Aleph Beth Gimel, Again

     Back to the Permanent Things.

     I've lately returned to studying Hebrew, as I've mentioned here before.  And the language strikes me as so terse, so like massive blocks of meaning set in impressive and mysterious relation to one another, that it seems inevitable that even the finest English translation will dissipate the concentrated power of the lines, and cast resounding allusions to the winds.  For example, when the Lord calls the reluctant prophet Jonah, he says to him, "Qum, lek," meaning, more or less, "Rise, go" -- with the word "go" doing double duty as "walk," as in going on foot.  That's the archaic meaning of English "go," too, preserved in such words as "gangway" and "gangplank," meaning a way or a plank you walk along.  Literally, God is commanding Jonah to get up and journey afoot to Nineveh.  Jonah doesn't want to do that, so he takes the more comfortable expedient of riding a ship to Tarsus, with consequences involving a lottery and a big fish.  When, finally, Jonah is spat up ashore, the Lord repeats the terse command, "Qum, lek."  It's a command the Lord often issues, sometimes with verb forms meaning "go up" or "go down" or "go forth," but sometimes with the straight "lek," as in "walk," and get going.  So he commands Elijah to get gone to Zarephath (1 K. 17:9), and Jacob to get himself to Padan-Aram (Gen. 28:2), or to Bethel (31:1).

     Now all that reminds me of when the friends of the paralytic lowered the man on the pallet through the thatch of somebody else's roof, because the crowds around the house prevented them from taking him to Jesus by a more usual means of locomotion.  Jesus, we recall, looked at the man with pity and told him that his sins were forgiven.  That of course was unthinkable -- I can't forgive you a debt you owe to the Universal Bank, unless I am myself the director of the Universal Bank.  "Only God can forgive sins!" the Jews within the house say to themselves, eyeing Jesus askance.  Jesus reads their thoughts, and immediately engages in a strange argument a fortiori.  "Which is it easier to say," he says -- and note that he does not therefore say that it is an easier thing to do, or the lesser miracle to perform -- "your sins are forgiven you, or rise and walk?"

     And right here I'll bet anything we have a defiant echo of the Hebrew scriptures, lurking behind the Greek.  Hebrew would not connect the imperatives with an "and."  It is too terse for that.  "Which is it easier to say," I imagine Jesus asking, "your-sins forgiven, or Qum, lek?"  A powerful moment.  In one part of the sentence he is claiming as proper to himself the power to forgive sins.  In the other part of the sentence he is echoing the very words of God's commissions, to Jonah, to Elijah, to Joshua, to Jacob, and others.  His audience, I suspect, would have understood, though the allusion is lost in Greek and English.  They wait in tense and perhaps horrified expectation.  "That you may know that Ben-Adam has power on earth to forgive sins," says Jesus, not bothering to finish the question -- "Take up your pallet, and walk."

     If I'm right about this -- and I guess I'll go out on a limb here -- it would be evidence of Hebrew words of Jesus, "heard" by Luke through the testimony of eyewitnesses, or read by Luke in the scrips of paper carried about by disciples in those days when they followed their teacher.  I don't know Aramaic, and don't know where Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, where he would have spoken Hebrew, or whether "Qum, lek" or something close to it is an Aramaic construction.  Still, it's intriguing -- and it is not, that I know, a Greek construction.  More intriguing still, for when that same Luke gives us the beautiful parable of the prodigal son, we are told that the debauched lad, coming to his senses, says, "I shall arise and go unto my father's house," and I'd bet anything that flickering behind the Greek is the first person singular imperfect of the same two verbs, without connector, followed by the quintessentially Hebrew "el beth-abi," "unto my father's house," as the more dilatory English has it.  I've heard it said by skeptical quasi-Christians that Luke invented nice stories for his gospel, so elegant a writer of Greek he is, and so amiable a theologian; and I've heard the parable of the prodigal son given as an example.  Hah!  That's a terse English interjection, but I think it will do here. 

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages."

From Thomas Sowell who had the gumption to state:

"How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable-- or even expert-- within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking."

Thomas Sowell is a conservative economist who by liberal elite standards is a backwards country economist compared to the Nobel-Prize winning New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman.

