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Thursday, February 14, 2008
Too early to think about preaching in the summer?
Preaching Today’s blog says no:
We got dumped with a foot of snow in Chicagoland two days ago, so I’m happy to think about summer! But preaching, rather than weather, is what’s on my mind. What are preachers to do when their people are ‘in and out’ the whole summer? Is it possible to preach a sermon series even though half the congregation may have missed last week’s sermon and will probably miss next week’s sermon, too? Let me share how I approach this.
Also see our guide to Planning Worship for July and August
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
JSOT on translating ‘yahweh’ with ‘kyrios’
From the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament:
The Reading and Translation of the Divine Name in the Masoretic Tradition and the Greek Pentateuch
Martin Rösel, Faculty of Theology, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Vol. 31, No. 4, 411-428 (2007)
The representation of the divine name in the Masoretic tradition and in the early translations of the Septuagint is the subject of ongoing discussion. It can be demonstrated that even the oldest Masoretic vocalization as preserved, among others, in [one source] must refer to adonai (the Lord) rather than shema (the Name). By means of exegetical observations in the Greek version of the Torah, it becomes clear that already the translators of the Septuagint have chosen ‘Lord’ (kyrios) as an appropriate representation of [YHWH]; the replacement by the Hebrew [YHWH] in some Greek manuscripts is not original. Moreover, it becomes clear that the translators of the Septuagint were influenced by theological considerations when choosing an equivalent for the divine name.
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Thursday, June 14, 2007
Names of God in the Old Testament from Ancient Hebrew Research Center
Related Resource
For a comprehensive list of biblical names for God, see p. 178-179 of The Worship Sourcebook, also reprinted as p. 15-17 of Prayers of the People
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Friday, May 18, 2007
Meditation on Philippians 1:1: Slaves
Reading 1: Philippians 1:1-11
Philippians 1:1
focal phrase: “servants of Christ Jesus”
focal word: slaves
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Monday, May 14, 2007
‘brood of vipers’: insights on an idiom
In Matt 3:7, John calls those Pharisees and Sadducees who have come out to him “brood of vipers.” The Syriac word for “viper” is simply a transliteration of the Greek echidna, and is not the Hebrew/Aramaic nachash that is used in the Old Testament. Lamsa takes this phrase as an idiom meaning “sly, deceptive.” Unfortunately, this meaning neither fits the context nor explains the origin of the phrase.
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Friday, May 04, 2007
Bees’ honey as a metaphor in the Old Testament
Roy Berkenbosch’s brilliant sermon on Samson, published in this book, made me interested in this article:
Bee’s honey-from realia to metaphor in biblical wisdom literature
by Tova Forti
Vetus Testamentum, Volume 56, Number 3, 2006, pp. 327-341(15)The word debaš in the Bible denotes various types of fruit syrup as well as the honey produced by bees. An overview of the literary adaptation of honey in biblical narrative and poetry leads us to an impressive assemblage of honey metaphors in the wisdom books of Proverbs and Job. This study identifies four rhetorical categories which encompass both didactic and reflective frameworks of honey imagery: A. ‘Honey’ as a metaphor of internalization wisdom and attaining good reputation; B. ‘Honey’ as a symbol of restraint and moderation against overindulgence; C. ‘Honey’ as a metaphor for temptation and ensnarement; D. ‘Honey’ in the context of the two antithetical idiomatic expressions; “Honey under the tongue” and “venom under the tongue”. These expressions serve to draw an ideational contrast between the pleasant words of the Wise and the evil stratagems of the Wicked. My investigation will provide insight into the way that particular qualities of raw bee honey inspired the composers of the various metaphors.
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Monday, April 16, 2007
The “holy and faithful” in Colossians and Ephesians
Summary of a brief but cogent paper in Biblica (pdf):
[This] study has demonstrated that from grammatical, linguistic, theological and literary perspectives, the best translation of a{gio” in Col 1,2 and Eph 1,1 is as an adjective. ... ‘’to those [in Colossus/Ephesus] who are holy and faithful.’
Existing Translations of Colossians 1:2:
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Friday, April 13, 2007
Biblical Languages page
I’ve tweaked my biblical languages page. Enjoy!
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Monday, April 09, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 22: Devoured
Reading 7: Psalm 22-23
Psalm 22
focal phrase: “My hands and feet have shrivelled.”
focal word: devoured
Psalm 22 may be a more gruesome description of Christ’s crucifixion than anything in the gospels. The image here is not so much of a person being slowly bled to death, but a person being devoured, ripped to shreds by hungry beasts. In Psalm 22, those aren’t nails in his hands; those are fangs.
