Evensong

 Evensong is the only service I attend these days since the pandemic has eased a bit.

This evening the psalm was 88. I was very disappointed in the translation that was sung. I compared it with mine and I was disappointed that I had not preserved more of the Hebrew word order. Psalms were my first exercise in translation before I knew the music. 

Now I have two psalms to set - must do 88 and discover what it sounds like and must do 51 for the Bethsheva project - just beginning.

I think I know what I should do before I die - complete as much of the music with English and Hebrew lyrics as I can. My closest friend died yesterday - without warning - much as my brother-in-law died in January 1, 2020 from his sudden fall a few weeks earlier while he was on holiday. 

Act now while the moment is present. So many even musicians have not heard any of the music that is embedded in the text of the First Testament. Here's my intro.

And here's Psalms 88. Verse 1 for the record.

Psalms 88:1

I have marked the glosses that are confusing to the liturgical version. E.g. gbr = man - many other Hebrew words are rendered as man - so the sense is diluted. Wound in the psalms is mkx (Ps 110:5). But there we are - it took me 10 years to unwind the overlaps in the Scripture. And it would do with even more work. Probably the saddest psalm in the Psalter, a good preparation for the lament of 89.

	My translation	The liturgical translation.
1	A song. A psalm of the children of Korah. For the leader in illness to jam. An insight of Heyman the Ezrahite.	The liturgy leaves off singing of the inscription. Everything is marked with hand-signals to be sung. Note too how the verses do not agree with the Hebrew. The music fully defines a verse from the 10th C CE.
2	Yahweh the God of my salvation, day I cry out and in the night before you.	O Lord God of my salvation I have cried day and night before thee:
3	Let come to your presence my prayer. Bend your ear to my shout.	O let my prayer enter into thy presence incline thine ear unto my calling.
4	For sated with evil is my being, and my life the grave has touched.	For my soul is full of trouble: and my life draweth nigh unto hell.
5	I am reckoned with those going down into a pit. I have become as a valiant one without potency.	I am counted as one of them that go down into the pit: and I have been even like a man that hath no strength.
6	Among the dead free, as the profaned lying in a tomb whom you remember no longer, and they from your hand are parted.	Free among the dead like unto them that are wounded and lie in the grave: who are out of remembrance and are cut away from thy hand.
7	You have set me in a low pit, in darknesses in depths.	Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit: in a place of darkness and in the deep.
8	On me your heat is supported, and you have inflicted all your breakers. Selah.	Thine indignation lieth hard upon me: and thou hast vexed me with all thy storms.
9	You have distanced my acquaintances from me. You have set me as an abomination to them. I am restrained and do not come out.	Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me: and made me to be abhorred of them. I am so fast in prison: that I cannot get forth.
10	My eye droops from poverty. I call you Yahweh every day. I unfold to you my palms.	My sight faileth for very trouble: Lord, I have called daily upon thee I have stretched forth my hands unto thee.
11	For the dead will you do wonders? If the shades arise, will they give you thanks? Selah.	Dost thou shew wonders among the dead: or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee?
12	Will they recount in the tomb your kindness, your faithfulness among the perished?	Shall thy loving-kindness be shewed in the grave: or thy faithfulness in destruction?
13	Will your wonders be known in the darkness, and your righteousness in the land of oblivion?	Shall thy wondrous works be known in the dark: and thy righteousness in the land where all things are forgotten?
14	But I, to you Yahweh I cry, and in the morning my prayer will confront you.	Unto thee have I cried O Lord: and early shall my prayer come before thee.
15	Why Yahweh do you reject my being, hide your face from me?	Lord why abhorrest thou my soul: and hidest thou thy face from me?
16	Jammed I am and expiring from my youth. I bear up your horrors. I am distracted.	I am in misery and like unto him that is at the point to die: even from my youth up thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.
17	Over me pass through your burnings. Your alarms annihilate me.	Thy wrathful displeasure goeth over me: and the fear of thee hath undone me.
18	They surround me like waters all the day long. They encompass me as one.	They came round about me daily like water: and compassed me together on every side.
19	You have distanced from me lover and friend, those I know, from darkness.	My lovers and friends hast thou put away from me: and hid mine acquaintance out of my sight.

