When I first began shopping my current book around, some prospective editors urged me to eliminate the Hebrew references: “You’ll just confuse your readers,” I was told.  However, I remain convinced that serious Bible students are well aware that the Bible was not written in English, and know that some subtleties in the original languages may not be captured in translation.

Further, I am persuaded that questions I have relating to translation and interpretation will occur to other readers too, whether they know the original languages or not.  So, in my teaching and preaching, as in my writing, I refuse to insult the intelligence of my audience, and when the text calls for it, I endeavor to guide them through the linguistic thickets–although I also try to avoid overly-technical language that will indeed frustrate and confuse rather than enlighten.

All of which is to say that today’s blog does indeed go pretty deep into the weeds of Hebrew grammar.  But I am persuaded that the exegetical and theological payoff is worth the effort.  To put it very simply, friends– this’ll preach.

On Day Five of the first biblical creation account (Gen 1:20-23), God addresses God’s creations for the first time: “Then God blessed them: ‘Be fertile and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth’” (Gen 1:22). The CEB translation rightly recognizes that the verbs in this verse are imperatives. But in Hebrew, the imperative doesn’t always indicate a command.

Semitic grammarians Paul Jouon and T. Muraoka note that “The imperative is the volitive mood of the second person;” it “is essentially a form for expressing the speaker’s will, wish, or desire” (A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, Part Three: Syntax [Rome: Ponifical Biblical Institute, 1996], 378-79).  The context of these imperative forms, within a blessing, suggests that they should not be rendered as commands, but rather as expressing God’s desire and intention for God’s creatures: as David Carr observes, “within a blessing, the imperative stands as a modal wish” (Genesis 1—11. International Exegetical Commentary of the Old Testament [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2021], 43).  Better would be, “May you be fruitful and multiply.”

That distinction becomes even more important when we examine Gen 1:28, which this verse foreshadows. Here, God blesses human men and women:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it.”

Unfortunately, some have tried to construct a sexual ethic out of this verse. Since, as the early Christian theologian and scholar St. Jerome (340-420) observed, “God’s first command” is, “‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’” (Against Jovinianus, 1.3; cf. Gen 1:28), any sexual act that could not produce a child is contrary to God’s design and intent.

In the Mishnah (the Jewish compendium of traditional interpretations of the Torah, to which the Talmud serves as commentary) as well, this verse is construed as a commandment: but for the man, not for the woman (b. Yebamot 65b)! As the broader context of this discussion is a debate regarding the divorce of a woman who is barren or miscarries, the point would appear to be that, while men are obligated to father children if they can, women are not necessarily obligated to bear them.

However, it is essential to remember, as in Gen 1:22, that—despite its (mis)use in Christian and Jewish traditions—Gen 1:28 is a blessing, not a commandment! Grammarians Bill T. Arnold and John H. Choi note that the imperative can express a promise: “The speaker assures that the recipient of the imperative will take the action in the future, although he action itself is normally outside the power of the person receiving the order” (A Guide to Biblica Hebrew Syntax [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003], 64).  Likely, that is the case here. As Carr observes regarding this passage,

The blessing here, as in 1:22, is formulated in Hebrew with an imperative form. This corresponds to the rule, wherein the contents of blessings, insofar as they are formulated in verbal form, are expressed with modal verb forms. . . . There is, therefore, no implication of a command to multiply or rule the earth in the imperative forms of v. 28. Instead, there is the promise of powers/capabilities (Carr 2021, 84).

When we read these opening chapters of Genesis, it is important to remember that they are neither history, nor science, nor law.  They are confessions, made by communities of faith—grounded not only in universal, timeless ideas but also in the particular circumstances of their authors.  Therefore, when we hear something from the priests in Gen 1:1—2:4a that we would not expect to hear, it carries particular weight.

The affirmation in Gen 1:27 that maleness and femaleness alike reflect the image of God hits like a thunderbolt: it can scarcely be ascribed to the typical attitudes of its patriarchal culture!  This extraordinary valuation of the feminine need not be read, however, as restricting God’s intention for humanity to the union of male and female.  Certainly Jerome, with his eloquent defense of celibacy (Against Jovinianus, 1.3), did not regard singleness as condemned by this passage!

Further, there may be a hint here about how God might be viewed. While admittedly, male images of God predominate in Scripture, female images as well can be identified. Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is certainly a feminine aspect of God. In the Psalms, God appears a midwife (Ps 22:9-10), while in Hosea 11:3-4, God speaks as a mother:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
        I took them up in my arms,
        but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them
        with bands of human kindness,
        with cords of love.
    I treated them like those
        who lift infants to their cheeks;
        I bent down to them and fed them.

Similarly, Jesus cries out to Jerusalem, “How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that” (Matt 23:37//Lk 13:34).

God is neither male nor female, for neither masculinity nor femininity can fully capture the Divine. Attempts, then, to derive from Genesis 1 a rebuke of transgender persons, or the affirmation of a sexual binary as the God-imposed norm, are seriously misplaced. Indeed, both masculinity and femininity reflect aspects of God, who makes all humankind, of every gender, race, and nation, “in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26).

On the other hand, the call to “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it” (Gen 1:28) is no surprise: it fits neatly into the flow of the narrative from Genesis through Joshua. As God’s people endure threat after threat, seeming always on the edge of extinction, fertility is essential for their survival.  In particular, Gen 1:28 prefigures the growth of the people into a great nation, despite Egyptian persecution (see Exod 1:6-7, 20) and despite the faithlessness of the wilderness generation (see Num 22:3-4),  in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham (see Gen 15:5-6).  We may question, then, whether this “first commandment” is intended as a universal imperative, or as promise to a beleaguered community.

I am thinking as I read this week’s lectionary passages (Jeremiah 23:23-29, Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Luke 12:49-56) about Troy Polamalu.  Polamalu is partly famous for his full head of long, flowing hair (indeed, he STILL does Head and Shoulders commercials!), but mainly, of course, as strong safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 2003-2015. During his tenure leading the Steelers defense, the team made seven playoff appearances, won five division titles, and won two of their three Super Bowl appearances. Polamalu is a member of the NFL All-Decade Team of the 2000s and the Pittsburgh Steelers All-Time Team, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2020.

My wife Wendy is a huge Troy Polamalu fan. She admires the classy way he shows love and respect for his wife, and his understated but firm confession as an Orthodox Christian—not to mention, of course, my own uncanny physical resemblance to Troy Polamalu:

Mostly, though, it was fun to watch Troy Polamalu play football!  He started 142 of 158 career games; made 32 interceptions for 398 yards and three touchdowns; successfully defended against 107 passes; forced 14 fumbles; recovered seven fumbles for 120 yards and two TDs; made 12 sacks; and recorded 783 tackles – 583 of which were solo.  So, how did he do it?

