Canter Bridge

Biblical Languages—What’s the Use?
CU Chapter, Religious and Theological Studies Fellowship
4 March 1997

Several years ago, I was asked to say some words to the RTSF chapter at Cambridge University, under the title ‘Biblical Languages—What’s the Use?’ I would love to have know the pre-history of the brief text which that title was. It sounded as though some particular agony lay behind it, the kind that might set biblical scholars to arguing whether it was an individual crisis or, conversely, some undocumented communal upheaval that gave it birth.

It seemed to hold a quiet existential groan in its letters rather than to be the product of a comfortable theologue expounding upon his certainties. The mind’s eye can almost imagine a shadowy figure behind it. Perhaps its author is a prophetic personality, perhaps an anti-wisdom poet like Job, perhaps—most likely—a suffering theology undergrad who has stumbled into one week too many with brand new verbal paradigms to memorise.

I very much liked the title, and I tried to use the slightly tortured angst which it communicated as justification for answering the question which it poses somewhat autobiographically. I repeat the experiment now, somewhat weathered, tested, and largely validated by the experience of teaching Hebrew and Greek in the theological college that I serve. If I mention autobiography, that is because own difficult friendship with the biblical languages has produced its own groans. Perhaps some of them sound very much like yours.

Upon arriving at University as an undergrad, I signed up for Greek and soon found myself in a classroom with the first scholar-pastor I had ever met. He was a giant of a man with a heart of gold but he did a quite insidious thing: he told us to buy the classical Greek grammar by Chase and Philips and to learn how the accents work. By ourselves. He felt it could be done. There was nothing more to say.

At about the same time, a strong-willed new friend of mine had bludgeoned me into auditioning for a men’s choir. The director had been charitable—or else distressingly short of voices—and I ended up on a weekend retreat with this group of men after the first week of classes. A quarter century later, I clearly remember sitting in the back of a bus on the way back to the university on a Sunday afternoon, poring over the first chapter of Chase & Philips, developing a monumental headache and feeling a very pure form of rage coursing through my body: ‘This makes no sense! This can’t possibly be understood! This is intended merely to torture us!’

To make matters worse, Chase & Philips had the gall to observe in their introduction that their grammar was intended for students at secondary school. It seemed I had run head-long into a brick wall. There was no way forward. The end of the road for my ambition to learn Greek had arrived shockingly soon.

By way of parenthesis, I remember a very similar feeling one thousand miles to the east and seven years later, when a dear man we called “the Velvet Hammer” laboured earnestly to persuade us that it really was possible to understand when a Hebrew scheva was vocalised and when silent. Only then I had the advantage of having learned that brick walls eventually reveal their hidden doors.

The second memory was born many weeks later in the cafeteria of the same university. As I sat there in the panicked manner in which I always faced the hour before class, with a tray of food, my three cups of coffee, my by-now-shop-worn copy of Chase and Philips, and my Greek New Testament, I was directed to look up and read 1 John 4.16. I remember as if it were yesterday the sensation of opening my Bible in the original language for the first time and reading a sentence that had come from the apostle’s pen: oJ qeo;” ajgavph ejstivn¬—‘God is love.’

The experience that marked me forever during that lunchtime was not one of discovering that God is love—I had read and heard that a thousand times in my own language. It was rather the galvanising sense of immediacy with my brother the apostle. It seemed as if the two thousand years between us meant nothing. When years later a seminary professor made the off-hand remark that the biblical authors were, after all, our brothers, I knew exactly what he meant. I had read their letters.

Perhaps you will bear one more short chapter of autobiography. It was now a whole academical year after we’d begun Greek, and summer vacation was almost upon us. The same coach, father figure, pastor, drill sergeant, and kind uncle who had thrown us into the den of accents at the beginning now roused himself to proclaim one more of his solemn revelations. ‘Don’t think’, I remember him saying, ‘that your knowledge of Greek will open to you profound mysteries which remain inaccessible to the hoi polloi. It won’t. You’ve worked hard and come a long way. You now have a tremendous tool in your hands which will allow you to work effectively in the Scriptures for the rest of your lives.
But that’s all it is. A great tool. Get to work. And have fun.’

Or something like that.

As I have thrashed my way forward in the biblical languages and texts over the past three decades, and as I have led students in that same path, I often revisit these sentiments. In the case of my students, it is a vicarious visitation, but I still feel these things deeply: rage and frustration, exhilaration, and chastened enthusiasm.

Returning now to the title of these lines—Biblical Languages: What’s the Use—the question allows us two paths forward. On the one hand, it is a voice of desperation which cries out for an apologetic answer. It wants to be persuaded that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at the hands of a Greek or Hebrew lecturer who seems to feel that the language is on our side—even if that seems the remotest of possiblities—will have a redemptive outcome and not be mere pointless suffering.

