David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11–12:7)
The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4)
Imagine that you’re at a moving and meaningful rock concert—say, Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo playing Sun City, South Africa, during apartheid. You happen to send the only surviving record of the event, and only through text messaging (and yes, I know this didn’t exist in the 1980s), and only to a monolingual English speaker in White Plains, New York, who is an obsessive collector of American Girl dolls. Having gamely transmitted the abbreviated first lines of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (“God Bless Africa”), you get back to singing and swaying.
We don’t get a much better record of what Psalm 137, for example, was like in its early incarnations. Here is the King James Version:
1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7 Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
What is this scene of lamenting and cherishing and threatening? It is so vivid and so specific that I’m convinced it was based on direct experience. It does appear that some of the Jewish elite of the Babylonian Exile lived near Mesopotamian canals. But why exactly would you hang harps on willow trees? And why the change to a vengeful mood in verse 7? And what to make of the horrifying verse 9? Was this originally two or even three poems?
Much of this puzzlement naturally comes from the present harrowing shortage of the data that were available to early performers and their audiences. In their oldest written form, the Hebrew words represented by the English “By the rivers of Babylon” would have consisted of ten consonant letters (written and read from right to left) and nothing else. Original written Greek—in a dialect of which, Koinē (“Common”), the whole of the New Testament was written—is so much more decipherable: it has vowels! Early Hebrew writing didn’t. But in both languages a short, handy phonetic alphabet, adapted from that of the Phoenicians, probably served for centuries as little more (at least in the realm of literature) than performance notes in a stubbornly oral culture.
A standard example of the gap between ancient performance and the texts and translations in their evolved forms is fifth-century B.C.E. Classical Athenian tragedy and comedy—for which we have no original stage directions. But at least we know something about that staging from other sources, such as vase painting. How much deeper is the mystery around early Hebrew literature. Was a Psalm “of Ascents,” for instance, one repeated while climbing up to the Temple or other place of worship, or perhaps one sung as the smoke of a sacrifice “ascended” to heaven? And though Psalms were, it’s clear, performed musically, what kind of music was it? And what did New Testament hymns in Greek sound like? Were they chanted or sung? In harmony, or perhaps in rounds? If I declared—according to my strong inclination as a translator—that the first written texts (as far as these can be reconstructed) are it, my logical and proper main interest here, how would I get closer to what that actually was—that is, how it was experienced?
Does a translator just fill things in? In the case of ordinary ancient literature, it’s an unashamed yes. When I translated Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, a Classical Greek comedy that imagines all the wives in Greece going on a sexual strike until a war ends, I counted on jokes occurring at fairly regular intervals, even though modern scholarly commentators couldn’t find all of them. Every turn in the action, every windup in dialogue, and everything unexplainable otherwise was probably a hoot to the original audience—and where there was nothing verbally funny, stage business must have filled in, so that even bland words were funny when paired with, say, slapstick, the imitation of some public figure’s voice, or just a strategic pause.
A Classics translator is readily forgiven if, to restore an arguably essential quality of the work (humor, in this case), she goes beyond analogy (the analogous modern joke is very common and very much accepted in secular translating, since humor dates—more like dies—so easily) and invents rather than leaves semantic blanks. When the protagonist Lysistrata proposes that the women withhold sex from their husbands, two wives respond with one line each. The lines are similar and contain an identical clause (usually translated as “but let the war go on”), yet I changed the second line into something much different:
CALONICE: No, I don’t think so. Let the war go on.
MYRRHINE: Me? Not a chance in hell, so screw the war.
This kind of reconstruction allows an ancient play to keep doing the basic thing it was created to do: hold a theatrical audience’s attention. Reconstruction can also allow an ancient poem to stay poetic, ancient law to maintain its tone of authority, and ancient rhetoric to show how it played on the passions and compunctions of crowds and juries.
A translator of the Bible can just try to get away with reconstruction. She had better, in fact, concentrate on the palpable intricacies of the languages and see what insights they yield. Those small marks in a modern, scholarly text (in Hebrew, a word can look like a cartoon character being beaten up) teach most usefully about grammar. Grammar is not just (obviously) for deciphering the text—that is, for setting more or less acceptable words of a modern language beside the original words; but also for observing how those original words act, how they express more than their bare lexical projections into the year Now: how they put on a show.
Ancient Hebrew and Greek are inflected, not phrasal languages, a fact that makes a momentous difference in their literatures. If in English I want to express (for instance) the concept that one thing belongs to another, I usually have to string out separate words in a fixed order—say, “a house belonging to a man,” “the house of this man,” or “a man’s house.” It’s relatively rare in English for individual words themselves to change much as their meanings change, in such a way that different meanings can branch out of a single word. An example is the principal parts of the verbs “lay” and “lie”: I lay the book down (present-tense meaning), I laid the book down (simple past), I have laid the book down (present perfect); I lie down (present), I lay down (simple past), I have lain down (present perfect). The reason it’s so hard to keep these forms straight is that we’re not used to expressing ourselves that way. But intricate phrasing is easy for native English speakers; one of my professors reported that his two-year-old daughter had spontaneously come out with, “What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?”—with that bizarre series of prepositions and an adverb (“up”), no problem for the likes of us, but liable to drive a foreign student of English around the bend.
In either Hebrew or Greek, the words in that sentence would be much fewer, with concepts like “I want” and “what for” and “to be read to” and “bring up” expressed by single words, each containing substantial meaning and often through their structure entailing close relationships with other words. In an English sentence, in contrast, words tend to develop their meanings and their relationships through their order. “What…for” in “What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?” can’t mean “why” unless the words are where they are (or maybe right beside each other at the start, but that would be awkward and not standard).
In Hebrew and Greek, word order is—on semantic if not stylistic grounds—much more flexible: the subject pronoun “you” is expressed through a finite verb’s form,*1 so wherever you put that verb, the subject of the little girl’s sentence, “you,” won’t be mixed up with the direct object of the verb, “book.” Both “you” and “book” in English become gibberish if they’re moved at all. In Greek, that noun actually has a special form to show that it’s a direct object, so heck, put it anywhere you want.
Hebrew has a nifty device called a construct chain for binding words together without the benefit of an “of” word; the words do have to stand side by side (showing that the first item belongs to the second), but beyond that their forms are usually just altered a little. “The hand of Yahweh” (traditionally translated as “the hand of the Lord”) is two words in Hebrew. But, hey, “of a person having been set free” can be one word in Greek; Hebrew does that kind of thing, too, just not as often.
I call such handy, highly cohesive units Legos, and I compare them to the rocks of English, which won’t stay on top of each other unless you place them just right. In these ancient languages, you didn’t have a great variety of words to choose from (see my next chapter, on vocabularies), as in an old-fashioned Lego set there are only a few kinds of bricks. But you sure could combine words more freely, to create structures of great size, diversity, and nuance. Custom—especially in literary languages—might dictate acceptable word deployment or even strings of specific words, which are called syntax and formulae, respectively; but those were powerful tools more than straitjackets. You could make a small change, fit an eight-pronged red brick in where two four-pronged blue bricks were expected, and it would be striking. Furthermore, most of these are inflected words, or bricks you can individually alter—say, by turning a four-point green one into a two-point white one. Nothing is in the way of creating very expressive and impressive edifices.
