Voices In My Head Podcast Episode 318: Dr. Julie Galambush - Hidden Truths: Why Translators Intentio

This is Rick Lee James, and the music you are hearing is from my new album, Thunder. The title track, Thunder, is a never-before-released song by the late Rich Mullins. There are also 12 other tracks made up of original music, hymns, and readings to guide the listener on a journey. You can buy Thunder today on clear vinyl and CD, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, and almost every other music streaming service. Thunder, hear it today at rickleejames.com. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay. Where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm very glad that you're back with us again this week. This is gonna be kind of a part 2, uh, from last week's episode with Dr. Julie Gallambush I had the privilege of going to a few of her talks when she was here in town in Springfield, Ohio at Temple Shalom last week. And last week, as you know if you listened in, she gave a talk on Luke-Acts and the creation of Christianity. She was gracious enough to allow me to record it and play it here on the podcast. And I asked her if it would be okay. The following night she did a talk on the hidden truths, why translators intentionally mistranslate the Bible. And it was mostly on the Hebrew passages and it was fascinating time to listen to her, and she's such a master of the Old Testament languages. And it was interesting to hear some of the reasons why certain passages get translated in different ways, some of them being ethical reasons, some of them being language translations, some of them being theological reasons. And it was fascinating to hear why and when those type things happen. So I asked her again if I could I have the talk that she did that evening and use it on the Voices in My Head podcast, and she was so gracious and kind to allow me to do that. So I want to recommend to you once more her book, The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book. And you can find links on voicesinmyheadpodcast.com where you can buy that book and find out more. About Dr. Julie Gallenbush. Again, tonight, as with last week, the introduction you're going to hear is by Rabbi Cary Kosberg, a friend of mine, and he's been on the show a few times before. He's giving the introduction to the evening and introduction to Dr. Julie Gallenbush, and then she will go into her talk. Now, just so you'll know, you'll probably hear me whisper at one point throughout the presentation. I'm trying to let the listener know what's going on. But she is doing a PowerPoint show, and so there are things you will not be able to see, but she is talking about. She does go on and off the mic, as with last week's episode, so there's times it's probably going to be a little easier to understand than others. But I think overall we were able to capture some good audio quality this week. So sit back and maybe take notes if you want to and enjoy this week's episode of Voices in My Head. Again, I want to thank Dr. Julie Gallenbush and Temple Shalom here in Springfield, Ohio, and Rabbi Cary Kosberg for allowing this to happen and letting me be a part of this very great event that brought our community together. All right, God bless, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. This episode of Voices in My Head is brought to you by Podbean. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile-ready right from the start. Visit podbean.com/voices to find out more. That's podbean.com/voices.

Rabbi here at Temple Shalom. Uh, before we begin our program tonight, uh, it's important for us to say that tonight marks the beginning of Yom Hashoah, which is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women, and children who were murdered by the Nazis because they were Jews, and the 5 million non-Jews who also lost their lives under the Nazis. The persecution of Jews by the Nazis was qualitatively different from persecutions that preceded it. Nazi Jew hatred was not based on religious ideology, but rather on racial ideology. In times past, Jews effectively— who effectively stopped being Jews by converting to Christianity usually avoided continued persecution. But in areas controlled by the Nazis, there was nothing a Jew could do to escape persecution, and ultimately death. And of course, one of the most poignant examples of this reality is the story of Edith Stein, a woman who was born a Jew, converted to Catholicism, became a nun, but was still rounded up with other Jews in the Netherlands and died at Auschwitz because she was deemed to be irredeemably Jewish. To be sure, Nazi racial antisemitism has its roots in the religious antisemitism that was prevalent in Europe for 19 centuries. And as was mentioned last night, that religious antisemitism often used scriptural passages as proof texts to fuel not godly love but demonic hatred. And yet, Hatred instead of love has often been a byproduct of disagreements about scripture's meaning, even within the Jewish and Christian communities themselves. With different interpretations and understandings of scripture, it's interpreted often causing serious intrafaith squabbles within our religious communities respectively. Today, a lot of us disagree about how to read Scripture. Most of us, not knowing Biblical Hebrew or Greek, read Scripture in translation, sometimes in a translation of a translation. And even then, folks often argue about which translation is authentic. We sometimes forget that a translation of a text is really someone's interpretation of the original text, and that creates problems. So this evening we're going to hear more about the phenomenon of biblical translation, specifically about the biblical mistranslations and why they occur, discerning how misunderstandings can cause fear, suspicion, and hatred, and how clear understandings can promote amity and cooperation. In lieu of a formal memorial service tonight, we dedicate tonight's program to the memory of the 6 million who most likely would have fared better had they not been the victims of fear, suspicion, and hatred that gripped a whole culture. Our speaker tonight is Dr. Julie Gallenbush, who is Associate Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. Dr. Gallagher holds a PhD in Old Testament Studies from Emory University and a Master of Divinity from Yale University. Formerly an ordained American Baptist minister, she is a convert to Judaism and a member of the Temple Brothers Sholem in Falls Church, Virginia. Besides her book, The Reluctant Parting, of which we still have a copy for sale, she has written extensively contributing to the book, The Jewish Unity of the New Testament, and is the author of numerous other scholarly works, most recently Commentary on Genesis.