With this in mind, we can accept the rather odd original wording of the phrase “my hands and feet have shrivelled.” In Hebrew it reads, “Like a lion, my hands and feet.” Translators were balking at this phrase even before the time of Christ; the Septuagint changed it to “they dug into my hands and feet,” reading the Hebrew text not as ka’ariy, “like a lion,” but ka’arî, “dig.” Other translations have experimented with the wording here, some using similar Semitic roots to the kry root word here--including “bound,” “shrivelled,” and “mangled"--and others relying mostly on the context--including “pinned” or “pierced.” ("Pierced," the translation of the King James Version, the NIV--with a footnote--and other English translations, comes partly from the Septuagint’s “dig” but mostly from the crucifixion narrative in the gospels--a case of translators trying to force a Messianic prophecy into this verse.)
But as Brent Strawn and others have argued, there’s good reason to keep the original Hebrew phrase “like a lion.” For one thing, it fits the overall imagery of the psalm, with the victim being devoured by wild animals, including lions in verses 13 and 21. (I was struck to realize how many first-century Christians died in the mouths of lions--which to me is one of the worst imaginable ways to die, right next to crucifixion and being burned, and is arguably the most terrorizing. Maybe they took comfort in Psalm 22’s promise that God is with us even under a lion’s mouth. Daniel certainly could.) More specifically, the image matches up eerily with crucifixion: the victim stretched out under a pouncing lion that has pinned down his hands and feet, preventing defense against its awful teeth. Eugene Peterson captures this imagery, if not the lion itself, in his paraphrase The Message: “Thugs gang up on me. They pin me down hand and foot.”
Less directly, Strawn suggests the image here might be of the leftovers of a lion’s feast; lions eat the muscles but leave the extremities of their prey. Or maybe it’s related to Isaiah 38; the medieval rabbi Rashi noticed that when Hezekiah remembers his illness, he says in verse 13, “like a lion he breaks all my bones.”
In any case, the picture is chilling. Tim Keller says that one reason Jesus couldn’t have been killed in a more efficient way is that crucifixion made a person about as vulnerable as he could be—body completely exposed, opened, pinned, frozen in a helpless embrace of death. The omnipotent was rendered powerless.
The crucifixion is so familiar to us. It almost seems normal, even a little holy, to see a figure of Christ nailed to a cross. It almost seems like a Christly pose, rather than the criminal’s pose. Mel Gibson’s The Passion had to shock us into the awfulness of the crucifixion by making it more pulverizing and bloody. But Psalm 22 shows us that we’ve just begun to imagine what the suffering of Christ on the cross was really like. It was like being eaten alive. Devoured, inch by inch.
But Psalm 22 also shows us something we tend to forget, something that puzzles theologians who say that Christ was rejected, abandoned on the cross. It’s in verse 24, the verse early Christians might have whispered before being ripped into by lions’ teeth: ”He did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” Christ on the cross, and Christians in the Colosseum, ended up looking like roadkill. But God had not abandoned them. God hears our cries of terror just as loudly as God hears our shouts of praise.
With Christ’s resurrection comes the promise of a day when the lion will peacefully lie down with the lamb, when all cries of terror are turned to shouts of praise. Some of those shouts might come right from Psalm 22: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord ... For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.”
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources for Psalm 22
-"Psalm 22:17b: More Guessing,” by Brent A. Strawn. Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 119, No. 3. (Autumn, 2000), pp. 439-451.
-”Psalm 22 as the Interpreter of the Suffering Messiah” by Victor Smadja
Resources for the Psalms
Psalms for Holy Week
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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Saturday, March 31, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 20: Anointed
Reading 6: Psalm 19-21
Psalm 20
focal phrase: “The Lord will help his anointed.”
focal word: anointed
Psalm 20 might not be the first psalm you think of on a list of messianic psalms. But that word ‘anointed’ stopped me in my tracks. The Hebrew is MShYH, from which we get messiah. The Greek is christos. (The Hebrew for “help” or “save” here, by the way, is YSh’—from which we get “Joshua” and “Jesus,” which mean “savior.")
Everybody knows the name “Christ,” but few people know, or at least dwell on, what it means: “anointed.” That might not be the first word that comes to your mind when you think of the second person of the Trinity. But when we learn to hear the echoes of the Old Testament word “anointed” and “anointed one” when we hear the name “Christ,” we can get to know more deeply who Jesus Christ is. (It can also help us make sense of the word “the” in the title ”the Christ,” which sounded strange when we heard the title of Mel Gibson’s movie: The Passion of the Christ.)
“‘Jesus’ was the name given to the child at his circumcision (Luke 2:21); when the title, ‘Christ,’ is used, that ... should be understood as a specific reference to the Savior’s office as Mediator, the agent of reconciliation between God and [humankind],” says The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary. “The appellation ‘anointed one’ derives from the ancient Near Eastern custom of consecrating with oil persons who undertake the responsibilities of a high office.”
