HTCG 01g

Posted on September 10, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 1 continues.

Section E: Collective Concepts and Ideas

Part 2: Platonic Parallels

First, a brief reminder here. I learned from linguistic experts that Greek, as with other western languages, tends to see language as a conveyance of content. Words have pools of meaning. Hebrew sees their language as signposts to a land or persons worthy of acquaintance. There’s a whole lot more than can be put into words. Boman never got this message.

Instead, he offers an explanation that is only half-correct. Quoting someone else, he lays out that Hebrew language is composed almost entirely of nouns and verbs. Thus, it is things and people who act, and their actions. Virtually all verbs are active, portraying something you cannot miss. By contrast, Plato’s ideas leave us with a language that is more passive, though solid enough. He expends a lot of words portraying the action of a magnet “passively” drawing things to itself as a metaphor for the Greek language.

Boman then says a lot in trying to convince readers that Plato and Greek language don’t actually portray man on his own power seeking the Good (equating it with God). This he says, referring to a culture that was notorious for being inherently man-centric. Man was the measure of all things in Greece, and Plato was partly responsible for that. This time, instead of pulling Hebrew toward the Greek philosophy, Boman drags Plato closer to the Hebrew.

The one thing he fails to address head-on so far is that Greek aims to make ideas and language impersonal and objective. The Ideal, the Good, is static and unchanging, while the Hebrew God was most emphatically a living person.

The chapter ends there.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

HTCG 01f

Posted on September 9, 2024 by ehurst

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.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on HTCG 01f

HTCG 01e

Posted on September 8, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1.

Section D: The Word

Part 1: The Word in Ancient Oriental and Hebrew Thought

It has been well established by many scholars that the image of word in Hebrew is not a matter of ideas or content, but a mighty force of will. Boman cites some big names to back this up, but then says something patently silly. He says that the convergence between Greek logos and Hebrew dabhar is stronger than any similarity between Hebrew and the rest of the Ancient Near East, despite the latter’s near unanimity.

Boman cites an example of the word as it is described in an ancient Marduk-Elill hymn. It’s the same kind of language you expect from the Old Testament regarding Jehovah. It’s a cosmic shattering power to change everything that exists, referring to both voice and word. In Egypt it was depicted as the substance of Creation flowing from specifically the mouth of one deity or another. Boman waxes lyrical in quoting multiple religious inscriptions from the Nile Valley and Delta. Creation texts from Babylon and Assyria don’t offer as much direct references, but it can be deduced by indirect mentions from other literature.

In Hebrew it’s not simply the mouth; there is a very specific focus on the voice of God that asserts power through nature. Hebrew distinguishes between the voice and the utterances of the mouth. The divine word is not expressed through forces of nature, but in His moral character. Jehovah was never depicted as some force of nature rather like Mesopotamian deities; He was always a person. Further, while a divine word in Mesopotamia and Egypt has a distinct worldly manifestation, Jehovah is portrayed as a being in the Spirit Realm.

Boman is not so clear and eloquent as Heiser on one point: The Hebrew writers in the Bible often hijacked pagan literature to ascribe the same powers and attributes to Jehovah — “our God is the real God”. Instead, Boman talks all around the idea, but does mention Hebrew writers would sometimes copy expressions used in pagan literature. His point, though, is that the image of Jehovah is transcendent, not corporeal, despite the symbolism. He argues strenuously against what we know was the established Second Temple doctrine of the Word as a second person in Heaven (The Two Powers). This is a glaring error on his part.

He does a fine job of pointing out how the creation myths from Babylon and Egypt are more a matter of transformation of existing materials (fluid) into the cosmos, populated by lesser deities, matter and humans. In the case of Jehovah, we are never told the mechanism, but that He creates from nothing. Then Boman crashes on the rocks of the Documentary Hypothesis (JEPD Theory). He gets all tangled up chasing which documentary source used which kind of expression. However, he does make clear that the Books of Moses have an unmistakable trace of Egyptian influence, which is entirely natural given that Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s household.

