Thought for Today
Genesis 11:8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Acts 2:5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.
I encountered 2 phrases recently which reminded me that I am not nearly as proficient in the English language as I like to think Maybe you are familiar with a ‘deixic shift’ or a ‘bespoke suit.’ I was not. I am not. I cannot imagine I will ever use either phrase beyond today’s Thought. I will leave it to your own discretion as to whether or not you pursue exploring either phrase.
Many of us are familiar with both the incidents associated with those verses above. “Tower of Babel’ has become a catch phrase in English for confusion. It is hard to imagine that any Christian is unfamiliar with Pentecost and the event in Acts 2.
Have you ever wondered about the languages of the Bible? Most of us are at least aware that the Old Testament was originally written in ancient Hebrew. Much of the Christian Old Testament, the Jewish Torah and Writings, evolved long before a written form of Hebrew was developed. I learned in seminary that the written Hebrew language probably was first developed around 1000 BCE during the period of the United Kingdom under the rule of King David. The ancient scrolls found through archaeological excavations record a progression of development over time. The most ancient scrolls are written only with consonants and without any punctuation or paragraphing. “Around the 10th Century AD, a group of Jewish scribes called Masorites, created a system of dots and dashes, called nikkudot or vowel pointings and added these to the hebrew text. These vowel pointings served to supply the vowel sounds to the text in order to codify the pronunciation.” (https://ancient-hebrew.org)
Could Jesus read and write? If so, which language(s)? “Luke 4:16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read.” When I was in elementary school, my Jewish friends went to Hebrew school in the afternoons to learn to read the scrolls for their own bar mitzvahs. In truth, most of them eventually just memorized the passages. We know that by Jesus’ time, Hebrew was no longer a spoken language. “Most scholars now date the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman Period, or about 200 CE. The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel.” (https://en.wikipedia.org)
Sometimes I joke that I learned English as a second language, having grown up a native speaker of Texican. “The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw famously once said: ‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language.’” Texas might well be added to the mix and increase the country count to 3. Even after living in New England for 10 years, I still have a Texican accent (I never had an accent before I moved!)
For us as Christians does any of this make any difference? Is it relevant whether Jesus spoke Latin, Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew? Does it make any real difference whether Jesus could read or write? I think not. However, using the principle of Occam’s Razor, I choose to accept Luke’s words and believe that Jesus could read and speak Hebrew, even though history suggest the common language in Israel in his era was Aramaic.
I do believe that it is relevant to our faith that the Bible has been translated into all of those confused languages of Genesis 11. My Bible software even has version accessible in a multitude of different languages. Is the Hebrew version best? The English version? Maybe the Polish version? The best Biblical language, like the best translation is the version one can and will read. I do have a personal ‘go-to’ version. When I really need to dig deep in a passage, I default to the version of the presentation Bible I was given in my youth. What is your ‘go-to’ version?
Stay safe, read your Bible, trust God,
Pastor Ray