I am late with this post. Unavoidable in the time I have had.

David and Bathsheba - rape or adultery

 I had noticed twitter abuzz with blame for Bathsheba and David. It is one of the stories I stayed away from in my letters to my children. How do you explain adultery to anyone? (I did, but I didn't draw the conclusions. See these letters: Instruction and Brokenness.)

A striking phrase came up for me - why am I so slow - as Poirot might say at the end of the mystery - Adultery requires consent from both participating adults - anything else is rape or abuse of power. Somewhere in those 6 Hebrew consonants (la tnaf) is a pointer to mutual consent!

Andrew Perriman notes that Bathsheba gets rewarded with Solomon, but it was not in her head that sleeping with the king would be advantageous. I wonder how the music would play for this story - wow - there's an idea for an oratorio from the Biblical music for someone with the right selection of Scripture.

James McGrath summarizes the dialogue with insight here.

Sin

Another letter for the children that needs another volume.

A classic broken family in the Bible is that of King David. It’s a long story. David had not learned to control his desire. But he did suffer the consequences of his errors.

Here he is talking to Yahweh when he was running away from his own grown-up son, Absalom, who was pursuing him with an army and was looking to replace him as king. So here’s prayer, fear, hiding, war, and stealing power all in one incident. (It’s not the only time that David gets into this kind of situation.) David’s family was broken, but he became famous for his poetry and his honesty.

Notice the simplicity of verse 6. I lie down and I sleep. I awake, for Yahweh supports me.

1 A psalm of David,
when he ran away from the face of Absalom his son.

2 ♪g Yahweh, how multiplied my straits!
Many arise over me.

3 Many say of me,
There is no salvation for him in God. Selah.

4 But you, Yahweh, a shield about me,
my glory, and lifting high my head.

5 ♪g My voice, to Yahweh I call,
and he answers me from his holy hill. Selah.

6 I lie down and I sleep.
I awake,
for Yahweh supports me.

7 I will not fear the multiplicity of people,
that surround set over me.

8 ♪~ Arise Yahweh. Save me my God for you strike all my enemies on the cheek.
The teeth of the wicked you break.

9 Of Yahweh is the salvation.
On your people your blessing. Selah.

I am not going to make any excuses for this - it’s his prayer. This not a politician talking or anyone making excuses. And it is his time and his place - about 3000 years ago. I don't know much about that period - except I wouldn’t take him as a good example of a family man.

He trusts his Lord. He trusts he will be safe. That’s a really good start when there is trouble. He does not smash the teeth of the wicked himself (at least not this time). Ponder that. (Maybe that's what selah means.)

David is also called ‘a man after God’s own heart’. This is good, that his heart (the things he says to himself and what he thinks about right and wrong) is like God’s. Listen to his elegy - a very sorrowful poem - on the death of king Saul and Jonathan, his son, two people, troubled also, whom David loved before he was king. They had just died in another battle a few years earlier. This is the elegy (4 minutes) that David wrote on the death of Saul and Jonathan. He was very sad and he expressed his sadness in poetry and music so everyone could share it.

You can find the words in English (2 Samuel 1:19-25) in lots of places on the web. There are a lot of words in it that I have not explained to you. But you will recognize the allusions and wonder at some of them in due course. Just listen to the emotion for now.

David also had to face his problems - and he made some of these problems for himself - and their consequences. If we have a problem, it is for the best if we face it, name it, and make a decision on what to do if we can. Sometimes our problems seem stronger than we are. That’s when to call for help. Even if we don’t call for help, we will be held by those who love us, and the one who is the origin of love, whether we realize it or not.

I too have had to face my troubles - some of them my own doing. I am now old, and I have seen many troubles that are hard to manage and not directly caused by me or under my control. I have, as all adults do, protected you from such things when I could without even mentioning them. It takes time to develop both language and strategies for learning about what is true.

Of course we all have to face the troubles caused by others as well. So a war or an accident or a divorce caused by one person's history and inability will be faced by many others. How do we respond? It is natural to be angry and to lay blame. And certainly their is fault to be borne, and crimes - actions against the laws of the social order, to be named. And everyone pays. Fault lines may trace back hundreds or even thousands of years. Who will we blame for inter-generational trauma whether it is personal or political? Will we walk away? There will be constraints no doubt.

