Wednesday, May 18, 2016

All Nurturing (Mid-week Message)



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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