Standard narrative Hebrew word order is finite verb, subject, objects and/or other elements. But see how interestingly that expectation, and the variations possible, are used in a famous story in the Second Book of Samuel. First, the King James:
11:1 And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.
2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
3 And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.
5 And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child.
6 And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David.
7 And when Uriah was come unto him, David demanded of him how Joab did, and how the people did, and how the war prospered.
8 And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet. And Uriah departed out of the king’s house, and there followed him a mess of meat from the king.
9 But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and went not down to his house.
10 And when they had told David, saying, Uriah went not down unto his house, David said unto Uriah, Camest thou not from thy journey? why then didst thou not go down unto thine house?
11 And Uriah said unto David, The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents; and my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? as thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.
12 And David said to Uriah, Tarry here to day also, and to morrow I will let thee depart. So Uriah abode in Jerusalem that day, and the morrow.
13 And when David had called him, he did eat and drink before him; and he made him drunk: and at even he went out to lie on his bed with the servants of his lord, but went not down to his house.
14 And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.
15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.
16 And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were.
17 And the men of the city went out, and fought with Joab: and there fell some of the people of the servants of David; and Uriah the Hittite died also.
18 Then Joab sent and told David all the things concerning the war;
19 And charged the messenger, saying, When thou hast made an end of telling the matters of the war unto the king,
20 And if so be that the king’s wrath arise, and he say unto thee, Wherefore approached ye so nigh unto the city when ye did fight? knew ye not that they would shoot from the wall?
21 Who smote Abimelech the son of Jerubbesheth? Did not a woman cast a piece of a millstone upon him from the wall, that he died in Thebez? why went ye nigh the wall? then say thou, Thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.
22 So the messenger went, and came and shewed David all that Joab had sent him for.
23 And the messenger said unto David, Surely the men prevailed against us, and came out unto us into the field, and we were upon them even unto the entering of the gate.
24 And the shooters shot from off the wall upon thy servants; and some of the king’s servants be dead, and thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.
25 Then David said unto the messenger, Thus shalt thou say unto Joab, Let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one as well as another: make thy battle more strong against the city, and overthrow it: and encourage thou him.
26 And when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband.
27 And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to his house, and she became his wife, and bare him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
12:1 And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.
2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds:
3 But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.
4 And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.
5 And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die:
6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.
7 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.
Certain words and phrases, and certain patterns of syntax, are repeated relentlessly in Hebrew Scripture. One thing to consider, however, in speculating about their effects, is that their flawless pedigrees as individual units could have made their artistic use in new and revised compositions both inviting and unassailable, and could have soothed and intrigued audiences at the same time. If you wanted to do something interesting, you could do it with the usual pieces, just by deploying them somewhat differently—and how could someone reject or forbid that out of hand? More likely, you got points both for employing the traditional material and for adapting it. The Legos are a family gift, an approved educational and recreational resource. They may come with a construction design—say, the “Mountain House”—including a picture on the front of the box and instructions inside. But are the children going to keep docilely building the “Mountain House”? My friends and I soon had different structures in mind to house Thicky, Patheta, Puppydog the Clydesdale, and the Raunchy Rats of Sicktown. And our parents and other children were entertained, not disapproving.
Look, in the King James Version of the David and Bathsheba story, at 2 Samuel 11:1, 2, 14, and 16: in these verses, respectively, David stays home from war; David is strolling on his roof one evening and sees Bathsheba bathing; David sends Uriah back to the front carrying orders to Joab the field commander to deploy Uriah in the most dangerous spot; Joab carries out the orders. Each verse begins with a clause dully familiar to many readers in English translation, “And it came to pass.” Once in a Hebrew class I was auditing, a Protestant student translated the Hebrew by merely quoting that English clause, and the Jewish professor snapped, “That’s not what the Hebrew says; that’s just what’s on the tape of the Bible running in your head twenty-four hours a day.” It was a moment I still cherish.
Technically, the Hebrew clause (more like a mini-clause) is a “vav consecutive” or “vav conversive” constructed out of the verb for “to be” or “to become” or “to happen” and the one-letter word for “and,” vav (which happens to be, on its own, visually, a straight vertical line). In a vav consecutive, vav is glommed right onto the front of a certain form of verb (well, visually, onto the back, as we’re reading right to left) and changes that verb’s quasi tense or aspect (or something). Don’t close this book and turn on a PBS documentary about ferrets: what I’m about to tell you is way more interesting.
In this particular vav conversive, the two reconstructed syllables mean, “Something new arose,” or “Then” or “Now” or “Next” or “And get this”*2—the variety of ways to translate resulting in part from the special character of Hebrew verbs. These don’t have a strict relation to linear time, and they don’t through their forms alone express any opinion on whether anything actually does, can, or should happen. (The “moods” in other languages take care of this: most familiar are the indicative [“It is…”] and the subjunctive [“If it were…”].) There is no progress or positivism here; we’re in the realm of circular human inadequacy and bafflement and cyclical divine mercy. Hebrew verbs do express whether action is “perfect” or “imperfect,” but that means, respectively, finished/simple or ongoing, so that the “perfect” can refer to either the past or present, and the “imperfect” to the past, present, or future, and can even express an effective command, often translated as “Thou shalt…”
The vav conversive is a common way of expressing the perfect, oddly by adding the “and” word to a verb in what looks like the imperfect form (but isn’t). The special vav conversive “and-it-was” (or “and now at this other moment”) apparently marks the passage of time, introduces a new scene or a turn in the action, or just establishes that these events are in the past—all quite convenient, when there are no true tenses to throw around.
All this is why the English translation “And it came to pass” is so deeply inappropriate. It feels like a train, chugging (coming) into the present and then chugging off (passing) into the future, with a slow momentum and maybe even on long tracks of inevitability, but in any case without any sense that, if not for what happens in this instant, everything would be different. There’s not a shred of the proper drama in “And it came to pass.”
What’s more, the plodding sound of this clause does nothing to reflect the Hebrew, vai-hee, which reminds me of the yip as you trip and fall: the noise of no return. But that’s not right: though it may designate no return, it’s just a brief, simple vav conversive, marking a moment not as noticeable to the people in the stories.
But from the authors’ and readers’ point of view, as a formulaic element, quite ordinary (something people wrote and heard again and again and again) and at the same time deeply significant (as part of a vast, ancient literary tradition, bound up with the culture’s most important ideas), vai-hee was a critical element in storytelling. By merely deploying it somewhat differently, you could effect your own subtle but authoritative interpretation of hinge events.
