much as L2 “motherese” being spoken to adult “children.”
Despite the similarities, it is much harder for an adult to master an L2 than it is for a child to acquire L1, in part due to the increased plasticity in a child’s brain and the limited time an adult has to learn the L2.51 Unlike children, adults typically do not have years to immerse themselves in a language environment, with all that that offers—above all, the extensive, incessant feedback from fluent, native speakers. So, according to “some estimates, . . . it takes well over a year to accumulate as much L2 experience as a young child gets from the L1 in a month.”52 And not all adult L2 learners succeed, or succeed equally. Certain personal qualities seem to help in second-language acquisition. These include empathy and adaptability, assertiveness and independence, good drive and powers of application.53 Additionally, “people need to be capable of assimilating knowledge in difficult conditions. They should have a good memory, and be good at finding patterns in samples of data.”54 Strong motivation is a huge issue in both the student and the teacher, as is a positive attitude because a “negative attitude is likely to influence language learning achievement—and conversely.”55 Finally, output is as important as input. The language must be taken outside the classroom and practiced in the real world. One cannot simply sit in class and absorb the language: one must use it in real life, in real situations, or at least in the language lab. Practice makes perfect is true in language learning, perhaps like nowhere else. Among other things, this means that exposure to the L2 must be regular, and the most effective instruction will be frequent, even if it must remain brief.56
Bilingualism and Code-Switching
In the case of second-language acquisition, there is already an L1 in place, which means that the successful student will become bilingual—even multilingual if there is an L3 and beyond.57 Bilingual individuals can revert, becoming functionally monolingual if one of their languages becomes dormant through nonuse or underuse. The un(der)used tongue could even be lost altogether. Normally, though, the term “bilingual” is reserved for those people who have native-like fluency in two languages, and as long as that fluency is exercised, it is unlikely to disappear.
Even among bilinguals, it is rare to encounter someone who is equally good in both languages. “The vast majority of bilinguals do not have an equal command of their two languages: one language is more fluent than the other, interferes with the other, imposes its accent on the other, or simply is the preferred language in certain situations.”58 This notion of language interference is important and has bearing on second-language acquisition, since one’s L1 can cause errors in one’s acquisition and use of L2.59 One language is always dominant and takes precedence over the other, even among those fully fluent in both.
There are some interesting points of similarity between the dominance of one of the two languages a bilingual speaks and the way one of two languages dominates in the creation of a pidgin, and thereafter how a language can dominate a pidgin-turned-creole, even leading to its ultimate decreolization.60 For the person who is (or becomes) bilingual, then, the question is which language dominates and why.
A fascinating and not unrelated question concerns when and why a bilingual speaker shifts from one language to another. This can take place even in midsentence and is called “code-switching” in linguistics.61 There are numerous reasons why bilingual speakers switch languages: everything from the sudden need to accommodate a monolingual interlocutor, to symbolizing one’s national identity, to signaling solidarity with a social group. It seems that, in most cases, code-switching is not random but motivated by something, even if the cause in question isn’t always obvious to observers or conscious on the part of the speakers.
Let me be clear about how the preceding considerations relate to the linguistic analogy of the Old Testament as (like) a language. It should be obvious, first, that to keep the Old Testament alive, to prevent it from total eradication, will require a goodly number of fully fluent language users, and that means, if Hauerwas is right, their acquisition of a second language.62 Learning to speak Christian involves, in no small part, learning to speak Scripture, both Old and New Testaments; here, too, that isn’t just similar to acquiring another language: it is acquiring another language—a second one.
Several things follow from this. One is that language acquisition is easiest when one is young (on the crucial role of religious education for children, see chap. 9). A second item is that many people will need to acquire the language of the Old Testament much later, as adults. That, in turn, means a lot of hard work, since adult language acquisition is far more difficult than child language acquisition. And again, acquiring an ancient language is even more difficult, much harder than acquiring a newer, comparatively easier one.