What he’s trying to do is make the case for converging Hebrew with Plato by stripping away parts of the native Hebrew culture that weakens his argument. He eventually circles back around to remind us that the Hebrew dabhar can also be translated sometimes as deeds — a word accomplished, the force of will. That is, “will” in the sense of commitment or drive (faith) for something. Thus, a lie is lacking commitment, a vanity. At any rate, to translate the Hebrew term as “word” can completely miss the point.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

NT Doctrine — Hebrews 5

Posted on September 7, 2024 by ehurst

The Covenant of Moses was not the root of divine revelation. It was a distinctly temporary arrangement, solely for the Nation of Israel during a specific period of time until things were ripe for the ultimate revelation in Christ. Thus, every provision of the Covenant of Moses was merely a contextual implementation of something eternal. The Order of Melchizedek was much older and closer to that eternal provision than the priesthood of Aaron and his descendants.

I find it hard to explain this chapter any better than I already have in a previous commentary…

Our writer closes the door back into the Law a little tighter by showing that there is but one High Priest whom God will accept. That one does not stand in Herod’s Temple. Further, he warns that the spiritual reality of things has eluded them completely, because they have refused to grow beyond their poor Hellenized Judaism.

While there may be some debate about the absolute accuracy of it, the various rabbinical colleges all had a copy of the roll of High Priests, going all the way back to Aaron. Each man’s name, lineage and some words about his service, were included in this roll. Some of them were quite famous, offering exemplary service during their term of office. Some were equally infamous for their failures.

The office of High Priest is conceptually fuzzy in our minds. In standard Hebrew fashion, the logic is symbolic, not concrete, not merely a matter of metaphor or allegory. Spiritual truth is hardly explained, only exemplified within a context. The calling of the High Priest was at the behest of God. He set forth the original calling of Aaron and commanded how this office would be carried on by future generations. Obviously no single man in this fallen world could live forever, so the office had to pass from one man to the next. There must always be a man in the office for as long as the Covenant of the Law stood.

Because these were humans, chosen from among the Nation of Israel, they could empathize with the human failings that bound Israelis in their sins. He could serve in his representative office before God Almighty because he was called to it by God, but did so with a human heart no less fallen than those whose offerings and burdens he presented. He had to offer covering sacrifices for his own sins before attempting to offer them for others. Were he not called into the divine Presence by God, He would be stricken dead immediately. Often enough, the sins of the nation caused this anyway. At this, it was not literally God’s presence, but merely an earthly representation of such a presence. It was an earthly model of God’s throne room in Heaven. Yet, for the sake of sufficient sin, the High Priest could well expire on the Day of Atonement when he carried the blood sacrifice into that little room with the wooden box coated with gold leaf and mythical sculptures. He was just a man representing other men to a God no man could see.

Again, this whole thing was by God’s command. All the desire in the world could not make a man High Priest. It was an ironclad birthright issue. By Hebrew logic, this took away any pride a man might have, for what did he do to merit such an office? It was not possible to wear the vestments by merit, but by grace alone, by God’s command. So it was with Christ. He came to Israel by God’s command. Further, He came not merely as one of the Jews, but as the Son of God who commanded. Our writer quotes again the coronation song, Psalm 2, which bears a Messianic truth. If the Davidic king could be called a son of God, how much more so the Messiah Himself, the one who was both anchor and end of the House of David?

Many of the mystical connotations of David’s reign are tied up in the Messiah. The writer also quotes Psalm 110. We are reminded that David was permitted to touch the Ark of the Covenant. While under the covenant for which that Ark existed, it was forbidden. He was permitted because he somehow had seized upon the faith and covenant that came much earlier and still stood. The Covenant of Abraham, which included Melchizedek, both as men of faith who had fully committed their lives to Jehovah, was of a much higher order than the Law. We note that the Law was merely an outward expression of what holiness would be under strictly circumscribed limits: that people, that land and that time. It was not the ultimate revelation of holiness, but was actually a poor reflection of it. While very much binding on Israel as a nation, it could never save souls. That was a matter of faith, of commitment as a gift of grace. When David embraced that level of faith, the Law was fulfilled. Moreover, he could approach the Ark directly, the symbolic Throne of Jehovah, as if he were a High Priest of some other order. That was the prior order of Melchizedek, the order of Abrahamic faith.