If you ever watched Polamalu play, you already know! Although he is from American Samoa, Polamalu was called the Flyin’ Hawaiian (!) and the Tasmanian Devil, because he hurled himself into the game, seeming to be everywhere at once. While other defenders try, with greater or lesser success, to follow where the ball is, Polamalu read the line, intuited where the ball would be—and then did whatever it took to put himself in that spot, to break up the pass, get the tackle, or make the interception.

To use a theological expression, Polamalu played proleptically. Prolepsis means anticipation, but also something more: Webster defines it as “the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished.” That is the way the Bible speaks about the future.

This week’s lectionary passages all speak of God’s future: which, to Christian believers, means Christ’s future coming, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. But we miss the point if we think this is all about the future. Far too much ink has been spilled and time wasted in the fruitless attempt to predict the future with the symbols and visions of Scripture, as though the Bible was a horoscope or Tarot deck rather than word of God for people of God.

The prophet Jeremiah had little patience for idle dreamers—particularly when their dreams are lies, which make no difference in people’s lives, and so cause them to forget God’s name:

I have heard the prophets prophesying lies in my name. They claim, “I’ve had a dream; I’ve had a dream!” How long will deceitful prophecies dominate the minds of the prophets? Those prophets are treacherous. They scheme to make my people forget me by their dreams that people tell each other (Jer 23:25-27).

According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), only 10% of those ages 18–29 in America identified as “religiously unaffiliated” in 1986. By 2016, that number had increased to 38%.  It declined slightly in 2020, to 36%, but still–over a third of a generation of young people want nothing to do with the church: not because they reject the gospel, I am certain, but because they have never heard it.  They associate the church with the dark, empty dreams and “deceitful prophecies” of prominent preachers, and want nothing to do with their racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric–which is what many young people think “Christianity” represents.

In contrast, Jeremiah says, God’s word is real!  The word of the LORD is “like fire and like a hammer that shatters rock.”

Jewish philosopher and Bible scholar Abraham Heschel saw this coming in 1966, and called for a prophethood of all believers:

In biblical days prophets were astir while the world was asleep; today the world is astir while church and synagogue are busy with trivialities.

Jesus, too, says that his words are like fire: “I came to cast fire upon the earth. How I wish that it was already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49).  He recognizes the dangerous power of the kingdom of God that he announces, which will sadly bring strife and division between those who follow, and those who will not (Luke 12:51-53).

Jesus’ word about the kingdom is not a word for someday, in the distant future: “You know how to interpret conditions on earth and in the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:56).  So, to follow Jesus is to live the way Troy Polamalu played: proleptically, as though the promised future was already a reality.  As the author of Hebrews writes,

So then, with endurance, let’s also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let’s throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God’s throne (Heb 12:1-2).

God calls and empowers us to live by the principles of God’s kingdom not someday, but here and now!

The problems we face are great—far too great for us to solve! There are too many lonely, too many hurting, too many sick and hungry and homeless—we cannot help them all.  It is easy, then, to succumb to despair, and yield to this world’s standards and expectations.

But the certain triumph of God’s coming reign gives us hope, so that we can live confidently in the present. Archbishop Desmond Tutu affirms,

The texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail. In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable – there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust.

We need not cynically conform to this world’s standards and expectations, because we know what God’s future holds. Like Troy Polamalu, we know where the ball will be! Now, are we willing to do whatever it takes to put ourselves there, at the point of God’s in-breaking reign? God wants to empower us today to do just that—to place ourselves, not where the world says the ball is, but where God says the ball will be.

AFTERWORD:

I have been blessed these two weeks to worship with the congregation at St. John’s Lutheran in North Versailles, PA–this blog is based on my sermon for Sunday.  Thanks to that vibrant community for their gracious hospitality, and to their pastor and my good friend the Rev. Dr. Kimberly Greway, for inviting me.

FOREWORD: As many of you know, I have been working for some time on a book dealing with creation in Scripture.  I am planning to finish that book in December, and to see it in print next year.  Many of you have been praying for this project, and through your questions, comments, and discussion in classes and retreats have helped shaped my thinking.  Thank you!  This is a bit of my work in progress, dealing with the translation of the Bible’s first words.

Translation questions emerge with the very first word of the first creation story in Scripture. We are accustomed to reading Genesis 1:1 as a sentence, introducing the account that follows: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1 KJV, RSV, NIV, ESV). But in many recent translations, this verse is rendered not as a sentence, but as a dependent temporal clause: “When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void” (Gen 1:1-2 NJPS; compare  NRSVue and CEB).

At issue is the first word in the MT, bereshit: reshit, “beginning,” with the prefixed preposition b, typically “in” or “with.” The problem is the absence of the article: as any beginning Hebrew student knows, were this word to be read unambiguously as “in the beginning,” it would be vocalized as bareshit. Without the article, the b should be read as “when” rather than “in,” making Gen 1:1 a clause providing “the temporal setting for the description of pre-creation elements in Gen 1:2” (David M. Carr, Genesis 1—11, International Exegetical Commentary of the Old Testament [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2021], 47). It is true that Hebrew sometimes omits the article, particularly in poetry, so either translation is possible. But this unit is not poetry, and nowhere else in this first chapter has the article been omitted. With medieval Jewish commentators Rashi and ibn Ezra, we should render this first verse “When God began to create the heavens and the earth. . .”.

Robert Jensen decries this shift in translation on theological grounds:

On the other hand, if we follow the creed’s unmitigated confession of God the Creator, we will read, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Therewith we will do an intellectually and spiritually tremendous thing, for there can hardly be a proposition more upsetting to our inherited metaphysical assumptions . . . Christianity’s doctrine of creation presents a drastically revisionary metaphysics, a construal of reality that affirms an encompassing creaturely contingency: we and all our universe might not have been (Canon and Creed. Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010], 91).

Surely, whether we translate Gen 1:1 as an independent sentence or a temporal clause, the radical contingency of the world is the point of this first creation account—apart from God’s sovereign creative will and word, our ordered world would not be. But while creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) is an important theological claim, to Muslims and Jews as well as to Christians, that is not what Genesis 1:1—2:4a is about. Quite apart from grammatical concerns, if our aim is to preserve creatio ex nihilo, translating Genesis 1:1 as a sentence is no real help. Genesis 1:2, with its description of uncreated watery chaos, already defeats that purpose, as the rabbis long ago realized. In Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 1:5, R. Huna says, “If it were not written, it would be impossible to say it. ‘In the beginning God created’ from what? ‘And the earth was empty [Hebrew tohu wabohu].’”  Creation begins with chaos.