On the other hand, it leaves the door open for us to talk about practicalities: If indeed there is life after Wenham or Kelly or Lambdin or Weingreen, what does one do with Greek or with Hebrew day to day, week to week. I’d like for us to walk briefly along both of these paths.

An apology

In order to persuade you theological students of the relevance of rigorous study of the biblical languages. I want to draw out some of the implications of my three memories. I am aware as I do so that the number and force of demands placed upon people in ministry makes mine a minority voice.

Study of the biblical languages takes a huge step towards immediacy with the voice of the biblical law-givers, prophets, visionaries, historians, and apostles.

There is no doubt a strong subjective element to this, for which I do not apologise. The Bible, after all, is compelling literature. Regardless of one’s theory of inspiration, it can be agreed that behind it stand human persons who yearn to be understood.

For those of us who embrace this collection of literature as our theological constitution as well, the longing to connect with these writers—both the named and the anonymous—grows only stronger.

The modern English-speaking world offers us tools to move in this direction which are unparalleled in human history. None of them supplants the ability to read an authors’ words as he wrote them down, to imagine as nearly as possible the texture of those voices.

A single cross-cultural experience is enough to convince most of us that a good Italian friend or a rude French parking garage attendant simply must be remembered in his original language. If that were not enough, the gospels themselves add their weight to the argument. Why does a Greek document quote Jesus in Aramaic at critical points? What is there in ‘Talitha, qumi’ or ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sebachtani’ that could not be said just as well in Greek? What would ‘Mara natha’ lose in translation? Yet these words stand out boldly, awkwardly, and sometimes tenderly in the gospels because they stood just that way in the early Christians’ memory.

There is a subjective engagement with the protagonists of the biblical drama that can only be enhanced when we speak their language, though imperfectly. Today’s vicar, pastor, or teacher can only find his bridging role made more effective if he knows both his conversation partners—the biblical authors on his left hand and the people he serves on his right—as well as possible.

Study of the biblical languages is an antidote against naive extremisms based upon words.

Almost forty years ago, James Barr took the stuffing out of biblical theologians with his The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961), and it’s a good job he did! Prior to that, English-speaking biblicists routinely practised what continues to be the custom of devout non-scholars today: overloading select ‘biblical words’ with profound and mysterious meanings rich with theological truth.

Barr pointed out that, essentially, words don’t mean things. Sentences do. Biblical language is still language, and follows the rules of any other similar language. It’s not magic. It’s linguistics.

I have a relative who has become enamoured of the word hnh, which she has heard in the music of a particularly gifted Messianic Jewish musician. She has a hard time imagining how anyone can understand the New Testament at all without recourse to the ever-so-theological word ‘behold’.

Her enthusiasm is admirable, but linguistically, she is mistaken. Hnh is just a word, with the full range of meanings-in-context which one comes to expect of words. It can be used with particularly profound results, as when the Lord poignantly displays his longing for relationship by taking up the language of a servant—ynny—in dialogue with restored Zion in the latter chapters of Isaiah. It is not, however, the missing key to the New Testament.

Students of the biblical languages who get past the beginning grammars are apt to pass through this de-mythologisation of Hebrew and Greek, and to be better interpreters of Scripture for having done so. This is all the more important for those whose profession will oblige them, in one way or another, to speak about biblical texts in a way that helps people to live.

It removes a layer of dependency

Studying at a place like Cambridge is about—among other things—gaining the critical faculties and the confidence to make one’s own decisions about important issues. In the study of theology, as in the practise of preaching and teaching, these same skills are unsettlingly rare.

Otherwise intelligent and insightful people seem somehow content to follow blindly like fish in schools upon climbing the steps to a pulpit or putting pen to publishable paper. If one hears a preacher two or three times, one can almost predict which commentaries stand on his shelf, which English translation he habitually consults. This is understandable when one considers the scope and quantity of demands placed upon the shoulders of the modern clergy, not least upon Evangelical shoulders. Still, I find it striking how people of all theological stripes coincide in their willingness to follow schools.

To attain a functional fluency in the biblical languages is to take a firm and decided step in the direction of independence. It is to understand why the NRSV has it this way, and the NIV that. It is to know, when one thinks or speaks or writes, that there are at least four options for understanding this clause, and to reckon with the responsibility for having chosen third, rather than the first, second, or fourth.

Study of the biblical languages reminds one of the distance between “us” and “them”. At the same time, it provides a way back.

Learning any language—let alone an ancient one which no one today speaks and of which we have no tape recorded conversations—is an excruciating task. It does not take one long, in the study of actual biblical texts, to realise that there are passages at which we can only guess the meaning.