Happy Yom Kippur Shabbat. Thank you again, Jerry, and thank you all for coming out in spite of the storm. Tonight's talk does not bear directly on Yom HaShoah and those events. That said, I think we'll be able to connect it as we go along. Those of us who were here at lunch today, we talked a lot about otherness and our tolerance for otherness. And I honestly, I think that this issue of intentional Bible mistranslation is about the inability to tolerate otherness. And there's some other reasons, but I think the largest one is that the Bible does not always say what the people who are translating it believe it should say. That ancient Israel was far more foreign to us and I'm working exclusively with the Hebrew Bible unless we have time for some New Testament tonight. But the New Testament has fewer of these issues going on, I think, for reasons we can get into. But anyway, ancient Israel was not— they would not recognize modern Jews and Christians. They would be, I think, very confused by us. Their categories were quite different. And we tend to resist with that, particularly if we're translating for pious reasons, and that is most biblical translations are done for pious reasons. And so here I am giving away my whole argument at the beginning, oops, but that, I think that fear of otherness and anxiety about otherness is actually at the heart of what I'm talking about tonight. I do want to give you what people now call a trigger warning. In that one of the things I want to talk about is the way the name of God is represented in translations. And when I am worshipping in a synagogue, I read the Tetragrammaton, Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, the name of God, of Israel's God, I read it as Adonai, as my congregation does. When I am teaching as a scholar, I'm We're talking about ancient Israel, and the Israelites said the name of their gods, or their god, well, both, another story. They couldn't have taken an oath unless they spoke the name of God. They take the oath in the name of their God, and that, we don't know for sure how it was pronounced, but the standard pronunciation that we work with today is Yahweh. And I'll be using that. And so if it's offensive, you might not want to raise your hand in public if it's offensive, but I don't know a way around that. Because I think it's a very important issue. But that's the warning that you get. Let's go. Translation, traduttore, traduttore, to translate is to do it again. And it didn't move. Come on, move. There we go. Yes. Move back one again. There's a PowerPoint display. I mean, I might. Let's see. Is it just that taking that long, do you think, Doug, to think about it? I'm not sure.

But remember positive is backwards?

Yes. I'm hoping to go backwards one. It's not doing it. And I'll say beep, you know. I actually don't need the one before. That is just this little, you know, cartoon telling you to translate is to betray. Many translation problems are inevitable because there is no English equivalent. Some translation problems are inevitable because we simply don't know what the original Hebrew or Greek word means. But I'm talking tonight about what contemporary translators choose to hide from unsuspecting readers when they translate the Bible. And as I'm sure you can imagine, that's a kind of distressing thing to ponder, that you could be reading your translation and not knowing when they're actually kind of leading you astray. In passing, I'll mention the category of mistranslation that I think is just due to a tin ear on the part of the translator. Beep. Yes, there we are. That is the innocent tone-deaf translation. The case of vav. There is this little Hebrew particle that we usually take to mean 'and,' But here's the bad news. This little particle can mean and, then, but, next, even however, depending on context. And as you can see, the question of whether you, or so, if you translate it so, it means one thing, and if you translate it but, it means something entirely different. And we have no way to know other in context what the authors meant. So I'll do a quick example of the vav problem here. If I get a beep, sorry. So, oh, I should have gotten it so I can see it because I can't see my own slide. That's all right. The word of God came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, go at once to Nineveh, that great city and proclaim judgment upon it, for their wickedness has come before me. In most translations, published translations, this happens to be the New Revised Standard, it says, Jonah, however, started out to flee from Tarshish, to Tarshish, out of the Lord's presence. Okay, very straightforward. God said, go talk to Nineveh, but Jonah ran away. However, my personal thought about Jonah, given how I read the whole book, is that it would be far better to translate it, the Lord said, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim what I'm telling you against it because they're so wicked. So Jonah went out to flee to Tarshish. You see the difference? One of them is very straightforward and logical. And the other one gives you this little twist, right? Here's a prophet, God calls him, tells him to go, this same language shows up with Elijah and Elisha throughout the Bible, and so here you've got an author who is tweaking it on you, playing a little joke. Say, oh yeah, so he went out in the opposite direction, and of course inevitably a translator had to choose how to translate it, translated, and because it's the Bible, translators tend to do it in the most serious and straightforward possible way. Ah, yes, the other example. David said to Uriah, this is, um, David has been sleeping with Uriah's wife Bathsheba, he wants Uriah to come, he brings him home from the front hoping that he will he will sleep with Bathsheba and they will think that the child Bathsheba is carrying is the child of her husband rather than David's child. You all know the story well enough to track that, okay. And here's how it works with that one little vav to be translated. Then David said to Uriah, then David said to Uriah, go down to your house and bathe your feet. But Uriah slept at the entrance of the royal palace along with the other officers of his lord and did not go down to his house. Or you can have, then David said to Uriah, go down to your house and bathe your feet. So Uriah slept at the entrance of the royal palace. And it gives you that moment of suspense, what's Uriah going to do, right? It tends to get washed out in Bible translation. Translations, and I think it's just because, I don't want to say we're taking the Bible too seriously, but I think we don't like the idea that the biblical authors were witty, right? That's not so familiar to most of us, but gosh, read Amos sometime if you want dry wit. These are, I'd say, innocent, I think, translations, maybe they reflect a tin ear, but I think they're innocent. What I want to look at are the blatant changes to the meaning of the text that are quite, um, the translators knew what they were doing. I want to look, beep, at three motivations for these changes. These are theology, moral ethical concerns, and the traditional draw of previous translations. Theology, the biblical authors' theology, that is their belief about the nature of God, their beliefs were simply different from those of most modern translators. Yes, people's beliefs have actually changed over the past 2,500 or 3,000 years, And translators tend to want to find ways around the inconvenient bits to make the text conform to their theology. It's a strong temptation. I could give you— how long do you want to be here tonight? Never mind. Okay, well, ethics, no surprise, the ethics of the biblical authors were also different in many ways from those of most modern people. And so I think this one is particularly ironic, but I think that out of a certain respect for the Bible, translators tweak the text, change the meaning in order to soften or even correct aspects of the text that the translator finds morally objectionable. And I'll give you examples in a minute. The issue of traditional translations I think is almost a reflexive or mechanical kind of issue. Of the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, thank you. There are many ways to translate that second half, and yet we feel it as I shall not want, right? It doesn't quite say what we want it to say, say in modern English, "I will not be in need," right? But we keep it, we love it, it's just in our blood, and so those tend to stay around. But sometimes that traditional pull does affect the translation in important ways. Now these three motives, theology, ethics, and tradition are not separate from each other. In fact, I think theology really sort of governs all of them, but I want to discuss each of them separately for now. Doug, theology.