One unusual thing about vai-hee’s deployment in the David and Bathsheba passage is that it occurs twice in quick succession for setups of action early on (how David came to be entangled with Bathsheba), and twice likewise toward the middle (how David and Joab got rid of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah)—but not later. The expression does tend to mark a new episode or a change of scene or viewpoint, but clearly not mechanically, at every start or change. In this story, at least, the shifts are where the most trouble starts, when David or someone else could have held back the wrecking ball. David could have gone to war in the first place; failing that, he could have turned his back on the beautiful nude woman; failing that, he could have let Uriah live, inconvenient as that would have been; Joab, finally, could have stood up to David, quietly ignored the instructions he knew were murderous, or figured something else out—he clearly doesn’t lack brains. The transition vai-hee fills a variety of functions in Hebrew Bible narrative, but one thing it does here is mark points of decision. But at the same time—look at what it means, and its “perfect” aspect—it reproaches speculation and second-guessing like mine. The reader or listener may smugly think, “I would have done something different,” but vai-hee says, “Yeah, but who cares?” This did happen, it’s over and can’t be replanned and improved; just contemplate it and don’t meddle in it.
But vai-hee is just an edge of the story, so to speak. The artistry in the structure is pervasive. In the Hebrew, the first two verses of the story (for example) are slyly but instructively laid out. To recap: the first verse, in the King James, goes, “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.”
In the original language, after the initial vai-hee, with its finite verb, we get a rather stately seasonal setup (literally “at-[the]-return [of] the-year”) and read what people typically do then (“at-[the]-time/season [of the] to-go-out [of] the-kings”). Only then do we read, via another finite verb, what David has done himself to instigate such activity—he has dispatched a military force—and what those he has dispatched are doing, namely warfare of two sorts (finite verbs for destroying and besieging). After that, David is shown doing diddly-squat, just sitting there (not a finite verb, but a participle, and most literally translatable as “sitting”); that’s going to be the problem. In this story, then, the first sentence*3 reads, “And-it-was/happened at-[the]-return [of] the-year at-[the]-time/season [of the] to-go-out [of] the-kings and-sent David Joab and-servants-his with-him and-all [of] Israel and-they-destroyed [the] sons [of] Ammon and-they-besieged Rabbah, and-David [was] sitting/staying in-Jerusalem.”
To show how subtle yet relentless a bad impression of David can rise from such compositional nuances, I need to point out what’s not in the Hebrew, and by extension what the nuances on their own are conveying. The rather officious syntactical props that any English translator has to add in a formal rendering do not even exist in Hebrew. Vav or (basically) “and” is the all-purpose conjunction, and it appears everywhere in Hebrew Scripture; linguists, philologists, and translators interpret it—and represent it in modern languages—as seems best to them in each instance. (The King James: “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.”)
Really: among many other absences, Hebrew hasn’t got an ordinary “but” or an “although,” distinct in itself, that could be used to comment more explicitly, to us anyway, on the king’s staying home, notwithstanding that this is the season for royal military campaigning, and notwithstanding that he himself has sent out a full force, and that such and such are the force’s activities. The narrative just records the conventional actions in the conventional manner and leaves David “sitting” at the end, a nonaction emphasized by the static tenor of the participle. But in the Hebrew there’s no need for a finger-pointing authorial “however”: David, according to the way the representation of him is arranged syntactically, is the judgment on himself. The three vavs attached to active verbs and then a vav attached to the word “David” lead the reader rhythmically along and then bring her up short.
There’s another stumble already at verse 2. The King James goes, “And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.”
Vai-hee: then something else ominous happened. “And-it-was/happened at-[the]-time/season [of] the-evening and-got-up David from-on bed-his and-he-strolled on [the] roof [of the] house [of] the-king and-he-saw [a] woman bathing from-on the-roof and-the-woman [was] beautiful/good to-see very.” Notice, first of all, the shorter, then the longer, construct chain ([of] expression): the text lingers over the idle time, and even more over the empty place where he’s puttering around—much as the verb for that puttering is a special, longer form of the verb for “walk.”*4
Then, within the verse, look at the shift from the king’s roof to “[the] roof,” as if this had no home under it worth mentioning, no location even in relation to David’s line of sight, no “across the way” or suchlike; as if it had no significance except in what is going on there visibly right now. Next, there is the shift from simply seeing the woman to seeing her beauty so as to appreciate it fully. “Woman” is repeated as notice grows into definite interest. The second instance of the word for seeing—that word is repeated, too—is enclosed by the words “beautiful/good” and “very,” so that the sequence of thought is “Good—now that I really see her—extremely good.”
But the big news is how alike yet how different the first two verses are. I’ll repeat both literal translations here, with their main elements set out vertically for easier comparison:
and-it-was/happened
at-[the]-return [of] the-year
at-[the]-time/season [of the] to-go-out [of] the-kings
and-sent David Joab and-servants-his with-him and-all [of] Israel
and-they-destroyed [the] sons [of ] Ammon
and-they-besieged Rabbah
and-David [was] sitting/staying in-Jerusalem.
and-it-was/happened
at-[the]-time/season [of] the-evening
and-got-up David from-on bed-his
and-he-strolled on [the] roof [of the] house [of] the-king
and-he-saw
[a] woman bathing from-on the-roof
and-the-woman [was] beautiful/good to-see very.
Both verses start with “and it was/happened,” and three more vav consecutives follow, then a participle linked to the noun for a major actor. In the second verse, however, the phrasing then lingers along with David’s eye, and the woman’s prolonged designation as beautiful hangs tantalizingly at the end of the sentence.
But an even sharper contrast is in the meanings of parallel and formally quite similar verbs across verses 1 and 2. In verse 2, David restlessly gets up from bed instead of waging war as other kings do. Instead of leading the campaign he has set in motion, he walks back and forth. Much unlike his officers and men occupied with destroying and besieging, he sees a woman—and this is the last finite verb. At this point, as in verse 1, everything goes still, or nearly so. The woman’s lingering participial “bathing,” with its formal sameness to David’s “sitting” or “staying” at home, may represent an eerie comparison: both these people indulge themselves. (A full-body cleansing was quite a luxury.) They fritter away the time.
This story as a whole is a marvelous illustration of the Hebrew Bible’s typical narrative panache as an inflected language. I won’t go verse by verse through a number of the tightly woven patterns—I could, but it would take two hundred pages in itself. Instead, I’ll just point out a few more characteristic and very effective features.
The stark centrality of verbs—and in Hebrew they suck in subject and direct-object and possessive pronouns, as well as containing a lot of other information—keeps heavy emphasis on the deployment of power. Leaders, especially, do what they want; moment by moment, they choose. Hebrew Bible narratives about them tend even to be free from notions of inborn character or immutable fate or rhetorical weighing of alternatives, as in Classical literature.