Thus, in that Psalm, David reveals an oracle of God, which named him as a High Priest of that other, older order. This is why the Psalms declared God’s command that the whole world should bow before His King on earth. Not as King of Israel, though the image was dressed in that robe, but as King of Faith, the faith Israel was meant to have, but rejected. Still, that faith was at work and it wrought the Messiah. These were prophecies of the Coming One who would be God’s own Son and High Priest of Faith. This was Christ Jesus.

While on the earth as a man, this Jesus was a vastly superior High Priest, for His offering never failed. When He stood before the Throne of God, He was there as Son. His appeals for mercy were surely granted, for God was granting them to Himself. Waxing yet more lyrical, the writer offers an old play on words in Greek. It was a common game to combine two similar sounding words in Greek or Latin as a phrase that encouraged some virtue, or made some pithy statement. Here he uses emathan and epathen – “learning is suffering.” Jesus didn’t learn how to obey; obedience to God was His very nature. Rather, He learned as a man that obedience was suffering, a very Hebrew concept. To gain was to grow, to be changed, to cut off things of the past and leave behind the comfort of the womb. In short, the trauma of birth itself was hidden in learning by experience. What a man hears, he knows. What he sees, he understands. What he experiences, he is.

Summing all this up with His life, pulling together all the unfinished threads of human history and God’s promises, God redeemed all mankind. With Jesus as High Priest in Heaven, any other man claiming that role is a blasphemer. The standing High Priest so-called in Herod’s Temple at that moment was a fake. For this Hebrew audience in Rome, our writer warns there is no place to go if they leave Jesus.

On the cusp of further explaining the image of Melchizedek, the author stops. He pulls his readers up short in their headlong rush back to the comforts of a familiar Judaism. He’s wary of explaining because his readers are weary of hearing. After this many years of walking in Christ and reclaiming their true Hebrew identity, they still remained mere Jews of that latter day corrupt Judaism. They had not traveled back into the land of parabolic truth, of symbolic logic, of things that cannot be taught, but only caught by the spirit enlightened in the Spirit of God. They were sucklings, tender and fat of souls. No wonder persecution was so hard on them. What infant is ready to face hardship? These readers were unable to sift the truth from the mystical viewpoint of the old Hebrew mind. They were still hardly grasping concrete toys of mere human logic with clumsy little hands. They knew the nursing of simple ideas, but the meat of truth was not something they recognized as food.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on NT Doctrine — Hebrews 5

HTCG 01d

Posted on September 7, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1.

Section C: Non-being

Part 1: In Greek Thought

In order to logically corner the Sophists, Plato sought to define being further by defining non-being. It’s not simply the negation of being; it includes things merely imagined but not real. Thus, a broader definition is that non-being is defined as anything except being. Just as darkness is simply the absence of light, non-being is defined by what it is not. It is not being.

Part 2: In Hebrew Thought

We’ve already seen that finding matching terms and thoughts in the Hebrew is tricky.

Boman finds parallels to being versus non-being in the Hebrew concept of “word” — dabhar. Typical of Hebrew fuzzy logic, that includes deeds and concrete objects that result from the word. There is a Hebrew concept of “not-being” — lo-dabhar. Rather than being a null set, it is rather something opposing life, and sinister. Vain words (i.e., lip-service) are a threat.

That’s because they are inherently deceptive. A false word may well be deceptive or even seductive, but is not simply absent; it is vanity. It provides none of the blessings it promises. It is futility, identified by the pain it causes when you trust in it. Boman offers several Hebrew words that carry similar connotations with different flavors: hebhel (puff of wind), sometimes combined with tohu to signify futility. You’ll also see combinations with shaw or bohu. There is the broad image of ineffectiveness of these vanities.