There it is.

Of the three categories, theology is by far the overriding reason for translating the text as saying something other than what it says. The most important theological factor I I think accounting for bad translation of the Hebrew Bible is monotheism. Now that may sound very strange to you, how does monotheism lead to bad translation? Oh, I hate to even say it, the problem is that very, very few of the biblical authors were monotheists. I'm going to hide under the podium here as I say that, because this is, you know, I think for those of us who work with this as scholars regularly, it's very obvious, but it's so controversial to say it. When you get to the latest text in the Hebrew Bible, Second Isaiah, you see, you not only see monotheism, but you see an argument for monotheism. If you take a look at Isaiah 45, You've got God saying, "I am Yahweh, there is no other. Besides me there is no God." And he repeats that in different words 4 or 5 times within a short chapter, right? Because he's insisting on it. You need to know this. Most of the Bible does not read that way. Instead you get Exodus 15 at the Red Sea, "mi kamah ha'aretz," "Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods?" Okay, somebody want to comment on that? We've got gods. I mean, the correct answer to the question, of course, is nobody. Nobody.

Nobody.

But I think that's sort of the equivalent of saying, we're number one, right? There's nobody like you, you're the best god there is. It's not how we tend to process it, but it's there. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, sure. You said that Wasn't a big part of Jewish belief in monotheistic? Wasn't a big part of Jewish belief monotheistic? The answer depends on when you're talking about. Translating the Old Testament or something like that. Oh, I think for the people writing it, well, the big, for folks translating it, yes, monotheism is a very big deal. For the folks who wrote it, Wrote it, no. And I'll go ahead and answer the question now. Most of the biblical authors are arguing and pushing very hard for something biblical scholars tend to call monolatry. I wish I had a slide for it. I don't. Hold your fingers there, Doug. They're arguing for monolatry or henotheism. We tend not to use the word henotheism because it has has a wide range of meanings, but monolatry is a little easier to, I think, get one's head around. It's the worship of one God. That means the worship of one God despite the existence of other gods. You're limiting yourself to one God. And actually Exodus 20 is the perfect example of that because it's effectively— this is the Ten Commandments— and it is a treaty between God and Israel in which the first promise is that they won't worship any other gods. It is modeled on Hittite and Assyrian vassal treaties in which the Assyrian monarch is going to come in, he conquers you, and he makes you swear that you will not have any other rulers besides him. Does he make you swear that because there aren't any other rulers in the available? No, no, no. He's making you swear that because there are other rulers. The same literary form and sort of social structure, I'm on a blackboard now, that same form is used in a marriage contract in which the wife swears complete and exclusive loyalty to the husband because there are no other men, no, because there are. And actually the parallels between those go beyond that and are quite interesting. But you shall have no other gods in my presence is not monotheism. We read it as monotheism. Why do we read it as monotheism? It's the Bible. It's the source of monotheism. Of course it's— we have a very hard time letting go of the Bible as something we, for the last 1,000 years and more, you know, have owned in some sense as a monotheistic text. In fact, when the Israelites become monotheists, they've got a job to do to struggle with their text, because the Bible is already sacred, accepted as sacred, but it's not monotheistic. And so, you know, as you work with the text, you can see them struggling with that in all sorts of places. So monotheism is a big problem for translation. Yeah?

May I ask, I've seen another translation, "Who is like you, Adonai, among the powers that are worshipped?" Is that a mistranslation also?