A third item, logically prior to the others, is that learning an L2 means that another language (L1) is already in place. Whatever that first, mother tongue may be, it is not impossible and indeed quite likely that it will cause interference in the acquisition and deployment of L2.63 In my judgment, that is what has happened in the creolization process of the happiologists, who manifest errors in their knowledge of and use of L2 precisely because of the predominance of their L1.64 (The L1, in other words, can also be understood analogically, just like the L2 of Scripture.) I believe the happiology pidgin-turned-creole to be comprised of a dominant superstrate that is not the Old Testament at all, but something else altogether (see chap. 6). The superstrate of prosperity theology seems entirely similar to the cultural-linguistic forms of twenty-first-century individualistic, narcissistic, consumeristic big business. Quite apart from the question of whether every nook and cranny of that superstrate is bad, it should be clear that not every bit of it is good either, and it is irrefutable that not every bit of it is the same as the language of Scripture. And since the two are not the same, if that (modern) L1 is dominant, it can easily cause interference with the (ancient) L2, especially if the L2 in question is not even Scripture at all but a pidgin or a creole that is already dependent on or dominated by the L1. Accurate retrieval errors are just one of the many problems that can result in such a situation, leading to confusion of the two languages, hybrid forms, erroneous syntax, misuse of vocabulary, and so forth. All that is to say that the L2 will not be “spoken here,” and it certainly won’t be spoken accurately.
The existence of an L1, of whatever sort (good or ill), means that people who learn the L2 of the Old Testament (and the people who teach them) will need to contemplate what it means to be bilingual—how they can avoid L1–L2 problems like those mentioned above; and how, when, and why they will code-switch. As a rudimentary beginning on these questions, I want to simply point out that L2 learners and teachers must come to terms with the fact that the L2 in question (whether it is the OT, the Bible, or the Christian faith writ large) is not identical to their L1. This seems obvious—why else would second-language acquisition even be necessary?—but it is made far less than obvious or is otherwise hidden altogether by the pidginization and creolization processes. Those acquiring this particular L2 will therefore need to cultivate (at the very least) a hair’s breadth of difference between the language of Scripture (L2) and the native language of their culture (L1).65
Much rides on this critical distance. According to the great literary critic George Steiner, “Language is the main instrument of [hu]man[ity]’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”66 Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, declares that it is the task of prophetic ministry “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”67 Combining Steiner and Brueggemann, we can say that the Bible provides us with the language or script to resist what needs to be resisted: the dominant culture around us, the nefarious aspects of our L1. L1 is not L2: that is the first, most basic, foundational point to make in the acquisition of L2. To put it in familiar language from Christianity: “This world is not our home” (see John 17:11, 14–16; cf. 1 John 2:15–17; 3:1; 4:4). And because of that fact, it is even more important that L2 be acquired so one can test the spirits—and the tongues—to see if they are of God (see 1 John 4:1; Acts 2:1–4).
But a qualifier must be quickly added: L2 is not just a matter of resistance vis-à-vis L1 and “the dominant culture around us.” L2 also allows us to recognize what is right and good about that culture, what truths may reside there, in L1, and beyond. We know, after all, and thanks to Scripture itself, that God is at work both within Israel and outside of Israel, both within the church and beyond the church, and thus working in “the world” more broadly, where Christ is at work and “on the loose.”68
In sum, the L2 of Scripture offers nothing less than the power to resist and the ability to recognize in the face of all that surrounds us. To add a third “R” to the mix: Scripture gives us the means by which we can redescribe the world.69 What could possibly be more important than the full acquisition and correct usage of that L2?
In this chapter, no less than in the others, the linguistic analogy of the Old Testament as being (like) an endangered language has proven to be both insightful and evocative. The implications of the linguistic data are obvious, even apart from the rather direct relationship that exists between the imperilment of the Old Testament and the successful resurrection of Hebrew. It remains to draw out several of these implications more directly and offer some further concrete suggestions on how the Old Testament might be saved from total extinction (see chaps. 8–9). Before doing that, however, a possible objection must be acknowledged and addressed.
The possible objection is that the linguistic analogy seems to go awry on the subject of language death because the Old Testament has canonical status as sacred writ. How could anything as sacred as canonical literature—the Holy Bible, in this case—be lost? How could something like that “die”? After all, didn’t Hebrew itself continue to exist, in some form at least, until its full revitalization?