Israel did this for prophets, priests, and kings. But as the EBD notes, “Because these Old Testament figures were anointed for only a short time and discharged their offices imperfectly, Israel anticipated the arrival of the Anointed One, who would be anointed ... by God, with the Holy Spirit.”
We no longer install leaders by dumping oil on their heads, and so it’s harder for us to fully appreciate these roots of the name “Christ.” (It helped me to learn that some linguists think the English word “cream” derives from the archaic English word “chrism,” for a substance used for liturgical anointing, which comes from the Greek “christos.” The theory is disputed, but I cherish the picture of whipped cream on a piece of pie as a sort of anointing.)
But we do still christen, or baptize. We are anointed to join Christ in his baptism. And Paul says in Romans 6, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” His death. That will echo more deeply in our souls over the coming week.
It’s a mistake to read the royal psalms as primarily messianic prophecies, as find-the-messiah riddles, as only retroactively operative. Psalm 20 wasn’t written for the immediate purpose of foreshadowing Jesus; it was written for worshipers to sing to and about their king, their commander-in-chief, on the eve of a big battle, a pep rally for war (with the healthy reminder, often ignored by modern superpower nations, that military might is not a source for faith and hope).
But it would also be a mistake to miss the Psalms’ clues of the coming Christ, as the travelers did on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. Jesus tells them, “Everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
And so it’s fitting to arrive at Psalm 20 on the eve of Holy Week. Our king, the Anointed, Christ, rides on a donkey tomorrow into a battle like we’ve never seen. He will win by losing. He will conquer by dying.
The battle will be brutal. But God will give his Anointed the victory. When we cry, “Give victory to the king, O Lord,” God will answer with Easter.
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
Psalms for Holy Week
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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Friday, March 30, 2007
Translating “my familiar friend” in Psalm 41
From Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog:
One of the most delightful Hebrew idioms I discovered recently is found in Psalm 41:9. The psalmist refers to his close friend as, literally, “man of my shalom.” Isn’t that beautiful?! Someone you can trust, in whom you can confide, is part of your shalom, your peace.
Of the 21 English versions I am evaluating for translation of Hebrew idioms, every one translated the idiomatic (figurative) meaning to English, as, for instance:
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Bookshelf: New Testament Words
Barclay, William. New Testament Words (Westminster John Knox, 1974)
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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 18: Gored
Reading 5: Psalm 18
Psalm 18
focal phrase: “the horn of my salvation”
focal word: gored
“Horn” is one of those poetic images that needs an explanation. I actually thought it was a little more poetic than it turned out to be. I was thinking “horn” as in “horn of plenty,” with salvation spilling out. Especially when you read the Vulgate, which has “cornu salutis meae"--"horn of my salvation"--with “cornu” as in “cornucopia.” Or maybe “horn” is some ancient military instrument or shield. Or “horn” as in “blow your horn,” the announcement of salvation, as when Joshua blew down the walls of Jericho in Joshua 6 with ram’s horns.
But most of the commentaries I checked say that “horn” is just a “horn"--the horn of an animal. The Hebrew word is qeren, for animal horn, the same one used in Genesis 22 when Abraham is called off on his sacrifice of Isaac and sees “a ram caught in the thicket by his horns.” Why “horn”? An NIV footnote explains, “‘horn’ here symbolizes strength.” A footnote in the Contemporary English Version--which translates verse 2 as “my shield, my powerful weapon, and my place of shelter"--is the most helpful of all: “The Hebrew text has ‘the horn,’ which refers to the horn of a bull, one of the most powerful animals in ancient Palestine.”
When I look at the number of ways the word “horn” is used figuratively in the Old Testament, I still can’t quite believe that this rhetorical flourish actually has in mind the pointy protrusion of a bull. But as I reflected on this phrase, I challenged myself to take the literal meaning and run with it. What does it mean, then, to praise God as the “horn” of our salvation?
The NIV Study Bible points to two verses that integrate the literal and figurative meanings of “horn”: first, Moses’ rather gruesome tribute to Joseph and his tribe in Deuteronomy 33:
A firstborn bull--majesty is his!
His horns are the horns of a wild ox;
with them he gores the peoples,
driving them to the ends of the earth
And Jeremiah 48, where losing your horn is the mark of defeat: “The horn of Moab is cut off, and his arm is broken, says the Lord.” Relatedly, Psalm 82 says:
I say to the boastful, ‘Do not boast’,
and to the wicked, ‘Do not lift up your horn;
do not lift up your horn on high,
or speak with insolent neck.’ ...All the horns of the wicked I will cut off,
but the horns of the righteous shall be exalted.
