Misunderstanding God

OK - so let's be totally negative. How do we escape from the thoughts of the past centuries (millennia?) about the character of God?

Bart Ehrman - entrepreneur, and Biblical Scholar, writes that "This God was indeed a God of wrath, not simply love. When people misbehaved, he punished them. Sometimes severely. Sometimes ruthlessly. We may not appreciate the picture, but you will find it both the both OT and NT." His context is here.

I have not translated the NT, so punish may well occur there, but it is not part of the character of God in the OT. It can be read in - but is it really there? Or are we reading the mind of the 16-17th century in the translation. 

In the NT, I see with a brief skim that punishment is rendered by two differing Greek words also translated as 'torment' or as 'vengeance', etc. It looks at first glance that the same problem occurs in the NT as in the OT: translators slip from a real character of God to an inferred one. They assume that if God is wrathful, or vengeful, that therefore God punishes, when the reality is that humans punish or that humans are tormented by their unconfessed lies and errors. It looks to me that in neither testament is the word punish required as a gloss for an action where God is the subject of the word. 

I have taken each root used for 'punish' to see and ask - does this really mean 'punish'?

I have written on this before, most recently earlier this year:

The 16th century translators had punishment on their minds a lot. The evidence is in the number of different Hebrew words (יסר נכה ענשׁ פקד רעע עוה) that are glossed as punish.

So I found 6 different roots that have been rendered as punish. I also note that in the version that everyone copies (KJV), Leviticus 26:41 elaborates iniquity into punishment and takes a whole interpretive phrase to render the one word. This is a case where the blood is not dry on the meat and the translator, that butcher of language, has failed to disentangle the ligaments when rendering the packaged gloss. The result reflects the bloody character of the translator rather than the character of God.

I did not set out to do this. I recall being surprised by the result as I combed out the impossible tangles of the KJV.

You can see each root and the glosses I chose for each in the concordance. The dominant glosses for the above list of roots are in this list with their counts for my translation. Punish as a gloss is never needed. It is always a slip into unnecessarily interpretive translation. (All translation is interpretation of the base data - but interpretation should not reduce the scope of what is said.)

• isr mentor (16), bewilder (3), chasten (62), warn (11), tutor (7)
• nch struck (331), stricken (8), strike (189), mill (1), gash (2)
• yvh wretch (2), perverse (16), perversity (2), pervert (2)
• ynw amerce (2), fine (10)
• pqd visitation (19), conscript (115), took/take census (10), officiate (11), entrust (38), officer (25), conscription (9), office (7), precept (25), visit (108)
• ryy evildoer (15), injure (11), deject (8), evil (654), get hurt (2), deal ill (1), dejection (3), hurt (47), worse (5), grimace (1), spite injury (1), injury (9), disservice (1), hurtful (18)

Conclusion, punish is an unnecessary gloss. It is never the dominant gloss in the KJV or those translations that copy it, and it is abundantly clear that these translators had punishment on their minds or they would not have given us that gloss for 6 different roots in the Hebrew.

I very much doubt that Bart Ehrman will notice this post. And I am not going to pay for the privilege of commenting on his post (sapphire membership or something). He is right in using punish to report what people thought and think today. I doubt he is right in assuming that Jesus thought this. Jesus expects to be tutored, chastened, warned, and taught. But Jesus seems to see clearly the love of God in the Old Testament. He accepts the role of son of God as one who is grieved by and absorbs rather than punishes evil. And so must we if indeed we are children of the same God.

Afterthought - God has visited and redeemed his people - do you think of this as positive or negative? pqd - visit - has overtones but punish is not one of them.  A visit from God is uniformly for good - not for evil. I wonder when we will learn to distinguish these things.