It is not quite like the western notion of chaos, because for us chaos is something very real and effective. For the Hebrew mind, it is just senseless fluff. Boman tries to bring this together with Plato’s definitions, but it doesn’t work too well. For the Hebrew, things are personal in the sense of relational. It’s always a matter of the role a thing plays, as if all things were alive.

Then he chases a rather useful tangent about Buddhism and it’s “yin-yang” outlook that negation and non-being is a positive thing in the balance of reality. Thus, the Greek and Hebrew are actually much closer to each other by comparison, in seeming to agree on the surface, at least, the non-being is inherently bad.

We’ll break here because the next section is quite long.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

HTCG 01c

Posted on September 6, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1, section A.

Part 5: The Dynamic Character of the World

Here I am compelled to reflect upon rather than interpret what Boman says. He points out that a major reason the Hebrews consider the earth so dynamic is that God made it and can change it dramatically at His whim. It’s substance and structure depends wholly and by the moment upon God holding it all together. This has always been a major difference between the ANE versus the West. The latter places a great trust in what they can perceive and use, and mountains look pretty solid in the flesh. Western minds put an awful lot of faith in such things. In the Hebrew mind, the confidence is in the God who made them.

Section B: Static Being

Part 1: The Eleatics and Heraclitus

The Greek philosophers focused on questions of being versus non-being. Rather than dig too deeply into the history of this, Boman selects the big three representatives: Eleatics, Heraclitus and Plato. If we consider the Hebrew image of being as a matter of dynamism, the Eleatics are emphatically the opposite. If it moves and changes, it’s not real for them. Only what is static is real.

Heraclitus was less dogmatic, and indeed, an outlier among Greek philosophers. He’s the one who gave us, “No man steps in the same stream twice.” It’s quite the dynamism. And it is readily apparent that the Greek language was not formed to carry across the ideas of Heraclitus. Even Plato said (in the mouth of Socrates) that this was a major problem for that school of philosophy.

Then again, Heraclitus was from Ephesus, where the ancient cultural background is distinctly more eastern than western. Plato despaired of being able to discuss this philosophy very much. It’s not that Heraclitus didn’t grasp the nature of Greek epistemology; he sees the issues from a Greek frame of reference. He did embrace the Greek rejection of Creation and a sense of purpose in history. However, it was almost as if he abused Greek language to push it into a different shape.

Part 2: Plato

Between those two extremes stood Plato himself. Oddly, Boman shows his own western bias in suggesting, of all things, that Plato is closer to the Bible than most other Greek philosophers. He sees Plato as fundamentally religious in his approach. I frankly chuckled when Boman opined that the early church scholars were mostly Platonic, and that their descent into the Dark Ages coincided with the rise of Aristotelian influence. He’s right, of course, about how quickly the early church abandoned the Hebrew thought for Plato, but the huge difference is that I don’t approve, while Boman rejoices.

He somehow avoids common academic talk about Plato, finding other ways to tell us that it’s all about the real versus the ideal. The real is transitory; things pass away, as our senses tell us. However, once you engage reason and logic, you arrive at ideals that can stand forever. This is “spiritual” and “eternal” for Plato. There’s a further distinction between math as the lower level (mere facts), and a higher level of ideas that reflect something of the nature of truth itself.

Moreover, reality is not the source. Rather, truth or ideas are the “spiritual” reality on which factual reality depends. God is not a living person, but the combined goodness of static ideas. Boman tries to keep God existing in this philosophy, but it doesn’t work. At any rate, it’s the old “what is true, good and beautiful” displaces God. On a sliding scale, whatever is more good-true-beautiful is also more trustworthy. Boman tries again to convince his readers that a synthesis is possible between Hebrew and Greek via Plato. I’m not buying it.

Side note: As clearly as I can recall, all the way back to the first stirrings of my academic studies back in the 1970s, and reading materials going back as far as the Second Temple literature, I cannot recall a single professor or scholar who didn’t prefer some flavor of western epistemology over the Hebrew. It’s bad enough that only a few of them actually understood the Hebrew approach, but not a single one of them favored it.