The question posed by the beginning of the Bible is not, after all, “How, or from what, did God create the world?” Ancient people likely did not worry much about such abstract questions.  What they wanted, and needed, to know was more immediate and pressing: Will the sun rise again in the morning? Will the winter pass, and the spring come again? In short: is there a meaningful order to reality? The first creation account affirms that the world does make sense. God has established order, not chaos.

The expression tohu wabohu (“formless void” in the NRSV) presents translation challenges of its own. The first term, tohu, occurs twenty times in Scripture, just over half of these in Isaiah alone (eleven times: Isa 24:10; 29:21; 34:11; 40:17, 23; 41:29; 44:9; 45:18-19; 49:4; 59:4). As used in these Old Testament contexts, tohu appears broadly to mean emptiness or nothingness: whether an empty, and so worthless, action (“I have spent my strength for nothing [Hebrew letohu], and vanity,” Isa 49:4 NRSV; cf. Isa 29:21; 40:7, 23); empty, vain idols (“Don’t turn aside to follow useless idols [Hebrew hattohu] that can’t help you or save you. They’re absolutely useless [Hebrew tohu]!,” 1 Sam 12:21 CEB; cf. Isa 41:29; 44:9); or an empty land (“God found Israel in a wild land—in a howling desert wasteland [Hebrew betohu],” Deut 32:10; cf. Ps 107:40; Job 6:18; 12:24). Apart from Gen 1:2, tohu is used three times in a context that refers to creation: Job 26:7; Isa 45:18-19, and Jer 4:23. Job 26:7 says of the Almighty, “He stretched the North [Hebrew Zaphon; evidently, God’s dwelling place; cf. Ps 48:1-2] over chaos [Hebrew tohu], hung earth over nothing.” From the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile called Second Isaiah, Isaiah 45:18-19 appears to relate not only to creation, but specifically to Genesis 1:

For this is what the Lord said, who created the heavens,
    who is God,
    who formed the earth and made it,
    who established it,
    who didn’t create it a wasteland [Hebrew tohu] but formed it as a habitation:
    I, the Lord, and none other!
I didn’t speak in secret
    or in some land of darkness;
I didn’t say to the offspring of Jacob,
    “Seek me in chaos [Hebrew tohu].”
I am the Lord, the one who speaks truth,
who announces what is correct (Isaiah 45:18-19 CEB).

Not only do the word tohu and God’s creation of the heavens and the earth (cf. Gen 1:1) connect these passages, but also the verb translated “create” in Isa 45:18 is bara’, the same verb used in Gen 1:1, 21; 2:3-4a. Here, as in the Job passage, tohu has cosmological implications: the NRSV translation “chaos” in Isa 45:18-19 seems apt.

The word bohu is found only three times in the Hebrew Bible, always following tohu: Genesis 1:2, Isaiah 34:11, and Jeremiah 4:23. Isaiah 34:11 comes from a bitter oracle against Edom (Isa 34:5-17), declaring its destruction as punishment for participating in Zion’s fall (for example, Ezek 35:1-15; Obad 10-16; Ps 137:7-9):

Screech owls and crows will possess it;
    owls and ravens will live there.
God will stretch over it the measuring line of chaos [tohu]
and the plummet stone of emptiness [bohu] over its officials.

Throughout this poem, wild animals and plants have taken over lands formerly inhabited by people, making clear that tohu and bohu refer to wilderness here.

Jeremiah 4:23-26 reads,

I looked at the earth,
and it was without shape or form [tohu wabohu];
        at the heavens
        and there was no light.
I looked at the mountains
    and they were quaking;
    all the hills were rocking back and forth.
 I looked and there was no one left;
    every bird in the sky had taken flight.
I looked and the fertile land was a desert;
    all its towns were in ruins
        before the Lord,
        before his fury.

Here as in the Isa 34:11, the context is a judgment oracle—indeed, a vision of judgment exacted not against a foreign enemy, but against Judah. Although there is no mention of creation in Jer 4:23, the allusions to Gen 1:1-3 are compelling: not only does this passage mention “heavens,” “earth,” and “light” (or rather, its absence), it is the only place in Scripture other than Gen 1:2 where the exact phrase tohu wabohu appears. As John Bright proposes in his classic commentary on Jeremiah,

in this poem, which is one of the most powerful descriptions of the Day of Yahweh in all prophetic literature, one might say that the story of Genesis i has been reversed: men, beasts, and growing things are gone, the dry land itself totters, the heavens cease to give their light, and primeval chaos returns. It is as if the earth had been ‘uncreated’; it is, if one cares to put it so, a ruin of ‘atomic’ proportions (Jeremiah, AB 21 [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965], 32-33)

Intriguingly, the judgment oracle that opens the book of Zephaniah also speaks of “uncreation,” in terms that also appear to allude to Genesis 1:

I will wipe out everything from the earth, says the LORD.
         I will destroy humanity and the beasts;
        I will destroy the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea.
        I will make the wicked into a heap of ruins;
        I will eliminate humanity from the earth, says the LORD (Zeph 1:2-3).

Zephaniah 1:3 lists the living creatures created by God on the fifth (birds and fish) and sixth (land animals, and humans) days of creation (Gen 1:20-31). However, as Michael De Roche has observed, they are listed in reverse order, moving backwards through the list from humanity (“Zephaniah 1:2-3: The ‘Sweeping’ of Creation.” VT 30 [1980]:106–107), so that creation is undone. The psalms bracketing Nahum and Habakkuk (Nah 1:2-11; Hab 3), which come right before Zephaniah, are poems celebrating the Divine Warrior, evoking the theme of creation by combat.  The divine warrior who defeated chaos and brought an ordered world into being (Nah 1:3-4; Hab 3:8) can also undo that order and return the world to the chaos from which it came. In Zeph 1:2-3, as in Jer 4:23, Divine judgment is described as unmaking, the very opposite of creation: God’s ordered world returned to chaos.

How, then, should we render tohu wabohu in Gen 1:2?   From his etymological research into tohu and bohu (The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2: A Linguistic Investigation, JSOTSupp 8 [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989], 17-22), David Tsumura concludes “Hebrew tohu is based on a Semitic root *thw and means ‘desert’; the term bohu is also a Semitic term based on the root *bhw, ‘to be empty’” (Tsumura 1989, 155). Therefore, Tsumura insists “the phrase. . . has nothing to do with ‘chaos’ and simply means ‘emptiness’ and refers to the earth as an empty place, i.e., ‘an unproductive and uninhabited place’” (Tsumura 1989, 156). So too Claus Westermann insists tohu wabohu “is not a mythological idea but means desert, waste, devastation, nothingness” (Genesis 1—11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion, S.J. [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984; from Biblischer Kommentar, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1974], 103).