English (or even Greek or Latin) cannot really depict, as Hebrew does, the full horror of David deciding and doing, indistinguishably. For one thing, Hebrew can much more thoroughly elide the presence and the activities of the king’s subordinates. Granted, the English of the King James in verse 3 (“And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”) is accurate in showing that David does not send or ask a person or persons but just “sends” and “enquires,” as if giving orders to a sort of disembodied servitude around him. But English, significantly, doesn’t allow a truly literal translation of the way David is answered: “And-he-said, ‘Is-not this [woman]…?’ ” In the King James English, there is “one [person]”—separate pronoun—doing the saying. In the Hebrew, a separate pronoun is not there. Though information about the speaker (a single one, male) is indeed encased in “and-he-said,” Hebrew allows for less strong a sense of the person-ness, if you will, of the person answering David.
As the subordinates are (and are to remain) so shadowy, this response is quite ironic. It is a tentatively, questioningly worded one but contains quite detailed identification about the woman: her name, whose daughter she is, and whose wife, and the ethnicity of her husband. She’s certainly someone, isn’t she? The sentence points up something quite creepy about the story: everyone around David and Bathsheba knows everything, at every stage. That’s a cost of being able to open your mouth and cause things to happen.
Moreover, as the story soon shows—especially after verse 17, when Joab subtly but insolently challenges what David has done—this is anything but a totalitarian state, in which far-reaching control of subordinates can protect a leader from their views. David may treat them as objects and use them for evil, but this will only make things worse for him in the long run. We are, significantly, only in the second generation of the kingship here. According to 1 Samuel, chapter 8, the people have begged for a king and been warned by a credible religious leader that they won’t like monarchy once they get a taste of it. They became acquainted, through their first king, Saul, with a common hazard of despotism, that the despot may become paranoid. Now the second king, David, is threatening to fulfill Samuel’s specific prediction, that a king will exploit the people for his own ends—including appropriating women—and that they won’t be able to do anything about it.
But from a Scriptural perspective—and from an actual historical one, as far back as it’s possible to see—this is not the basic character of the nation. A political leader (or a religious one, or a combination of both), no matter how powerful, was never the ultimate authority, never regarded as a god-king. In Scripture, in fact, any great wrongdoing that his great power leads him into will result in a punishment packed with drama and ironic edification. Traditional Hebrew narrative downplays the eyes that see and the minds that predict what is coming but doesn’t allow the reader to forget they’re there. All this makes their vindication in the end more impressive. God has not neglected them, any more than he has neglected wrongdoing.
Here, that spring is wound very tightly. Not only does vai-hee show up again at the beginning of 2 Samuel 11:14 and 16, the two most blameworthy turns in the action, but the employment of another extremely common vav consecutive, vai-yōmer, “and he said” (already heard in David’s exchange with the servant), helps create strong tensions.
Like vai-hee, vai-yōmer (“and-he-said”) normally heads up a clause; unlike vai-hee, of course, it is often closely followed by the explicit subject of the verb: “And-said Speaker A…, and-said Speaker B…” is the typical form of dialogue, creating far different emphases than dialogue in English literature tends to. In Hebrew, the act of speaking and the identity of the speaker (if named) usually take precedence as information.
The medium is very much the message here. It suggests what linguists and anthropologists say about “speech acts,” that very special category of performance such as oaths. A speech act, in itself, creates consequences. (“I take thee, Mary, to be my lawful wedded wife.”) It is as a rule far more momentous than questioning, commenting, narrating, or describing. (“Said Simple Simon to the pie man, ‘What have you got there?’—‘Pies, you twit.’ ”)
Therefore, a great difference in ethical tone is inherent between the Hebrew, which goes essentially, “Now there was speaking; So-and-So was doing it,” and modern literary lines of dialogue, some standing alone without even a verb of speaking, most others with verbs of speaking and speech attributions only in the middle or at the end, and some with verbs of speaking that suggest that the important thing is the speaker’s mood or personality. (“ ‘It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues,’ Abraham Lincoln quipped.”)
For modern dialogue that really drives home the implications of the sheer act of speaking, we have to look, tellingly, to theater and film among our own literary art forms—vehicles of performance, in which a set of subordinate components (lighting, physical background, costume, music, dance, facial expressions, etc., very roughly analogous to the intricate arrangements of words we can still see in the Hebrew text) sets off the two central components, speaking and acting, in such a way as to squeeze the most oomph out of that primal source of hope and horror: people speak and act.
Such drama is plentiful in the story of David and Bathsheba. In verse 7, David’s questioning of Uriah, as a pretext for summoning him, sounds quite a bit more idiotic in Hebrew than in an English translation (“And when Uriah was come unto him, David demanded of him how Joab did, and how the people did, and how the war prospered”). First, after a mini-buildup of “and-inquired David” (with an initial vav consecutive similar to vai-yōmer), the king’s actual questions are, literally, about the shalōm of Joab and the shalōm of the people and the shalōm of the army. We are used to the translation “peace” for shalōm, and that can sometimes work in Classical Hebrew (not here, of course, concerning the activities of a military expedition). But more commonly, the word means “welfare,” “wholeness,” or something like that, and an ordinary courteous inquiry goes (sort of), “Does So-and-So have shalōm?” Uriah must wonder why he was summoned for such a bland interrogation, which in fact points up, through its dense, singsong repetition as represented in the original language, the waste of everyone’s time.
Worse, Uriah is a subordinate commander and a foreigner. He can’t figure out why it’s he who’s been brought all this distance to be so softly but lingeringly drilled. What’s going on? The text contains nothing of his reply and doesn’t need to: we can intuit a reply that it is broad, cautious, content-free. The Hebrew text allows Uriah a dignified silence instead of putting an equally inane speech into his mouth: “And-said Uriah, ‘Welfare [is] with-Joab….’ ”
Nor, in verse 8 (“And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet…”), is he shown assenting or not when David tries to jolly him toward spending the night at home—starting this speech with the first of several formulaic vai-yōmers written around their interaction. “To wash the feet” is a Hebrew euphemism for having sex. “Go back to your house and have a nice time with your wife” is the effective command. I was brought here in order to have sex with my wife? Uriah must ask himself. What is this? A test of my loyalty and commitment? Perhaps not voicing his intentions at all, so as to avoid open defiance, he leaves the palace only to rough it all night in the servants’ quarters or the guardhouse (verse 9)—letting members of the king’s household keep an eye on him.
In verse 10, the disembodied voices of subordinates again report to David, and this time, when the king delivers his challenge to Uriah after vai-yōmer—the rhythmic stateliness of this dialogue framing is starting to look, in comparison to the dialogue’s content, kind of farcical—Uriah replies in kind, with the same lead-in (verse 11); but the author includes a pointed “to David” (who else would Uriah be talking to?) and a long, passionate speech to cut through David’s palaver: “The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents; and my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As thou liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.”