It seems to me this is fundamental to fallen human nature. It goes all the way back to the Jewish rabbis. The moment they were exposed to Greek philosophy, it seized their human pride and they couldn’t seem to shake the monkey off their backs. I honestly have not run across anyone who has published a preference for the Hebrew epistemology. It’s been pretty lonely.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

HTCG 01b

Posted on September 5, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1, section A.

Part 3: Logical “Being” in Hebrew

Boman had previously mentioned the Hebrew noun clause that was often used in a place where we expect some kind of verb “to be”. The noun clause does a better job of portraying what exists than our western languages do with inactive verbs. In this part he drags readers off into a technical grammar discussion comparing western grammar with Hebrew, using all the obscure parts of speech terminology.

At any rate, Hebrew language won’t often bother with stating “X is Y” to indicate that one is the material or substance of the other (the predicate), but simply places the two terms together in such a way as to indicate something about the matter at hand. Boman doesn’t immediately discuss the way Hebrew is inherently symbolic first and foremost, painting an image with terms that have deep symbolism.

What he does point out is that western grammar follows the logic of wanting to consider first the form of the thing, and then the material, with those two things being separate considerations. For the Semites, the material is what matters most, because it determines the form. It would be entirely inappropriate, for example, to have an altar of wood shaped anything like an altar of stone. Common elements, yes, but the choice of one material or the other changes the shape and basic purpose. They cannot be used the same way. Separating the form and substance is simply not possible. The very meaning of the subject includes the materials. Do you notice how we can scarcely even describe the Hebrew manner of thinking in English?

It gets worse with a related noun clause form, consisting of tying to the subject a list of attributes that clarify, but still presumes a possession or sense of belonging between the noun and the predicates. Variations on the verb “to be” would be implied from our western perspective, but are not declared in the Hebrew because it misses the point in their thinking.

Part 4: The “Being” of the Verb hayah

At first glance, you would think the verb hayah is the missing “to be” we want to find in Hebrew. It’s complicated very quickly, and you may struggle to follow the discussion without familiarity with linguistics and the broad culture and civilization of the Ancient Near East. For now, think in terms of to be, to become, to produce an effect. Be warned that even this much is still rooted in our western psychological biases.

Boman cites four different ideas that we would distinguish, but which are all inherent in the how the word is used — (1) becoming in the sense of something passing from one condition to another; (2) becoming in a symbolic sense, a change in moral quality; (3) becoming in the sense of a vocation learned by someone; (4) becoming in the sense of changing the effects of the subject. The parenthetical translations that follow are simply approximations.

He then lists the way the thrust of the term hayah varies in the context of different prepositions. With hayah le (become something) the same four concepts in the previous paragraph become more intense, if you will — most emphatically not static — and the most common emphasis is the matter of effects. It’s inherent in the phrase itself.

For hayah ke (become like), it carries the connotation of becoming like something else, of appearing or serving as the other thing — as though. Again, it carries more drama than a simple statement of fact, particularly when used in the negative. If we find in a text hayah `al (being at) we find the implication of something heading toward the indicated condition, as in “It will be thus when it gets here.” It also portrays something will “act upon” another thing, all the more so if in response to an authoritative command. Yet again, there is seldom a precise translation possible.

With hayah be (being in) the emphasis is filled with personhood, most often referring to people. Even when used of ostensibly inanimate objects, it implies something with power and potential greater than normal. Boman notes that none of these prepositions changes the underlying meaning of hayah, but simply refines it. The same could be said of several more prepositions he lists but does not explain in detail.

While standard English translations often consider hayah as some form of “to be”, it rarely means that in any given context. For example, in Isaiah 51:6, God’s salvation doesn’t just exist in stasis, but shall endure rather like a living thing in itself. It will be there covering and prospering you dynamically in response to everything that comes your way. That’s all in hayah.

In conjunction with statements about time, hayah often portrays that what is now is quite different from what was at some time before. The world in Genesis 1 was previously chaotic and unformed; Nineveh was once a great city; Joseph was already in Egypt ahead of his brothers. In other contexts, it is purely stylistic as part of a formulary statement (like the genealogical tables). When you find hayah used in a comment about someone being fair or beautiful, it is meant to convey far more than just a pretty face. It’s someone who has a lot of charisma.