The Vulgate, which in Gen 1:2 reads vacua erat et nihili, “it was empty and worthless,” could support this reading: the pre-creation earth was desolate and lifeless—a desert hostile to life. Similarly, in both Gen 1:2 and Jer 4:23, the Aramaic Targums render tohu wabohu as tsadya’ waroqanya’, “desolate and empty.” The Greek Septuagint, intriguingly, has aoratos kai akarskeuatos, “unseen and unready” (Brenton’s delightful 1870 translation reads, “unsightly and unfurnished”!) in Gen 1:2, and the single word outhen, “nothing,” in Jer 4:23.  The Septuagint translators of Jeremiah treated tohu wabohu as a hendiadys: two words expressing a single idea. Indeed, Westermann proposed that bohu “is added only by way of alliteration” (Westermann 1984, 103). Accordingly, Robert Alter translates tohu wabohu in Gen 1:2 as “welter and waste” (The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Volume 1 [New York: W. W. Norton, 2019], 11), while William Brown proposes “void and vacuum” (The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder [New York: Oxford, 2010], 34).

On the other hand, in its context in Genesis 1, tohu wabohu is immediately followed by a description of dark, restless, unruly water (Gen 1:2), which is most naturally read as a depiction of tohu wabohu. Together with the numerous clear parallels between Genesis 1:1—2:4a and the Enuma elish, this makes it difficult to hold, with Tsumura and Westermann, that tohu wabohu is not mythological, and has nothing to do with chaos. The “uncreation” texts in Jeremiah and Zephaniah support reading this phrase as chaos: the opposite of the ordered world, but out of which (as Bereshit Rabbah 1:5 reminds us) God’s creation has been established. The translation tradition going back to the KJV “without form, and void” seems valid (NRSV, “formless void,” CEB, “without shape or form,” JPSV, “unformed and void,” NIV “formless and empty,” NRSVUE, “without shape or form”). The point of Gen 1:1-2 is that the pre-creation world was chaos, upon which God’s word imposed order.

Yet, in this priestly vision of beginnings, not even chaos was devoid of Divine presence! For “God’s wind [Hebrew ruakh ‘elohim] swept over the waters” (Gen 1:2). The Hebrew ruakh is a marvelously multifaceted word. Its base meaning is “breath,” but by extension it can mean “wind,” or the enlivening and empowering agency within a person, hence “spirit” (as in the KJV and NIV; compare the use of the similarly mutifaceted Greek noun pneuma in John 3:5-6, 8). In Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, all three meanings of the word appear. Ezekiel prophesies to the four rukhot (the east, west, north, and south winds; Ezek 37:9), which blow over and into the corpses in the valley, filling them with ruakh (breath), so that “they came to life and stood on their feet, an extraordinarily large company” (Ezek 37:10). In the interpretation of this vision, the LORD promises the exiles, “‘I will put my breath [Hebrew rukhi]  in you, and you will live. I will plant you on your fertile land, and you will know that I am the LORD. I’ve spoken, and I will do it. This is what the LORD says” (Ezek 37:14).

In Genesis 1:2 as well, we need not choose one meaning over the others: it is likely that all three meanings are present at once. The wind has mythic resonances with the Babylonian creation epic Enuma elish, where Marduk wields the winds as a weapon against the sea monster Tiamat. However, it is also appropriate to see this breeze as breathed by God onto the waters, and to understand ruakh as expressive of God’s spirit—God’s presence and person—even here.

This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday.  The lectionary  readings for the day were apt expressions of the mystery of the Divine life.  But I can imagine some readers wondering why 1 John 5:6-8, which in the King James Version clearly confesses the Trinity, was not chosen:

This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.  For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.  And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

The reference to the Trinity in the KJV, which I have placed in bold-faced type, does not appear in the CEB, or indeed in any modern English translation of 1 John.  But that is not because of some conspiracy among Bible translators who do not believe in the Trinity!  While this verse is included in Erasmus’ Textus receptus (“the received [and therefore presumably authoritative] text,” 1516), it is not found in the oldest and best texts of this book.  Indeed, it does not appear in any Greek text of 1 John before the 14th century, and appears only in late texts of the Latin Vulgate (see the detailed discussion in A Textual Commentary on the New Testament, Bruce M. Metzger [London: United Bible Societies, 1975], 715-17).  Simply put, this neat Trinitarian confession does not belong to 1 John, but rather reflects later Christian reflection on that text.  Modern translators are right to exclude it.

Since we do not have the single, pristine, “original” text of ANY biblical book, New Testament or Old, responsible Bible scholars encounter this sort of problem all the time.   For every passage of Scripture, we have multiple witnesses, among which we must choose. This study is called text criticism. 

The best concise statement I know of why text criticism matters comes from Julia O’Brien: “Knowing what words are in the text is often as complex as understanding what those words mean” (The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets, ed. Julia M. O’Brien [Oxford: University Press, 2021], xxii).  Before deciding how best and most faithfully to render the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek text into clear and understandable English, we need first to determine what the best text is: which words to translate.

For example, consider the climax of John’s vision of the world to come in Revelation 21.  Here, the New Jerusalem is a massive golden cube, 1,500 miles long, wide, and high (Rev 21:16)!  The most likely parallel for John’s image is the inner room of the temple, called the Most Holy Place: a perfect cube, with walls were covered in gold (1 Kgs 6:20; Ezek 41:4; see Craig Koester, Revelation, AB 38A [New Haven: Yale, 2014], 816] and Mathias Rissi, The Future of the World: An Exegetical Study of Revelation 19.11-22.15, Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series 23 [Napierville, IL: Allenson, 1972], 62-63).  John tells us, “I didn’t see a temple in the city, because its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22). But indeed, the entire city is the holy dwelling place of God, where all God’s people are invited to live.

As in Ezekiel’s vision of the ideal city, John’s new Jerusalem has twelve gates, named with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel (see Ezek 48:30-35). But in John’s vision, these gates are never shut (Rev 21:25)–which, since the whole reason for gates is to control access to the city, subverts their purpose entirely!  The light of God’s glory streams its invitation out of the open gates into the world outside, and John says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. . . . People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations” (Rev 21:24-26, emphasis mine).  Who are these people, outside the city, but now invited to enter it?  As the nations and their kings have just been thrown into the lake of fire (Rev 20:11-15), what are we to make of this extraordinary claim?

