Unfortunate Words of the Bible: A Biblical Theology of Misunderstandings

By G. P. Wagenfuhr

What do unicorns, law, love, and hell all have in common? They are all unfortunate words of the Bible. Through mistranslation, cultural shifts, anachronisms, and misguided intentions, this book traces several key words whose meaning is commonly misunderstood in our world today.
If the blatant mistranslation of unicorns could survive in the Bible for thousands of years, securing their place in our cultural imagination to this day, what would happen if important words, like salvation, were misunderstood? How might our cultural imaginations hide the meaning of the Bible rather than revealing it?
By tearing down misunderstandings, Wagenfuhr builds up a broad overview of the story of the Bible that illustrates a more mature and more exciting vision for Christian faith(fulness) than is commonly assumed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532660757

G. P. Wagenfuhr

G. P. Wagenfuhr (PhD, University of Bristol, UK) is a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (ECO). He has spoken internationally on Jacques Ellul and an engagement between sociology and theology.

Book preview

9781532660733.kindle.jpg

Unfortunate Words of the Bible

A Biblical Theology of Misunderstandings

G. P. Wagenfuhr

955.png

UNFORTUNATE WORDS OF THE BIBLE

A Biblical Theology of Misunderstandings

Copyright © 2019 G. P. Wagenfuhr. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6073-3

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6074-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6075-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Wagenfuhr, G. P.

Title: Unfortunate words of the Bible : a biblical theology of misunderstandings / G. P. Wagenfuhr.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-6073-3 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-6074-0 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-6075-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. English versions authorized | Bible. English versions revised standard | Bible. English glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | Bible. | English language etymology.

Classification: bs186. w20 2019 (paperback) | bs186 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/16/19

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are my own translation.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

Part I: The Beginning

Chapter 1: God

Chapter 2: God’s Idols

Chapter 3: Work Sucks

Chapter 4: Paradise

Part II: Rebellion and Rescue

Chapter 5: Rebels Who Fell for It

Chapter 6: God’s Royal Law

Chapter 7: The Messiah Complex

Chapter 8: Losing Salvation, Finding Purpose

Chapter 9: Predestined for What?

Part III: The Mission of the Rescued People of God

Chapter 10: I Pledge Allegiance to the Faithfulness of Jesus

Chapter 11: For the Love of God

Chapter 12: Redeeming the Kingdom

Chapter 13: Children of God

Chapter 14: Take Me to Church

Chapter 15: Send Your Money to the Lord?

Part IV: The End

Chapter 16: Oh Hell

Chapter 17: Our Heavenly Home?

Conclusion

Bibliography

For Ainhoa, who shares my desire for a truly prophetic imagination of the kingdom of God.

Preface

I hope that this book is as enjoyable for you to read as it was for me to write. This book should offer a challenge to many long-held assumptions that you might have and I am confident that it will leave you with more questions than answers. But it does give some answers that have boosted my own confidence in the reality of Jesus’ kingdom, and the authority of the Bible.

This book was made better by the help of friends who formed a book club and read, commented, and criticized the book: my wife, Ainhoa Prieto Wagenfuhr; Blake Boeckerman; Alan Donald; Craig Zebell; Michael and Amelia Harrell; and Daniel VanCamp.

Thanks also goes to Robin Parry and the team at Cascade Books.

Introduction

Biblical Unicorns

Unfortunate words in the Bible? How can anything in the word of God be unfortunate? Well, of course I don’t mean that the Bible originally has poorly chosen vocabulary. We are the ones who make the words of the Bible unfortunate, embarrassing, confusing, awkward, and downright weird. This all happens for a variety of reasons. Some words are old fashioned, and Christians are very good at holding on to old fashioned words. Think of testify or witness being used in any context other than a courtroom. In other cases, Christians have fixated on words and tried to stuff the whole Bible into a single idea, like salvation, one of the unfortunate words we’ll look at later. Some words, like god or hell, were borrowed in the original languages from other religions and the same happened in English. We are really good at forgetting about those sorts of things. The meaning of some words has changed so much in English that we’ve ended up making up dangerous confusions. We will see this with words like charity, redeem, and faith. Some words have come to mean different things in church life from the actual biblical texts they reference, like tithe. And last, but not least unfortunate, there are words that simply have no good reason for being in our Bible whatsoever, like unicorns!

Unicorns are a good starting place for talking about the Bible. Maybe you think that the Bible, like the existence of unicorns, is superstitious and silly, even though people used to take it seriously. If so, this book is for you, because I’d be willing to bet that your knowledge of Christianity is full of unfortunate words and ideas that misrepresent the Bible itself, and the fault does not lie with the Bible itself.

