In an effort to attack Christian faith as a whole, many critics attempt to discredit the Bible. Many of their criticisms are similar and can be grouped into a few categories. Most of the criticisms in one category can be rebutted in pretty much the same way so it's important that Christians learn how to identify common criticisms so that we can give a proper response (1 Peter 3:15).
One such category is “reverse etymology” (as identified in “Exegetical Fallacies” by D. A. Carson). Reverse etymology occurs when we force our modern understanding of a term onto the original meaning. Words in different languages rarely have exactly the same semantic range of meaning. It is an unfortunate yet unavoidable consequence of translation that every word we choose when translating, will project onto the original text the English reader's understanding of the English word being used. Consider the following example:
Leviticus 11:13,19 NASB, “Moreover, these you shall detest among the birds; they are detestable, not to be eaten: the eagle, the vulture, and the buzzard,... the stork, the heron in its kinds, the hoopoe, and the bat.”
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In English, the word bird has a specific meaning. In this verse from Leviticus, the Bible lists a bat among the types of “birds” not to be eaten. Certainly in modern English, bats are not birds. Critics will pounce on this fact as evidence that the Bible is wrong. The problem with this criticism is that when the Bible was written, the English word bird did not even exist. You have to understand that dictionaries don't write languages; languages write dictionaries! There is no immutable, transcendent standard that establishes the meanings of words. Words mean exactly what the majority of people understand them to mean. Whatever we think of as a bird (feathered, egg-laying, etc) is not what the original readers of this passage would have thought.
The word being translated as bird (fowl in the King James) is the Hebrew word oph (עוֹף, Strong's word 5775). According to Strong's, oph means, “flying creature.” In English, we may not label a bat as a bird. Yet, regardless of how we understand the word bird, we have no grounds to say the ancient Jews were wrong to describe bats as flying creatures!
With that in mind, consider these passages that describe the creature that swallowed Jonah. In Jonah 1:17, the KJV says, “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” In Matthew 12:40, when Jesus was talking about His death and resurrection, He said, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Looking at these verses side by side, it looks like the Bible is calling a whale a fish. However, just as in the case of birds/bats, the “error” is only the result of us projecting our understanding of the word fish (scales, gills, etc) onto the original meaning of a Hebrew word. Furthermore, the Greek word translated as whale in the KJV (kētos, κῆτος, Strong's word 2785) could also have been translated as a great fish so, technically, there isn't even a perceived error.
We don't know the exact species of critter that swallowed Jonah. It shouldn't be a surprise that a swimming creature, large enough to swallow a man, might be called a huge fish or a whale. Regardless, it would be the epitome of word-snobbery to believe the writers of the Bible should have used these words (words that didn't even exist when the books were written) in exactly the same way we understand the them in the 21st century!
There are other examples I could cite but these are enough to demonstrate the flaw with these types criticisms. They aren't problems with the Bible. They stem from the ignorance of critics who seem to not realize the Bible wasn't written in English.
I entirely agree with you, at least regarding the cited examples.
ReplyDeleteI would point out that you don't even need to go back to actual Hebrew to find examples of taxonomical categories that don't match up with modern Linnaean or cladistic taxonomy: Hermann Melville spent a couple of pages of Moby Dick protesting against the idea that whales weren't fish, inasmuch as they clearly lived in the sea. He knew every reason that taxonomists lumped them with bears and cows and rabbits rather than with trout; he just didn't think this bore all that heavily on the question. There is even a book, Trying Leviathan, about a 19th century court case about whether the word "fish," in New York law, encompassed whales (it was about state inspection of whale oil vs. fish oil).
An analogous, albeit more minor problem, arises in descriptions of the crucifixion. The gospels mention wounds on Jesus' "hands," though both engineering and surviving bones from crucified criminals strongly suggest that the nails should have been driven through his wrists, not what English usually refers to as the "hands." But lots of languages differ from English on where (or even whether) to draw the dividing line between "hands" and "arms," and apparently Greek cheir included the entire wrist.
Steven J,
DeleteThanks for your comments.
People group things any number of ways and there's no one way that is objectively the “correct” way. I had a person point out, once, that supermarkets frequently keeps eggs in the dairy section. Do they not know that cows don't lay eggs? LOL. There are usually obvious reasons why people group things the way they do so it's hardly compelling when one person criticizes the way some other person chose to group something.
Like I said in my post, when we assign an English word to a Greek word (or what language is being translated) we necessarily project the meaning of the English word onto the original. It's unavoidable, really. Another example that has caused much bickering is the word “wine” in the New Testament. The original word has a much wider range of meaning than the English word, as the Greek word also describes a non-fermented type of grape juice. That will have to be the subject of another post.
Please keep visiting. God bless!!
RKBentley