David was constrained and bore the blame for his own errors and received in his own self their consequences, but we all have learned from his errors.

In the example of Jesus, we see that God did not walk away from problems that have fault lines tracing to the origin of all things. Creation is indeed very good, but it is not complete. The rule (rdh) of human ity in the beginning continues. And the internal governance (mwl) of God also. God has given us the responsibility to care even for those who are in error and who are bearing their sin. In our care, we make up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ Jesus himself. This is a very strange puzzle piece.

Mission AD 19: Galatia

“As elsewhere in the empire, so in Galatia: there was peace and order where before there had always been war. The Galatians, for most of their existence, had been a people largely defined by their aptitude for violence. Three centuries before the death of Augustus, twenty thousand of them, migrants from distant Gaul, had swarmed across the straits from Europe into Asia Minor, a land celebrated for the wealth of its cities, the softness of its citizens, and the talents of its celebrity chefs. Here, in the central highlands of what is now Turkey, the Galatians had quickly carved out a new home for themselves. … Barren though Galatia was, it was ideally placed for launching raids on neighbouring kingdoms.”

So Holland begins his chapter on mission.

Well, who knew anything about the history of Galatia? Is it enough to be able to identify it on an ancient map? They were people with a history just as we have and those who we know only by name have, not just a random target of Paul’s ministry. 

He spins a tale of the three Galatian tribes, now living “in marble cities of the kind that their ancestors had delighted in raiding in a province dotted with Roman colonies where the common language was Greek. The title, Sebastenos, favoured by Augustus had been bestowed on them by Cesar himself.”

This chapter is called Mission because it describes the mission of Paul. What I think the book did for me is to take the mind of someone who has been introduced to Asia Minor purely by the scripture, (and a short visit to the place so I could find it on the map and identify some fauna and flora) and put real flesh to the characters that are described in the Bible.

He ends the chapter with a brief on John’s gospel: “So ended a gospel that had begun with the Word that was with God, and was God, at the moment of creation: beside a barbecue on the shores of a lake. Hope from despair; reconciliation from betrayal; healing from trauma.”

The remaining chapters outline a varied history of how the human story absorbed and transmitted this story to what we see in our culture and government today. I may get to a few more summaries. I found the chapters all increasingly interesting.

Wisdom

Being and becoming like God, that is the issue. (This is another letter I did not include in my current volume of letters. It needs much more teasing out.)

I will begin with a conundrum, probably the most mysterious poems you will ever read. The first is of David, a psalm. He performs: an oracle of Yahweh to my Lord. Sit at my right hand, till I set your enemies as your footstool. Oracle is a special word - there are only 2 uses of this word in the Psalms, this and psalm 36. Each of them is followed by an acrostic, a signal that the poem is to be celebrated. Psalm 36 begins with An oracle on the transgression of the wicked within my heart, // there is no dread of God before its eyes. 

In the following, Psalm 110, king David, speaks of his Lord, and his Lord is being addressed by Yahweh. What sort of conversation is this?

The prayer is followed by two acrostic psalms, perfectly using every letter of the Hebrew alphabet in its sequence to express a thought.

The first acrostic is about Yahweh, how great are his deeds and that his righteousness stands for ever. The second acrostic is about the happiness of the person who fears Yahweh - and that person's righteousness stands for ever also.

Look at the character of that person as it develops: gracious and compassionate and righteous, a good person, gracious and lending, managing words with judgment, never moved, not in fear of messages of evil, heart prepared, trusting in Yahweh, prodigal of love. You could find the words in the two acrostic poems that match.

The lesson here is the beginning of wisdom. The one who fears Yahweh and delights in his commandments is promised in the poem to be upheld even when things get broken.