If you read this passage in the KJV, that question never emerges.  There, Revelation 21:24  reads “And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it” (emphasis mine). As with 1 John 5:7, this translation is not based on any ancient Greek text of Revelation, but on Erasmus’ sixteenth-century Textus receptus.  Erasmus inserts ton sozomenon (“the ones who are saved”) after ta ethne (“the nations”) in Revelation 21:24. Neither the Latin Vulgate nor the majority Byzantine Greek text have this addition.  Nestle-Aland’s critical edition of the Greek New Testament Novum Testamentum Graece doesn’t mention this insertion, even as a minor variant to be considered, and Metzger’s Textual Commentary doesn’t even discuss it.

So why did Erasmus add these words to the text of Revelation?  Likely because he believed that John must have intended something like this.  Otherwise Revelation  21:24 contradicts the last chapter regarding the fate of the nations. Erasmus may have been right to resolve this conflict–but what if he wasn’t?  What if the text actually is contradictory, and ambiguous?  The evidence of the best text of Revelation forces us to confront that apparent contradiction, and ask what it may mean.  What if, in the end, God in God’s sovereign freedom includes even those once thought excluded? So, what does text criticism mean to Bible students who do not know the original languages, and so lack access to the many texts behind the text on the page?  First, the King James should not be your go-to study Bible.  The language of the King James is beautiful and poetic: more often than not, the passages I have committed to memory are from its pages!  For its day, the King James was an excellent translation.  However, quite apart from the fact that we no longer speak in King James English, the translators in 1611 simply lacked access to the many ancient texts now available.  Indeed, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts extant, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, were unknown before the mid-twentieth century.

So, what should be your go-to study Bible?  I recommend the Common English Bible for ease of reading (it is my go-to reference for Bible quotes in this blog), and the New Revised Standard Version for serious study.  Comparing multiple translations is a good policy–but only if we are careful not simply to select from among them the reading we like the best!  Instead, ask why the translations differ?  What could account for the choices the translators have made? Some guidance to answering that question may come from the introduction in the front matter of your Bible, which discusses the translation team’s intentions and philosophy.

Any responsible translation will also include text notes on each page, marked like footnotes.  For example, on 1 John 5:7, a text note in the NRSV reads, “Other ancient authorities read (with variations) There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth:”.  In the NIV, the note is more detailed: ” Late manuscripts of the Vulgate testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. ⁸ And there are three that testify on earth: the (not found in any Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century).”  Always make certain to check the text notes, to see what other options the translators had to consider.  I should note, by the way, that neither the NRSV, the NIV, nor the CEB has a text note on Rev 21:24, but that in itself tells us something: none of these teams of translators believed the added words in the KJV to be worthy of comment.

Finally, a good study Bible, with detailed footnotes, will discuss in greater depth the issues involved, including text-critical questions. I recommend the HarperCollins Study Bible,  prepared under the auspices of the Society of Biblical Literature. This edition of the NRSV has lots of maps, charts, and other helps, but the best parts are the extended introduction to each book of the Bible, and the footnotes: a third or more of every page, providing cross-references, further information pertaining to the history back of the text, and in many cases, additional insight into the translation.  In some cases, the author of the introduction and notes on a book is the person primarily responsible for the translation of that book in the NRSV (for example, my late mentor S. Dean McBride in Deuteronomy), so that you can get straight from the horse’s mouth the reasons behind the choices made.

Determining, in O’Brien’s words, “what words are in the text” requires expert knowledge–and even experts may disagree as to their resolution. However, every reader of Scripture needs to be aware that these issues exist.  Believers come to the Bible in order to hear God’s Word for us.  But in order to hear the Word in Scripture, we must first be clear on the words of Scripture.

AFTERWORD:

For my jiffy summary evaluation of a number of Bible translations and paraphrases, enter “Which Bible?” in the search window above, or follow these links: “Which Bible?“;  “Which Bible? Part Two“; “Which Bible? Part Three“; “Which Bible? Part Four.”

Sunday is Pentecost, which means that bewildered lay readers (and more than a few preachers!) across the church will once again be wrestling with the jawbreaking, tongue-tangling list of place names (go here for pronunciation help) in Acts 2:7-11.

They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them?  How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language?  Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!”

This concatenation of unfamiliar (to us, at least) places makes an important point.  Pentecost (called Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, in Judaism) was one of the pilgrim feasts, when Jews able to make the journey were to come to Jerusalem for the celebration (Deuteronomy 16:16; Exodus 23:14-17; 34:18-23). So Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman world (and, in the case of the Parthians at least, even from beyond the empire) were gathered for Pentecost in Jerusalem’s streets.

Meanwhile, Jesus’ followers were waiting in Jerusalem as he had commanded them (Luke 24:49), praying in an upper room.

Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting.  They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them.  They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak (Acts 2:1-4).

Boiling out of the upper room and into the streets, Jesus’ followers crashed into that polyglot crowd–and those pilgrims from distant lands discovered, to their astonishment, that they could understand these Galileans perfectly: “’we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!’” (Acts 2:11).

Luke’s account of Pentecost plainly alludes to the Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9.  But too often, preachers and teachers of Scripture (including me!) have described what happened on Pentecost as undoing the curse of Babel, as though cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity were problems to overcome.  But that is not at all what Luke says!  This passage does not say that the people all started speaking the same language—that their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness was denied or undone. The Spirit does not return them to “one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1). Instead, each group hears God’s praise in its own language.

We should not be surprised that the members of the Pentecost crowd all hear the Gospel in their own languages. The entire Bible models for us how to escape what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the danger of a single story.  Scripture rarely gives us a single story about anything!  At the beginning of our Bible, we find two different accounts of the creation of the world (Genesis 1:1—2:4a and  Genesis 2:4b-25).   Our New Testament opens with four gospels, presenting four quite different accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Scripture itself, by its very structure, calls for us to listen with open ears and open hearts for the truth told, not as a single story, but as a chorus of voices.  Sometimes those voices are in harmony, sometimes they are in dissonance, but always they are lifted in praise to the God who remembers all our stories, the comedies and tragedies alike, and catches them up together in love, forgiveness, and grace–as Luke’s account of Pentecost goes on to show.

Peter responds to the confused crowd’s questions with a sermon (Acts 2:17-21) based on a remarkable little book of prophecy, the book of Joel:

I will give signs in the heavens and on the earth—blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. But everyone who calls on the Lord’s name will be saved (Joel 2:28-32 [Hebrew 3:1-5]).

