Slouching Toward Somewhere
(with apologies to Robert Bork)
March 18, 2023
(a six-minute read...better buckle up)
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51
We had planned to walk through Jeremiah for as long as it took. 52 chapters. 1364 verses. 33,000 words. We’ve made it to the beginning of Chapter 3 after a week (and we even skipped chapter 1). As we said, this is going to be a while. Pull up a chair. Have a coffee. And be ready for detours…like today’s. The Whitman poem refers to our contradictory ways: we are staying with Jeremiah, until we are NOT staying with Jeremiah. Which brings us to today: Judges. Along with Jeremiah, we are also reading Judges. Chapter 13 has caught our easily-caught attention.
Chapter 13 tells the story of Samson’s (SHIMSHON) birth. It is a familiar enough story if you’ve been to Sunday School. Bob and Larry have not yet told it, but it has been told many times in many ways by many artists, from Handel to Saint-Saëns to Cecil B DeMille. There are even tee shirts. Horrible, cheesy, awful tee shirts. We all know Samson’s story quite well. But in reading it today, I was riveted to the Text in a new way. Let’s take a detour.
Chapter 13 begins as do so many stories in the Book of Judges: “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD…”
There are a few things to pick up on in this opening line of the Text. First, you will note that this is not the first – nor the last – time Israel will do evil in the LORD’s eyes. Second, you should remark that a familiar word is prominent in this and all verses which begin stories of Judges: AYIN (עַיִן). We will not re-tread a discussion on AYIN. Read yesterday’s post. Instead, we’d like to draw your attention to three words in this verse that have significant connotations for how you read the Text: again, did, and evil.
Let’s begin with “again”. In Hebrew, there are many ways the authors use to describe the phenomenon of “once more”. For instance, OD (עוֹד) is used 486 times to express the idea. The verb SHUB (שׁוּב) means “to turn back or return” and appears over 1000 times in the Hebrew Bible. It can mean “again”. We will discuss SHUB when we return to Jeremiah (see what we did there?). SHANAH (שָׁנָה) means “to repeat, to do again”. It uses the same three Hebrew consonants as the word for “a year”; the only difference is the vowels. But the word used here is none of those. Rather, it is YASAPH (יָסַף).
YASAPH is a verb that occurs 211 times in the Hebrew Bible. It primarily means “to add”. Does it sound familiar? It should. In Genesis 30:24, it is used twice, once as a verb and once as a noun (quoting from the ESV because it preserves the Hebraic way of saying this).
“And she called his name JOSEPH (יוֹסֵף), saying, ‘May the LORD ADD (יָסַף) to me another son!’”
The upper case words above – JOSEPH and ADD – are from the same root word: YASAPH. And each uses the same three Hebrew consonants, which you can plainly see.
A quick sidebar on the letter “J” might be helpful here. (If you already know the story, feel free to skip ahead. This might lead to TL|DR.)
Translating from one language to another must always consider each language's rules and limitations. We can see it in modern language translations, for example, where the simple English imperative “run away” has many options in Spanish, French, or German. Which option should you choose?
Then there are added challenges with the Hebrew Bible. To begin with, we have the problem of scale. As previously mentioned, our modern English vocabulary contains over 1,000,000 words (and is growing by the day), while Biblical Hebrew only has about 8600 words. And they are fixed in number. Language is constantly evolving, with new words being added, and even existing words changing their meaning over time. We can experience this firsthand simply by observing the plethora of English translations available to read.
Moreover, significant cultural and historical hurdles must be surmounted to effectively translate the ancient Biblical Text into modern English. How do you convey an ancient worldview in modern terms in ways that are accurate, to say nothing of being meaningful or useful?
Add to this the fact that Biblical Hebrew is written without vowels. The vowel sounds are conveyed by a sort of standardized code of dots and dashes – called NIKUDIM – that was added in the Middle Ages. So the standard three characters of SH-L-M (or in Hebrew characters, שּׁﬥﬦ) can be rendered into many words. SHALAM (שָׁלַם) is a verb meaning “to be complete”. SHELAM (שְׁלָם) is a noun that means “welfare or prosperity” SHELEM (שֶׁלֶם) is also a noun, but it means a peace offering or sacrifice. SHALEM (שָׁלֵם) is an adjective that means “complete or safe”. Finally, you have probably already figured out that these three characters also lie behind the Hebrew word for “peace”, which is SHALOM.
Finally, you need to render an ancient alphabet into modern English, and there is not a one-for-one correlation between the characters. This process, called “transliteration”, attempts to render the language phonetically. It is precisely why you will see the Jewish Winter holiday spelled variously as Hannukah or Channukah or even other ways.
Translation is very hard work.
Now, let’s SHUB (return) to YASAPH, and it is an alphabetic challenge that has confounded English readers for 400 years.
There is no letter “J” in Hebrew. When the first English translations of the Bible began to appear in the 1500s, they substituted the Hebrew YOD (י) for the newly emerging English letter “j”. A long and circuitous story explains how and why this happened. You can read about it here (https://tinyurl.com/5n6uz6y7) and here (https://tinyurl.com/ycktncs2). The practical upshot is that not only does the very Hebraic YOSEPH get turned into the common English Joseph, but also YAAKOB gets rendered into Jacob. Most seriously, the Holy Name – the four letters of the Tetragrammaton Y-H-V-H – gets converted into the execrable Jehovah, a word that does not exist in any way, shape, or form in Hebrew. (If you have any friends who use it, immediately strike them about the head and shoulders, and then gently correct their ignorance. And if those friendly missionaries from the Watchtower cult come to your door, you can point out how their translation of the Text is garbage.)
Now, where were we before we digressed? Oh, yes! YASAPH in Judges 13!
Why the author chooses one word over others which convey similar meanings is one we cannot answer with fixed certainty. But we can speculate here why the Divine Author, blessed be He, chose YASAPH instead of OD or SHANAH.
SHANAH means “again”. But it is also the word behind the Hebrew term for the number two: SHENI (שֵׁנִי). Does the Book of Judges tell a story where G-d’s people only do evil twice? Would that connotation be desired here? So SHANAH does not work because Israel are repeat offenders, not just “second offenders”.
The other candidate here -- OD (עוֹד) – certainly would work in this verse. In fact, OD is used in Chapter 13 several times to express the idea of “again” (13:8,9, 21). Why use YASAPH here, as well as in every other reference in Judges where Israel again does evil in G-d’s eyes?
YASAPH connotes adding, while the other two signify more repetition. Perhaps the author wants the audience to take away the sense of compounding the evil. It is not simply continuing or repeating. Rather, it is adding on – or building upon – the evil that was done by their fathers.
There is a metre to this repetition that we are meant to see and consider.
YASAPH is used again near the end of the chapter, where the Text informs us:
“When the angel of the LORD did not show himself AGAIN to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realised that it was the angel of the LORD.”
Next up in this detour through Judges 13 are “did” and “evil” from verse 1. Understanding these two terms will have enormous significance for your reading of Scripture.
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