	1 Of David a psalm, an oracle of Yahweh to my Lord. Sit at my right hand, till I set your enemies as your footstool.
Yahweh speaks in the third person How does David's Lord rule? The same rule (rdh) as in Genesis 1:28. Different from mwl (govern) in Gen 3	2 Yahweh will send the rod of your strength out of Zion. Rule within and among your enemies.
Are we willing in the day of his trouble? David's Lord is young	3 Your people are willing in the day of your weal. In the honour of holiness from the womb of the dawn, yours is the dew of your childhood.
Melchi-zedek = king of righteousness	4 Yahweh has sworn and without a sigh, You are a priest forever, by the word of Melchizedek.
Who is the 'he' in each of these sentences?	5 My Lord is at your right hand. He will wound kings in the day of his anger.
many bodies - dead or alive?	6 He will advocate among the nations, a fullness of bodies. He will wound exceedingly a head on earth.
imbibe = drink a difficult drink rewarded.	7 ♪g He will imbibe from the torrent in the way. Therefore he will lift a head high.
A celebration of Yahweh aleph-bet (a-b)	1 ♪f Hallelu Yah. I will thank Yahweh with a whole heart, Before the council of the upright, and assembly.
gimel-daleth (g-d)	2 ♪g Great are the deeds of Yahweh, Delight of all who search them out.
heh-vav (h-v)	3 Honour and splendour his work, Verily his righteousness stands for ever.
zayin-cheth (z-k)	4 ♪B Zoomed in to memory makes he his wonderful works, How gracious and compassionate is Yahweh.
tet-yod ('t-i)	5 ♪g To those who fear him he gives prey, Yea, he remembers forever his covenant.
caf-lamed (c-l)	6 ♪B Known to his people is the power of his deeds, Letting them have the heritage of the nations.
mem-nun (m-n)	7 Mark the deeds of his hands: truth and judgment, Near and faithful are all his precepts,
samekh-ayin (s-y)	8 Supported for ever, forever, All done in truth and upright.
peh-tsade-qof (p-x-q)	9 Purchase price he has sent to his people, So he commands his covenant forever, Quite holy and fearful his name.
resh-shin-taf (r-s-t)	10 ♪~ Right at the beginning of wisdom is the fear of Yahweh, Surely a good insight for all doing them, To stand his praise for ever.
A celebration of the one who fears Yahweh	1 ♪f Hallelu Yah. A happy person fears Yahweh. By his commandments he has much delight.
Success - fruitfulness	2 Grandly valiant in the earth will be his seed. Days of the upright will be blessed.
Riches - respect	3 High value and riches are in his house. Verily his righteousness stands for ever.
Understanding - grace	4 ♪~ Zenith-bearing in the darkness there is light to the upright. He is gracious and compassionate and righteous.
Reliable - reserved	5 This is a good person, gracious and lending. Yea, he will rein in his words with judgment.
Stable - memorable	6 Causing him never to be moved. Lasting forever in memory is one who is righteous.
Steady - prepared	7 Messages of evil he does not fear. Now his heart is prepared, trusting in Yahweh.
Supported - facing trouble	8 Supported is his heart, he does not fear, Even when it is that he sees his troubles.
Generous - secure - full	9 Prodigal of love, he gives to the-many needy. Standing for ever is his righteousness. Quite full his horn, exalted in glory.
In contrast	10 ♪~ Rebel will see and will grieve. So will his teeth gnash and decay. The desire of rebels will perish.

How should we translate "man"?

I have a new blue-ray player. It is connected to my TV by a directional HDMI cable. The input has an arrowhead pointing out and the output an arrowhead pointing in (if that's clear). The cable will work in both directions, but the intelligence of the input may not be fully used if the cable is hooked up backwards. 

The title of a recent post on How should we translate "man" by Ian Paul seems to get the arrows backwards. Are we translating the English gloss "man" into our own thoughts? Or are we translating from another language using the English gloss "man"? Both were in view. This one grunt in our tongue underlines the translation problem with some significance. I made a few comments on the question which stimulated me to look closer at what I had done.

There are a lot of issues: the gender connotations, the singular-plural axis, what gloss to use, word-play, metaphor and theology - particularly Christology, and the structural significance of the source word and its parallel in the verse. [Here the direction of my cable is from Hebrew (input) to English (output).]