The Hebrew of Uriah’s speech is a striking contrast to ordinary narrative diction, in which this story has been set up and is to continue, as David administrates himself further and further into trouble. Instead of a clause opening with a finite verb followed by its subject, Uriah uses three grand nouns and a participle (“[are] sitting/staying”) for what these entities are doing—and it’s the same verb that’s used, in a participial form there as well, for David at the end of verse 1; but what a contrast with David’s lingering in Jerusalem. Next, it’s the very deferentially named Joab and the officers or men (or both), who, in syntactic parallel to the Ark, Israel, and Judah, “[are] camping” on the open plain. When we finally get a finite verb, it’s for the unthinkable thing Uriah won’t do under these circumstances: go home—the way he won’t act to upset this honorable stasis. The outburst so far goes literally like this: “The-Ark and-Israel and-Judah [are] sitting/staying in-the-tents/sheds and lord-my Joab and-[the]-servants [of] lord-my on [the] face [of] the-field [are] camping and-I will-go to house-my to-eat and-to-drink and-to-lie with my-wife…?” Uriah, notably, brushes aside euphemism and names the act as it was named when David did it with the same woman (verse 4).
At the end of verse 11, Uriah swears an oath, not on his own life and soul but on that of his adopted king. Usually a destructive outcome of an oath, in the event of nonperformance, is for the speaker; but Uriah, with ironic foreshadowing, in effect calls down disaster on his ruler, not himself. Speaking of speech acts, an oath is the ultimate one; and in this case, as if we needed a reminder of the closeness of words and action as depicted in Hebrew, Uriah literally winds up with, “if I-do this thing/word/action.” It’s the same term, and the one used in “The word of the Lord came” to a patriarch or prophet. “Word” can point to momentous intentionality and responsibility. It is David’s “word/action” in commandeering Bathsheba and killing her husband that God disapproves of (verse 27).
In verse 12, David’s vai-yōmer answer to Uriah’s speech is feeble: an order to stay another day; and he tries to soften up this dedicated man with food and drink. Uriah is again shown as wordless, only carrying the words of his own doom back to his commander in a sealed letter (verse 14). More creepy verbal sparring occurs when the messenger returns with news of his death—this time with both parties understanding exactly what has happened, and each knowing that the other knows (verses 22–25). When Nathan shows up in the next chapter with his own verbal snare, telling the story of a powerful man who murders a weak one in order to slaughter and consume his cherished pet instead of an animal out of his own abundant herds, David bursts out in smug, unthinking anger, swearing by God that the man must die because he did “this thing/word” (12:6). Like David, the fictional man doesn’t need to do the dirty work himself, but can use words to make other people do it. In the Bible, the only being who can’t go wrong in speaking and causing things to happen is God.
David is to endure the slow death of his and Bathsheba’s child, and then he must face the violent and humiliating loss of his kingdom, including the appropriation of his own concubines by his son, Absalom (2 Samuel 16:21–22), who is reacting to his sister Tamar’s rape—which was known to David but went unpunished by him, because the rapist was his eldest son. Absalom promises justice and equality under his own rule (15:4).
It’s critical to register what this passage may have been at its historical core: an ugly court scandal. The early kingdom was, and either part of the divided kingdom continued to be, an autocracy (though, as I’ve noted, not a god-kingship), with autocrats inevitably behaving badly and subjects typically having little recourse but to remember. It’s hardly surprising that the rage in the mind(s) behind this composition is expressed with stealth. But this is a strong stealth, built up in a very careful pattern, which plays an indispensable role in the story’s becoming far more than gossip or a trivial homily. This occurs through the tight fusing of manner and matter, style and substance, story and message.
*
In all the special intricacies that a highly inflected language allows, New Testament Greek is like ancient Hebrew, only more so—or, at any rate, because the depth to which a language can be read depends on the evidence available, scholars can tell more about the stunts Greek pulls. The Greek of the New Testament has a vast context in surviving pagan literature and the known social history of the Greco-Roman world, so it’s clear how hard there the producers of formal language worked, and how demanding the consumers were.
Particularly important was rhetoric, the art of speaking and writing, which was vital to the conduct of public life. Rhetoric was the basis for all prose literature, even what we might consider private and analytical, such as history. Herodotus, “the first historian,” read out loud from his work in public in Athens in the fifth century B.C.E.; it was a performance, whose charms we can intuit from the surviving text. In ancient Classical literature, there was no hard distinction between poetic and rhetorical devices. Many of us learned in school that simile, metaphor, and personification—that somewhat cartoonish trio—are “poetic” devices. Well, they weren’t alien even to Greek and Roman scientific prose; and the poetry is crammed with rhetorical phenomena that have classifications suggesting rare butterflies, like “antimetabole.”
Granted, it’s a good question exactly how much pagan literary sentiment and practice penetrated the New Testament, which was of course about much more than individual literary skill exuberantly flaunted and passionately vetted. But Koinē Greek was the same basic language as that of Sophocles. It had a similar propensity for dance-ability, for exuberant rhythms that suited public recitation.
What’s more, in early Christianity the Greek language arrived full circle back at a state somewhat like the one it evinces in the early “Homeric” hymns, which are full of the formulaic language and religious preoccupations that go so well together. In the New Testament also there is a compositional tension between, on the one hand, inherently cautious conservatism in telling of the unseen, and in melding together traditional material from multiple sources;*5 and, on the other hand, impetuous efforts to create a dramatically appealing work that could defeat the ranks of competition (much of it saying more or less the same things) and become a beloved, official, authoritative text. And it’s my strong feeling, as both a poet and a student of literature, that in Homer, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, the simultaneous cohesion and flexibility of an inflected language gave the means to manipulate even traditional, formulaic phrasing—especially through word order—to produce resounding effects.
Here is an instance of Greek-speaking early Christians’ turning a short piece of cryptography into a poem, through the arrangement of formulaic language alone.
A plausible legend says that the outline of a fish stood for Christianity and could be drawn in the dust for covert mutual identification during persecutions, because the Greek word for “fish” is an anagram of the Greek words for “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior.” So far, so much like a movie that Charlton Heston stars in. But if he knew of the exquisite expressiveness of the anagram, Charlton would lift his lip and draw down his eyebrows in that inimitable way, staring with his teeth as if at the ultimate pagan decadence.
If the anagram is read out loud—Yeisūs Christos theh-ū hwios sōteir—a powerful rhythm emerges. Only a moderate number of Greek nouns accent the final syllable, yet every one of the two-syllable words here is so accented. It’s a chant. And there’s an interlocking pattern of ū and os sounds in four of those accented syllables, and a matching ei vowel sound at the beginning and end syllables of the whole phrase.
But, you may object, there wasn’t much room to move in designating Jesus—these are just his most important epithets, presented in a mandatory-looking way. Ah, but Greek, as a highly inflected language, had the malleability to make the formulaic powerfully witty through word order alone. In this case, there appears to be a poetically theological sneak-attack.
