Sermon. St Michael and
All Angels, Little Ilford. 27 October 2019 (Year C)
· Bible Sunday
But… I am happy to “roll
with it”, as an “one off”. So we will call today unique, and we will call it (in
case you haven’t picked it up yet…) “Bible Sunday”!
What I propose to do with
this unique occasion is offer some teaching on the Bible, and you’ll
guess that for me that means on the Bible in its original languages. This in
turn means I am not going to offer an “exhortatory” sermon. (I know that’s what
you were asking yourselves as you came to church today: “I wonder how
exhortatory the sermon will be today”!) “Exhortatory” is just a specialist (or
posh) way of saying a sermon which says how we should all be living. So you see:
I am going to be even less bossy than normal. (And that’s not entirely a joke.
It is also a warning: if you think I am normally bossy, you have been spoiled!)
I am going to share some bits of knowledge, just to see if we can together
agree that the Bible is fascinating.
And so to the Hebrew
Bible, which Christians have tended and do tend to call the Old
Testament (and I don’t say wrongly). This is, after all, the greater part of
the Bible in terms of length, about 4/5 of the Christian Bible.
The first thing you
should know about Hebrew is that the core text does not have any vowels.
This is true of every Torah scroll used in a synagogue. But it is also true of many/most newspapers in Israel today. You might think that makes things very hard. I
suggest it doesn’t. You can test this. You can write some sentences down in English,
but without the vowels – only the consonants – and give it to somebody else. My
guess is that they will understand most of it.
Hebrew texts as such tend
to have no vowels.
The second thing you must
know about Hebrew is that the meaning of the words can change dramatically –
utterly – depending on what the vowels in a word are.
For example
· Lamad means “he learned” (maybe all
by himself)
· Limmad means he taught
· Lummad means “he was taught” (by
another).
That’s changing (pretty
much) only the vowels.(1)
So you can see that there
is a problem: the core text has no vowels; the vowels often determine the meaning
of the words.
And so it happened that,
that between the 6th and the 10th centuries of our Common
Era, some Jewish scribes started adding vowels to the text. They did
this by adding dots and dashes above, below, and sometimes within the
consonants. (I can show you later.) So a Hebrew text with the vowels added is
called a “pointed” text. And by the end of the 10th century,
the words – the words with the vowels – were fixed. They weren’t added to the
Torah scrolls themselves. The text on the scrolls was held to be too holy to
have any later additions. But they were added to the books the congregation
might have, or the books people practising reading or chanting the text might
have.(Again, I have an example.)
Now, does this mean that until
the vowels (the dots and the dashes) were added, people could just make up how
to pronounce the vowels in the words, and so give the text the meaning they
wanted? No, not at all. We have to remember that the early centuries after
Christ, both Jews and Christians lived in what was basically an oral culture.
They would be hearing these texts, year in, year out, week in, week out, or
even day in, day out. So the vowels and the meanings would have been fixed
(by and large) long before they were actually written down – written down in
the form of those dots and dashes.
So, l am going to take a
risk here. I am going to tell you something you may find boring, or you may
just, like me, find intriguing. If you find it boring, you can tell me bluntly,
as I won’t be preaching on “Bible Sunday” again. If you find it boring, but no
more boring than any other sermon from me – that you don’t have to tell me.
Here goes. If we consider
the Hebrew Bible as fixed by the addition of the vowels, how does the Bible
begin? What is at the very opening of the book of Genesis? This is a real
question…
Actually, the very opening
of the book of Genesis does not say “In the beginning”. It does not work
as a translation of the “pointed” Hebrew. The Hebrew says: “In a
beginning”. The definite article – the word or the sound for “the” – is missing.
But “In a beginning, Gd created heaven and earth” sounds strange in English,
and more or less as strange in Hebrew. What might it actually mean? So it leads
the grammarians/the translators to think creatively. So some modern
translations read “When Gd began to create…” And I have to say:
that is a fair translation of the Hebrew, really. “In beginning creating” might
be the underlying idea.
This example also
provides evidence for the point I was making earlier – that the later scribes
did not invent new meanings from the consonantal text (the text that was just
consonants) out of thin air. I say this because if we turn to the main Greek translation,
the Greek also says: “In a beginning”. In the Greek, too, the word
for “the” is missing. And this Greek text (which I also have with me) was
written down a couple of centuries or more before Christ. It is unquestionably
ancient.
And indeed, so fixed is
this idea that the story of creation begins with the strange words “In a
beginning”, that when St John wants to write his great meditation, reflecting and maybe going behind the story of creation, which he wants to relate to the Word of Gd who becomes a
human being in Jesus Christ, he too writes as he starts his Gospel: “In
a beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd.”
Have I bored you to
tears? I have really just wanted to drop the smallest hint that, if we do dig
down into the biblical text in the original languages, things will become not
easier, but more difficult and stranger for us, but – at least sometimes
- more intriguing, deeper, richer.
As for New Testament
Greek, Greek does have vowels, and always has had vowels. What the
oldest Greek texts do not have is.. gaps. Gaps between the words.
Each word just runs on from the word before. Oh, and all in capitals, in the oldest
texts. That makes like harder in another way. But – worry not – I won’t unfold
all of that here. We’ll either have to keep “Bible Sunday” another year, or find
another way of having some Greek for fun!
Let us return to the
Hebrew. I offer what I believe is one fair interpretation of Genesis 1, taking
seriously the absence of that “the”.
When Gd began to create
the heavens and the earth (you see, the earth was waste and void(2) and a
darkness was on the surface of the deep, and a divine wind would sweep over the
waters…) when Gd began creating, he said: Let there be Light, and there was
Light.”
You may say that this
sounds pretty similar to the traditional translation. Is anything at stake
in preferring this new version? Oh yes. Most certainly. What? I am
sorely tempted to tease you now and ask you to settle down while I outline the
top twenty points why it matters. But that would indeed be to tease you. Instead,
I will dare to hope that we might have seen that the Bible is a little bit more strange than
we realised, and so intriguing, drawing us in. A blessed “Bible Sunday”
to us all.
Amen.
(1) Readers rather than hearers will see that it also involves a doubling of the middle consonant. However, in Hebrew this too is shown not by a second written consonant, but a dot in the middle of the single consonant, i.e. here too the consonantal text does not as such determine the meaning.
(2) The Hebrew is tohu va-bhohu, terms it is excruciatingly difficult to translate. Do they refer to some substances which predate creation as we can imagine it? The rabbis were apparently willing to imagine them as different types of slime – as one option among many, not an authoritative reading.
(2) The Hebrew is tohu va-bhohu, terms it is excruciatingly difficult to translate. Do they refer to some substances which predate creation as we can imagine it? The rabbis were apparently willing to imagine them as different types of slime – as one option among many, not an authoritative reading.
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