Margarita Sikorskaia, Image of a Mother
All Nurturing
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
May 18, 2016
One of the problems people of our day and age have in
reading the Bible is that they find the translations reinforce ideas and ways
of feeling that they have found problematic and thus rejected: whether patriarchal and androcentric misogyny,
violent and bloodthirsty images of God, hierarchical and authoritarian depictions
of church life, general exclusivity and concern for purity, or a morbid concern
with human sexuality or ill behavior. Many of the standard ways of translating
Hebrew and Greek words in the Bible into English, I find, obscure rather than clarify the message of
Scripture simply because the traditional translations have become so encrusted
with centuries of theological and emotional baggage that the original texts do
not have.
One example is the English word sin. This word carries for
most of us overtones of impurity, immorality, and rebellion. But the Hebrew words it usually translates, hattah or hattat, generally mean simply offense
or offend, and the Greek word, hamartia, simply a missing of the mark or falling
short. Another is the word believe. Again, the Hebrew
and Greek words behind it are not limited to subscribing to a proposition or
signing onto a position. Rather, both
entail the idea of giving one’s heart,
or trusting. In the Hebrew Scriptures the repeated use
of the word Lord to speak of God
lends an overemphasis on the maleness of the Deity so named, where the Hebrew
divine personal name YHWH (Yahweh) does not have such an effect. If in reading
the Bible you find yourself stumbling over a passage that uses any of these
words, you might find it useful to substitute the less freighted alternative
renderings I give here.
An important example is a somewhat obscure and mysterious term
used to describe God in a few Hebrew Scripture texts: El
Shaddai. Translated into Greek, it
is rendered theos pantokrator, or God, the One who Holds All Things.
This in turn was translated into Latin as Deus Omnipotens, or God the
Ominpotent One. This lies behind
most English Bibles’ translation God
Almighty, a phrase that shows up regularly in our Prayer Book. The translation stresses the power and might of a Deity conceived in military and imperial
terms.
The problem is that the ancient mysterious Hebrew word
contains none of these masculine warrior-like senses. El means God.
Shaddai comes from the root shadd, which means mound. Some translations have thus made it to mean
“God of the Mountains.” But Hebrew, in addition to having a singular
(for one) and plural (for many) form of
a noun, also has a dual form for two. Shaddai is a dual form and thus means “two
mounds.” Most scholars now agree that this very ancient expression probably
goes back as far as the late stone age, when most of Europe and the Middle East
shared a matriarchal cult of the Mother Goddess, known to us most graphically
in the Venus of Willendorf. In its
earliest form, the expression means, the god
of the two breasts, or the god who
suckles, the nurturer. Later male sky
gods from middle of the Eurasian continent took over later religion in the
area, including the Hebrew worship of Yahweh.
But the preservation of the ancient El
Shaddai as a way of talking about God is probably best understood as “God the All Nurturing One.” The idea is not that God has the power to
do anything, but rather that there is no situation, no matter how bad, where
God cannot help and sustain us. So next time you run into the phrase “Almighty
God” in the Prayer Book, you might mentally substitute “All Nurturing God.” It might feel a bit better for many of
us.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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