It's a different passage, and I can't remember off the top of my head which one that is, but no, it's God's. Elohim, we'll see this in a few other places, that Elohim, God, is sometimes translated as powers, it's sometimes translated as judges, and it's sometimes translated kings. Why? Because they didn't like the word that was there. They didn't like it being God. They were not comfortable with the actual word. And that really, that is the core reason, I'm afraid. Why are there other locations in 2 Kings where Elohim is used simply as powers? About God, so God was all gods. Well, I don't know, certainly Elohim becomes a name that is used for Israel's God. It's used as a name. It's a plural form, but Hebrew plurals can be kind of tricky, right? Yerushalayim is plural, or Yeruul. It doesn't mean there are many Jerusalems. It's a sort of an older grammatical problem that shows up there. And so Elohim Elohim in Hebrew, the word we'll see later that is translated gods, can mean a god, it's one Elohim, many gods, Elohim, or it can be used as a name. In some regards it's a little like the way we might use mom or dad. It's not a name, but we can use it as a name, and that seems to be the way that they're using that. Whether it is used that way to try and incorporate all gods, as if we don't have yet, I have never seen an argument that really got onto the table. I would say that it's a good piece of information, but it's just information. It's not actually a rationale. They use it to mean all three. We would never do that, so we don't want them to have done that. Henry? Yes, yes, the royal we, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Although it's always used with singulars in the Bible. They don't use it as a we, but yes, the King James folks liked it that way. Let's see, where are we? Some examples on the screen, we've got the, oh, we have one more. Psalm 97, I think, is really quite dramatic, and most of us don't realize that it's there. All gods— we're talking about our God Yahweh— all gods bow down before him. What does this say? This is your standard ancient Near Eastern model of a high god system. We see this in Assyrian texts, particularly in the 8th century BCE, all over the place, where they'll say Ashur, You are the true god, you are sometimes even the one god, all the gods acknowledge that you are god, right? And so they're living in this funny place where they can sort of talk monotheism when they want to, but clearly they're still talking polytheism at the same time. I'll give you a tacky example, you get the feeling it's almost like saying, "Oh baby, you're the only one." That's really appropriate, actually. Well, I think it is, actually. I mean, serious assyriologists have made that suggestion. It's not just off the top of my head. But that they, it is like that, that idea that Elohim incorporates all of them. And you see some texts about Marduk, the Babylonian high god, that seem to do that. And they say, oh yes, you are the You are the strength of this god, and you are the brightness of that god, and you are the eyes of this god. And in a sense, they're clumping them all together, but they're not saying those other gods don't exist. They're in that in-between place. Yes? It kind of seems to me that we have multiple gods also. Yes. The god of fame, the god of money, Sex, the meaning of fun. Whoa! I mean, sure. Mary Kate. Gods in the sense of them being high values that really jerk us around, so to speak, that control our actions and that we don't often question the importance of acting in accordance with those values. Culturally, we would never say they are our gods or worship them, but sure, absolutely. In a sense, we're all idolaters. Yeah, yes. But I mean, for them it's much more specific. They know the names of these gods. Well, Martin Luther said, "Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god." Well, exactly. I think that is the same point. Now for them, In ancient Israel they didn't need to do that because they had other gods. There is a god of childbirth and a goddess of healing, and they had gods for different occasions, just as the Mesopotamians did and the folks, other Canaanites did. And so they actually, quite literally, those were their gods as well as their high god Yahweh. Keep going a little bit. I could make this a long talk about monotheism, but it's supposed to be translation, so I don't want to go there. But yeah. Is this— seems very familiar to me. My God is a jealous God. Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Yes. If we didn't know all the things that we— that makes sense within this. Yes. Yes. Places in the Bible that just seem out of step. Yes, where Yahweh says he's a jealous God, there's somebody for him to be jealous of. Absolutely. Yeah, he is, he is claiming his turf, and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go.

Particularly when he does stuff that the other gods didn't do for Israel.

When he does stuff that the other gods couldn't do for Israel, or when Israel is politically, nationally in trouble, being in one way or another abused by another country and its gods, in those periods you get texts in which Yahweh is saying, "Oh yeah, I'll show you who's the god around here." I mean, there's very much a sense— well, I'll back up a minute and just briefly say, in antiquity, certainly Mesopotamia and Canaan, when people go to war, their gods lead them, right? The high god by this period is always a war god, among other things, sometimes also a storm god. But the gods are in a way battling in heaven at the same time that their people are battling on earth. But that means that if your god, or if you guys beat me, I'm sure you would too, then your God has just whooped my God, and my God has been shamed, and I've been shamed, and I have to somehow deal with that. And because Israel was not a particularly powerful nation, certainly, oh, when the Babylonians and the Assyrians come in and take over, they need religious texts that will help them believe that their God is still in charge, and that's a lot of what we're seeing in the Bible. But that's, alright, that's a bit of a diversion from translation, but it's also part of what's sitting behind it. Give me another slide. Another image of it, the Divine Council. Every ancient Near Eastern religion that we know of, if we're talking southern Mesopotamia, northern Mesopotamia, Ugarit, other Canaanite areas, has a council of gods, and the high god presides over this council. Clearly the Israelites also had a council, we just didn't grow up thinking about it, but it's there in the text. So in 1 Kings 22, The prophet is saying, I saw Yahweh seated on his throne with all the hosts, the tsaba'ot, it's armies literally, around him or standing before him, and Yahweh asked, who will entice Ahab so that he'll go and get killed at Ramoth Gilead? Okay, he's got his advisors, right, it's a cabinet meeting, and he's saying, okay guys, I need an idea. I need some ideas, how are we going to get Ahab killed? And you know, one guy says, I'll do it, I'll do it, and they move forward. Beep, done, beep. The biblical authors believed Israel was to worship only one God, but this does not mean that other gods did not exist. I'm backtracking a little, because it's in my notes, so I'll say it, right? Modern translators almost always are folks who consider the Bible scripture, holy, and therefore correct, at least when it comes to God. And so it's very, very hard not to translate the polytheism out of the text, to clean it up and make it look like it's supposed to look, namely like monotheism. So I think polytheism, biblical polytheism, is one of the main motives for sanitizing the text via translation. El, oh El. El is the old creator god of the Canaanite religion and probably was the earliest god of the Israelites, the earliest high god of the Israelites. And there's one very simple piece of data on this that all of you know, whether you have thought about it or not. What's the name of the people? Yisrael. It is not Yisra Yahweh or Yisra Yah, it's Yisrael, El struggles. And the idea that they would have been named after a high god who wasn't their high god is is in itself very daunting. We also have other things in the text, like this wonderful passage in Genesis 33, where Jacob set up an altar there and called it El Elohe Yisrael. That is the translation in Tanakh, the new Jewish Publication Society translation that some of you walked in carrying a copy of be the blue one, yeah? You can hold it up, yeah, that one, right? And that's correct, the person did not choose to translate 'El Elohe Yisrael,' but what it means is 'El, the God of Israel.' El, you read any Ugaritic text and El is is there on his throne doing his stuff, he's not Yahweh. And, you know, the money is on the idea that this group started out as Canaanites worshiping El as their high god, and only later did Yahweh, a god who was from the south, join them and replace El as the high god. There's a NOVA special on this, The Bible's Buried Secrets, that I think does a nice job. If you want to, you know, go, it's on YouTube and such. You read, there are a lot of texts, a suspicious number of texts in the Bible that talk about Yahweh coming from the south. Where is Yahweh's holy mountain? Sinai. Sinai. If that's it, why doesn't he live at home? Right? I mean, if he's the God of Israel and those are his people, why is he at home? You know, this is his summer home? This is really hot. And other texts talk about Yahweh came from Teman, Yahweh came from Paran, like Deborah's song and such. Some of the oldest parts of the Bible talk about Yahweh coming from that area in the south. And so our hunch is that he is actually not a native Canaanite god, who comes in and becomes the high god of an older people who had El as their high god.

