The Hebraic New Testament (Part 2)

This is the second in a series of studies on the Hebraic New Testament.   The purpose of this series is to demonstrate the Hebraic characteristics of significant portions of the New Testament and to justify the use of the Septuagint as a primary tool for interpreting New Testament Greek.  This post covers the same material as the last in this series— I am hoping it makes the subject a little clearer.

Here are a few photographs of "Chinglish" signs.  The photographer is Jeremy Barwick.

More photographs of "Chinglish" signs can be seen here.

When you see a sign like this, what do you know about the writer of the English text?  Based on the English text alone, we know that English is not the native language of the writer; we know that the writer is from a non-English speaking culture.

Following is a familiar nursery rhyme as it might look if it had been badly translated from Hebrew.  Are we justified in saying "this looks foreign?"  Would any native English speaker doubt the foreignness of this text?

And behold, Miriam to her a goat young
Which hair as snow.
And all places that Miriam walked,
The goat certainly to walk!

He walked her to the house of the book day one,
Which toward the statutes.
He did the sons mock and sport,
To behold a goat at the house of the book.

The Hebrew word seh (שה – H7716) can mean either "a sheep or a goat".   If Miriam, in the Hebrew "original", had a little seh, which word should we use to translate it into English?  It is the same question we would face in translating Genesis 22:7 from Hebrew to English.

Genesis 22:7 – And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the seh for a burnt offering?

The Hebrew word qaton (קתן – H6996) can be translated in various ways including young or small or unimportant.   In the rhyme, is Miriam's goat old but small in size or is it young?  In the following text, Solomon refers to himself as a na'ar qaton which is translated in the KJV as a small child.  The word na'ar (נער – H5288) is translated in the KJV most frequently as young man or servant.  It is thought that Solomon was in his late teens or possibly early twenties when he became king.  Did he really mean small child or did he mean unimportant young man?  (Or did he mean that he was a short servant?)

1 Kings 3:7 – And now, O LORD my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my father: and I am but a na'ar qaton: I know not how to go out or come in.

The Hebrew word halakh (הלך – H1980) is translated in the KJV as go (217 times), walk (156 times), and come (16 times), among others.  In the rhyme, did Miriam's goat go or walk?  The translators of the Bible have to make decisions like this one.  Compare the following two verses that use the identical word (‏ויתהלך – v'yithalekh) in Hebrew, but where different English words are used to translate it?  Did the translators make the right choices?

Gen 5:24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.
(Or, did Enoch go with God?)

1 Chr 21:4 Nevertheless the king’s word prevailed against Joab. Wherefore Joab departed, and went throughout all Israel, and came to Jerusalem.
(Or, did Joab walk throughout Israel?)

There are two points to this exercise.  One— translation is not easy and it is not possible to produce a perfect, English representation for any foreign language source text.  The English translation is always a compromise between choices— none of which perfectly express the meanings and connotations of the foreign text.  Two— sometimes some foreign elements are retained in the English translation that indicate the foreign origin of the text; the characteristics of these foreign elements may allow us to identify the foreign language of the source text.  Or, the specific characteristics in an awkward English text may allow us to identify the native language of the writer struggling with faulty English.  We may not be able to determine whether a text is a translation or whether it is mearly written by a foreign writer, but we can often identify the foreign language and culture that the text came from and we can often point out specific features in the foreign language that produced the awkward English.

Some medical transcriptionists working in English with doctors whose native language was Spanish noticed that one doctor routinely mentioned in his reports that his patients had "three sons" or "two sons" or "five sons", etc.  After a while, they began to wonder if the doctor somehow never had patients with daughters.  When they asked him he said, "Of course some have daughters.  Why do you ask?"  They pointed out that he always said "sons".  He asked, "How do you say it then?"  In Spanish, the word hijos is the plural of hijo (son) and is used to mean both sons and children.

A brief detour— this difficulty also exists in translating Hebrew to English.  The following two texts both use the same word b'ney but one translates it as children and the other as sons.  B'ney is the plural of ben, which means son.

Exod 1:1 KJV – Now these are the names of the children of Israel (b'ney Yisrael), which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob.  /  ESV –  These are the names of the sons of Israel...

2 Kgs 6:1 KJV – And the sons of the prophets (b'ney hanvi'im) said unto Elisha, Behold now, the place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us.  / GOD's Word – The disciples of the prophets...  /  NIV – The company of the prophets...  /  The Message – the guild of prophets  /  CEV – the prophets  / 

It wasn't a grammatical error that was the clue that something was anomalous in the doctor's use of the word sons;  it was the improbability of his language that was the clue indicating that he was using a Hispanism— a usage derived from Spanish rather than standard English.  In a similar way, the pattern of verses beginning with and-verb in New Testament Greek is not grammatically disallowed, but it is unlikely to be frequent in standard Greek.  When we see this pattern repeating frequently in a text, we are justified in looking for an explanation.   A Hebraic origin for the text is an explanation because the pattern matches the structure of Hebrew text.

Following is Mark 6:30-44.  The text is taken from the KJV.  I have modified it so the English matches the Greek word order in the places where the Greek begins a verse or phrase with a kai-verb pair (in English and-verb).  It is non-standard English, but it makes it possible to see the pattern apart from the Greek text.  The pattern is highlighted with green for the and and orange for the verb.  Notice that this is a very frequent pattern in this passage (it is common throughout Mark) and recall that this pattern in not frequent in standard Greek.


Mark 6

• 30 And gathered the apostles themselves together unto Jesus,
  and told him all things, both what they had done, and what they had taught.
  
• 31 And said he unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place,
  and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.
  
• 32 And departed they into a desert place by ship privately.
  
• 33 And saw the people them departing,
  and knew him many, and ran afoot thither out of all cities,
  and outwent them,
  and came together unto him. 
• 34 And came out Jesus, he saw much people,
  and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd:
  and began he to teach them many things. 
• 35 And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed: 
• 36 Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to eat. 
• 37 He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat.
  And say they unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat? 
• 38 He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? go and see.
  And knew they, they say, Five, and two fishes. 
• 39 And commanded he them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass. 
• 40 And sat they down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties. 
• 41 And took he the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all.
• 42 And did eat all they, and were filled.  
• 43 And took up they twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. 
• 44 And were they that did eat of the loaves about five thousand men.
  

Biblical Hebrew is a language that prefers verb-subject-object order (Hit John the ball); Greek is flexible but tends towards subject-object-verb order (John the ball hit) or subject-verb-object order (John hit the ball).  English is a subject-verb-object language.  If we see a New Testament Greek text with frequent use of verb-subject-object order, and we have other reasons for making a Hebrew connection, can we understand it correctly while ignoring the Hebraic character of the text?  I will talk about other Hebraisms in the New Testament in a future study. 

The purpose for looking at Hebraisms in the New Testament is to lead us to see the texts through the lens of the culture in which it was written.  We can use the Septuagint as a tool for comparing the language of the New Testament with the Old so that we can better understand it.

1 Corinthians 14:13 (Contemporary English Version) –
When we speak languages that others don't know, we should pray for the power to explain what we mean.