[DGP]

Thank you, it's a nifty reading, and an excellent example of the richness of OT-NT intertextuality.

[Stuart Koehl]

Why should anybody be surprised that Luke contains verbatim translations of an underlying Aramaic tradition? The ancient world, for all of its literacy, was still largely oral in practice (even texts were normally read aloud; Julius Caesar was considered exceptional in his ability to read silently). Anthropologists have shown that oral societies have the ability to transmit very complex materials (e.g., epic poems) across many generations without corruption. Yet from the Resurrection to the composition of Luke/Acts is less than fifty years. Jesus the itinerant preacher probably had a fixed set of "stump sermons" that he gave repeatedly in different places. They might differ somewhat each time he delivered them, but the basic points would be the same. He had a knack for snappy aphorisms, precisely because these would be remembered and repeated. Why, then, the surprise that a gentile convert like Luke would run into people who had been there who remembered precisely what Jesus had said?

Going beyond that, tachygraphia, that is to say, shorthand speed writing, was very common in the first century. The "Tironian" form, developed by Cicero's freedman Tiro, allowed him to capture his master's courtroom speeches verbatim (which Cicero later cleaned up for posterity--today we would call that "revising and extending" his remarks). Many courtroom officials and civil servants had mastered the art, and they were dispersed across the Empire. Matthew, as a customs official, probably used tachygraphia to record invoices and customs duties, which he would later write up into his official reports. And, indeed, linguists have demonstrated that much of Matthew's text translates directly into Aramaic, the Sermon on the Mount being an excellent example of something that can be re-translated back into decent Aramaic poetry.

In light of both these factors, the underlying authenticity of the Gospels cannot be denied. Furthermore, the recognition that there is a Semitic substrate to the Greek texts ought to be a guide to modern translators, who show a distressing tendency to eliminate these semitisms (the parallelisms, the redundant connecting "ands", the antitheses, and so forth) as not being "good English". Rendering the texts into what is now considered "good English" has a tendency to flatten the language and suppress the word-play that was a core element of Jesus' teaching method. In short, the text is impoverished when we ignore the style in which it was originally written.

[Fr. Frederick Watson]

More to consider. In each of the references Dr. Esolen gives us for the "rise!" command in the Old Testament, the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew is, in each case (and the Genesis 31 reference is to verse 13 and not to verse 1), a form of the Greek verb "anisthmi," English:
"Resurrect!" Luke, however, does not reflect this LXX usage, but rather uses the more ordinary word, "egeirw," simply meaning "to stand up" but used in many NT places as a reference to the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Ambrose has caught the idea in his Exposition of the Gospel of Luke on this (Luke 5) pericope: "Yet it is far more divine to give resurrection to bodies, since the Lord himself is the resurrection."

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>the Greek verb "anisthmi," English: "Resurrect!"<<<

I think it better to use "rise up" or "raise up", since the same verb is used in the New Testament to refer also to Christ being "raised up" on the Cross, "raised up" from the tomb (We greet each other at Pascha, Christos anesti! Alithos anesti!--"Christ is risen! Indeed, He is risen!"), "raised up" to the Father. Resurrect does not capture the real action, which is in each case, an exaltation or glorification, one in which we shall share when we in our turn are "raised up".

[W.E.D. Godbold]

The version of the KJV that I use has the interpolated words in italics so you can get a sense of how much is supplied by the translator and how terse the original words were.

Poul Anderson wrote an SF novel, the premise of which was that modern life evolved while the earth was in a band of intelligence-damping stuff/beams/radiation. One day we come out of this stuff and find that the chimps and dolphins have become the equivalent of human geniuses and we're way past that. One of the nifty things is how succinct speech gets. Tremendous meaning is conveyed with a word with intonation and gesture. I think this is probably a glimpse of what our situation will be like after the General Resurrection, but it will be the culmination of what once was when God taught Adam to speak (and from which we have, perhaps, descended).

[Sandra Miesel]

The Anderson novel mentioned above is BRAIN WAVE, in case anyone wants to look it up.

[Helen]

As used by the LXX to translate QWM, anisthmi is intransitive, and it's not an intransitive used for the passive with the agent (God) indirectly referenced.As used in the LXX From 1 Sam onwards, the verb is imperative. God is the one who issues the command, in fact: QWM! LK!/anisthmi!