It goes on like this for several more pages. If you pair hayah with participle, it renders as a come-n-go repetition, but a passive participle shifts to an image of duration. In dependent clauses it means the thing will come to pass. It is not merely a subjective perception, though. It’s very real to the Hebrew mind, but lacks the nit-picking definition and distinctions of western thinking. In Hebrew thinking, the whole universe is alive and dynamic, and you must strive to keep finding your place in it.

For context where hayah refers to God, it’s nothing new on this blog. Boman affirms over several pages the basic teaching here that all you can say about God is what He requires of you. You are surely expected to know Him as a person, but He transcends even the symbolic statements about Him. Factual assertions about God have no meaning. It’s an ongoing story of interaction with Him and how He changes us.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

HTCG 01a

Posted on September 4, 2024 by ehurst

Note: Each chapter of the book is outlined into sections, which are in turn outlined in smaller parts.

Chapter 1: Dynamic and Static Thinking — Again, the issue stands on how any separation between thinking and language is artificial. There are a whole class of so-called Bible translators who know the mechanics of translation as taught, but who never quite get inside the head of those who used that language. This is why some translations into English are so bad, and yet so very few people even begin to understand that such translations are bad. New Testament translation should be a breeze, right? Not if you can’t grasp the Hebrew minds of most of the writers.

Section A: Dynamic Thinking

Part 1: The Dynamic Character of Hebrew Verbs of Inaction

The primary purpose of Hebrew writing was to inspire, not to inform. Thus, Boman notes that Hebrew thinking is characterized as “dynamic, vigorous, passionate and sometimes explosive” while the Greek was “static, peaceful, moderate and harmonious”. In this case, the stasis is not simply “rigid, inflexible and lifeless”, but also “prudent, moderate and peaceful”. Viewed from the Greek perspective, Hebrew thinking is “exaggerated, immoderate, discordant and in bad taste” (all quotes from page 27). The author prefers to make the two different without making them enemies.

As a rule, Hebrew verbs are all inherently dynamic, yet can be used to express images of passivity. Boman launches into a list of verbs which can all be translated as “stand”. All of them have a fundamentally active meaning of how one arrives at a standing position, though some point more to taking up a dwelling. His point is that what strikes us as passive in English is imbued with dynamism in Hebrew — actively pushing against resistance (if only internal entropy) in order to hold a spot. Because of our internal psychological frame of reference, Hebrew words can be ambiguous, portraying opposite ideas in the same word — stand versus sit. In Hebrew, those two concepts are closely connected.

In a footnote, Boman notes that Arabic scholars even have a word for how common this is in Semitic languages in general — addad. For example, life and death are linked in that “death is the weakest form of life.” (p. 29) Then he says something very critical to understanding Hebrew: Those who live with the Hebrew language would not differentiate between a word spoken and its effects. That is, the concept of “word” is itself equated with the will and intent of the speaker. Words and actions are generally not distinguished.

And it’s not just people. In a very roundabout fashion, Boman points out that even inanimate objects are spoken of as having taken an action, using the various words for “stand” cited from several passages. Even a city “standing” takes on the connotation of being inhabited, as if the city itself chose this. In Hebrew, “dwelling” means a person dwells actively (as in “occupying, using”), while in Greek minds the whole point is the facility and normal contents that come with active use.

Part 2: The Dynamic Character of Hebrew Verbs of Condition and of Quality

Such verbs in Greek (and English) portray a state of being. In Semitic languages, translators commonly use them to convey an active becoming. However, even that often fails to capture the Hebrew emphasis of getting work done. Boman refers to “lighten” as more than brightness or even becoming bright; it means the work of illumination — the effect of lighten.

He offers another collection of Hebrew verbs often translated “lighten/brighten” followed by a very technical discussion of Hebrew verb forms and how to recognize them. His point is that a great many experts have struggled to find ways to discuss these things (transitive versus intransitive verbs) in their western languages and there is no solid consensus on how to portray the subtle distinctions between types of verbs, distinctions we consider essential, but which apparently don’t seem important from a Hebrew point of view.