Does that work?

Like last night, I will say stop me if I'm not making sense. Yeah? You are making perfect sense. I'll stop there. I wonder, like in Hinduism, see God in all creation. Some forms, yeah. And so there could be the God of this and the God of that. Yes, yes. Okay, so what kind of a God is El? Because we're referring to him as him as if he was a person. Oh yeah, oh yeah. So what was the Jewish idea of God? Part of the problem in answering this, what is the Jewish idea of God and why do we We call him him. Even if we're politically correct, somebody like me is going to call him him because he was male. He had a wife, we'll get there. When I think, what is their idea of God? I can't answer it because their idea of God changes. And so I can't even pinpoint point in what century are they having this idea, it's also the case that in a given century different people are going to have different ideas of God. If you're familiar with the Hebrew Bible and Josiah's reforms, getting people not to worship anymore any of the other traditional gods, but only worship Yahweh, those didn't last very well. People backslid all over the place. And there's a wonderful passage I don't have a slide of. Jeremiah 44, go to Jeremiah 44 when you get the chance and start reading at about verse 16. This is after Josiah's reform, but only about 30 years after Josiah has said, really by imperial decree, royal decree, you're not allowed to worship the other gods. Jeremiah is is with some folks who during the exile have been taken off or fled to Egypt. And he's really mad at them, and he calls out the men because their wives have been making offerings to the Queen of Heaven, probably the traditional Israelite consort, wife of Yahweh, okay? They've been making offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and Jeremiah says, tell your wife to knock it off. And the men say, "As for this word from Yahweh, we're not gonna listen to you." It's like, whoa! They're not ashamed. They're like, "We're not gonna listen to you. We will go on making our offerings to the Queen of Heaven, just as our ancestors and our kings have always done in the streets of Judah and Jerusalem." Okay, we're gonna practice that old old-time religion, honey. Don't you tell me I have to stop worshiping the other gods. And then the kicker is they say, ever since we stopped worshiping the Queen of Heaven, we have had nothing but— it's something like war and famine and disaster. And you look at it, you've got Josiah's reforms about 623. By 597, the Babylonians come in and are taking the king off. And you've got this tiny little precious moment of history where somebody has said, you're only going to worship this one God. They seem to have tried it. It didn't work. And they're saying it's baloney. They're negotiating this. They have theological fights the way we have theological fights, right? And so those things get submerged because we We want to see them, we want to see them be like us. We don't want to let them be people whose religion was actually quite foreign to what modern Jews and Christians practice. But that's the fun, right, is to see these places where that nugget is still somehow embedded in the text and nobody thought to edit it out. All right, enough of that. I'm never going to get to the end if I talk about MonothEism, I could talk about monotheism all night. So, need a new slide for sure. One of the premier examples of biblical polytheism, which I dearly love, that is not necessarily— oh, no, wrong slide. This is El. Didn't realize it was there. No, no, I love this one, actually. This is an image of El, the Canaanite creator god, he knows his creator. Baal, the other god that is very big in Canaanite religion, is a war god. And Yahweh comes in and actually combines the traits of El and Baal. So he is both the creator and a war protector god, and a storm god, which Baal is. And so you can see him sort of like a conglomerating the traits of the other gods pretty early on. And this is the beginning of Psalm 82 that we're going to take a look at, and it's the council of gods. Elohim has taken his place in edat El, in the council of El, and everybody argues over the relationship between how you work with Elohim and El in that birth. 'in the midst of the Elohim he gives judgment.' So here you see, this is, it's a psalm, but it's very much the Canaanite model. He's taking his place as the head of the board, right? He comes in, here's the council of the gods. This is a great little Assyrian cylinder seal, a stone seal that you would roll on wax, and you can tell, here's your Hayyad, I think in this case it's actually Asherah, but the other gods are all lined up, and you can always, in case you just find an Assyrian inscription, you know, like this in the street, you can tell a god because they have horns on their hats. That's the key. So that's the council of God talking to Asherah in this case. Okay, next slide. Same song. Elohim has taken his place in the council of El. In the midst of the gods he gives judgment. How has that been translated? Tanakh has. God stands in the divine assembly. Among the divine beings he pronounces judgment. Okay, why translate Elohim divine beings? You want angels in there also. Or something like that, but not gods. Exactly, they're not, yeah, they can be divine beings, but not gods. If you spend enough time trying to think of what it means to be a divine being but not a god, you know, you will get as crazy as I am, and you don't want that. New International Version, the most popular Protestant translation, the most popular translation in the world at this point, God presides in the great assembly, edat Elohim, or is it El, the edat El, the council of El, the great assembly. He's a senator, I don't know, you know, what's this great assembly, it doesn't say that. God presides in the great assembly, he renders judgment among the gods. And it has the scarce quote in there.