Given the morphology of the verb, and since the LEH, which is authoritative wrt the LXX, does not support anisthmi as "resurrect" or anything but "stand up, rise", it seems a bit of a stretch to go from anisthmi to Christ on the cross.

In fact, it also seems a bit of a stretch to go from anisthmi to egeirw; that's making a move from simple divine command to direct divine action. Even though there appears to be some congruence at the most basic level of the lexeme, contextually the two words are incongruent.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>it seems a bit of a stretch to go from anisthmi to Christ on the cross.<<<

I guess you'll just have to take that up with the Greek Fathers, who in their commentaries, homilies and hymnography constantly play on the relationship between Christ's being raised up upon the Cross, his being raised from the dead, and his being raised up on high with the Father. I haven't stood through so many Paschal liturgies over the years not to have that beaten into my head.

[labrialumn]

This reminds me of an older English translation of the creed, where the resurrection of the body is called "The again-rising"

[Stuart Koehl]

It wasn't really necessary until quite recently to have a Spanish rendering of the Byzantine-Orthodox Paschal greeting "Christ is risen!", but when they did, their choice of words was most unfortunate:

Christos es resucitado!

Which brings to mind all sorts of ER-type situations. "Code Blue! Get the paddles! CLEAR!!!"

[Tony Esolen]

Stuart's comments have set me to wondering what the Hebrew is for "raise" in the OT; I will check. Hebrew's terseness is in part owing to the convenient verbal construction called Hiphil, which turns an ordinary verb (usually but not always intransitive) into a causative verb. English has some examples of stative-causative doublets: to fall, to fell; to drink, to drench; to sit, to set; to lie, to lay; to rise, to raise. I'm guessing that the verb will be the Hiphil for "rise." I could be wrong. Anyhow, if it is, then the Hebrew qum, haqim will be nicely parallel to rise, raise.

I always rather liked the German "Christus ist auferstanden," exactly analogous to the Greek; English is a little more distant.

[Michael]

>>Christos es resucitado!<<

"¡Cristo se levanta!" would have been better. Not only does the use of se make Christ a direct object, but it also makes it indistinguishable who is doing the raising, since se is functionally impersonal (see: all stores that have signs in the windows reading "se habla español"). Of course, le/se is also the functionally formal form of you as direct object (a usted). Therefore, it also says Christ raises you or even Christ raises him when not used reflexively. Spanish grammarians might complain that the sentence should read "Cristo le levanta!", but it lacks the impersonal nuance of se. Perhaps it might even be better to use a perfect tense of levantar instead of the present indicative. Hm, I'm inspired to construct liturgical greetings in Spanish...

All this to say: yes, Stuart, poor choice of phrasing by the Byzantines.

[Brian K]

From the Spanish Hypertext Bible:

"Verdaderamente el Señor ha resucitado y ha aparecido a Simón!"

'Thine be the glory' is also the translation of 'A Toi la gloire, O Resucite!'

[Michael]

Brian K--

The unfortunate use of the present perfect tense is that the haber form says "Christ has risen"--not that He is risen. I have risen this morning, but it doesn't preclude me also going back to sleep. That's why I used the present indactive of levantar. Also, due to the connection to English resuscitate as Stuart noted, resucitar is unfortunately muddying the waters. Christ wasn't revived from death; He conquered death of His own power.

¡Cristo es levantado! = Christ is risen. Some might argue that the use of ser instead of estar backhands the Spanish use of estar for states of being, but ser makes it intransitory, meaning Christ is permanently risen, and not mearly resuscitated to life "for now". I still like the use of se for direct object puposes, so maybe "es levantadose".

Quick, Stuart, direct me to the appropriate authorities to correct their liturgy! (Talk about young ego...)

[Tony Esolen]

The old way of forming the present perfect in English, for verbs of motion, was to use forms of the verb to be: He is come, she is gone, I am risen, even they are become, and so forth. We lost that, but retained the usage in specialized cases suggesting permanent states of being. So, not "I have risen," but "I am (and always shall be) risen."