This objection seems quite reasonable, at first blush, and no doubt people mean well by appealing to (and trusting in) the special place that the Bible holds in Christian thought and practice. Unfortunately, the objection is otherwise seriously uninformed, for several reasons. First, one should remember that the Hebrew language, which according to most scholars did suffer linguistic death, was also deemed sacred. The rabbis taught that Hebrew was God’s own language, the language God used to create the world.70 But even ha-lāšôn ha-qōdeš (the holy tongue) died. Yes, Hebrew eked out a slim existence, preeminently by means of its use in written sacred texts, but it was lost as a spoken vernacular, which means that most Jews did not understand Hebrew, could not read the sacred texts written in it, and could not converse in Hebrew, which means they could not think in its idiom, compose in its cadences, resist and recognize and redescribe the world and God’s work in the world through its lens—at least not in its precise linguistic form.71
Second, the objection operates with a facile understanding of the meaning and significance of “canonical status” and “canonical literature.” Long ago Gerald T. Sheppard identified the existence of at least two types of canon.72 The first type (canon 1) is whatever is widely authoritative for people. This may be or include the sacred literature of their religious community, but, within the linguistic analogy, could just as well be composed of someone’s favorite literature, music, political pundits, and so forth. Whatever is impinging on people, guiding and informing their lives somehow—that is what is authoritative for them, and so, functionally at least, canonical. There’s always a scripture of some sort; the question is whether or not it is Holy Scripture.
Canon 2 refers to that subset of canon 1 that a religious body (or individual) selects and deems authoritative in a special way, distinct from and more important than (at least officially) the rest of canon 1. Canon 2, then, refers to what most people tend to identify when they think of “canon” or “canonical literature” or “the Bible.” In the process of canon formation, canon 2 is constructed or selected from a larger body of religious writings that were deemed authoritative, helpful, and/or otherwise sacred by various people and in various ways. Many of these “canon 1 books” from antiquity are still extant; they are the books that didn’t get in to “the canon” (i.e., canon 2) and include compositions like Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and The Shepherd of Hermas.73
Canon 2 is well and good but maintains its authoritative function only if it is also used, per the category of canon 1; otherwise it will simply become that which is officially “on the books” but not anywhere else. Linguistically speaking, it is only the continued use of the language that is canon 2 as an everyday resource that keeps it from becoming underused, unknown, and eventually otiose, especially in the face of the more powerful and functioning canon 1. Someone can have a “high view” of Scripture, even a carefully constructed doctrine about it (canon 2), but if the Bible isn’t functioning authoritatively on a day-to-day basis (as per canon 1), then it is practically—that is, in terms of actual practice—dead.74 And even if the pronouncement of death isn’t accurate for the entirety of canon 2 (i.e., as a subset of canon 1, at least part of canon 2 might remain functionally authoritative), it is certainly true for a goodly portion of it. The Old Testament is precisely an example of this, with the previous chapters establishing its sickness and documenting its demise.
In brief, then, not all of canon 2 (the Bible) is canon 1 (functionally authoritative literature). What isn’t functionally authoritative is not necessarily authoritative, even if it is technically or officially “canon” or “Scripture.” And if canon 2 (or large parts of it) is dead-in-practice, then any survival one might speak of will largely be a matter of antiquarian preservation akin to documenting dead or dying languages so that they can be kept “alive” (at some absolute minimum) in books that someone, God only knows who, might someday want to read. Then again, who wants to read a grammar, especially one of a dead language? Only a precious few. Old English is alive in this sort of way, as is Akkadian, Middle Egyptian, Ugaritic, and many others. That is fine and good: such languages are important and their mastery worthwhile for a host of reasons. But one can’t imagine living communities—especially living communities of faith—predicated on these “preserved” languages, which are more like mummies, embalmed remains, than mommies, who can, via their skills in motherese, teach their children fluency in a living, used, and useful language, one by which they can and will live the rest of their lives.
Third and finally, poignant proof that even sacred writ can die lies near at hand: it may be found in the (non)status of the Old Testament Apocrypha in Protestantism. The Old Testament Apocrypha is a collection of books held by the majority of Christians for the majority of Christian history to be Sacred Scripture. The Protestant Reformation changed all that. Following Martin Luther (1483–1546), Protestant Christians quickly left the Apocrypha behind.75 (Indeed, the very terminology “Apocrypha,” which is at least slightly pejorative [it means “hidden (things)”], is largely a Protestant designation, though it traces back to Jerome [c. 345–420].) Within a short period of time, (Protestant) Bibles were printed without these books.76 To this day, much Bible publishing outside strictly Catholic or Orthodox endeavors treats this corpus separately—either not translating it at all or translating it separately and subsequently, sometimes only after the rest of the Bible is complete.77 Even in the translations that include the Apocrypha, it can be printed and issued independently or only included in “ecumenical editions,” though even in the latter the books are often not in their traditional locations but are instead lumped together between the Old and New Testaments.78 Still further, the existence of “ecumenical editions” signals the existence of “nonecumenical” editions that exclude the Apocrypha altogether.