First comes the word “Jesus.” This was one of the most common names in Palestine, a region stereotyped for its foreign oddity. Early on, ancient Europeans probably perceived “Jesus” somewhat as Americans used to perceive “José” or “Pierre”: as a cliché label for an outsider. To Palestinian Jews, however, who were numerous among early followers of Jesus, his name was more like “Bob” or “John”—which might help explain the violent controversy that raged once Jesus’s followers tried to establish themselves within Judaism and recruit other Jews. Imagine being asked to come follow “Bob” on the “Road”—and he doesn’t even have a full name. To believers, he would not have been “Jesus the Son of Joseph,” because, well, get this—
Now the anagram starts to swell in its claims: he’s Jesus/Pierre/Bob the Anointed: he has had ceremonial oil poured over his head, as King David had. He has been anointed by God, and God is the next word, but that single word is in the genitive form, signifying “of God,” and the next word is “son”—here’s your patronymic! The words aren’t in themselves an outrage: “son of God” was an established Jewish honorific. But as such it wasn’t meant literally, that’s for darn tootin’. That’s, however, the way the Christians meant it—and they didn’t mean it in the Greco-Roman sense either, designating a half-divine hero, the offspring—mortal himself—of a philandering Olympian by a mortal woman. They meant that the sole, all-powerful God had a son, human but also divine like himself, as divine as a son of two homo sapiens would be mortal, yet here’s what he did with him, the last word of the anagram.
Jesus is the savior. By dying in the flesh, he delivered humankind from death, which is—as both Jews and pagans faced with this statement might have noticed—more than his father himself was supposed to have done for humankind by any means. Oh, you crazy Greek speakers! The buildup is like a slow explosion, from the ordinary name of a crucified criminal to the hope of the universe. It is five short words of total defiance—and, as usual, you can dance to it.
Imagine what Biblical Greek could do in an important passage several verses long, such as the Lord’s Prayer. The commonly used version, in Matthew 6:9–13, is a particularly good example of the expressive power of an inflected language.
But first, some background. The “harmony of the Gospels” is a major issue in New Testament studies: the four stories of Jesus’s life and teachings—the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—have a number of parallel passages but are almost nowhere identical, which naturally undercuts them all as documentary history. But because the news of the resurrection changed everything, starting a millennia-long scramble to explain why Jesus was more than history, more than another wandering preacher and healer or political leader, Christians prefer passages of the Gospels that are (however inauthentically) elaborated, as long as that elaboration serves to explain more. This is why the Matthew Lord’s Prayer has been preferred over the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:2–4. We like passages that make more sense of events and bind that sense together with fuller word patterns, so that we not only tell ourselves why but can more easily remember, recite, sing, and be comforted by that why.
Science and religion are not so very far apart in this respect. A bare, isolated fact is pretty useless; such a fact in an intrusive, alarming form (a hurricane, a sharp drop in genetic diversity in a region, or the disappearance of a corpse from its sealed tomb) demands an explanation, and the explanation is likely to be more formal, more patterned, more intricate the more important it is. Your peer-reviewed, published research will include a Methods section, so that everyone can see how you set up the experiment or observation. Your traditional prayer will, among other things, invoke the deity quite specifically, and according to a well-established formula, so that there is no confusion. For the same reason, you will clearly indicate when the prayer is over and you return to mundane life.
Here are the Matthew and Luke Lord’s Prayers (in that order) in the King James translation.*6 In Part Three, the full literal translation in English and the full phonetic transliteration of the Greek are set out in short lines, like poetry, because the Greek editions set them out this way.
Check out how much more prayer appears in the King James Version of both passages, reflecting how many Greek words were added onto the texts even after they diverged into two quite distinct versions of what Jesus said. This made for very “corrupt” bases for early English translation; and since some corruptions became part of the liturgy, later translators have naturally been shy about “correcting” them. But now we all have the cleaned-up Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament to work with, and I have used it alone for my own experimental literary translation, shown in Part Two.
But I’m going to concentrate here on how much fuller, in the most plausible version of the original text, the Matthew prayer (which is, again, the first of the two King James passages below) is than the Luke one. These differences came about because the prayer as prescribed by Jesus flowered and seeded itself, so to speak.
Matthew 6:9–13
9 …Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever. Amen.
Luke 11:2–4
2 …Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
3 Give us day by day our daily bread.
4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.
In Matthew 6:7–8, Jesus says, as a prelude to assigning the prayer in that Gospel, “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” Is Jesus’s special disapproval directed at cosmopolitan, Hellenized Jews who prayed to their own Jewish God in Greek, a language that, besides coming from a pagan (= “heathen”) culture, was highly developed for literary display and competition?*7 This might well bother a Jewish reformer from the local backwater of Galilee; Hellenizing influences weren’t absent there, but they would have stood out more sharply than elsewhere. Consider also that Jesus has shown himself concerned that prayer be humble and private, not a self-aggrandizing public production (6:5–6).
All this suggests certain looming paradoxes in these two Lord’s Prayers. Both are written in Greek, of course, not Jesus’s own Semitic language, Aramaic (closely related to Hebrew). Moreover, following Jesus’s strictures in Matthew, we get the version of the Lord’s Prayer that reflects them less than does the shorter, simpler Lord’s Prayer in Luke, which is also shown as a response to the request to be taught how to pray, but is set out without any comments as to the proper manner or form of prayer. But on the pretty solid principle that New Testament passages tended to be added onto over time, rather than stripped down, it’s the more elaborate, repetitious, formulaic Matthew Lord’s Prayer that’s less authentic than the Luke Lord’s Prayer—which itself appeared in many manuscripts in longer renditions that the modern scholarly text shows.
In the most plausible Greek version of the Luke Lord’s Prayer, nothing is said (for example) of “the sky” or “skies” or “heaven” at all, let alone twice, ring-compositionally, at the beginning and end of the prayer’s first verse (“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.”) The posited original Matthew Lord’s Prayer, for its part, is missing the whole crescendo of praise at the end in verse 13 of the King James translation, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever. Amen.”
Am I outraged? Am I saying, “Tsk, tsk”? Hardly. In fact, I’m risking the fury of other Christians by writing that, well, preferring brief, simple prayers in the confidence that God already knew what was needed and would certainly provide it was easier for Jesus than for ordinary believers, wasn’t it? To my mind, a significant boon of his words’ coming to us through a long Scriptural tradition, and in another language from near the start, is the greater allowance for Christians to quietly act on a sense of their own more extensive needs. They need, in this case, a prayer to teach their children that can get quickly beyond questions such as “ ‘Father?’ Whose father? Mine? You? Aren’t you my father? If I have another father, why haven’t I ever seen him? Where is he?” They need a prayer that doesn’t end with an image of torture (that’s more or less what “temptation,” or “testing,” in “And lead us not into temptation” would imply here) but instead rounds itself out in reassurance that, as precarious as things are now, what is permanent is the majestic power of the creator they’ve invoked at the beginning. While people are at it, of course, they will form these changes in patterns more powerful than the earlier Greek prayer showed, probably way more powerful than the Aramaic words of Jesus, with his stress on brevity and humility.
