Judeo Talk

Several times now, I have made reference to the difficulty of directly translating Hebrew into English. This problem has resulted in centuries of debate over the exact meaning of many passages from the Torah. This is not an issue confined to any one religion. Modern Jews who have little to no training in Hebrew, Toritic or otherwise, often approach scripture from the same angle as Christians who only have the Old Testament in their regional vulgate. So, why is Hebrew difficult to translate and why are there so many discrepancies between the many versions of the same passages?

The story begins in Alexandria, Egypt circa 300 BCE. At this time, the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon spread throughout the Mediterranean region, including the former Egyptian Empire. After Alexander’s death, Egypt came under the control the Ptolemy line, maintaining a decidedly Greek influence in the area, including the Greek language. Alexandria was the home to The Great Library, a collection of texts that was, at the time, unrivaled the world over. Countless scrolls and other documents came through Alexandria where they routinely underwent translation by a veritable army of scholars.

Among those scholars were Jewish thinkers who found that it was necessary to bring their holy texts into the modern world so those Jews under Greek rule who had no Hebrew education could still study the Torah. So, the Septuagint project was born.

As the name suggests, the Septuagint was reportedly translated by a series of approximately 70 scholars. This process took place over the course of 200 years. Given the timeframe, complexity and sheer scale of the project, mistranslations and general disagreements were bound to happen.

On top of these problems, there is an issue inherent to bringing a semi-linear Semitic language into a decidedly linear European language. As I’ve pointed out before, Hebrew’s shoresh system using “root” combinations of three consonants creates the potential for myriad connotations and shared symbols between several words that aren’t necessarily related in other languages. Take for instance the Hebrew word Dahm. This means “Blood” and naturally shares a root with word Adom, the word for the color Red. Of course, these also share their root with the word Adama, “earth, ground, or soil” which is where the name Adam comes from because in Genesis Adam was created from clay. These shared roots and connotations do not survive into the Greek, let alone into further translations from Greek into other languages.

Beyond the Septuagint, the Torah or Old Testament underwent more translations into other European languages. The Greek Bible soon found its way into a Latin translation during the Roman Empire. After that, the Latin was used to translate the text into German. In time, every society with a monotheistic presence had a version of the Bible in their native tongue. As one might guess, this resulted in a very complicated version of the Telephone Game. A translation of a translation of a translation is bound to have some errors and lost content.

This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to get a lot of wisdom out of Biblical texts in a language outside of Hebrew. The stories are simple enough on the surface to be accessible in Martian if need be. All the same, Hebrew is the original language of the Torah. In order to understand the text in all its fullness, one must be able to read it as it was first written.

There is perhaps no city on Earth more mythic in emotional scale or more torn by conflict than Jerusalem. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, having been dated to as early as 4000 BCE. Next to Byblos in Lebanon, Jerusalem may be the oldest continually inhabited city in human history. It has been destroyed twice, once by the Babylonian Empire and then by the Roman Empire. It has been under seige, captured, recaptured and otherwise fought over hundreds of times. This makes the origin of its name tragically ironic.

At the root of Jerusalem’s Hebrew name, Yerushalayim, are three letters. They are Shin, Lamed and Mem. In all semitic languages, that root pattern and its cousins have the same connotation. Shalom, Salaam, peace.

There are many early references to the city of Jerusalem. Biblically, the first mention of it is in the book of Genesis, chapter 33. As part of his travels, the patriarch Jacob journeys to a country called Shachem, specifically to a city called Shalem. This word, Shalem, essentially means “completeness” or “wholeness”. As is often the case, specific locations in the Torah are used to represent philosophical concepts. If a troubled biblical figure travels to a city called “wholeness” there is some sort of lesson to be learned. From this and from other references, it’s fairly obvious that the people of the ancient world saw some great importance in the city that would be Jerusalem. Exactly why, it is impossible to say.

It was not just early monotheistic societies who saw greatness in Jerusalem. Egyptian records, specifically the famed Amarna Letters, mention a city in the levant using the Akkadian term Uru Uru Salam Ki. That “salam” ought to be familiar by now. As for “Uru Uru”, this shares an etymological root with a modern Hebrew word, Ir, meaning “city”. This is where the “Jeru” in Jerusalem comes from. In ancient semitic languages, repetition was used as a means of emphasis or aggrandizement. The “ki” was just a grammatical structure declaring the end of the phrase. In this case, the phrase would mean “That great city of peace”.

