Laws, statutes, precepts, commands, ordinances, what is it with all this legal jargon and how should we parse it?

Currently in the process of some initial checks on my Non-Religious Bible Psalms project, I noticed some interesting parallels between Psalm 19 and Psalm 119. Apart from sharing a very similar number, we see first in Psalm 19:7-9 and then in more detail in Psalm 119 a whole array of legal terminology that is not easy to translate, especially if we want a reader to find it believable that anyone could find such a thing as an "ordinance" exciting or delightful.

One of the initial things that has had me puzzled is the order in which the Psalmist unpacks his message. Given that he starts in Psalm 19:7 with GOD's Torah, we might be permitted to think that he is going from big to little, but that is not always immediately clear. From the most overarching and society-directing to the individual minutia GOD's words/instructions/insights/instincts/lessons/judgements are fantastic?

This is the order the Psalmist takes it here:

1. TORAH, traditionally rendered "the law of the LORD" (7a)
2. EDOT, traditionally rendered "the statutes of the LORD" (7b)
3. PIQQUDIM, traditionally rendered "the precepts of the LORD" (8a)
4. MISWOT, traditionally rendered "the command[ment]s of the LORD" (8b)

[interlude on the YIRAT/fear of the LORD (9a)], then 

        5. MISHPATIM, traditionally rendered "the ordinances of the LORD" (9b)

(Later in Psalm 119 we will also have huqqim, dabar and imrah.)

So what is going on here, do we have our big-to-little? Or what other thought patterns can we discern? Torah is indeed the benchmark for the Hebrews and so it makes sense to begin here. Where commentators can go is then to say there is no need to think in terms of "big to small", because the Torah comprises all the following points anyway. If this were the case, then we might want to ask the question, how come all the following verses do not switch subject? Ie: The Torah of Yahweh is perfect... the Edut of the Torah are trustworthy... That is not what we see. Rather we see each legal item attached directly to Yahweh himself.

So how big is Number 2, EDOT? The English-favoured term, statutes, are pretty high up. Unlike the Torah, of which there is just one (as far as I am aware), God's whole legal framework for his healthy society, these are nationwide laws. So far so good, although there is a sense of 'warning' about EDOT that might be necessary to factor in for more meaningful translation.

Next, 3. PIQQUDIM. The translated term of "precepts" is a more local enactment of something higher. So yes, we do seem to observe a pattern of big-to-small.

4. MISWOT seems to betray the pattern, however, since we have spoken commands, often of divine origin. Maybe the betrayal is not so great, however. Remember what was said about how all the verses might point to the Torah after 7a? Well, just because MISWOT is usually a divine command does not mean that it should be higher up the pecking order especially because they are all directly linked to Yahweh himself. So the real transition that is happening is that we now move from something that was intended to be written as a written part of the legal structure of Yahweh's society to something that was intended to be recorded as a spoken clarification or a contextualised instruction from Yahweh, that would have future ramifications. So written to spoken could be seen as a progression in this sense.

Then we have the fear interjection, which I do not particularly find fitting here (sorry Mr. Psalmist!) as it seems to interrupt the flow. After that, the pattern is restored where we have our potential candidate for the most localised outworking of GOD's wonderful clarity for flourishing society, 5. MISHPATIM, "a judge's statement of what should have taken place in a particular case" (Wilson, NIV Application Commentary). It seems to me that the order is more or less intact, with the rather awkard interjection needing some consideration. Do we desire that translations contain awkward structure when the intention is for poetic beauty to reflect the beauty of the subject? I would suggest that at least for some translation purposes that the answer is in the negative.

So before we tackle a non-religious rendering of the passage, first we need to think about positioning of the fear clause. My suggestion would be to make it 11c. In the NIV this would read:

By them (all these laws and guidelines by God for his people) is your servant warned;

    in keeping them there is great reward

        [for] the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever.

Although I was originally intent on reordering some of the other parts slightly, I believe we can maintain original "big-to-local" thought as follows:

7. a. LOVE’s way is like it,

Reviving the soul after a long cold night.

7. b. LOVE instincts in us can be trusted,

Making even the inexperienced among us seem like wise sages.

8. a. LOVE paths are bang on and lead to real joy in the community.

8. b. LOVE’s words are pure and literally light up our gaze.

9. b. LOVE insights are solid and consistently right.

Note that the "it" of 7.a. serves as a nice connector to the whole preceding section of God's wonderous creative order, the conclusion of which was the sun's gracious sharing of its life-giving heat as it journeys from horizon to the other.

Obviously, a lot more to be said, but I think that will have to do for today.

Psalm 42 and restoring the idea of "countenance"

AS THE DEER pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, my God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When can I go and see the countenance of God?