This is evident in the most obscure details. In the Matthew prayer in Greek, there are tiny words in the middle of each of the first four lines (verses 9 and 10):*8 hŏ, tŏ, hei, tŏ. Those are just the definite article, for “the,” in all three genders, in clauses that go, literally,
Matthew 6:9–10
9 father of-us, the [one] in the skies/heavens (1)
let-be-made-holy the name of-you (2)
10 let-come the kingdom of-you (3)
let-come-into-being the wanting of-you (4)
as in [the] sky/heaven also/even on land/earth (5)
The article occurs in the order masculine, neuter, feminine, neuter. The middle of a clause tends to be a place of less emphasis than the beginning or the end, but even here, repetition with variation is at play. In the more authentic-looking Luke prayer, there is patterning with the article, but it is less fancy patterning.
In Matthew, the second through fourth lines each begin with a similar-sounding jussive verb (“let such and such happen”—expressed in one word), and each ends with a noun and the pronoun for “of-you”—weighing the first part of the prayer strongly in favor of God, who is “of-us” only in the second word of the first line.*9
Earlier in chapter 6 of Matthew, as I’ve noted, Jesus has warned against religious hypocrisy, which to him means praying in public as well as displays of charity. Instead, he commands, shut yourself up in your room and pray in secret (verse 6). But Jesus was a Jew, and Judaism was a communal religion—so in fact were the main pagan religions of the wider Roman Empire; only the edgy “mystery” religions were primarily about a special, individual relationship with divinity. It’s significant in the Lord’s Prayer, and stressed more in the Matthew one with all its repetitions of us-ness, that the sincere worshipper, though she’s supposed to be completely alone or even furtive, does not in a single line pray for herself as an individual, but always for the entire community.
The deployment of the pronoun for “we” is very expressive in the prayer’s second half—and again, particularly in the Matthew version. Here is the literal English:
11 the loaf/bread of-us the [one] coming-on give to-us today (1)
12 and let-go to-us the debts of-us (2)
as also/even we [have?] let-go to-the debtors of-us (3)
13 and do-not [please] into-bring us into testing (4)
but save us from the evil [one] (5)
For the Greeks, “we,” “us,” “to us,” and “of us” were a single word, heim-, which varied only in its ending—hence there is a much more extensive repetition of sounds than we see in the English. The plea of the prayer’s first line, that the addressee is the father “of us,” is picked up later in a frantic stress on the idea of “we,” God’s people. The word occurs eight times in five short clauses as the speaker pleads for the collective gift of food, for the collective forgiveness of sins (in exchange for collectively forgiving each other), and for the collective exemption from what the King James calls “temptation.” But the emotion does not get in the way of careful patterning. Note, in the literal translation, the parallel positions of “we” words: three times they are the third word in a clause, twice (in the same form) the final word.
The word kai—“and” or “also” or “even”—plays a meaningful role itself. In Matthew, “kai on earth” (from verse 10, literally “as in [the] sky/heaven also/even on land/earth”) brings the prayer down to human concerns, the humble, urgent needs of humankind in contrast to God’s distance, holiness, and power. The King James has the courtly overwriting “in earth, as it is in heaven,” but if the emotional weight is to fall (as often) at the end of a line, the translation should be something like “actually on earth.”
Other clauses beginning with kai, occurring two and then again four lines later (the King James: “And forgive…,” “And lead us not”) are pretty clunky Greek, even in the colloquial “Common” dialect of the New Testament. This sounds like a child’s nervous or hopeful petition (“Oh, and bless Aunt Grace, and also bless Fluffo—and can we go on the roller coaster at the fair on Saturday?”). Between these two lines, the phrase hōs kai heimeis ahfeikamen…(King James: “as we forgive…”—again, the kai idea is left out) comes in, for humans acting in obedient imitation of God’s mercy: as heaven and earth form a harmonious contrast emphasized by kai (verse 10), so do mortals and the deity. The possible “even” meaning for kai might be a special source of plaintiveness in both lines. God is present and powerful “even” down here on earth. “Even” we can strive to behave as God does, forgiving all wrongs.
There was never any solid justification for the translation “daily bread” (Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3: literally “the loaf/bread of-us the [one] coming-on give to-us…”), as the only material thing the faithful ask for. The adjective (perhaps) means “coming on” and could refer to either tomorrow’s food or to rations, but in any case the pairing of the word in Matthew with “today” and in Luke with “day by day” in the same lines suggests anxiety—the speaker wants to know that the food will be here on schedule. Moreover, this isn’t properly “bread,” but “the loaf.” Many inhabitants of the Roman Empire would have pictured a regulation loaf from the public dole or household rations. The word as a collective singular for “bread,” however, often occurred in such expressions as “eating the bread of slavery”—the usual sense being that this was essential, very basic food.
Fittingly, the syntax suddenly changes here in Matthew 6:11 (as in Luke 11:3), in the plea for bread. Instead of a quite abstract and impersonal verb coming first, the noun for “bread” does. Again, the verse goes, “the loaf/bread of-us the [one] coming-on give to-us…” The attention fixes on that loaf. The verb “give” follows its direct object, the long phrase “the loaf/bread of-us the [one] coming-on” in both Matthew and Luke; both Gospels then add a redundant-looking “to us” after “give”: the loaf “is ours,” but not really, unless God acts. Here, also, the verbal form switches from the more circumspect jussive (“Let such and such happen”) of previous lines, and becomes a straight imperative (“Do this”). Though it’s not the same tense of the imperative in both versions, in both the meaning is stark: Give us our food, God.
The “debts” to be forgiven by God and between human beings in Matthew (verse 12: literally, “and let-go to-us the debts of-us / as also/even we [have?] let-go to-the debtors of-us”; compare verse 4 in Luke) are usually taken as a metaphor for sins (and are often translated as “trespasses”), but I think the actual debt crisis at the time the prayer arose is worth considering. To those just getting by—or not getting by—in ancient Palestine, debt meant they could be thrown off their land, or kept on it as struggling (and probably soon re-indebted) tenants once the lender seized the plot, or maybe forced to give up their children or themselves as slaves to settle the account. In several components, this verse echoes the previous one, the plea for bread, which is about survival. There is a plain imperative verb, and a “to us” and an “of us” (though in the Greek the order is different): God is to “let-go to-us” (= separate us from) these terrible entities that are (alas) “of-us” (we could almost read, “fastened to us”).
“As we forgive” isn’t in an ordinary present tense, the way it’s translated. This is an aorist; as to time, it normally refers to the simple past, but can also be used to indicate a generally occurring event. In either case, we could understand a special force in the condition that we forgive. Only once we’ve forgiven, and not before, can we expect forgiveness; or we must forgive as a rule. Moreover, there’s kai heimeis to consider, probably “even we”; the King James takes no account of the kai and reads simply “as we forgive.” (In Luke, kai gar owtoi is more like “as in fact [we] ourselves.”)