Unicorns are also a good place for Christians to start. Maybe you believe that every word in the Bible is sacred and you believe in taking it literally. We’re not going to talk about that unfortunate word, literal, because it isn’t in the Bible, and isn’t a concept that existed when it was written. But, by beginning with unicorns, I hope you will see that both translating and interpreting the Bible requires help from outside of the Bible itself. I know that sounds terrible to many Christians. Isn’t the Bible alone enough? Can’t it be understood by itself? Won’t the Holy Spirit interpret it for us? I want to encourage you that the Protestants who introduced the idea of sola scriptura, or scripture alone, did not mean that Scripture could stand on its own. They meant that Scripture was the sole authority in matters of faith.¹ We have to understand something of the original authors, audience, genre, and culture. And that requires study of things outside of the Bible. I wrote this book for you too. And unicorns will prove it.

Maybe you’re not in either one of those camps. Maybe you know that we need to study contexts, original languages, and be critical of every translation, which is an interpretation in disguise as my Greek teachers used to say. Well, this book is for you too. Because it’s about much more than just the words and original contexts. This book is a biblical theology by deconstruction. By breaking down common (mis)understandings of important words in the Bible, we will build a coherent picture of what the Bible is really talking about. And unicorns are a fascinating and short case study to begin our adventure.

Unicorns

Unicorns exist in the following texts in the King James Version: Numbers 23:22, 24:8; Deuteronomy 33:17; Job 39:9–10; Psalm 22:21, 29:6, 92:10; Isaiah 34:7.

If they’re in the Bible, they must be real, right? Maybe they are actually just rhinos, since some rhinos are one-horned animals. Certainly Jerome (347–420 AD), who translated the Bible into Latin, made that connection. But let’s go on a short journey to find out how horses with one twirling horn on their foreheads, which don’t exist and were unknown to the writers of the Old Testament, got there. After all, the one place we might expect them, with the rainbow after the end of the great flood of Noah’s time, shows a disappointing lack of unicorns flying through the sky painting that rainbow.

Unicorns have changed significantly since we first find out about them from a Greek who lived in Persia named Ctesias of Cnidus (k-tee-see-us of k-NEE-dus). Ctesias was the personal physician to Artaxerses II (art-a-KSER-sees), the emperor of the Persians around the 400s BC. This may have been the emperor Ahaseurus (a-hess-yer-us) of the book of Esther in the Bible.

Chris Lavers in his book The Natural History of Unicorns gives a full and detailed history of the unicorn beginning with Ctesias, who reports that there is a one-horned ass with some surprising qualities. It is bigger than a horse. Its horn grows out of its forehead to about a one to one and a half feet in length. The horn is white at the base, black in the middle, and bright red at its sharp point. Those who drink out of it can be cured of epilepsy. The horn can also nullify poison. The unicorn is faster than a horse, but takes a long time to accelerate to top speed. This enables hunters to bring it down when it is grazing with its young. But it is a fearsome animal that must be killed at a distance with bows and thrown spears. This report from Ctesias doesn’t sound much like the cartoon images of white horses with rainbows. There is a long development of this animal from ass to goat in the middle ages, and finally to the horse we know today.

Furthermore, in nearly every Bible passage that I listed above, the animal in question has horns. That is, it has more than one horn, and so cannot be a unicorn, whose very name means one-horn. So we can be very confident that the Bible is neither talking about unicorns, nor rhinos. Why then do many translations use the word unicorn? And what does that mean for the reliability of the Bible?

I believe that the Bible is the word of God, but the translations of it are not. There are no perfect translations or versions of the Bible. All of them make decisions about what word to use in translation for an original Hebrew or Greek word or phrase. The unicorn is a good example of why I don’t believe translations are the exact word of God. Going back to the ancient world, we come to the 200s BC. At that time the Jewish people were largely scattered. They had been conquered by the Greeks, as had most all of the Middle East, even to India. Greek became the common language, as English is today. The result was that, especially for Jews living outside of Judea, knowledge of Hebrew was disappearing. The Jews needed a Bible translation. This translation has come to be called the Septuagint (sep-too-a-jint), and is abbreviated as LXX (Roman numeral seventy). It is the Greek version of the Old Testament. And although the legend of its translation, which unfortunately we cannot repeat here, holds that all the seventy-two translators worked independently and came up with the exact same thing, we know that it has errors.

One notable error was the substitution of the Hebrew re’em, רְאֵם, with the Greek monokerotos (μονοκέρωτος, mono-KER-oh-tos), which simply means one-horn. The correct animal is most likely an auroch, a now extinct wild ox. The last ones died in Poland in 1627. Aurochs were present in biblical times and lands, and they were the animals that were domesticated to form the variety of cattle breeds as we know them now. Many modern translations rightly substitute wild ox for what earlier might have been translated as a unicorn or rhinoceros. Though we can’t be sure, the mistake was probably made because Hebrew speakers simply forgot this word re’em. It’s not very common. We have older names for animals that are often forgotten, like coney. A coney is a rabbit and was a common word only a century ago, but is now no longer used. In Spanish, a rabbit is a conejo. So we have a similar word in other languages. The Greek translators didn’t have the luxury of knowing similar words in other languages for re’em.