My tears have been my food

day and night,

while people say to me all day long,

“Where is your God?”

These things I remember

as I pour out my soul:

how I used to go to the house of God

under the protection of the Mighty One

with shouts of joy and praise

among the festive throng.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise him,

the saving health of my countenance and my God.

My soul is downcast within me;

therefore I will remember you

…. Deep calls to deep

in the roar of your waterfalls;

all your waves and breakers

have swept over me.

By day Yahweh directs his love,

at night his song is with me—

a prayer to the God of my life.

I say to God my Rock,

“Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I go about mourning,

oppressed by the enemy?”

My bones suffer mortal agony

as my foes taunt me,

saying to me all day long,

“Where is your God?”

Why, my soul, are you downcast?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise him,

the saving health of my countenance and my God.

Restoring the KJV's "countenance", as explored by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones in Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure, I have found beneficial. Blessings!

Why This Research Matters

In the previous post I presented some preliminary results of my Septuagint study of the divine Name renderings into Greek in the Psalms, noting only around 18% of nominative and genitive occurrences of the hundreds surveyed to include the definite article: the remaining 82% are "anarthrous", lacking the article.

I am now starting to see already why this research matters. Professor Albert Pietersma is the lead translator of the NETS New English Translation of the Septuagint. This is a major scholarly work combining expertise across the Septuagint field, including Larry Perkins, whose paper on Exodus we have already discussed on this blog.

Pietersma includes in the introduction to the NETS translation of the Psalter the following note (p. 546):

Since the Greek Psalter provides no evidence that the translator made any serious attempt at distinguishing between the divine names Yahweh, including the short form "Yah", and Adonai, I have in accordance with NETS policy rendered all occurrences of kyrios, when representing either, by "Lord".

The decision is a difficult one, because even if he is right about this (no serious distinguishing going on), then you still have to work around the Adonai plus Yahweh problem with increased difficulty if both are translated by "Lord" (see Psalm 68:20: Our God is a god to save, and to the Lord Lord belong the escape routes of death).

But I don't think he is quite right about that assumption of no difference, and here're two reasons why.

1. In contrast to the article treatment in Yahweh translations in Psalms (82% are rendered anarthrous in nominative and genitive forms), when Adonai is translated into Greek only half of the translations are anarthrous (53%, that is 9 out of 17 times with respect to genitive and nominative cases - note however that one of these anarthrous instances, Ps 16:2, could almost certainly never have been confused with Yahweh in that it translates a possessive, "my Yahweh" being unheard of). This partial similarity between Yahweh and Adonai translation policy may represent a vague gesture at the sanctity of the Yahweh solution, but nonetheless, a significant difference remains (from an albeit small sampling).

2. Less significantly, but most intriguingly, is a translation of Psalm 130:6, my soul waits for the Lord. Here the Greek reads: ἤλπισεν ἡ ψυχή μου ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον.  Since we are focussing on the more meaningful cases of nominative and genitive, I almost missed this accusative construction, but it rang a bell. As it turns out, "ἐπὶ" before κύριον when translating "to Yahweh" systematically removes the accusative article τὸν: Ps 4:5, Ps 21:7, Ps 22:8, Ps 31:24, Ps 32:10 and 11, Ps 37:3, Ps 40:3, Ps 55:22. Not so in Psalm 130:6 translating Adonai.

So to conclude, I can't help but wonder if Pietersma has considered these two important pieces of evidence when he dismisses the possibility of distinguishing efforts on the part of the Psalter translator. Only a more thorough investigation of the benchmark for anarthrous renderings, the Pentateuch, and the Adonai goldmine of Ezekiel will provide us with more evidence. If it can be shown that the "NETS policy" mi, in fact, be misrepresenting the translation practice of the Greek translators, then that should filter down to less clear-cut cases such as the Psalms.

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: results

Back in August, I focussed closely on the Greek translation of Yahweh (and Yahh), the Israelites' personal name for their God. This was fueled by a steadily growing interest that followers of this blog will have noticed in the notion of Lordship and increased clarity in the usage of those words today among Bible-believing Christians. But why the Psalms? Well, it has also become my favourite book that has been a source of much inner reconnection and spiritual life, to such a point that I am also in parallel preparing a Psalms study of the self that I hope may even make this part of the Bible appealing and useful to non-believers. But the Psalms as a large Old Testament book outside the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) provides a wealth of information about the practices of a subsequent translation period (the Greek Septuagint grew to encompass the whole Hebrew Bible over many decades).

