I came across another translation issue. I found this one quite humorous. In an essay about the creation of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Bruce Metzger writes about the translation committee's difficulty with the Hebrew word miknas. It refers to the special underwear of the priests as described in Exodus 28:42. This word is rendered as “breeches” in the King James Version. The committee thought that was misleading since the garment covered the priest's body from the waist to the thighs. They eventually settled on “undergarments” after considering several other possibilities: drawers, underpants, shorts, and skivvies. I'm amused by the picture of these PhDs in Hebrew sitting around talking about underwear.

I came across an interesting translation issue in Genesis. Chapter 4 describes Cain's murder of Abel and his subsequent punishment by God. Part of his punishment was to wander over the earth for the rest of his life: “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” After this pronouncement, Cain leaves and settles in the land of Nod. I guess Cain never was very good at listening. The ESV translates verse 16 as

Then Cain went out from the presence of the LORD and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.

The interesting item to note here is that the Hebrew words translated as Nod (in verse 16) and wanderer (in verse 12) have the same root. The ESV mentions in a footnote that Nod means wandering. I checked the Latin Vulgate and it translates this as approximately

Then Cain went out from the face of the LORD and dwelt as a wanderer on the east side of Eden.

John Wycliffe, in the first English version of the Bible, translated it the same way. The “land of Nod” rendering entered the English translation stream through Tyndale. His work served as the basis for the KJV which has had a tremendous influence on all following English translations. I checked all the major versions currently available and they all had “land of Nod”. Tyndale's Cain found a loophole while Jerome and Wycliffe's Cain appears to have received his punishment. Which one is the true Cain?

As I mentioned in the previous entry, the church has always had a complex task in the evaluation and integration of the creations of culture within its mission. The church must play a redeeming role with the surrounding culture while not valuing that which is antithetical to its purpose. The use of music in its worship is an excellent illustration of the inherent tensions in this task. The decision of the early church with regard to music was a unique one in ecclesiastical history and bears looking at.

The early church had a single response to instrumental music in the church: it did not belong. The style did not matter. The instrumentation did not matter. The lyrics did not matter. Instrumental music in the Graeco-Roman culture was a part of pagan religious celebrations and licentious entertainments and therefore had no place in the church. It was even debated whether singing should be allowed. The concern was that the emotional response from the melody may be greater than that of the words. Augustine went so far as to call it sin. In his Confessions, he writes about his struggles with music:

Church and culture. It has been an uneasy and complex relationship. The church must contextualize the gospel to communicate it to the culture without distorting its message. The culture influences the forms of worship and the discourse of the church. In many ways this second interaction has caused the larger disagreements of the two within the church. It has touched everything from styles of music to language to feasts and festivals. It began with the creation of the church and continues today.

The church developed within the cultural context of the Graeco-Roman world even as its religious origins are Jewish in nature. The music, language, and philosophy of the time were inherently pagan given their roots. The church needed these, though, as it worked out its theology and worship. This created an obvious tension between the desire to use the intellectual and artistic fruits of the Classical Greeks and yet not be overly influenced by the ideals of that society. This tension can be illustrated through the rhetorical question of Tertullian in the early 3rd century: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” The answer for Tertullian is that the church does not and should not depend on classical thought.

I came across some interesting quotes about miracles in a book about the Enlightenment. Diderot wrote that he would not believe the report of a resurrection even if all of Paris were testifying to it. Similarly, Hume said that he would deny the resurrection of Queen Elizabeth against the testimony of all the historians of England. Both Diderot and Hume began with an a priori belief that miracles were impossible. I compare this to one of the famous sayings of Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I can imagine one of the philosophes of the Enlightenment saying something like this. An actual resurrection is impossible scientifically so the search is on to find the improbable event that fooled all those people.

Relentless. Page-turning. Plot-driven. That describes my previous experience with the latest fiction—the best-seller kind of stuff that you hear about and see everywhere. I wanted to try something different to find out if today's writers had anything worth reading. I found it in Gilead.

It is thoughtful and meandering. Forgiveness. Grace. Doubt. Belief. These themes are explored throughout. This book is not meant to be taken in quickly. It encourages pauses. Sentences need to be reread. New perspectives need to be pondered. The simple things of life become profound. The prose is rich and requires a little wrestling: “There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”

I think I will have to read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead again.