Learning Curve

People are slowly catching up this week, which means we're slowly seeing comments appear on old posts.  If you're interested, peek back at a few.  At the bottom of each entry on the main page, you can see how many comments exist for each post, and even jump straight to them.  You can post comments of your own, too; if you don't have (or want to use) one of the accounts suggested, you can choose Name/URL from the drop down list, and just leave URL blank.

In addition his thoughts on a few of our posts, Mark adds this general question:  

Hosea is proving to be complicated.  There's a lot of new stuff to learn to understand the meaning.  It reminds me of Revelation.  Is it intrinsic in Old Testament study that the context and history are so much more involved than the New Testament?  Or is this just a difference in the way we approach them?

It's a good question, so I thought we'd look at that today.  And like Hosea itself, the answer is complicated.

Yes, the tools we use for each testament are different.  The main reason for this is that Old Testament studies and New Testament studies are treated in the academic system as if they were two completely different things, with little connection points between them.  Most scholars pick one or the other.  And so, over time, one field has developed tools that the other doesn't use.  Some things cross genres, like textual criticism, the art of trying to find mistakes that crept into the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of our Bible over the years as one person after another copied them by hand, and then figure out the best way to fix them.  But even there, the methods used in the Greek are quite a bit different than those in the Hebrew.  There's reasoning behind this division of labor, and that reasoning is more interesting than the division itself.

Revelation was hard because it uses a lot of symbolism that we aren't familiar with.  Everything in the book is a metaphor, and we don't understand the metaphors.  So, there's a steep learning curve.  Even so, we're generally familiar with its background.  Firmly situated in the middle of the Roman Empire—and for that matter, in Asia Minor (now Turkey), which means that even though it's the furthest reaches of Europe, it's still mostly Europe—we live in the same culture as the author and recipients of Revelation.  That culture has undergone a lot of change over the last 2,000 years, to be sure.  But we're still talking about Western culture, rooted in Greek/Hellenistic ideas.  We're talking about the empire that sits at the beginning of the weaving of the same Western history we're living in today.  We're at different ends of the cloth, but we're pulling the same thread.

The Old Testament, though?  That's a different thread entirely.  Ancient Near Eastern culture was very different than Postmodern American culture is today.  It takes a lot more for us to wrap our heads around what's going on.  We'd have an easier time being dropped into China today.  And on top of the culture change, we're also talking about a society that lived centuries before the foundations of Western culture were being written.  It's not just that they had different ideas than the Greeks and Romans who gave us our inheritance; the Greeks and Romans didn't even exist yet!  In short, our learning curve is a lot more steep for the Old Testament than for the New.

Or in other words:  If we're looking at the Gospel of Luke and talking about the Roman Empire destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, even if we've never been there, we can all kind of picture it in our heads.  There's no need to identify the players, the time period, the instruments of warfare, the effect on people, etc.  But if we start talking about the Syro-Eprhaimite War, about which Isaiah speaks in chapter 7 of his book, we'll have to talk about the 8th century; the Assyrian Empire; where on the map that was; the difference between Judah and Israel; the difference between Syria and Assyria; the difference between Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia; the whole dynasties of which King Tilgath-Pileser III, King Ahaz, King Rezin, and King Pekah were a part; perhaps how to pronounce "Tilgath-Pileser" in the first place; the economic, social, and religious contexts of each of the four nations involved in the war; how Ancient Near Eastern empires built their territories; what these empires did to the people they conquered; how one king can stay king of his nation even though the nation had been conquered, and how tribute was paid; the military technology available at the time; and so on, and so on—all that, just to get to the same level of basic background information for one chapter of Isaiah that we had for the whole Gospel of Luke.

To be honest, I always knew some of this was true.  But I didn't really get it myself until we started this study.  The thing that is driving this message home for me is the part of the study you mostly don't see—the translation work, turning the ancient Hebrew words into intelligible English.  As many of you know, I'm something of a language nerd, and I'm pretty good at the Hebrew bits, far more than Greek, for example.  To begin with, Hebrew is a language constructed in totally different ways than English is.  Honestly, Hebrew is easier by far, but it forces you to think in totally different ways than the typical English speaker does.  Sometimes, you look at two words that are standing next to each other, and you have to try them in twenty different ways before you can figure out how they relate.

On top of that, there's the problem of poetry.  Prophets often—and especially when they're delivering God's own speech—speak in poetry.  If you look at the running translation (click the link at the top of the page), you'll see that in chapter 1, verses 1-2a are prose, running text.  Then God starts talking, and the words become poetic.  Then in verse 3, we get a description of the results—prose again.  "And then YHWH said to him,"—and we get poetry again.  Verse 7 doesn't fit this pattern.  It's God speaking, but it's prose.  This is one of the reasons we know it was added later.

But how do you turn Hebrew poetry into English poetry?  It's a piece of the translation process that defies translation.  English poetry is primary about rhyme scheme, as well as meter.  Hebrew usually has no rhyme, but it always adores alliteration.  It does have meter, but it's complicated to say the least—and an area about the language about which I know nothing (Robert Alter's book on it is on my "someday" reading list).  Hebrew poetry does like to relate the idea of one line to the idea of the one preceding it.  So Isaiah will say (40:3),

In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.

Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Desert and wilderness being synonyms in Hebrew, it seems that Isaiah has said something, and then said exactly the same thing again but with different words.  Why would he repeat himself?  He does it because that's the most important feature of Hebrew poetry:  Repetition.  It's everywhere.  So, how do you make that "feel" poetic, rather than just repetitive, in English?

And then you start worrying about problems with the Bible text.  Words that make no sense at all--perhaps are they a copying error?  Do any scholars on this passage suggest a fix for that error?  Is that fix really a good idea?  What about some of the weirdnesses of Hebrew, where the author will suddenly change tense (well not tense, but aspect; there is no such thing as tense in Hebrew, natch) or change person in the middle of a sentence?  Some of the most beautiful parts of prophetic poetry are the metaphors that the prophets use; but how do you track with them when they mix their metaphors, using six different metaphors in the space of two verses?

The Old Testament is a very beautiful, but very strange, landscape, in which nothing quite looks like we expect it to.  And if we believe, with current scholarship, that we need to understand what the prophet meant in his own context in order to understand what he means for us today, we've got a lot of information to learn about that "own context" before we can make any sense of it.  No wonder it's so much easier to study Acts or even Revelation than Hosea.

So why bother?  Why not stick to Acts?  It's an old question.  As old as Marcion in the early 100's, who was denounced as a heretic (despite a large following) when he came to the conclusion that the God of the Old Testament was a cruel God, and was different from God the Father of Jesus Christ.  From time to time, when people talk today about the Old Testament, I hear variations on this theme.  But the early church insisted that the God of (revealed in) Jesus was the same as the God of Abraham.

I won't say more about that at the moment.  Instead, I leave it for you to ponder this week.  I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below, especially because I think this is one of the fundamental problems of the Christian religion.  And I think it's one of the most life-giving ones, if we can find a way to untie it.  Let me know what you think about these Questions to Ponder:

1) Why should we care about the Old Testament at all, especially when it's so hard to understand?  If God is revealed in Jesus Christ, why don't we just read the parts of the Bible that are about him?  What does the Old Testament give to our faith?

2) If the old adage that "the translator is always a traitor" is true, what do we do about the problem of inaccurate translation?  How do we know that the Bible we're reading is really the Bible?  How do we deal with the fact that we're losing something in the translation process?

3) Is it worth learning all this history and background information for our study of the Bible?  Can't we just, you know, read it?

4) What do you think the biggest learning curve is for you as you come to scripture?