I’ve read plenty of such analysis, and have often wondered if they aren’t all missing some bigger point: The Semitic languages developed before such concepts were even available in that part of the world. The whole discussion may well be artificial and pointless. Boman seems to come to that conclusion eventually. It’s not a question of being or becoming, but of the intention from within the subject of such verbs. For us, the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects is just a figure of speech; for the Hebrews, it is the essence of reality itself. Without meaning to, Boman comes out in support of our teaching that the Hebrew people seemed to act as if all of reality was living, sentient and willful.

Tangent: For all those who claim that the reading and understanding the Bible should not require graduate level training in Biblical Studies, your arrogance is showing. Translating Hebrew thinking into English is extremely difficult, and the results are numerous different translations, all of which clearly miss the point in one way or another. Such a contention is dismissive of the radical difference in psychology between the people in the Bible and western folks today. The reason you can’t instantly get the whole gospel message from your favorite English translation is because you are unwilling to surrender the two millennia of cultural corruption that made our world so alien to God’s revelation.

Yes, you can probably meet Jesus in just about any English Bible translation, but you will not be able to walk in His Covenant and bring Him due glory without that vast depth of knowledge. That was the reason He died on the Cross. You may be content to just step inside the gate and camp out there; we want to accept God’s invitation to wander the Garden of Eden at His side.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

HTCG Introduction

Posted on September 2, 2024 by ehurst

It’s this blog’s turn to review a book: Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek by Thorleif Boman (HTCG). The book was published first in German back in 1954; this is the second edition translated into English around 1960. The copy I’m using is a later release from Norton paperbacks, available on Amazon or other online booksellers. Some of you may struggle to follow this highly philosophical discussion. The underlying premise is that you cannot separate language and thought.

This book dives deep on the first page; it is not a light read. There are critical explanations from the very first words of the introduction. One of the first things you learn is that, among Hebrew intelligentsia familiar with Greece and Hellenism, they regarded themselves as anti-Hellenists by predisposition. A footnote explains that, in their rejection of Hellenism, the Hebrews didn’t feel the need to worry about the form of things, nor to harmonize with the natural world, but to remain focused on the moral reality of everything. Thus, they produced no visual art simply because the Second Commandment to avoid idolatrous images.

European theologians very early became aware of the inherent contradiction between Jesus’ Hebrew mindset and the early church doctrines so deeply rooted in Hellenistic thinking. A major difficulty for us is the very uneven scholarship which addressed this conflict. There was no consensus in European scholarship about this question.

Boman is honest enough to admit his bias in favor of seeing the Greek influence as not a such a big problem as I do. He states that, in regards the question of Greek influence on the gospel message, Plato is the pinnacle of Hellenism — the idealist proposition (Allegory of the Cave). If there’s a problem, he believes rests on Platonism. I agree that taking away Plato will not mean the gospel prevails, but only because I think that misses the point.

Boman goes on to note that Platonism was a much bigger influence in English church history than was the case in Germany. In his mind, Plato is about what exists, while German idealism is about training the mind to consider what ought to be. Thus, while Catholicism (Thomism) was Aristotelian, the Reformation was Platonic idealism. Both tend to nail things down statically from different approaches. Meanwhile, Hebrew is more aimed at tracking the Divine Person of God, a dynamic prospect.

In that sense, Hebrew thinking is more temporal (timely) versus the Hellenistic mind seeking permanence. There’s an odd quality of “eternity” as time rolling on forever in the Greek mind, versus Eternity as unknowable and incomprehensible to humans in Hebrew.

So, the question of how the gospel message was influenced by casting it in Greek intellectual assumptions is a very hard one. Most previous scholarship has been notably one-sided, preferring the net result of Hellenism in how it formed western Christian religion. It is exceedingly difficult to get inside the Hebrew mind from a western position. The task is so large that the author confines himself to Platonism versus Hebrew outlook.