Why?

It's so blatant, right? Because the Bible cannot possibly say what it actually says. An earlier version of the NIV had judges. Because you can't, you have to find something other than what it says to put there. It is the, thank you, most maddening thing. The old JPS, the old Jewish Publication Society translation, God standeth in the congregation of God in the midst of the judges he judgeth. There's no shofetim, well at the end he gives judgment, but no, they can't be gods. Onward. Similarly, the goddess Asherah was widely worshipped as Yahweh's spouse, and that is something we've only been able to argue fairly conclusively in recent decades, since finding wonderful inscriptions like this one. How many of y'all are familiar with this inscription? This is on the Kutebet Ajsrud piece it's a jar about yay high, and it was probably inscribed, it was found down in that area near Kadesh Barnea, northeast Sinai, and it's probably late 9th century or early 8th century, and it has, it has this, it has an inscription, and it has images. The inscription up here, says, I bless you in the name of Yahweh and his Asherah. Okay? And so people have spent a few generations now trying to link up that inscription with the picture. Is this actually a picture of Yahweh and his Asherah? One tends to hope not. The theory sometimes has been, you know, this person is making music, she seems to be female, she has little circular breasts on, so far so good. This one has the little circular breasts on, is that Asherah? Maybe. The big problem, of course, right, they both seem to have penises. That part, It's a little, you know, a step too far. Some people have argued that they have little spotted lepers, leopard skins on, and this is the tail dangling down there. Honestly, bottom line, it doesn't matter because the relationship between the text and the image is such that they're almost certain that the text was there first and the image was maybe just graffiti, right? They may not, the person who put the the image there, might not have known how to read what the inscription said. But it says, I bless you in the name of Yahweh and his Asherah. And we have at least 3 other examples of inscriptions to Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah, Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah. That is Yahweh as worshiped at some sacred site, sort of like Our Lady of Lourdes, what Yahweh of Samaria, Yahweh of Teman, and the corresponding Asherah, that is his wife. Yeah? The bull, or whatever the bull connected with the early Canaanite bell, like an image connected, I've heard. Well, she's a cow because she's suckling the calf. And that is actually a common motif referring to a god or goddess. Throughout, again, throughout the ancient Near East. So it would be appropriate, but again, how does that, it looks like they're using a different utensil to make it there. So she's actually more appropriate than they are in a lot of ways. Good eye, yeah. Asherah, Asherah, Asherah. Next slide, please. Here we go, you were there, you're perfect. The fact that Asherah was widely worshiped as Yahweh's spouse is also, at least her connection to Asherah is attested in the biblical text as well as in these epigraphic remains, something that would be almost impossible to deduce from most English translations. Yeah? So you get 2 Kings 18, Hezekiah comes to the altar He cut down the Asherah in Jerusalem. This is what the Hebrew says, the Asherah. So somehow, presumably an image of Asherah. And this is not just in Jerusalem, it's actually in the temple. So the main cult center for the entire nation has an Asherah in it. The New International Version, he cut down the Asherah pole. Poles dedicated to Asherah. Maybe, but it doesn't say poles, it says Asherah. New Revised Standard Version, this sort of more, slightly more liberal, what has been called mainline Protestant translation says, he cut down the sacred pole. Well, I'm sorry, Again, it's like, what is wrong with your people? It says he cut down the Asherah, and yet they, they, Josiah and the other good kings all removed the Asherah from the Jerusalem Temple. There weren't that many good kings, and somehow in between all the good kings, she manages to sneak back in there so that they can take her out or cut her down. Down again. These translators are like helping Josiah with the job, right? They also are removing Asherah from the Jerusalem Temple by referring to a sacred pole when the text says Asherah. It's a very strange thing. 2 Kings 21, Manasseh, bad king, made an Asherah. Tanakh, New JPS, he made a sacred post. I'm just giving you all the bad news tonight here, right? You cannot trust the translators, because they want to help you, right? They're trying to save you in a way from the text, or save the text from itself. There we are, messenger gods, yes, yes, yes, we had a mention of angels earlier, right? The Hebrew word for a messenger is malach, so messengers are malachim. Malachim can be human messengers or divine messengers. In Greek, the translation of malachim is angeloi, which also can be human messengers or divine messengers. In biblical texts, well, in all the other ancient Near Eastern cultures that we know, messenger gods are the lowest rank of gods. You've got high gods, the husband and wife high god, then you've got that divine council who are very important gods, then you have gods that are like, you know, the gods of blacksmiths and the gods of, the god of gods of healing, but mostly gods of trades on the third level, and at the bottom are the messenger gods. And the messenger gods take messages back and forth between the other gods, okay, sort of a Hermes-y thing, but they don't actually go to talk to humans. In the Hebrew text, the messengers usually go between Yahweh and humans, so there's a slightly different function. But here you see, This is Shemesh, this is the sun god, and a messenger god has arrived to give a message, okay, the horns, got to have the horns. In the Bible, let's go next, see what I did, ah yes, in the Bible when the translators become monotheists, They simply decide that the English word angel, which the translation of malachim or angeloi, just means something different from what it meant. They decide that an angel is a category of its own as opposed to a god who happens to have the job of being a messenger, right? So I love this quotation from Barbara Porter, an Assyriologist, And she is writing here in the introduction to a book