So as a very quick reminder of the grammatical context: the Septuagint translation for Greek-speaking Jewish communities (probably initially in Egypt) had to come up with a solution for God's personal name, YHWH. A complex debate rages about the status of this name by the time of the Greek translation and the extant pre-Christian translations, but by the early centuries of the common era, the standard was to use the Greek word for Lord: Kyrios. This translation has been preserved through the millennia in many modern translations, but with important differences: every since the King James (although maybe earlier, but not Latin, which does not use articles), the article was added, and Lord was capitalised: the LORD (BTW I have an opinion developing within me about this scholarly debate, but let's hold that for another post and a bit more research). Now some scholars had reported that the article-free Kyrios (the technical word for this is "anarthrous") is a more consistent technique in the Pentateuch, and with respect to articles, on a direct par with other personal names, like Moses. In the Pentateuch, occasionally (about 7% of the time in Exodus) you get "the Lord", but absolutely no more frequently than "the Moses". So this "the" is contingent on necessary grammar and by no means requires framing the word as an impersonal title.

Here, then, is what happens in the Psalms:


Some words of explanation are in order!

Since I quickly realised that Greek case was influential (has the Greek translator used a nominative, genitive, accusative, dative or vocative?) to the presence or absence of the article, the main table is a summary of article behaviour for the whole Psalter with increasing "weeding out" of certain cases. Firstly, since the vocative (VMS) κύριε is always anarthrous in LXX Psalms it could hardly be included in research about what I am calling the grammatical "signature" of YHWH translations into Greek: it is totally necessary to exclude them (209 occurrences) altogether. Of the remaining 479 occurrences where a form of Kyrios is used to translate YHWH (a few occurrences of YHWH are not translated that way), 301 are anarthrous. However, since the dative seems to almost always require the article (96% of the time), it seemed necessary to weed that one out too. And once the rather erratic accusative κύριον is also removed, we are left with the only stats that really matter: 18% of the Psalter's κύριος carrying the article and 17% of its κυρίου.

With that task complete, you can see how I was also interested to see if there were notable variations across the Psalter's traditional five volume format, by breaking down these arthrous counts accordingly. This may or may not have been useful. What it shows is when a particular volume strays significantly from the averages above. Since there is variation in both volume length and "YHWH density" (number of YHWH occurrences per verse to translate), it may have been more helpful to simply divide into say 4 or 5 (or more) even sized chunks.

I hope this clarifies the data presented.

I have actually had a little exchange now with Professor Larry Hurtado on this research, which appears to have gained his interest. I am appealing to him for guidance on how I might most usefully develop this research.

One possibility might be to follow Perkins, whose paper I think I previously discussed on the blog. I wonder about doing a similar comparison to that which he performed, to a name like Moses but also a title like theos before proceeding onto some other OT texts.

I am keen to learn from experts also what are the other types of instances that I should be excluding from the data, beyond Greek case? I also have a very rough-and-ready tagging system for some interesting common constructs (like κύριος ὁ θεός: always anarthrous, including a couple of non-nominative cases) that I think could be developed under the guise of "lexical units".

(Updated 25/05/2018)

The function of the kidneys

On my previous post we looked at the verses in the Old Testament that use the word for "kidneys" as a symbol to express a part of a person that is deep down and central to them. Thus far that might seem a little vague - surely just a synonym for "heart", why must we assume that the Hebrew authors meant anything else? Because we saw that the very word for heart is used in those same verses to mean another aspect of the person. In those instances we noticed two rather strange phenomena.

Firstly, the use of the translation "mind" in English. That is odd because the kidneys seem to be capable of holding strong emotion, which in English would be closer to the heart.

Secondly, the switching of the "heart" and "mind" in English to create (in my view) alignment with action of the Son of God in Revelation, especially if the Old Testament verse includes the action of searching.

So the Hebrew categories are probably different to ours. We still haven't got to the Hebrew word traditionally translated "soul", but let us try and get a better feeling for the heart and kidney categories by looking closer at the supporting language and actions.

