Opus 2024-299: Rabbinical Latin

Sunday the sermon was from Nehemiah 8.  In the chapter it had reference to the Levites and a group of specifically named individuals, who help the people understand the law that was being read to them.  It does not explain that clearly in the text, you could pass over it easily.  What is going on is they are reading the law in Hebrew and the multitude no longer understood Hebrew.  So they had people translating for them to explain what it meant.

Hebrew at this point, and also at the time of Jesus, had a similar position to Latin in the Middle Ages.  It was the language of scholars.  It was the language of law.  It was what the educated communicated with.  The common people did not generally understand it.  Up until the 20th century the Catholic Church held services mainly in Latin.  Part of your training as a new Catholic was to learn what those Latin chants meant.

In the days of Nehemiah, and also in the days of Jesus, there was no physical translation of the word of God into the every day language of the people.  It remained available in the language of the scholars, but they kept it that way.  When they would read from the Hebrew, they would have a translator there to say, “This is what it means”.  This made it very easy to censor what people knew about what God was saying.

They had interpretations, which I believe were called the Targums.  Originally these were not written down.  A traveling Rabbi would bring an interpreter with him.  Why not write them down?  I go back to my suspicion of the desire for power in the leadership.  You keep people ignorant, and you keep them in your control.  You can always tell them, “Because God said so”.  That is easy when they can’t read what God actually said.

I find myself wondering if this isn’t also part of the strategy of the modern translations.  The goal is to confuse not communicate.  Instead of a word for word translation they offer what they call “dynamic equivalence” or some other catchy phrase.  What it comes down to is a paraphrase.  I think you can call some of these translations with the philosophy of dynamic equivalence as a type of Targum.

I wonder and speculate if people who push the King James only version are in the same camp.  I’m sure that some feel that it is a good translation.  I would agree with him.  And 1611 it was an outstanding version.  It met the need to communicate God’s word accurately.  I don’t feel that’s true today.  I’m fairly well educated and I have a hard time understanding the KJV, not because the ideas are difficult, but because the language is archaic.  I sometimes wonder if the people who endorse and push the KJV aren’t a bit happy with the fact that people don’t understand it.  That puts them in a position to explain it.  That puts them in the driver seat.

I am willing to submit that this is done unconsciously.  Our pastor is a good man and wants to communicate truth.  He has great confidence in the King James.  I’m pretty sure that’s because he was raised with it.  When I was following along in my NASB I missed a lot of the little things that were happening.  I assumed that he was reading what it said.  In the pursuit of understanding his sermons, I got myself a good KJV with study helps and continued to follow along.  I began to notice something; he would often paraphrase and re-translate certain passages.  When he came to words that were archaic, as he read he would substitute a modern world.  He was providing a Targum as he went along.  Every once in a while, he would point out that he was changing it, but generally he did it on the fly without thinking.  If you’re going to update the translation, as you read, it would seem to me entirely logical that you simply go to modern translation.

I wonder if this is another area where the idea of “the fullness of time” comes into play.  We are looking at a time between when the Romans used Latin and the Muslims used Arabic.  This was the time when anything translated that wanted to communicate would’ve been written in Greek. Was that part of God’s plan and timing?

homo unius libri