called What Is a God, which is an edited volume, an absolutely fascinating description of the ongoing problem in different cultures and then also in scholarship of defining what constitutes a God. And she says, this I have here, assertions of monotheism, she's talking Judaism, Christianity and Islam, assertions of monotheism do not typically result in any significant depopulation of the divine sphere at all. Okay, oops. People become monotheists, but they still have a crowded population up in that divine sphere. Um, no significant depopulation, but simply a reclassification of the divine sphere's still numerous inhabitants. Inhabitants. She's so droll. Divinity in all three of the monotheistic traditions continues to be highly multiple in its forms. It is simply that only one divine entity occupies the class of deity. Okay, that has been our strategy. So, I mean, you can probably name me some other divine beings who are understood to inhabit spiritual realms, whether they're heaven or not, like angels, um, the accuser, the accuser, yes, Satan, the devil, Iblis, whatever you're going to call them. You've got the bad guy there too, hanging out. The saints who intercede, they take messages to God actually. And so depending on your tradition, there's a whole bunch of people who are immortal at this point. And actually, messenger gods could, in ancient Mesopotamia, could be killed by the high god or any other powerful god. Gods could die in Mesopotamia. So they can't die of natural causes, which of course is also true of things like angels. They can only die if a higher god or the god wants them dead. We have very crowded heavens for people who are monotheists. And I think, again, most of our intentional mistranslation is a reflection of our unwillingness to let the Bible express something other than our own beliefs. Oh, I've got a long way to go, so we'll go. I couldn't resist, as we talked about earlier, I've done a lot of work about Ezekiel, and Ezekiel has some really, really raunchy parts that don't get translated very well, and this is actually God talking to his wife, the city of Jerusalem personified as the wife of Yahweh in this text, and he says, in most Tanakh and most translations, "You played the whore with your neighbors, the lustful Egyptians." I always picture them kind of dead, oh, the lusty Egyptians, you know. And it literally says, you were unfaithful with the Egyptians, your neighbors with the big flesh, lebasa, okay, your well-hung friends. And they just, obviously that's not appropriate in the Bible, so they just kind of take it out. I'm afraid in Ezekiel in particular there are many examples like that, and I won't go into them. We'll go into something far more serious than prudishness, and that's ethics. The example here is corrections on ethical grounds, and here we have something we talked about, those of us who were here at noon, places where Yahweh commands the Israelites to commit genocide, to kill everyone who breathes. The verb used is harām, which means to annihilate or utterly destroy. Some scholars have argued, and not impossible, that harām simply means to set something aside as a gift for God. This may be true, but it's relevant that this gift is always dead. Okay, you don't want me to set you aside for God because I have to kill you. That always means that if it's a person, they are dead. So you're seeing here, this is Joshua and the Israelites, and we're looking at the Tanakh translation. They captured Eglon on the same day and put him to the sword proscribing all the people that were in it. Wait, have you prescribed anybody lately? You take your prescription to the drugstore. Prescribe, right, to make something illegal or not allow it. So they declared them illegal? Nah, I need another slide. Well, they— they— I don't have the right slide. They destroyed them. They don't proscribe them, they killed them. And this is Deuteronomy 20 that we were talking about earlier, the command, as to the towns of these peoples Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let any living soul remain alive. You must proscribe them. Why would anyone? I'll whisper into the microphone. The only reason to use a weird word like proscribe that means nothing in this sentence is that you don't, is that you hate what the text says, right? We don't want to read about God commanding the Israelites to commit genocide, or in Joshua that they actually did it. We hate it so we we translate our way around it. Now, it may or may not be comforting to know that no historian who is working from a secular context believes that Israel ever did this. There is no evidence of the Joshua conquest, and even biblical evidence suggests that they did not do this. If you look at Ezra 9, um, Ezra is being written after the Babylonian exile, and so theoretically 1,000 years after Joshua wiped out all the Canaanites. And what's Ezra mad about? He's mad because the people in Israel are marrying Canaanite women, that they're marrying the Hivites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, all the people who died 1,000 years ago. And so even the biblical authors are telling this almost I'm not going to second-guess them here, but they do not actually see this as something that happened historically. You've still got the problem that it's something that God is commanding. I mean, it doesn't go away, but I don't think you can argue that the Israelites did it. Yes, the next issue is tradition, where translators simply replicate earlier translations, and I am going to I'm going to need to move through that rather quickly. Yeah, I'm not going to introduce it, I'm going to go straight to my first example, which is Satan, our buddy. The Hebrew Bible, so I need a new slide, no Satan in that slide, there he goes, okay. The Hebrew Bible includes a character called HaSatan, so Ha means the, and Satan, When it's a verb, it means to challenge something or test it, sometimes to oppose it. So he's roughly the challenger. It's a title, not a name. He is always HaSatan, the Satan. So there's a divine being who holds the position of being HaSatan. It's his job to oppose. And you can see, next slide, what he does. We're in Numbers 22, Balaam's donkey. And God's anger is kindled against Balaam, this prophet, so the malach, the messenger of Yahweh, took his stand in the road, lishtan lo, as his satan. Okay, the guy's going down on the road on his donkey, God sends a messenger to stand and block his way and challenge him.