If the language gap between the protagonists is so huge, one learns, how far removed must other elements of life and culture be from what we can imagine as normal. Spending the time and energy to master these languages ought surely to humble us, to slow down our rush to certainty just a bit.

At the same time, however, one finds great delight in the labour of re-assembling the grammatical and syntactical bricks which enable us to come to at least a tentative understanding. I find that all but the most incorrigible personalities emerge from this process with a chastened humility about their own conclusions.

I wonder sometimes whether my hunch that biblical scholars are less self-assuredly dogmatic than systematicians is an accurate one … and whether the wrestling with the language which is required of the former at every turn has anything to do with this.

Study of the biblical languages opens up a world of exegetical ponderings.

To study the Bible in a devout and scholarly manner is to enter into dialogue with more than two thousand years of communal rumination over sacred texts. So much wisdom has been scattered and sown along the way. So much of it is available only in dialogue with the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek texts.

I can hardly keep from blushing when I recall reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship in high school. If you know this masterpiece, you’ll remember that his text is punctuated by Greek words and phrases.

I recently listened to my nine-year old son reading a book with occasional words too long for him to digest. As he reached each one, he hummed softly to get past it. The spectacle of this brought me back to my encounter with Bonhoeffer, whom I read as a sixteen year old with no acquaintance of even the Greek alphabet. I too hummed to get over each Greek word.
How different would be the experience if I could return to it now! Pick up a work like William Holladay’s two volumes on Jeremiah in the Hermeneia series, and you will be treated to the magnificent privilege of walking ever so slowly through the prophetic text beside a master of the exegetical craft.

These are the few of the thoughts I would share with you if I felt that your question was What’s the Use?

Practicalities

But I suppose it’s likely that you’ve already spent a year, or even two, in these languages. You may not need to be convinced to do the thing. You may be wondering where to go from here. If so, perhaps you’ll listen to a few minutes more of practical advice, far too personal to be authoritative, from someone not so many years removed from where you stand at this moment.

Build your language into the disciplines of your life and work.

If you memorise Scripture, you may not feel you can memorise a passage in Hebrew or Greek. But you can master the elements of that verse in its original language as you memorise it in English.

I find this especially important since the healthy habit of memorisation brings along with it the unhealthy necessity of memorising it according to one particular English translation. Having gone over it carefully in Hebrew or Greek is perhaps the best antidote against this risk.

Force yourself to engage the literature according to is use of the original text.

A participant in RTSF might well know the Tyndale OT and NT Commentaries. As you move from familiarity with these to the WBC, Hermeneia, and other helpful secondary literature, discipline yourself to have the original text open beside you.

Follow the commentator’s engagement with the text. Do you understand his thought? Is he right? Has he considered all the angles? Does he rush to judgement? Or does he allow the meaning of the text to emerge and make its own persuasive case?

Gradually correct the lines between primary and secondary texts.

We all begin reading the biblical texts through the eyes of English translations and commentaries. But develop an agenda to reverse the order. Desire to work out the Hebrew or Greek text first, using secondary lit only as a check.

Ask yourself what this passage can possibly mean. List all the interpretative options, then look for help to see if you’ve missed any. You’ll feel greatly rewarded as you find your hunches anticipating those of the exegetical masters. You’re not crazy or inept after all! Eventually you will find them to be colleagues.

Work towards the point where you feel naked and unproductive when you are obliged to offer an opinion/lecture/homily/Bible study based upon mere translation.

A few cantankerous warnings

Don’t be a gnostic

Refuse to suggest that only those who read Hebrew or Greek can truly understand the Scriptures. It is patently not true. A reasonable command of the biblical languages is a way into the biblical world. But there are other doors which sensitive monolingual readers will find with humiliating frequency.

But don’t refuse to be the expert you are

Democratic/egalitarian/low-church/relativistic impulses often lead one to diminish the value of study of this literature in its original language. Only in the field of biblical study does this occur. No student of French literature would ever imagine that study of the French language does not equip him or her to understand the literature.

Don’t give in to this. Although perhaps only in relative terms, you are an expert. There is no need to deny this, though the productive use of your expertise will require great wisdom.

Have fun

During the preparation of this talk, I have been haunted by the suspicion that much of this apologetic is secondary, and that my own daily connection with biblical language and texts is the stuff of a very enjoyable love affair. If you need reasons, perhaps these thoughts will at least not have hindered you. But if you’re drawn instead by the pleasure—may I use the word joy?—of immersion in Scripture, you may not have needed any of this. Sink deep down into it and, as those caricatured American waitresses say—enjoy!