[Michael]

Dr. Esolen,

Many thanks. The TV series Heroes had an episode earlier this season entitled "I Am Become Death", and though the phrase is of cultural familiarity, the grammar of it bugged me immensely all the same. And yet it is apparently a proper, albeit archaic, formation of English verb forms.

As to using "to have" as a connecting verb instead of "to be": yes, we are in complete agreement, which is why I am loathe to use "haber" in a Spanish liturgy. Linguistics and theology--are there greater academic joys? (I submit that there might be some, but linking the two is a highlight. Thanks always for your posts!)

[Brian K]

Michael, I'm in my early days of learning Spanish, but have many (somewhat rust-encrusted) years of French, Greek and Hebrew behind me. I don't know if 'resucitar' has the same connotations in Spanish as in English; it seems to have wider semantic range, as apparently in French. It's also here in Hechos 2:33 -

"A este Jesús, Dios lo resucitó, y de ello todos nosotros somos testigos."

'raised' (levantarse; egeiro) doesn't necessarily connote what we mean by 'resurrect' (= reanimate what is dead). But I await further light on this.

[Brian K]

I see the two verbs appear together in this passage from 1 Cor 15:

12 Ahora bien, si se predica que Cristo ha sido levantado de entre los muertos, ¿cómo dicen algunos de ustedes que no hay resurrección?13 Si no hay resurrección, entonces ni siquiera Cristo ha resucitado.

[Tony Esolen]

Michael, thanks for the encouragement!

Brian,

That's fascinating, that passage from Corinthians. Literally, Latin "resuscitare" means "to rouse up (again) from below," and the meanings "to revive a dead man" or "to cause someone to breathe again" are figurative. Perhaps it does not have the sense of reanimation, which would be a problem.

I have checked Hebrew usage -- I the kindergartener in Hebrew -- and in fact "heqim" is Hiphil for "qum" and means "raise," so the English doublet raise-rise is a nice parallel to the Hebrew. I've also checked the LXX and the Greek NT on translations of "qum, lek" (though apparently I should be transliterating it "qwm, lech"). In the Gospel, the word for "go/walk" is "peripatei"; in Jonah, it is "poreutheto" -- in other words, there's a distinction. Interesting to get behind the distinction, though.

[Michael]

Brian,

I come from a strictly Spanish-English (and Chinese, but that's in no way linked here) background, and whereas it is true that "levantarse" does not have strict sense of reanimation, I think it is a theological conundrum (what, the Resurrection is a mystery? who'd have guessed?) to have "resucitar". "Resucitar" may be used biblically, but it is a medical term as well--CPR is "RCP" in Spanish--and leads to all the associations Stuart pointed out earlier. He wasn't raised by someone else's influence, but raised himself. If we use a reflexive form of "resucitar", that might be something! Indeed, in the Reina-Valera translation (cf. BibleGateway.com), Jesus becomes a direct object of God's resuscitation: "A este Jesús resucitó Dios" (Acts/Hechos 2:32).

I think "Cristo es resucitado!" is a little lacking, whether "resucitar" is preferable to "levantar" or not. I'm inclined to stick with another "raise" verb, though. "Revivir" is specifically about death, so there is that as an option, but to "re-life" is a little different, no?

"Resucitar" doesn't even necessarily mean "to raise." It only means that the person is given life again; I think the image of Christ standing triumphant over death is just as important as the fact that He is no longer dead. A Jesus alive but bedridden is not the victorious King we worship.

[DGP]

>>Literally, Latin "resuscitare" means "to rouse up (again) from below," and the meanings "to revive a dead man" or "to cause someone to breathe again" are figurative. Perhaps it does not have the sense of reanimation, which would be a problem.

Why not reanimation? Isn't this in line with the Spirit hovering over the waters, the stirring associated with breath and heartbeat, even the roiling of the waters for healing? And of course, there's a strong biblical sense of Christ's resurrection as something passively undergone "by the power of the Spirit" -- certainly as strong as the Johannine "I take it up again."

[Michael]

>>Why not reanimation? Isn't this in line with the Spirit hovering over the waters, the stirring associated with breath and heartbeat, even the roiling of the waters for healing? And of course, there's a strong biblical sense of Christ's resurrection as something passively undergone "by the power of the Spirit" -- certainly as strong as the Johannine "I take it up again."<<

But since Christ and the Spirit are One, how passive was the Godhood of Christ in the act? Certainly the man was dead, but the Son?