Agent.

He does not send the messenger to be the devil. It is an agent of God that challenges and tests people. Onward. Onwards some more. Job. It's always translated Satan in Bibles, but one day the heavenly beings that is the bene Elohim, the sons of God, came to present themselves before Yahweh, and haSatan also came among them. Yahweh said to haSatan, where'd he come from? New RSV, Tanakh, New JPS, all translate it Satan with a capital S. It is not in the text. It's haSatan, the challenger. This guy, and there's no particular reason even to capitalize it. But in later tradition, we developed this tradition that there is an opponent, and we looked in the Bible and said, well, he should show up in the Bible if he exists, and we decided that this must be him. And so it comes to be a name. It's a strange sort of process here. I want to skip ahead though, because Because, oh well.

No.

Yeah, skip that one. And that one. I want to leave Satan. I think I've done enough there, though there's a lot to do. Who is Yahweh? The divine name. You will not, there is one major translation, the New Jerusalem Bible, which is a Catholic translation, translation writes Yahweh where it says Yahweh in the text. And this one is important enough that yes, I'm going to keep this over a little bit to talk about it. I just find it crucially important. In the Hebrew Bible, over at least 77 times Yahweh says, I am going to do X act of power or vengeance, and they will know 'When they know that I am Yahweh,' or 'you will know that I am Yahweh.' It literally occurs that way 77 times. There are variants on it. 'When they know I am Yahweh, I will such and such.' The divine name Yahweh is the most frequently used word in the Hebrew Bible. Okay, the name of God is the most common word, appearing over 6,500 times in the Bible. So God really, really wants you to know that his name is Yahweh, right? He keeps repeating it. So why do we remove it? I've got a few others here just as examples, right? Pharaoh will pursue, I'll beat up on him, I'll get glory, and they'll know I'm Yahweh, right? It's about his reputation, it's right about his credibility. Knowing that I'm Yahweh is knowing that I'm here and I'm somebody to be reckoned with, right? Let's see, Pharaoh of course doesn't know Yahweh at the beginning of this story, and so the whole point is he needs to know that I am Yahweh. Onward. Yes, you will know that I'm Yahweh already. At some point, we don't know when, we speculate, Jews decided that Yahweh was simply too holy even to pronounce his name, right? And so despite the biblical God's repeated effort to show his glory so that they know I'm Yahweh, the community decided to effectively forget that he is Yahweh. Now in worship situations where the name Yahweh appears, Jews read something else, typically Adonai, or often Adonai, which in English is a word that is translated as the Lord. And because of the Jewish tradition of saying Adonai, English translations— new slide here somewhere— typically translated "The Lord" with those funky all-capital letters. Because somehow when you see "LORD" in all capital letters, you're supposed to actually somehow know that that means Yahweh. Just because everybody knows that, right? From birth. I have up here a quotation which I've just lost in my text, so it's a good thing it's it's up there, from the introduction to the New Revised Standard Version, okay, again the most popular translation in what have been called mainline Protestant churches. This appears at the beginning of every copy of the NRSV. And it says, careful readers will notice that here and there in the Old Testament The word Yahweh, in certain cases God in all caps, is printed in capital letters. Reread the beginning of that. Careful readers will notice that here and there, how many times? 6,500 times. Here and there it's written the Lord or God. This represents the traditional English manner, or manner in English, English versions, of rendering the divine name, the Tetragrammaton, 4 letters, the usual, oh, here it comes, the use of any proper name for the one and only God as though there were other gods from whom the true God had to be distinguished, who would do that, began to be discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is appropriate for the universal faith of the Christian church. Okay, what did the NRSV translators just tell you? That the biblical authors were inappropriate.

Hmm.

6,500 times. The biblical authors' proclamation of the divine name in a culture that used the divine name, again, liturgy and in swearing oaths, was inappropriate. So they're going to protect you from that inappropriate behavior. Oh, here he is right in front of me. Briefly why I think this matters, and then I won't keep us quite forever. And I assume you all have your own reasons why you might think it's, well, it matters. It's dishonest. I mean, that, I find that endlessly upsetting. I'm really quite devoted to the Bible in all sorts of ways, and it offends me, and I find it inappropriate that these people trying to protect the Bible simply make it match what they think it should say. I just don't think that it's healthy to change something and tinker with it because it's sacred and it should look the way you want it to look. That's a bad sign, guys. I think there's a kind of immaturity in this. Why can't we let ancient people be who they are instead of trying to remake the Bible in our image? There's, um, an unwillingness to accept otherness, a kind of self-centeredness in this. Yes, it's sacred, but we get to decide which parts of it are not appropriate and should effectively erase them. And I think it's cowardly. If you actually thought that what the author said was inappropriate, why didn't you just say so in the first place? And instead of hiding it in these ways. Again, very generally and quickly, it raises for me a larger question about what we think we're doing when we're practicing religion. Are we revering ancient texts and taking our sort of light from them, or are we manipulating them in order to provide authority to what we happen to believe? It's probably some of both, but For me at least, that translation problem and our impulse to remake the text, to wrestle it into what we think it should be, results in a lot of mischief because it means that we're really not willing to admit that we don't know our relationship with this text. If we have to change it and then say, oh, it's sacred, holy, we're just lying. Again, back to it being dishonest, and it worries me for reasons that I can't even quite fully express. So I've kept you up later than I hoped to. May I take questions, Rabbi? Thank you, I can take questions, good. Or thoughts, reflections. Yeah. I've heard that in the King James Bible there were something like 30 30,000 was the number I heard. 30,000 errors in the King James Bible. I mean, they're just, you know. The King James Bible is an interesting example because the King James Bible was written before we had— I mean, typos is one thing, that kind of errors. But they also did not have the tools we have. We had none of the other ancient Near Eastern languages at the time. Time it was translated, and so they just had to make it up, often, what this object might be, and since then we've dug up these objects and we know what they are, and so King James is beautiful and actually tries very hard to be literal. King James, unlike modern translations, will tell you when they're having to add words to make something work in English. If you've ever noticed in King James, there'll be little see little phrases here and there in italics. That's because in order to be grammatically correct, English needs a few extra words that aren't there in the Hebrew or the Greek, and so they want you to know. So I think they did a brilliant job, but their tools were not the tools we have.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me Get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at RickLeeJames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.