In any event, in the Greek there is a weight on the human duty that’s invisible or even distorted in English translations. “Do this, as we do it” sounds almost like an attempt to stipulate an equal exchange with God. The Greek words, in contrast, seem to contain all the wild drama of basic Christian theology, expressed by John Newton (the coauthor of the hymn “Amazing Grace”) as “I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.”
The first line in Matthew 6:13 (the last of Luke 11:4) is mistranslated with true abandon as “And lead us not into temptation.” In this context, there are only two plausible sets of images for peirasmon, the Greek word for “temptation” or testing: hardships that test character and commitment, and judicial or administrative investigation, which could include torture. (The basic verbal idea of the peir- root is “to see what someone/something is made of”—sacrilegiously in the case of a divinity, aggressively in the case of another person.) I favor the latter set of images as more plausibly grounded in the urgent concerns of New Testament readers.
Only Roman citizens, with their high status, were immune from inquisitorial abuse and extreme punishments. When Christians, a mainly lower-class and servile group, systematically refused to sacrifice to an image of the Roman emperor as a god, routine enforcement of norms could turn into elaborate persecutions. Christians were tortured sadistically, often in public, in efforts to make them recant their beliefs and conform, and to name other Christians. This must be what they begged in this prayer to be spared—no longer begging with the imperative of command, but with the subjunctive of a respectful request. Please God, do not bring us into testing. Given the Greek verb “into-bring,” with the supplementary, repetitive preposition “into” coming after it, there may be an actual suggestion of the torture chamber door or the archway into the amphitheater: you are led through it to unspeakable agony. But in any case this is very certainly not a plea to be spared enticements to forbidden self-indulgence, the prevailing modern meaning.
If Christianity offered the ultimate comfort, eternal life in exchange for faith alone, it also offered the ultimate precipice. There was no sure providence on earth, no guarantee of favor for the righteous, but rather extra suffering and danger, and perhaps a shameful, excruciating death like Jesus’s own. In Matthew, chapter 6, in the famous “lilies of the field” passage, Jesus assures his followers that God will provide the necessities of life for them—or more precisely, he protests that worrying will not help: in the logical course of things, given their lofty position in creation, they can expect to do at least as well as wild birds and flowering weeds (verses 25–30). But here in the Lord’s Prayer, they are taught to ask for survival rations, for the “loaf” making its painful way toward them. Forgiveness of sins is a promise, but a dauntingly contingent one. And they can ask to be spared a terrible death, but Jesus himself asked his father (Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42) for the same thing and was rebuffed.
The Matthew prayer continues, while the one in Luke (or the best reconstructed—or deconstructed—version of it) stops here. Ahlla in Matthew (second line of verse 13) is a strong “but”: I might write, “But at least save us from the devil.” At this point, the pleading descends to the ultimate pathos. Even as scholars have recognized the great likelihood that this is a personality, not evil in the abstract,*10 Western translators and church hierarchies have remained squeamish, and in Bibles and church services I still encounter an unlikely request for deliverance from a vague “evil” that speakers of the prayer may imagine to be the same thing as “temptation.” But no, originally the children beg their father to save them from the monster.
Then, according to the most reliable manuscript evidence, even the Matthew prayer goes silent—and in the Catholic tradition it remains so. It is at this point much fuller than the Luke prayer, but still shows a chilly confidence in a dispensation that’s on balance quite negative. Among very early Greco-Roman Christians, both prayers probably found resonance in stern pagan philosophical theories of the proper relation to the divine. It is unwise to pray for anything but “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” The gods may haul off and slam you with the full punishment of fulfilling your wishes, with beauty that gets you raped, wealth that gets you robbed and murdered, and so on.
But it’s our Bible; people added what they needed, and some added a whole verse’s worth of words onto the prayer in Matthew. These words (a prolongation of verse 13 in the King James) are a ring-compositional shift back to God’s majesty and power, and in the King James are translated, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” (“Amen” is Hebrew for “truly.”) We can expect to be saved from the devil because of this deity we invoked already, but now there is more of the deity: he has not only a kingdom but power and glory. In the Greek, his possessive pronoun shifts from the end (verses 9–10, lines 2–4) to the front, because these things emphatically belong to him. And God is not just an entity coming into manifestation, invisible in the sky but with a name to be blessed, a kingdom to arrive, and a will to be enacted. His kingdom, power, and glory simply are, now and through eternity—with an emphasis on eternity: the expression that means literally “into the ages of-the ages” is particularly fervent and poetic. The way the end of the prayer clings and prolongs itself makes me think of Genesis 32:26, in which Jacob says to the angel, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
*1 A finite verb (“is,” “has gamboled,” “will splatter,” “Look!”) must have a subject, if only the impersonal “it” or the unexpressed “you”; in contrast, an infinitive or participle (to be, gamboling, besplattered) is effectively a noun or an adjective: no finite verb, no subject necessary.
*2 In Part Two, I use this clause to show a variety of criteria for applying practical considerations to translation choices (beginning on this page).
*3 “Sentence” is a term of mere convenience, based on European notions of rounded out or “periodic” syntax; in construing the Bible, the notion of a “sentence” is also based on the Renaissance division of the text into numbered “verses” according to scholarly judgment of where each natural pause came. But admittedly, “sentences” and “verses” are very convenient for discussing the Bible.
*4 There are separate verbal forms for actions that are repetitive, or perhaps even frustrating or pointless, as well as for clearer categories like intensive, causative, passive, and reflexive.
*5 I say this even of Paul of Tarsus, who, though he was a true original author, came late to the apostolic scene and had to deal with many things that had been said if not written already about the new religious movement—and of course he drew on Jewish Scripture, primarily that of the Septuagint Greek translation.
*6 It’s important to note, however, that the last clause (“For thine is the kingdom…”) of Matthew 6:13 is absent in Catholic Bibles; this is one place where the Protestant and Catholic Scriptures are significantly different.
*7 In fact, the Psalms as quoted in Greek in the New Testament look to me almost like the lyrics of Broadway musicals: they are sometimes bunched into stanzas with an overt, jingly structure.
*8 I am going by the Greek layout—and I follow it throughout my literal translation and transliteration in Part Three—not the much later verse numbers, shown everywhere in my book on the left, as is conventional.
*9 Classical Greek prefers possessive adjectives such as “your” and “our”; New Testament Greek’s possessive pronouns are stronger both in their longer vowel sounds and in their position after nouns, which is often at the emphatic end of a phrase, clause, or sentence.
*10 This grammatical form of the words “the evil [one/thing]” does not allow certainty as to whether this entity is neuter or masculine, but in most places where the form occurs, the context dictates that it’s masculine.