These verses make it a little less strange to praise God as the “horn of our salvation.” But I still find it hard to relate to the language of attack and defense in Psalm 18. In fact, I’ve been struggling with the Psalms’ exultations of God’s violent deliverance throughout my psalm readings so far. I find it hard to celebrate war and death, even when it’s God’s hand working through them. (Psalm 18 is adapted from David’s song in 2 Samuel 22, after he escaped Saul). And I struggle to apply them to my own life, which is free from persecution and military attack.
I’ve come up with three guesses. First, these psalms about deliverance remind us to keep celebrating the acts of God in the biblical story: the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14, the defeat of Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, the rescue of Daniel’s three friends from the fiery furnace in Daniel 3, the miraculous prison breaks of Peter in Acts 12 and Paul in Acts 16. Second, we can celebrate our ultimate deliverance, the fact that no matter what suffering or death we experience, “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
But third, and most directly, there are some echoes, some faint, some furious, of this previous and future deliverance in our current lives. Just this past week, the brother of a colleague in Africa was inexplicably spared his job after several of his coworkers were fired for being Christians. The six-month-old daughter of another colleague, after weeks of chemotherapy on her tiny body, was pronounced cancer-free. This kind of deliverance doesn’t always happen, but when it does, our souls leap.
And in these moments, the image of an animal’s horn isn’t entirely disagreeable. Let’s be honest—because the Psalms are nothing if not honest—don’t we kind of like the image of God as a charging bull, horn poised for attack, not just waving a wand over a medical chart but actually goring that cancer, driving it away? Don’t we take comfort in standing behind a horn so sharp that sometimes it scares persecutors away?
Deliver us from evil, we pray. God has in the past, and God has secured our eternal refuge. And once in a while, even now, we see evil with holes poked in it, deflated, defeated.
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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Monday, March 19, 2007
Resources for Fonts for the Biblical Languages
Fonts resources:
- from the Society of Biblical Literature
- from Bible Researcher
- from Biblical Studies on the Web
- from New Testament Gateway
- from the Institute of Biblical Greek
- from StudyLight
- from Crosswalk
- from LinguistSoftware.com
More resources for reading and learning the biblical languages
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Friday, March 16, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 9: whole-hearted
Reading 2: Psalms 9-11
Psalm 9
focal phrase: “with my whole heart”
focal word: whole-hearted
The true opposite of idolatry is not merely faithfulness or obedience, but whole-heartedness. Especially for us today, believers who are seldom tempted to collapse to our knees at the sight of a golden calf, idolatry may not seem to be a very urgent temptation. But many of us live lives of divided loyalties, partial commitments, hedged bets, lukewarm worship. Two masters. Elijah seems to tell the Israelites that the only thing worse than giving your whole heart to Baal is giving half your heart to Baal, and the other half to God. So does the Spirit in Revelation 3, saying to the Christians in Laodicea, “You are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot.”
The Hebrew words for “whole heart” are “kol leb.” The word leb and its variants appear over 800 times in the Hebrew Bible, but we seldom get its fullest sense in English (or even in a quick glance at the Greek translation, “kardia,” whose English derivatives are mostly medical, as in “cardiac arrest” and “cardiology"). The Hebrew word “leb” means the totality of a person—one’s mind, will, heart, understanding. This is the totality Jesus is talking about when he says in Luke 12, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
We come closest to “leb” in English when we say “her heart just wasn’t in it,” with “heart” meaning not the muscle but a person’s full commitment, interest, and ability. We’re in the neighborhood when we say “I love you with all my heart"--meaning the entirety of my person, and my faithfulness--although Valentine’s Day has so sentimentalized the icon of the heart that it has further distanced the word “heart” from “leb.”
Especially how “heart” is tied to “understanding.” “My mouth shall speak wisdom; the meditation of my heart shall be understanding,” the psalmist says in Psalm 49. This makes no sense if you place the head against the heart, as Plato did when he identified human passions as the enemies of sound reasoning. But in the Hebrew Bible, the head and the heart play in harmony. In fact, when Solomon asks God for wisdom in 1 Kings 3, he asks not for a smart brain, but for a leb shama—literally a “listening heart.”
A “listening heart” knows one more thing; while some psalms urge us to give whole-hearted praise, this one calls for whole-hearted thanks. And whole-hearted thanks is even harder to give than whole-hearted praise. In our relationships with other people, and with God, we find it much harder to say “Thanks"--period, or exclamation point--than to say, “Thanks, but ...” We often qualify our gratitude with the realization that what we’re giving thanks for was, after all, a little late, a little small, or a little too short-lived, in our view. Even when we remember to say “thanks,” we don’t always give thanks with all our “leb.”
“Give thanks in all circumstances,” said Paul, who endured a lot of circumstances in which it was hard to give thanks. Pray “with thanksgiving,” he tells the Philippians, and “the peace of God ... will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Your hearts and your minds. Your “leb.”
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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