So let us round up what "the kidneys" do:
- faint/fail/are consumed (the exact verb used in Job 19:27, כּלוּ - ka lah is predominantly linked with eyes "failing" and smoke "vanishing"). NIV gave yearning. The word has to be closer to this consistent idea of being "finished up" and used more in this way elsewhere. Further, the context needs to allow for it - Job is not expressing his deepest love for his God (or redeemer), but rather that he is being persecuted to an unbearable point by God (verse 22) that goes beyond the physical sufferings.
- are tried/probed/examined (as is the heart) [Ps 7:9 and Jer 11:20, 20:12], although Jeremiah 17:10 has hoker H2713 (searching) for Yahweh's reserved action for hearts while He keeps trying/probing/examining bohen H974 for the kidneys.
- instruct/discipline/chastise (as opposed to Yahweh who counsels) [Ps 16:7]
- are a place in which the person can be pierced/pricked (as opposed to the heart being grieved) [Ps 73:21]
- the person's primitive beginning. I already gave some comments on Ps 139:13 on the previous point, and I remain quite convinced. The psalmist also appears to be using repetition by following up kilyotay with you knit me together in my mother's womb. To begin with when God made the most central parts of me, those parts were all there were of me. This would obviously need to be investigated much more fully, but it could be that this represented the biological developmental understanding of the day. In particular (as gruesome as this sounds), research could examine if any ancient texts use kidney language to refer to miscarriages or stillborn children.
- rejoice [Pr 23:16] (as can the heart, see Ps 28:7)
- an inner place in which Yahweh can or cannot be located, independently of Yahweh's presence on a  person's lips and His role in planting and establishing that person [Jer 12:2]. Compare with the similar formulation in Isaiah 29:13, where the heart (leb) is far from God (cited by Jesus).

How could we combine these kidney references?
For the Israelites, we could say, that the kidneys are the fundamental and primitive organs from which Yahweh creates humans, which He will continue to examine and in which He would like to be - within the human life source. Functionally speaking, my picture thus far of the Israelite perspective is that the kidneys can hurt in a way similar to how we see a human conscience functioning, punishing the person with some guilty feeling about a decision or behaviour, while also able to cause the person to sense triumph and rejoicing - either way, some sort of emotive response about a completed performance.

So there we have our kidneys - I hope it was helpful. Clearly there is overlap with heart and probably with "soul" too, although the preference of some translations for "mind" seems questionable to me as this is too closely tied in our modern understanding to brains. Hopefully I will be able to map the heart and soul too before long.

Hearts and souls

I was off running today - gently and off-road in some light-weight shoes. I wound my way through the burnt out remains of a hillside recently gutted by fire. It was quite a liberating experience as with a lot of that destruction, there is also a lot of space to move around in that normally would require runners and walkers to stay closer to paths. It was also liberating because I was listening to Rob Bell talk about the heart, which you can (read: should) check here: Welcome to your heart

Part way through, this triggered this response from me, where I basically feel a need to do some Hebrew-checking on the words underlying "heart" (featured heavily in Bell's teaching) and "soul" (not mentioned once). It's only a couple of a minutes, totally unrehearsed and unprepared, but it's while running, and I love diversity!

Here's a couple of other piccies from the same sortie:

Psalms: God's keys for oneness/presence

Some of you might know by now that since I had the amazing opportunity to do a spiritual retreat in April (please consider doing this!), that I have become ever increasingly infatuated with the Psalms. My basic pattern is to read through the Psalms, and when I come across passages that speak to what it means to be an integrated human, capable of being truly present within themselves, their relationship to God and others, I write it down. That’s right, with a good ol’ fashioned pen. As I do this, strange things go on within me. I find myself engaging in similar wrestling to what I sense the Psalmists went through. Sometimes, huge, vaulted “atria” of self-space well up, and I sense the intra-connectivity within me develop. I then sense crushing disappointment when it becomes me-centred again, suddenly lacking in power. Then I realise that the perfect and outside “other” that is God himself is to be worshipped and honoured with all that is within me, and gives my self shape. Quite a roller-coaster I can assure you.

I’m up to Psalm 119 at the moment. The plan is to release here on the blog, and maybe elsewhere too, a Psalms reading plan. 

Firstly will come the easy part, entitled: PSALMS: GOD’S KEYS FOR PRESENCE. This will include an introduction and the suggested readings for each day.

Secondly will come the longer part, entitled: PSALMS: MEDITATING GOD’S KEYS FOR PRESENCE. This will include the simpler version as well as some meditative thoughts.

I’m pretty excited about it. Of course it would be tempting just to get going on it quickly and ditch the physical pen, but I also enjoy the discipline and the sense of positive mounting tension.

It is such a great place to meditate. Here’s something that literally just jumped into my brain while pondering Psalm 119: This morning I thought of a friend and his (sometimes) inauthentic and slightly-nervous laugh. My soul, unprepared, is not blessed or well equipped to handle such multiplicity of signals, which don’t fit in with the one-mindedness drive of the Psalms. Things to remember:

• The good intentions and desire to connect
• I’m equally if not more capable of such symptoms
• The path to depth is sometimes through the shallow.

But what response? Do I partake? Do I isolate my friend in his nervous inauthentic moment? Or can I even take quick responsibility for causing an inauthentic moment in the bridging process, with a gracious smile for instance? I like the third option.

Please also check out my post on responsibility, humility and Jesus here, which I think is relevant to this discussion.