The setting for Joel is a locust plague, which has decimated Judah.  After the swarm has passed, and the locusts all are gone, reassurance is offered to the community, the “children of Zion” (Joel 2:23), who twice are promised, “my people shall never again be put to shame” (Joel 2:26, 27).

But Joel’s audience also learns that they are part of a larger community than they had realized.  The “children of Zion,” called “my people” by the Lord, turn out to include far more than the adult men of the worshipping congregation!  Women, children, the aged, slaves:  all are a part of God’s congregation, upon whom God will pour out God’s Spirit–and as my dear friend and former pastor Ron Hoellein often says, “All means all.”  The Hebrew Bible emphasizes the importance of this affirmation by a chapter break: Joel 2:28-32 in our English Bibles (following the Latin Vulgate) is Joel 3:1-5 in Hebrew (the English Bible’s chapter 3 is Joel 4 in the Hebrew Bible).

Joel reminds us that we too belong to a larger community than we had realized.  We may have forgotten that—I confess that often I have forgotten that.  We succumb to the temptation to define our community too narrowly, as including only those like us, whether ethnically or ideologically or theologically.

This Pentecost weekend marks the gathering of the United Methodist annual conference in Western Pennsylvania, a meeting held in the shadow of schism, as many of our churches will likely join the newly-formed Global Methodist Church.

Also this weekend, the Pittsburgh Pride march will be held on Saturday, in support of LGBTQ+ folk: a striking juxtaposition, as the new Methodist denomination is forming in large part to escape the continuing controversy in United Methodism surrounding the full inclusion of those very persons.

There may be no stopping that schism.  But in the days and weeks to come, friends, we must learn to listen to one another—not to agree, necessarily, but to listen, to learn, and to understand. Like Joel’s audience, and Peter’s centuries later, we today need to hear God’s promise of deliverance and freedom from shame. But we cannot experience those blessings separately and severally. They are not offered to us in that way. God calls us, not to homogeneity, but to unity in diversity.  We must find our salvation together.

Here in the U.S., Monday is Memorial Day: a day for remembering and honoring the deaths of soldiers, sailors, and pilots who fought for freedom. It is good, and right, that we do so.  If you are a veteran, or if you are mourning today for a beloved veteran, thank you and God bless you for sacrificially following your calling.

But it is also right for us to remember that, in the Christian calendar, Tuesday May 31 is the Visitation of Mary, expectant mother of Jesus, to Elizabeth her cousin–also pregnant with her son, John the Baptist.  The Visitation is a celebration of God’s gift of new life.  It is also the occasion for Luke’s Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55), often called the Magnificat after its opening in Latin, Magnificat anima mea Dominum (in the KJV, “My soul doth magnify the Lord”).  Here is the whole song, from the Common English Bible:

With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
    In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant.
    Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
        because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
    He shows mercy to everyone,
        from one generation to the next,
        who honors him as God.
He has shown strength with his arm.
    He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
    He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
        remembering his mercy,
    just as he promised to our ancestors,
        to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.

The Magnificat (the Presbyterian hymnal has a lovely and vigorous setting of this passage!) draws freely in style and imagery on the Song of Hannah, mother of Samuel (1 Samuel 2:1-10), although Hannah’s song is a bit more specific as to how God intends to upend the seats of the powerful:

The bows of mighty warriors are shattered,
    but those who were stumbling now dress themselves in power! (1 Samuel 2:4).

The notion of God shattering the weapons of war speaks powerfully to me after these last two weeks.  First, a racist massacre at a Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York, perpetrated by an 18-year-old white nationalist who “wore body armor, tactical gear and a helmet, officials said, and carried a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, modified to hold high-capacity magazines.”  Then, another racially-motivated attack at a Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, California, carried out by a Chinese man armed with two handguns.  Now, this week, yet another horrific school shooting: 19 elementary school children and two adults gunned down for no apparent reason in Uvalde, Texas by an 18-year-old armed with an AR-15 assault rifle.  The same weapon was used nearly ten years ago when another gunman massacred 26 people, including 20 first-graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Since then, there have been over 900 school shootings: Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida; Santa Fe High School in Texas; Oxford High School in Michigan; and FAR too many more.

Meanwhile, also this week in Texas, the National Rifle Association convention continued unimpeded by these tragedies.

We must be willing to put feet and hands to our prayers–to be a part of God’s solution.  And God’s solution, friends, is right there in the Magnificat. Our God is a God who takes sides, with the powerless against the powerful, with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the victims, and against the guns.  As Hannah knew, our God’s intent is to shatter the weapons of the warriors.  On this Memorial Day weekend, perhaps we can resolve at least to keep weapons of war on the battlefield where they belong, and out of our schools, churches, and grocery stores.

AFTERWORD:

The statue that I have used to represent Mary and Elizabeth’s encounter is “Two Women” (ca. 1950-1960), by Charles LePlae.  It stands outside the Openluchtmuseum voor Beeldhouwkunst Middelheim (Antwerp, Belgium).  I found this image in Vanderbilt Library’s wonderful online resource “Art in the Christian Tradition,” which is linked to the lectionary.  Also from that lectionary site comes this beautiful prayer for the Visitation of Mary:

Recently, I was captivated by a quote from A. J. Jacobs, the author of The Year of Living Biblically (2007), regarding his most recent book, The Puzzler (2022):

I’m an advocate of what I call the Puzzle Mindset. Instead of seeing the world as a series of hard-to-win battles, I try to view it as a puzzle–to see the world through the eyes of an engineer, not a warrior.  Even using the word puzzle can help. When I hear about the climate crisis, I want to curl up in a fetal position. But if I think about the climate puzzle, I feel motivated to find solutions.

As a Bible Guy, I tend to think biblically–in terms of texts and images from Scripture.  So Jacobs’ challenge “to see the world through the eyes of an engineer, not a warrior” got me thinking about martial metaphors in Scripture.  The earliest passages in the Bible celebrate God as the Divine Warrior: the Song of Deborah in Judges 5; the song of David in 2 Samuel 22//Psalm 18; the psalm in Habakkuk 3; Psalm 68; and in particular, the oldest passage in Scripture, Exodus 15:1-18, the Song of the Sea.

I will sing to the Lord, for an overflowing victory!
    Horse and rider he threw into the sea!

Unfortunately, because we so readily think of our world as “a series of hard-to-win battles,” and so of life as combat, we are likely to forget that this ancient biblical metaphor is a metaphor, and to embrace it uncritically.  A personal example of this tendency takes me back eight years, to the time soon after my ankle replacement surgery.

