Chapter 1 continues.
Section D: The Word
Part 2: The Word in Greek Thought
Boman avoids the bigger question of “word” in Greek thought and restricts his explanation to what he considers the correlations with Hebrew. Thus, the only Greek word that matters here is logos. It’s based on lego “to speak”. That leg- root suggests pulling things together in an orderly fashion. Thus, logos points to “speak, reckon and think.” Boman offers a brief history of how the term became so heavily used after some time among the Greeks. It came to signify the rational order of ideas that one could enunciate about something.
He boils it down to this: Just as dabhar is characteristically Hebrew, so logos is characteristically Greek. He sees them as the pinnacle of cultural identity for each. He works hard at trying to converge them with a little chart portraying two intersecting thrusts of meaning. Our English term “word” is, he believes, an appropriate intersecting point.
He closes the section with a quick review of his thesis about “word”.
Section E: Collective Concepts and Ideas
Part 1: The Hebrew Collective Concepts
Here Boman chases his tail again trying to pull Hebrew thought out of the mystical realm where it belongs, but only half-way, as it were. He invests a Hebrew mind with a wealth of intellectual concretion that most experts say was not there. Still, he avoids nakedly equating it with Greek thinking.
Then he moves on to the Hebrew sense of generalities about people, referring to this as Hebrew collectives. He sort of misses the point that the Hebrew reckoning arises from moral recognition of the various tribes of mankind. They are what they are because people choose a role in the divine drama being told; they present a loyalty to something (i.e., faith). Instead, Boman makes it a very simple collectivism that mostly ignores individuals, contrasting it against western individualism. I’ve often said that this is a false characterization of Hebrew thinking.
He goes on striving like this for a couple of pages, trying to define Hebrew thinking in terms that simply don’t match the established scholarship. Things and people and natural forces are all recognized by who they are, not what. The subject is known by how it fits in the moral frame of reference. He comes close to saying something simplistic like, “Hebrew is deductive and Greek in inductive.” That’s merely one’s first impression of Hebrew thinking when all you’ve ever known is western thinking.
Hebrew labels are contextual; you cannot reduce it down to a formula. It’s not something inherent in the thing. Ruth was born Moabite; she embraced the Israeli identity. The only reason the Bible text keeps referring to her as “Moabite” is because it’s critical to the story. The people in Naomi’s hometown would have soon stopped referring to her background until it mattered. She became an Israeli in their minds. The Israeli writers would be very proud of how she found it worthwhile to change her national identity by embracing the Covenant of Moses.
