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May 10, 2005
Biblical Literalism
Take the following sentence: The Job Got Done.
Extract the spaces: TheJobGotDone.
Take out the capitalization and the punctuation: thejobgotdone
Remove the vowels: thjbgtdn
Just for fun, put it backwards: ndtgbjht
This is what Hebrew looked like when the Torah (and Old Testament) was written. It makes translation just a bit difficult. Let’s try another example:
Q) Where is god?
A) rhwnsdg
There are a few ways the response can be rendered, but the most common would be either (1)"God is now here!", or (2)"God is nowhere". So we have a choice to make, we can either believe in a universe where God is daily filling us with his presence (1), or a universe where God can absent himself (or be forced into absence) (2).
Here is another example, pointed out by Ms. Lynne Truss in her book Eats shoots and leaves:
Luke 23:43
"Jesus answered him, 'I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.'"
Vs.
Jesus answered him, 'I tell you the truth today, you will be with me in paradise.'"
The first tells us that the condemned man will be heading strait to heaven, the second that there might be a stop at purgatory first. Which one is it? Quickly now, a major point of doctrine hangs in the balance. The plain, literal meaning of the text depends in this case on how the text is translated...
It isn’t like this problem hasn’t come about before: in Islam the Quoran is only considered the true word of God when it is written in Arabic. Translations into other languages are thought to be guideposts until a believer can read the true word for himself...
Indeed, around the 3rd century BC, one of the Ptolemys was getting annoyed with the local Jewish groups’ continual dogmatic infighting. Believing that if they could just agree on a decent translation, this problem might go away, he called 70 of the greatest Hebrew scholars (there were not Rabbis back then) together, locked them each into a separate room and had them individually translate the Torah from Hebrew into Greek, only to emerge when they were finished. The story goes that at the same minute on the same hour of the same day they all burst forth. When their translations were compared, they were found to be identical. Getting 70 Jews to agree on something was held to be a great miracle, and so the Septuagint (as it came to be called) was held to be the holy and official word of God. Eventually Greek itself changed and the Septuagint fell into disuse...
Modern Fundamentalist Christians have there own version of this story, but based around the King James Version. For the full story, see the lovely, Chick Tract on the subject...
I could go on about this subject for a long time. The point is that there is no basis for believing that the Bible can be understood as a literal construct. Placing faith around decision of a typesetter is a quick road to frustration...
Posted by Andrew at May 10, 2005 12:25 PM
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