This word (man and its plural men) occurs in the King James translation over 4,000 times. When I see this, I ask what Hebrew roots are these glosses rendering? There is no easy way to determine this without a database of the KJV. Maybe I should load it into my data - a thought that I quickly dismissed for the moment. With a little (a little more than a little) work, the Blue Letter Bible site allows a query or two to identify the unique lexical items that use this English word or its plural as all or part of a gloss. These are (in SimHebrew)

adm, anow, aiw, byl, glgl, dl, gbr, kll,

sometimes with a qualifier (child, old, young, dead, poor, ...) as in zcr (at times not even using the natural homonym male), zqn, ild, nyr, mvt, dl.

Also to be noted are the uses of the modifier cl (all / every) - sometimes with aiw and sometimes without it, and zh (this / that) and other particles  in order to clarify their generic scope, and as a default generic subject of a verb (e.g. Ex 21:13).

This is just one admittedly difficult gloss that is rendered in the KJV by 7 or more different Hebrew roots, and with another uncountable set of roots as a generic qualifier. I have looked at the KJV and the lack of concordance is mind-boggling. This became a primary focus for me in my translation effort.

So - the backward use of the cable is complex - how did KJV English gloss for 'man/men' get to where it got? This particular translation, like my old DVD and CD player, is broken.

In my own work, the forward connection of the cable reveals the mapping of Hebrew stem to English gloss. You can find it in the concordance. In particular, look at (use you find feature on the browser) the domain human so you can more easily separate the significant from the accidental uses of the string 'man'. The best search with ctrl-f is for 'man,' - that will identify all the significant roots (only two - aiw and mt) and the roots (a few others) where man/men is qualified by an adjective as part of the gloss.

Concordance and the support of the musical line were my two guiding principles. They were in part supported by database rules and exceptions. You can find my translation here. 

Jerusalem 63 BC

Jerusalem is conquered by Pompey. Holland then introduces the idea of international law!  Who knew that in 63 BC there was anything but the rule of the law of might makes right? 

“How, after all, were two powers to agree to a treaty without invoking guards that both parties could acknowledge as valid witnesses to their covenant?”

His description of Pompey in Jerusalem is a fascinating contrast between Roman and Hebrew thought.

He then sketches history from Abram to David through the exile and the rebuilding of the temple connecting Jewish history with what he had discussed in the previous chapter. The story moves to Alexandria and the translation of Torah into the Septuagint. 

Here was the manifestation of a subtle yet momentous irony. A body of writings originally collated and adopted by scholars who took for granted the centrality of Jerusalem to the worship of their God was sleeping its editors’ purposes: the Biblia came to possess for the Jews of Alexandria a sanctity that rivalled that of the temple itself. (p. 57)

Holland then writes of the character of the Judaism into which Christ will be born.

Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no God had ever cared for a People with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel. Wise, he was also willful; all powerful, he was also readily hurt; consistent, he was also alarmingly unpredictable.

I am finding it difficult to thread together a description of this book - I think I am probably too busy to do this at present. My focus is off.

I think I will leave this project incomplete. The book was a good read. It is as Dairmaid MacCulloch writes: history boldly and elegantly retold, with fascinating interconnections traced to create a narrative that cannot fail to stimulate, for it leads to a never-ending question. 

Hmm - on second reading, that is not quite a compliment, is it? Here I am unable to focus what this never-ending question is. Seems to me the questions are legion.

The subversion of the wicked

Here’s a transcription of the puzzle in the letter on uncertainty. The text is Psalms 146, verses 6 to 9. There are many possible ways of transliterating Hebrew. I have chosen one that maps to the SimHebrew (left column) as much as possible. It might help you with your pronunciation - but you can see that the centre column is more data than you need eventually - i.e. when you get used to reading SimHebrew. The raised comma is a guttural (aleph), the y is a deeper guttural (ayin). So the double ii is the English y sound and there are schwas that are more or less obvious between two successive consonants in the SimHebrew.