Once again, these present-day practices trace back to decisions made in the Reformation. Shortly thereafter, Protestant Christians simply stopped making much of the Apocrypha, whether that was in sermons based on it, commentaries written about it, or allusions to or citations of it of whatever sort.79 The dearth of “Apocrypha practice” within Protestantism is entirely to be expected, since Protestant Bibles were being produced (in the vernacular) that no longer contained the Apocrypha. It is only relatively recently that Protestants have come back to the Apocrypha, realizing the significance of these writings, though it must be admitted that this significance is often limited to historical-critical concerns.80
To be sure, doubts about the apocryphal writings are as old as Jerome, who preferred the Hebrew truth (Hebraica veritas) of the Hebrew Old Testament books over those books known only in the Greek Septuagint (LXX).81 Luther was thus not altogether de novo in his judgments about the Apocrypha. Nevertheless, detractors like Jerome were few and far between, with Augustine’s defense of the apocryphal books carrying the day for more than a millennium, such that Luther, while not without precedent, was nevertheless a major innovator on this score. Further proof of his innovation on the matter of the Apocrypha is found in the objections to his position raised by his contemporaries at the time.
The upshot of all this is that Protestants have a Bible that differs from that of their Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters—a smaller, reduced Bible. While the merits of these different Bibles could be (and often are) debated, it is irrefutable that all Christians once had a fuller biblical “language” than the one that presently lives within the pages of most Protestant copies of the Bible. The continued use of the Apocrypha in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (BCP) only proves the point: that use stems from the fact that the roots of Anglicanism lie in Roman Catholicism; it thus is a holdover, a trace of or memory from the earlier, fuller language.82 The main point, regardless, is that, for Protestantism, the writings of the Apocrypha, once deemed sacred Scripture, have died.83 Language death can happen, then, even to the Bible, or at least to parts of it. That is exactly what I am arguing is happening to another part of the Bible, at least in North American Christianity. The death of the Apocrypha proves that another scriptural death is completely within the realm of possibility, though the affected portion is even larger and more ancient than the Apocrypha. Today we must contemplate the death of the majority of the Christian Bible, the entirety of the Old Testament, which is sick, endangered, and facing imminent demise.
Lest some readers of this book remain unconvinced, perhaps because they are Protestants who care little for the Apocrypha (though that would be just further evidence in support of my point), let me offer one final example: the phenomenon of New Testament–only Bibles. New Testament–only editions have a venerable heritage, going as far back as Erasmus (1466/9–1536) and scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament.84 But they have become especially prominent in modern times, thanks to the countless printings of New Testament–only Bibles by major publishers like Zondervan and distribution by the Gideons. Here too we should recall standard procedures in Bible translation and production like those encountered with the Apocrypha: most Bible translations begin with the New Testament and often release New Testament–only versions first before publishing the rest/entirety of the Bible (see, e.g., CEB, The Message, The Voice).85
The preceding considerations combine to suggest that it is far from unthinkable that the Old Testament might eventually be completely excluded from future versions of the Bible. Indeed, the publication of New Testament–only Bibles is already proof of the point! Software platforms and e-versions that can select the New Testament only while deselecting the Old are just the latest instantiations. In light of the Apocrypha’s fate at the hands of the Reformers, one can see these phenomena as nothing if not a not-so-short step toward the total exclusion of the Old Testament. Indeed, the death of the Apocrypha in Protestant Christianity and the popularity of New Testament–only Bibles, especially among evangelical Protestants, shows that there is nothing to stand in the way of the complete elimination of the Old Testament—nothing, that is, except continued use of the Old Testament, which means competent speakers of its language.86 But here is the most disturbing proof that the Old Testament could die, since it is precisely its lack of use—the fact that it is increasingly devoid of fluent users—that has prompted this study in the first place. In the next two chapters, however, I offer some suggestions on how the Old Testament might be saved despite its grim, imperiled situation.