The translators struggled to remember what a re’em was, so they substituted their best guess, at least that’s Lavers’s hypothesis. The context told them it had to be an animal, and from the verses I listed above, we know something of what the animal was like: strong, having horns that can kill people, free and difficult to tame. That sounds something like Ctesias’s unicorn. We know that Aristotle soon before the LXX project had talked about the unicorn in one of his books, and so they may have known it through him.

So, the Greek Old Testament had an error in translation. It’s a fairly minor problem in the grand scheme of things. But that error, and the failure of later translators to fix it for more than 1,500 years, meant that unicorns became culturally important, far more than any other mythical creature, except perhaps dragons. At one point the horn of a supposed unicorn, called alicorn, was worth far more than its weight in gold. These were probably narwhal tusks. But people even sold powdered alicorn because they thought it could neutralize poison, and it was also worth an insane amount of money. Kings and queens used unicorns in their coats of arms. The royal family of the United Kingdom has a lion and a unicorn (of the later horse variety) on their coat of arms to this day. The lion is for England, the unicorn for Scotland, those being the official animals of each nation. It’s hard to imagine unicorns being so widespread if they had not been in the Bible for two millennia.

If something so minor made such a big impact on European culture, and now on popular culture, what would happen if translators and interpreters got something major wrong? We often think that translations work on a word-for-word level, and sometimes they do. After all, a cat is a cat (even if cats aren’t in the Bible). A re’em is a wild ox. It refers to a single, identifiable species. But concepts like love, salvation, God, creation, law, and hell cannot easily be translated word for word. They are far more complex. As we will see, some of these words carry significant cultural baggage with them, both in the original language and in our own.

This book is a tour through the Bible looking at a number of these words. We will see how direct translations and interpretations, and our love for dictionaries, has led us down a perilous path. These unfortunate words have led to important cultural ideas, entire movements and political agendas. Unicorns are simple and silly, but revolutions, rebellions, and the rise of secularism are neither simple, nor silly. As you read this book, my hope is that you will come to reconsider important concepts of the Christian faith, have a new and more mature confidence in the Bible, and see how the whole of the Bible fits together in ways that have often been missed. We will frequently try to understand the Bible in the world in which it was written, rather than just assuming it was written today to us in our world. The Bible is for us, but it was not written to us. So, we cannot just take it at its word, or literally because as we saw with unicorns, there are some very unfortunate words in our translated Bibles.

A Note About Bible Translation

There are dozens of excellent books on how we got the Bible and how we know it is reliable. It is reliable and most of our translations are very good as well. The problem we will see arise again and again in this book is that words have meaning in their contexts and in their worlds. Simple words like money mean entirely different things in the Old Testament to what they mean now. There were no banks, no coins, no bank notes, no checks, no credit cards, probably very little bartering, and loans with interest were outlawed. In short, money did not exist in the Old Testament.² But all of our modern translations have the word money in the Old Testament. That’s because no translator can translate an entirely different world by a single word!

The Bible as we have it took hundreds of years to write. It was written by nomadic shepherds, people in mighty kingdoms, prophets in exile, oppressed minorities, and Roman citizens. It shouldn’t surprise us that Paul doesn’t write a lot about how God is like this or that animal, but the psalmists do. The psalmists looked after animals and lived very close to the natural world. Paul, as a Roman citizen and city-dweller, uses imagery from soldiers, sports, sailors, and marketplaces to explain his ideas. The word of God has not changed, but the world has, and the Bible wasn’t written in our world. Again, no amount of word-for-word translation, no amount of wanting to take the Bible literally, can bridge this gap of millennia. But it’s not impossible, or even that difficult to walk over that bridge. The bridge has been built by hardworking people for thousands of years. Sometimes it has rotten planks that need to be replaced, which is the task of this book. But if there is a bridge from our time and world to those of the Bible, we are the ones who have to walk over it. We cannot make the ancient worlds come over to us. And that means we need to study, listen, and learn.

So let’s take a look at some of the unfortunate words of the Bible and see how we might come to know the Triune God through his word by correcting our preconceptions about it.

Further Reading

Grudem, Wayne, C. John Collins, and Thomas R. Schreiner. Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning. Wheaton, IL: Crossway,

2012

.

Lavers, Chris. The Natural History of Unicorns. New York: Harper Perennial,

2010

.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity. Grand Rapids: Brazos,

2016

.

1. See Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel.

2. See Wagenfuhr, Plundering Egypt,

151

–

52

.

Part I

The Beginning

Words contain a whole world within them. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s start with creation. That seems like such an innocuous word. It just means the universe, doesn’t it? Hold on for a moment. Universe is not the same as creation. Those two words contain two entirely different realities. Creation is something that is created, and created things require creators. Now, if we use the word creation to refer to everything, we imply that there is a creator who made all of it. The creation has a relationship to the creator, either a good one or a broken one. Universe means everything taken as a whole. It doesn’t have to talk about how things came to be, or whether there is a God or not. There is no relationship in this word. It may be used purposefully