As Jerusalem grew and the language spoken in it solidified, the name transformed into its modern state. The current suffix “ayim” is an ancient Hebrew grammatical structure to denote duality. This makes reference to the fact that Jerusalem is built upon two hills. There is another frequent geographic term in Hebrew that uses the dual suffix. Mitzrayyim is the Hebrew word for Egypt. At the time when the Hebrew people interacted with Egypt, it was split into two kingdoms.

Many cultures have recognized Jerusalem as an important city and have used it as a symbol of peace and righteousness. The early American settlers of the Puritan pilgrim lines were especially fond of the concept of “the city on the hill”. American cities like Salem, Massachusetts bear the same etymological root as the holy city. Only time will tell whether Jerusalem will remain such a pervasive symbol in human culture. Should our species ever colonize lands beyond our own planet, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a settlement called Jerusalem.

Last week’s Hebrew lesson began our look into the history of the language and the people who spoke it. Today, we’ll be exploring where the term “Hebrew” itself originates.

When discussing the term “Hebrew” in reference to the language, there are actually three separate words we need to understand: Hebrew, Yihudit, and Ivrit.

We’ll begin with “Yihudit” because the other two terms are much more closely related. “Yihudit” is a word that means, “The language of Yihudah”, while the term “Yihudah” refers to the kingdom of Judah. In the ancient territory that we know today as the modern State of Israel, there were actually two presiding kingdoms. In the north was the ancient kingdom of Israel, which had the kingdom of Judah at its southern border. When the Roman Empire came to dominate the region, they latinized the name of the territory into Judea. This is where the terms “Judaism” and “Jewish” come from. The people who lived in Judah would have said they spoke “Yihudit”, as naming languages based on the regions in which they were spoken was the linguistic convention of ancient Hebrew speakers.

The terms “Ivrit” and “Hebrew” are related both linguistically and in spirit. “Ivrit” comes from the root word “Avar” which refers to someone who comes from far away. It should be noted that this is distinct from the words referring specifically to foreigners. The Hebrew word “Goi’im” is the most direct translation of “foreign people” and became the modern Yiddish term “Goyim” which refers to all non-Jewish people. In addition, there was an ancient Canaanite slang term for foreigners, “Gidolim” which literally translates as “Big ones”. This is where the story of David and Goliath comes from. Goliath originally wasn’t a giant, but a foreign leader.

The “far away” to which “Avar” refers is actually closer in spirit of the word “Hebrew”. That word can be traced to many similar iterations in various ancient Near and Middle Eastern cultures. Many Near Eastern cultures, like Sumeria, Akkad and Babylon had the term “Ibiru”, while the Egyptians adopted the word into their Coptic language as “Ipiru”. These words essentially indicate a people who live outside the cities. They often get referenced as the people who live on the other side of the river, which had a similar connotation as the modern colloquial term “People from the wrong side of the tracks”. At the time of its regular use, “Ibiru” didn’t necessarily refer to a particular ethnic group, but to a certain variety of ancient civilization. People called “Ibiru” weren’t really seen as being foreigners because they weren’t from a particular kingdom or city-state. Many of them were nomadic and tribal. Those people who would eventually become the dominant ethnic group in Canaan were known as being “Ibiru” in the lands in which they previously dwelt.

Ultimately, this sense of the Jewish people being outsiders without necessarily being foreigners has carried throughout Jewish history. It is, for better or worse, an intrinsic part of the Jewish identity. Perhaps this is why Jews have flourished in the United States. Most of the people who came to live here were not natives of the land, so America became a place of outsiders who were all equally foreign.

Whenever a curious non-Jew enters a synagogue for the first time, one of the most striking parts is the strangeness of Hebrew. It is read right to left and the letters are completely foreign. It looks more than just ancient, it looks arcane. Hebrew is full of sounds not found in American English and the chanted prayers come from a very different time and place. But Hebrew really isn’t as strange, or as foreign, as it first seems. Let’s break down some bits of history to show how Hebrew really isn’t that far removed from the languages we know in the West.

Hebrew didn’t develop in isolation. In fact, it’s one of most-traveled tongues in the world. It belongs to a linguistic super-family called the Afro-Asiatic languages. The vast majority of European languages come from a super-family known as Indo-European. The Hebrew we see in the Torah is Classical Hebrew, which itself is fairly close to Modern Hebrew. To put things in historical context, 2000 years ago the version of Hebrew spoken in Judea was called Aramaic, but Classical Hebrew had already come to be adopted for ritual purposes. The two languages are very close. Aramaic was really more of an everyday spoken language.