Besides, reanimation wouldn't be a problem. I believe Dr. Esolen's point was that "resucitar", considering the strictest Latin meaning, has nothing to do with reanimation, which undermines the point that He was truly dead. Here's a question for the Latin readers: what Latin verb is used in the Vulgate to describe the resurrection? Might tell us what Spanish word we should be looking to.

[DGP]

>>But since Christ and the Spirit are One, how passive was the Godhood of Christ in the act?

As to the relation between Son and Spirit in the resurrection -- this is an age-old theological discussion, in which angels should fear to tread. My point is merely that the biblical grammar tolerates and even warrants a passive construction.

>>Besides, reanimation wouldn't be a problem. I believe Dr. Esolen's point was that "resucitar", considering the strictest Latin meaning, has nothing to do with reanimation...

I know that reanimation is okay, which is why I asked about it. Why doesn't resuscitation have the sense of reanimation? I then offered my (admittedly uneducated) speculation about how "rousing" evokes biblical rousings related to the power of the Spirit as the "Giver of Life."

[Michael]

Fr. DGP,

I misunderstood you. Apologies.

[Brian K]

Michael: Vulgate of 1 Cor 15.14 - 'Si autem Christus non resurrexit...' (from resurgere); Acts 2.32 'Hunc Jesum Deus resuscitavit' [!]; Luke 2.34 'Dicentes, Quod surrexit Dominus vere, et apparuit Simoni.'

I wonder if we're up against the problem of semantic change, with an old word now having a narrower range of meaning than in the past. The advantage of the calque 'resurrect' (is there a Spanish verbal accompaniment to 'resureccion'?) is that it means to bring back something or someone from the dead, whereas 'resuscitate' means to restore consciousness, to bring back from the portals of death.
My thanks to you and Tony for a thought-provoking discussion (and to Tony, for your books - have your 'Inferno' now, awaiting P.I.G. on western culture).

[Brian K.]

Michael: Vulgate of 1 Cor 15.14 - 'Si autem Christus non resurrexit...' (from resurgere); Acts 2.32 'Hunc Jesum Deus resuscitavit' [!]; Luke 2.34 'Dicentes, Quod surrexit Dominus vere, et apparuit Simoni.'

I wonder if we're up against the problem of semantic change, with an old word now having a narrower range of meaning than in the past. The advantage of the calque 'resurrect' (is there a Spanish verbal accompaniment to 'resureccion'?) is that it means to bring back something or someone from the dead, whereas 'resuscitate' means to restore consciousness, to bring back from the portals of death.
My thanks to you and Tony for a thought-provoking discussion (and to Tony, for your books - have your 'Inferno' now, awaiting P.I.G. on western culture).

[Michael]

>>I wonder if we're up against the problem of semantic change, with an old word now having a narrower range of meaning than in the past. The advantage of the calque 'resurrect' (is there a Spanish verbal accompaniment to 'resureccion'?) is that it means to bring back something or someone from the dead, whereas 'resuscitate' means to restore consciousness, to bring back from the portals of death.<<

I think it is evident that we're always fighting such a ghost (the ghost of time, no less, if you'll the pardon the bad pun on German), and as such we must always settle for the best of the worst possible options. The only way to literally indicate a resurrection from the dead in Spanish is to string out an entire verb phrase: volver a la vida. Whereas it literally means "return to life", I think we can all agree that it lacks a certain elegance essential to good liturgy.

What I must submit to is that despite my extensive fluency in the language and love for linguistics, I am not actually a Spanish scholar. The men who translated this liturgy, with reference, I hope, to the Scriptures in the original languages, chose that specific word despite all other options because it suited their purposes best.

The Vulgate uses three different words in three different places to indicate the same action. Perhaps the Spanish ought to take a loan word from another language, or go back to a more ancient form of their own language (Catalan or Castillian perhaps) to find a suitable word to embody all of this.

Brian, I am not used to your input here--it is new, refreshing and exciting to be able to dialogue on linguistics with someone other than Dr. Esolen, who posts so regularly and is caught up in his day job. Thank you for the conversation as well.