Infidelettante

Kugel is discussing the rise of the need for interpreters of the scriptures. This need was occasioned by several conditions. The nature of the written Hebrew language is one. The mutability of language over time is another. Kugel gives the example of English from Chaucer to the present. I don’t know if they still teach Chaucer in High School, they should, but it did challenge my love of literature. Almost as much as Beowulf.

Kugel, in a passage above the one I quote, points out that it is not only words that change over time. Social institutions and political structures evolve and cultures modify their language accordingly. Ideas and patterns of thought give way to new governments and their forms of organization. In Biblical history of course these are represented by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and the Romans. Even the insular society of the Jews could not, as we know, resist all these pressures.

There is in Kugels book a treatment of the subject of interpretation that is new to me. It is the importance of interpretation to the Jews who returned from the Babylonian exile. As Kugel puts it you can’t ask the hills and olive trees how your ancestors lived. In many ways the scriptures were the only source of continuity between those who once lived in Israel and those who returned. To reestablish the Jewish nation required the reestablishment of God’s Law. And that required interpretation.

The way this played out in scripture is revealed by how the books of Haggai and Ezra approach the heir to the throne of David, Zerubbable. Haggai, in refering to Zerubbable used echos of Jeremiah when he says the Lord will make him as a signet ring, a sign of favor. Comp. Hag. 2:23 and Jer. 22:24-25. Haggai is saying that Zerubbable is chosen by God to lead the nation. But Ezra never mentions the Davidic ancestry of Zerubbable. He even credits the Persian Cyrus as the instrument of God’s will in the return of the Jews using Jeremiah to support his political choice, just as Haggai does to support the opposite. See Ezra 1:1.

What interests me most about this subject is its application to inerrancy. How does the apologist maintain the doctrine of inerrancy in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the construction of the OT was such that its very language and the motives of its authors is to be questioned. And not only questioned but clearly determined to be inconsistent with inerrancy. How can anyone not see the obvious truth that God’s Word is deeply flawed.


JT

judge

Excellent points. Also these texts were originally written without vowels!!
So dog would look like dag.

There appear to be more than a few instances where greek translators of the NT mistranslated the text from Aramaic inot greek because they chose the wrong word.
When Jesus said "do not give what is holy to dogs and do not cast pearls before swine" , it appers this is probably a mistranslation. To read the Aramaic as "do not give what is holy to dogs" is a little awkward. It is slightly incorrect the way it is in aramaic.

It is much more likely that it reads. Do not hang earings on dogs. Something like the phrase Don't put lipstick on a hawg.

Here is another example. there are more as well.