Long before even Classical Hebrew when the Jewish culture was in its early stages of development, those people who would become the Hebrews likely wrote and spoke Proto-Canaanite, the language of the loose amalgamation of peoples in the region of Canaan near the dawn of human civilization. Proto-Canaanite was a pictograph system, meaning that the symbols that later became associated with specific sounds began representing whole concepts. For example, the original pictograph for the letter Alef resembles the head of a bull and was meant to indicate strength or leadership.

From Proto-Canaanite, a more directly phonetic alphabet developed in the Phoenecian language. The region of Phoenecia was, like many parts of the world at that time, arranged as a series of independent city-states rather than a unified kingdom. To run with our example, the letter Alef transformed into the following shape:

It’s easy to see how this letter, like so much of the Phoenician alphabet, influenced the Greek language, which is the origin of the letter Alpha, itself being functionally identical to the modern letter A. This is because Greek informed Etruscan and Etruscan developed into Latin. Today, we anglophones use the Roman Latin Alphabet.

Even the term “Alphabet” comes from the first two letters in that system stemming from Proto-Canaanite, “Alef” and “Bet”. Even the progression of Western letters follows the the same progression as Hebrew. Where the Greek runs- Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc., Hebrew runs- Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, etc.

This is how languages develop; not in a vacuum, but as a confluence of cross-cultural communication. There are even a few Hebrew words that snuck their way into English. One that comes to mind is the word Sabbatical, meaning an extended period of vacation from one’s work. This comes from the Hebrew term “Shabbat”, which means Sabbath, and comes from the Hebrew verb Lishavet meaning “To rest”.

So, no matter how strange and foreign Hebrew may seem to a lifelong English-speaker, the two languages share a common history, as do the majority of the languages spoken on planet Earth today.

On the 25th day of the Hebrew calender month of Kislev, it has been the tradition for several thousand years to celebrate a holiday called Chanukah. This festival commemorates the liberation of what would become Israel from the occupation of Seleucid forces under King Antiochus IV. Many people grow up with the fable about the oil in the Temple lamps during the rededication of the Temple after the war. Legend says that one day’s worth of oil miraculously lasted eight days, but it is false to say that the holiday is meant to celebrate this supposed miracle. Jews today recognize that story as being a metaphor for hope and perseverance in difficult times. So, if Chanukah isn’t about the miracle, why do we celebrate it?

The real essence of Chanukah is the lesson of holding to one’s beliefs regardless of external pressures. Many times throughout history, Jews have been persecuted for their culture and their faith. More than once, we have been pressed to convert to other religions. One such event was the occupation of the Levant region by Antiochus IV and his armies, who mandated the conversation of all those living in Judea to Hellenistic Greek traditions. So, who is Antiochus?

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, he left a massive empire. Having spent most of his life pursuing war, Alexander’s closest political allies were his generals. When the time came to hand power to another, Alexander’s son had yet to be born. Alexander’s generals, known in this period as the Diadochi, spent many years afterward vying for control over the fragments of the Macedonian Empire. During a long period of in-fighting that involved murders both on and off the battlefield, the line of Antiochus took segments of Asia. Due to the endless wars between competing Greek forces, many local cultures grew strong enough to pursue independence, among them were Carthage, Rome and an upstart group of rebels in Judea under a devout leader named Judah Maccabee, whose name translates as “Hammer”.

The Maccabee rebels represented a fairly small portion of the Judean people. They were, in a sense, political and religious extremists intent on maintaining the traditions associated with the Temple of Jerusalem. Using guerrilla tactics to wear down the Seleucid armies (which were already stretched thin from other, larger wars), the Maccabee movement wrested control of the region from the Greeks. After the war, they rededicated the Temple, which is where the festival gets its name. “Chanukah” relates to the root word “Chanakh” meaning “To dedicate” in the sense of religious sanctification.

Since that time, the liberation of Judea has been celebrated by Jews all over the world. Because the lighting of special candelabra called Menorah (pl. Minorot) was a feature of the rededication of the Temple, the most important Chanukah tradition is the lighting of the Chanukiah, a special 9-branched Menorah. The ninth branch, called the Shamash (protector) represents God, while the other eight branches represent the eight days of the festival. Eight is a very important number in Judaism, but that’s another lesson.

Chanukah 2008 runs from the evening of Sunday, December 21st to the following Sunday, December 28th. Happy Holidays. Join us here at Judeo Talk this Wednesday for a special Chanukah edition of our Hebrew lesson.