I remember waking up on one morning to the realization that my leg was itching under the cast, where I couldn’t reach.  It was driving me crazy.  I twisted my leg inside the cast, got up, stomped around on the walker–and then realized that I would be trapped in that cast for another three weeks.

I sat in my recliner with the offending limb stuck up in the air, trying to read, trying to pray–trying desperately to think about something, anything, other than my leg–to no avail.  I imagined that ants were crawling around on my leg under the cast.  I began to have trouble breathing.  My heart was racing.  I was disoriented.  I thought, “I am having a panic attack.  This must be what a panic attack feels like.”

Then I thought about my son Sean.  Sean has wrestled since childhood with Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Along the way, he has learned not only to cope, but to thrive.  So I asked him if he could teach me how to fight my obsession with my leg’s discomfort.

Sean’s answer astonished me.  He said he had learned that you can’t fight obsessive thoughts: “They just come.”  What you can do is rob those thoughts of the emotions and anxiety associated with them.  To do that, Sean taught me, you first relax your body and your mind.  Then, you let the forbidden thought come: you deliberately think about what you do not want to think about.  As you do so, you keep breathing slowly; you deliberately relax, and so replace the anxiety with calm.  Sean suggested that I think, “My leg is uncomfortable, but that really doesn’t matter!”

That night, when my leg itched, I didn’t try to fight it.  I breathed slowly, in and out, praying the Jesus Prayer in time with my breathing: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  I thanked God for my healing.  I thought about the hundreds of other people who had had this same surgery, and had come through this period of recovery just fine.  I told myself, “My leg is uncomfortable, but that really doesn’t matter.”  And I fell asleep–the most restful sleep I had had since coming home from the hospital.

Over the next three weeks, I continued to practice my prayer and meditation, and bit by bit, my leg stopped bothering me.  It didn’t become magically more comfortable, or less prone to itching, but I stopped worrying about it.  I “won” the fight when I stopped fighting!

Please do not misunderstand me.  I do not question society’s need for warriors.  Undoubtedly, there are times when resistance to political and social evil requires a militant response: as is the case today in Ukraine.  But under the dominant influence of the martial metaphor, resistance to any evil becomes a war: the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, the War on Terror.  Theologian Walter Wink called this seductive notion the “myth of redemptive violence”:

Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been afforded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees absolute obedience to death. . . Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not appear mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts (Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 23).

In a seventeen-minute video appeal to his fellow Evangelicals, Phil Vischer, creator of the wonderful Veggie Tales series, briefly summarizes the horrific history of race in America–faulting, in particular, the martial metaphor.  The War on Crime and the War on Drugs, he argues, led us to militarize our police, and to criminalize and incarcerate an entire generation of Black and Brown Americans.

Tara O’Neill Hayes, the Director of Human Welfare Policy at the American Action Forum, has the sobering statistics:

There are currently an estimated 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States.  The incarceration rate is now more than 4.3 times what it was nearly 50 years ago. This increase has led to the United States having the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, 37 percent greater than that of Cuba and 69 percent greater than Russia. This high incarceration rate is not because crime has increased; in fact, crime rates have declined since the 1990s.  Rather, the arrest rate increased dramatically, while sentences—particularly for drug crimes—have gotten longer.  These policy changes have disproportionately affected low-income and minority populations, who now make up roughly three-fifths and two-thirds of the prison population, respectively.

President Biden’s recent clemency actions, pardoning three people and commuting the sentences of 75, were a small start on responding to this injustice: “White House officials say the president thinks too many people — many of them Black and brown — are serving unduly long sentences for drug crimes.”

In the wake of the very public, brutal murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer, worldwide protests called for justice and reform–including calls, specifically, to “Defund the Police.”  But a far better call would be to ditch the martial metaphor, and demilitarize the police–as they did in Camden, New Jersey.

In 2013, Camden had one of the highest murder rates in the country.  In response to that sobering statistic, the city “dismantled the entire police department, starting a community policing approach.”

In the early church, when believers met in this holy season, they would greet one another with a hearty and enthusiastic Christe anesti–“Christ is risen!”–to which the only possible response is Allthos anesti–“He is risen indeed!”

God bless you, friends!  In celebration of this day of resurrection, I would like to share with you two short and very sweet Easter poems by Ann Weems. First, “The Story and the Child.”

The child comes, and we dye eggs
and make a cake and decorate.
“Why are we doing this?” he asks
“Because,” I answer, “Life is about to happen,
and on Sunday morning we’ll catch stars.”
He looks at me, quizzically at first,
and then grins. It’s then I ask him
to tell me the story. The only way he’ll learn
is to tell it himself.
The only way we’ll learn
is to tell it again… and again…

The second poem, by way of retelling the story, is “Lost and Found.”

As we approached Jerusalem
The crowd stood at the gate and cried in a tear-choked voice:
“We are lost in his death.”

Upon the hill the angels sang: “We are found in his rising.”

Christe anesti, friends!

I am a lectionary preacher–a practice I commend as a way to break out of the hamster wheel of our favorite, comfortable passages and encounter the wideness–and wildness–of the Bible.  But I confess that sometimes, the logic of the lectionary escapes me.  The only reading from Zechariah in the Revised Common Lectionary is 9:9-12.  Apart from it being yet another witness to the comparative paucity of readings from the left-hand side of the Bible in the Revised Common Lectionary, I have two problems with this reading.

My first beef  is its location in the church calendar: as the alternate Old Testament lection for Year A, Proper 9: the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost; the Gospel for that day is Matt 11:16-19, 25-30.  How, I wonder, is this is not one of the readings appointed for Palm Sunday?

Both Matthew and John quote Zechariah 9:9 in their accounts of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt 21:5 and John 12:15), while Mark 11:1-11 and Luke 19:28-40 both use the word polon, “colt,” found in the Greek Septuagint (commonly abbreviated LXX) of Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion.
        Sing aloud, Daughter Jerusalem.
Look, your king will come to you.
        He is righteous and victorious.
        He is humble and riding on an ass,
            on a colt, the offspring of a donkey.

Applying to this passage a wooden literalism, Matthew describes Jesus entering Jerusalem mounted on both an ass and her colt, like a circus act (Matt 21:6-7)!  But this was no mistake on Matthew’s part: the most Jewish of the Evangelists certainly knew how Hebrew poetry works.  Rather, this bizarre image was intended to ram the point home, making absolutely certain that the reader could not miss the connection between the prophecy and its fulfillment. Similarly, in his commentary on this book, the early Christian teacher Theodoret of Cyrus records, “This acquires a clear interpretation in actual events: the king who is prophesied has come.”