thlim qmv	a little help in pronunciation	Psalms 146
v yowh wmiim varx at-him vat-cl-awr-bm hwomr amt lyolm	yose shamaiim va’arets ’et-haiiam və’et-col-’asher-bam hashomer ’emet ləyolam	6 who makes heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, keeping truth forever,
z yowh mwp't lywuqim notn lkm lrybim ihvh mtir asurim	yose mishpat layashuqim noten lekem larəyevim ihvh mattir ’asurim	7 doing judgment for the oppressed, giving bread to the hungry, Yahweh, releasing the prisoners,
k ihvh poqk yivvrim ihvh zoqf cpupim ihvh aohb xdiqim	ihvh poqeak yivrim ihvh zoqef cəfufim ihvh ’ohev tsaddiqim	8 Yahweh, giving sight to the blind, Yahweh, uplifting the disturbed, Yahweh, loving the righteous,
't ihvh womr at-grim itom valmnh iyodd vdrç rwyim iyvvt	ihvh shomer ’et-gerim iatom və’almana iəyoded vəderec rəshayim iəyavvet	9 Yahweh, sheltering the guest. Orphan and widow he relieves, and the way of the wicked he subverts.

The character of God is fully revealed in the Psalms. God cares for the poor. As Holland notes, this is contrary to the law of the survival of the fittest. It gives rise to the declaration of human rights. Curious, eh? The whole character of God is to subvert the way of the wicked. See also this post on war.

Athens 429 BC: The Hellespont

 Tom Holland's first chapter is on Athens. Like Diarmaid MacCulloch, Holland begins with preparation of the back ground to many Christian assumptions. The chapter outlines the tension between governance by early democracy and the whims of the gods. Violence is a theme throughout the book. A page on Sophocles outlines how "many were brought to question the glaring contradictions that lay at the heart of how they conceived the gods" (p. 36).

It took me a little while to get into this book. I confess I was less than interested in Athens except to the extent that it reminded me of what I had been taught about the Greeks in high school. Holland would have been a good source for exam questions.

So he reviews the birth of philosophy, the lies of poets, and the emerging idea that the stars follow geometric laws, the rational - and hence divine - workings of the cosmos. So there was a god imagined as the unmoved mover. It seems that Aristotle was anticipating Newton. In this way Holland begins a thought that continues through the book and allows us to recapitulate several processes over the millennia. As is typical, Holland creates a quip that encapsulates the mood: 

The sublunar world, lacking as it did the inerrant order of the stars, and far distant from them, could hardly be expected to concern the unmoving mover (p. 39).

This chapter continues from Aristotle to Alexander, and the founding of the great library at Alexandria to the Roman dominance. He touches on Posidonius, Cicero, Zeno and the Stoics, and Fortune. Here he introduces almost as asides Greek words like parousia, the physical presence of a deity, syneidesis, conscience. Greece seems a mashup of ideas about god and gods, many of which provide a backdrop to the their usage in Christian theology.

Hollands first books are on this period of history, so in spite of my limited appreciation for the period, I was taken in to his summary preparation for the rest of the book. I think if I were to trace in more detail his thoughts I would find them framed by the Iliad. Always fight bravely, and be superior to others.

Dominion by Tom Holland

No less than any other aspect of culture and society, beliefs are presumed to be of mortal origin and shaped by the passage of time.

This month I hope to begin a review of the chapters of Dominion by Tom Holland. He shows how even the secular west is saturated with the assumptions of Christianity regardless of religious framework. His book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in the west that is often doubtful of religions claims, so many of its instincts remain - for good and ill- thoroughly Christian.

There are 21 chapters and I feel I must reread them. They provide a survey of western thought that certainly touched many of my thoughts about what is important. In my own study, I have concentrated on what I discovered about the character of the God who is, who was, and who is to come, called by the letters, i-h-v-h. See for instance the essay here including my emphasis on Psalms 146.

Holland in his preface traces the origin of crucifixion and its use by Rome till the third century CE.

Sparta and Rome, retain their glamour as Apex predators. ... And yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. ...

To paraphrase quickly: Sparta practiced eugenics and Rome killed millions. We don’t consider today that either of these examples is a good example of civilization. We have a sense that the poor and the weak have significant intrinsic value. Where did this come from? (And the apex predators were destroyed - though some remain as birds for cleaning up our garbage.)

Holland concludes his comment on this assumption with this: It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.

We may not take for granted that there is a God - but we have been changed to care for the poor and the marginalized. Will we continue in this tradition?

Carnival for June

 John MacDonald (no relation) has posted the June BS carnival. It is substantial.