Thus, while the Hebrew mind considers the power and authority of the Creator, the Platonist looks at what kind of Person the Creator is shown to be by Creation. The latter is a very human question. This is quite natural for a man-centered epistemology; all things are measured by man. What can we make of this? Hebrews would instinctively think to ask what this requires of them; not an intellectual exercise, but a moral one.

Boman notes that previous approaches to this whole question have often labeled the Hebrew mind as primitive, while the Greek is more highly developed. Thus, they compared the Hebrews to any number of other primitive cultures instead of trying to give the Hebrew credit for simply being different from Greeks.

I take a moment to note that Boman seems to have embraced the JEPD Documentation Hypothesis, now long discredited. This is where his own bias peeks through at us, because it is a purely western superiority that proposed the JEPD Theory in the first place. I can recall college professors who seemed to believe God built the West. “Doesn’t Hellenism come from God? Surely God could not have really been that primitive Himself?”

If you track the intellectual development of the Hebrews, even from Scripture alone, you will see that the cultural and intellectual drift of Hebrew leadership away from “primitive” Hebrew to more cosmopolitan and developed thinking is highly correlated with God’s very clear growing displeasure with them.

At any rate, Boman describes a very deep lack of academic interest in the whole question of just how it is that Hebrew is truly different from Greek thinking. The true experts in such a study seem to have no interest. The comparison of the biblical narrative with Homer’s epics is missing the point. This is not a simple literature question; the Hebrew purpose in literature is altogether different in the first place. Too many scholars are working too hard at collating Hebrew and Greek thinking, and too from from a Hellenistic bias. Even a great many Hebrew scholars seem to write from a western mind.

Boman goes into a long discussion of these scholars by name, and it’s not likely any us would recognize them. I spotted W.F. Albright, the founding father of biblical archaeology as we know it today, mentioned for his expertise in Ancient Near Eastern languages. Too many of the scholars approached Hebrew with all of their western presuppositions, and so completely missed the fundamental differences. He also notes that on the one hand, a knowledge of the other Semitic cultures is essential, we still need to be aware of how the Hebrews struggled so hard to distinguish themselves from them.

We shall see if Boman is able to step outside his own biases for a task that precious few have even bothered to approach.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

NT Doctrine — Hebrews 4

Posted on August 31, 2024 by ehurst

Israel as a nation did not enter into God’s rest (in Hebrew related to the word “Sabbath”). Never mind the Talmudic perversion, the Law of Moses itself could not grant that divine rest; it could only point out that such peace existed. Under Moses, peace with God was a matter of feudal submission to Him. Now that same submission and peace are found in Christ. This is what Moses and David both foresaw.

The writer pleads with them not to come up short of that peace. The nation in the wilderness did not listen to the good news of peace, did not yield to God’s sovereignty. It’s all connected to the Sabbath of Creation, but the nation of Israel rejected it. A whole generation died in the wilderness without seeing it. But that rest didn’t simply cease to exist; the door was still open. While Joshua brought them into the Land, they still didn’t find that rest, still would not fully obey. This is why David, several centuries later, was still calling prophetically for the nation to submit to God, quoting that passage where God swore that generation would die in the wilderness.

Don’t go back out into the wilderness, says the writer. Again, that Sabbath rest was not in the Law, but was indicated by it. When you enter the Christ’s rest, you are no longer under that Law, but under Him. You are joining God who rested after His works of Creation. Returning to the Law means you didn’t find the Sabbath rest of faith. The constraints of the Law were for those who had no faith.

The Word of God — Christ, the Living Word — is sharper than a sword. Like a butcher knife it can cut cleanly between bone and flesh. Just so, the Word can discern the commitments of your heart; He knows your most intimate secrets, the ones you keep from yourself. No High Priest in Jerusalem can minister to you like Jesus. Our Savior came down from Heaven, yet walked in our flesh, fully knowing everything we face.

Cling to the message of Christ and come boldly into the Father’s Presence. Everything we need to face the troubles of this life He will supply.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on NT Doctrine — Hebrews 4