The NRSV translation “triumphant and victorious” (9:9) is difficult to understand, although the CEB “righteous and victorious,” is only a little better. The Hebrew reads tsaddiq wenosha’. The first term means “righteous,” perhaps defending “the royal legitimacy of the king” (so Carol and Eric Meyers, Zechariah 9-14; AB 25c [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1993], 127), although it may also refer to his morality (the Aramaic Targum on this verse has zaqay, which means “innocent”).

The second word, nosha’, is a passive participle, meaning literally “one who is saved” (reflected also in the Targum). The LXX renders this as sozon, an active participle (“saving”). Following the Greek rather than the Hebrew, both the CEB and the NRSV read nosha’ actively, as “victorious.”  Carol and Eric Meyers, however, stay with the plain sense of the Hebrew: “Yahweh is victorious over the enemies, with the result that the king is ‘saved,’ thereby enabled to assume power” (Meyers and Meyers 1993, 127). In short, Zechariah 9:9-10 presents a transformed notion of kingship, grounded not in dynastic and regal pomp, but in God’s own action.  Remember Zechariah’s words to the governor Zerubbabel, earlier in this book:

This is the LORD’s word to Zerubbabel:
        Neither by power, nor by strength,
        but by my spirit, says the LORD of heavenly forces (Zech 4:6).

As this unit unfolds, it continues to draw distinctions between this king and other, previous kings. Although the humble mount in 9:9 derives from a long tradition of kingly processions involving the king riding an ass (Meyers and Meyers 1993, 129), this passage surely catches the point of that tradition: by riding an ass rather than a war horse or chariot, the king shows humility, and declares that he comes in peace. Yet this time, the prophet declares, this is more than theater!  This king truly is humble, and not only comes in peace, but comes to bring peace: a promise our war-torn world desperately needs to hear!

He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
        and the warhorse from Jerusalem.
The bow used in battle will be cut off;
        he will speak peace to the nations.
His rule will stretch from sea to sea,
        and from the river to the ends of the earth (Zech 9:10).

The mention of Ephraim (the largest of the northern tribes, often used to represent the entire northern kingdom of Israel, for example, see Isa 7:2; Jer 7:15; Ezek 37:19; Hos 5:3) shows that this renewed kingdom will include those formerly excluded: the “lost tribes” from the northern kingdom destroyed and dispersed by the Assyrians long before.

This brings me to my second problem with this lectionary reading: it is two verses too long!  Although in its final form, Zechariah 9 is a unit, the differing histories of its parts call for attention.  Zechariah 9:9-10 belongs with the first eight verses of the chapter–a series of oracles against the nations of Syria-Palestine, culminating in the arrival of God’s appointed king.   Zechariah 9:11 and 12  belong with 9:11-17.

In sharp contrast to the peaceful vision of Zech 9:9-10, but in continuity with older visions of divine kingship (see Nah 1:2-11; Hab 3:1-19; Zeph 1:2-18), these verses describe the LORD as a blood-soaked warrior. The exiles are gathered, not so that God can guard them in peace (Zech 9:8), but so that God can muster them as an army. The expression “the blood of the covenant” appears only in Zechariah 9:11 and Exodus 24:8, where Moses sprinkles the people with the blood of their offering at Sinai, sealing their promise to obey God’s torah. Here as there, God has delivered Israel from bondage and oppression, but will now lead them into times of trial and conflict.  Including Zech 9:11-12 in our reading will likely prompt us to misread, or even ignore, the peaceful message of Zech 9:9-10–which would be a tragic shame.

It is little wonder that Zechariah 9:9-10 so captured the imagination of the Gospel writers. While the first Christians confessed Jesus as Christ (Greek christos, the term used in the LXX for Hebrew meshiakh, “Messiah”), it is clear that their understanding–and Jesus own understanding–of what being “Messiah” means transformed this title.

Mark 1:1 identifies Jesus not only as Christos, or Messiah, but also as “the Son of God.” While related to the idea of the king as God’s adopted son (Psalm 2:5-9; 45:6-7), this confession goes much further than any Jewish conception of Messiah: Jesus the Messiah is God! This confession creates new problems, raising the need for the church to affirm that “Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2; John 1:14).

But while on the one hand Christian confessions about Jesus exalt the role of Messiah far beyond traditional Jewish expectations, on the other hand these ideas subvert the idea of Messiah as king. In debate with the Pharisees, who believed in a literal future Messiah, Jesus asks. “‘What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” ‘David’s son,’ they replied.” (Matt 22:42). In response, Jesus quotes Psalm 110:1

The Lord says to my lord,
    “Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies your footstool” (NRSV)

Assuming the speaker to be David, Jesus asks, “If David calls him [that is, the Messiah] Lord, how can he be David’s son?” (Matt 22:45). Although Matthew’s genealogy takes pains to demonstrate Jesus’ descent from David (Matt 1:6, 17), Christ is more than David’s son!

Particularly subversive of traditional Messianic expectation is the Christian view that the Christ must suffer. Thus, in Mark, Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is Christos is inadequate: faced with Jesus’ determination to suffer and die, Peter rebukes him, and is in turn himself rebuked by Jesus (Mark 8:29-33). Indeed, in Mark, the first human to make a full confession about Jesus is his executioner, who declares when Jesus dies, “This man was certainly God’s son” (Mark 15:39).

It may well be that Jesus understood his own role in terms of the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13—53:12). Certainly, early Christians did (1 Cor 15:3; Acts 8:32-35; 1 Peter 2:22-25), and the idea must have come from somewhere (Matt 8:17; 12:18-21; Mark 9:12; 10:45[//Matt 20:28]; Luke 22:37). In any case, for early Christians, the image of the peaceful and humble king in Zechariah 9:9-10 was the perfect representation of Jesus–and one we as well must learn to embrace.

AFTERWORD

The mosaic icon of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as king of all) above comes from the central dome of  the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv, Ukraine.  The scene of wartime violence is also from Ukraine, following the Russian missile strike on refugees at the Kramatorsk train station.  The continuing senseless violence perpetrated by Mr. Putin in Ukraine is a reminder of how much we need the peace-bringing Messiah of Zechariah 9:9-10.

If you would like to support the people of Ukraine, I recommend that you consider giving through the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).  Since administrative costs are covered through the church by other means, 100% of money you donate will go to Ukrainians.  UMCOR is communicating with partners in the region to coordinate a humanitarian response. You can support UMCOR’s international disaster response efforts by making a gift to Advance #982450. Global Ministries’ Advance #14053A supports Methodist pastors in Ukraine and Moldova.