From the Narrow Desert

My June 14 post "Stink Gorilla More" explored the idea that apes represent ourselves, human beings, as seen by beings more heavenly. In a comment there, William Wright referred to human beings at worship as "Gorilla-men (Beings clothed in coats of Gorilla-skins) asking to be heard and enter into God's presence."

Did you know that there's an Art Garfunkel album called Angel Clare? Neither did I. It was released in 1973, on September 11 -- a date which we now associate with the idea of Two Towers -- and one of the tracks is in French (or Creole anyway) and emphasizes one particular French word I had been obsessing over just yesterday.

Willie works as the garden man;

He plants trees, he burns leaves,

He makes money for himself.

Often I stop with his words on my mind.

Do spacemen pass dead souls on their way to the moon?

Observing as the leaves would turn

From green to gold, and some would burn

With orange or with scarlet hue,

And Humpty Dumpty saw that, too.

Update (10:00 p.m.): Immediately (less than 10 minutes) after posting this, I taught a small group of adult students. One was wearing a T-shirt that said "C'est la vie," with a wreath of leaves and flowers around the words. The title of this post includes la vie and the French word for "leaves." Even the word c'est has been something of a Claire calling card.

"Save my life" -- which I linked specifically to Rimbaud's wanting to preserve his childhood -- is also a link to Bookends ("Crescent waxing"), which opens, after a brief intro, with the track "Save the Life of My Child." This track also includes in the bridge two lines from "The Sound of Silence" -- the same two I quoted recently in "More on Joan and Claire."

The original, as published in Histoire d'une âme:

Aux premiers feux du matin,
Formant son riche butin,
On voit la petite abeille
Voltiger de fleur en fleur,
Visitant avec bonheur
Les corolles qu'elle éveille.

Ainsi, butinez l'amour:
Et revenez chaque jour,
Près de la crèche sacrée,
Offrir au divin Sauveur
Le miel de votre ferveur,
Petite abeille dorée!

My English version:

See the little insect which is
Gathering its daily riches
In the morning hour.
Joyful, it the petals waketh,
Enters and the honey taketh,
Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,
Taking love in place of nectar,
All that thou canst hold.
Gather thou of all that pleases,
Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,
Little bee of gold!

It's just one sync flashback after another these days. Remember this?

Latin is not among the 115 languages into which the Book of Mormon has been translated, so I had to do this myself. The original prayer of Alma the Elder at the Waters of Mormon, just prior to baptizing Helam, is:

O Lord, pour out thy Spirit upon thy servant, that he may do this work with holiness of heart (Mosiah 18:12).

Here is my Latin rendition:

Effunde Spiritum tuum, Domine, super servum tuum, ut opus hoc faciat in sanctitate cordis. Amen.

I spent quite a lot of time fiddling with different word orders, and I'm fairly confident that this one flows the best. My only real liberty with the text was to translate with holiness of heart as in sanctitate cordis (rather than cum sanctitate cordis). I have no real explanation for this, other than that my "ear for Latin" (such as it is, trained only on the Rosary and the Vulgate Psalms) demands it. A Google search shows that cum sanctitate cordis is an attested Latin expression but that in sanctitate cordis is about 100 times more common, so I suppose I'll take that as confirmation of my hunch.

As always, I welcome feedback from (and this is a very low bar!) more competent Latinists than myself. Me, I'm just some guy with a Bible and a dictionary.

The King James Version will always be the Bible I know and love best, but reading a different translation from time to time can be helpful, too, as it makes the familiar unfamiliar and helps one to see it in a new way. Such has been my recent experience reading the Penitential Psalms in the Vulgate translation of St. Jerome. My attention was particularly arrested by the 10th verse of Psalm 32 (called Psalm 31 in the Greek numbering used by Jerome). This is the King James Version I have always known:

Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.

And here is the Vulgate, followed by the Douay-Rheims, which is an English translation of the Vulgate rather than of the original Hebrew.

Multa flagella peccatoris, sperantem autem in Domino misericordia circumdabit.

Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord.

Insofar as I can judge, the sorrows, wicked, and trusteth of the King James are more faithful to original Hebrew than the Vulgate's flagella, peccatoris, and sperantem. However, Jerome sticks closer to the Hebrew when he translates the first clause without a verb, literally "many scourges to the sinner." This is not really grammatical in English, though, so the King James inserts shall be, italicized to indicate that those words are not present in the Hebrew, while the Douay-Rheims instead uses are. I think both are justifiable from the Hebrew, which has no verb at all.

I've always read the KJV Ps. 32:10 as one of those contrasts between the righteous and the wicked that one associates more with the Proverbs than with the Psalms: one type of person will suffer, while a contrasting type will be encompassed with mercy.

The Vulgate suggests a different reading: not a contrast between two types of people, but between the present state of sinners and (what may be) their future state. All sinners suffer, but those (sinners) who trust in the Lord will be encompassed about by his mercy (chesed, "lovingkindness"). I think this is a much better fit for the overall tenor of the psalm, which is not about how much better it is to be righteous than wicked, but about a sinner who suffered, acknowledged his sin to the Lord, and found forgiveness.

I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah (v. 5).

The idea of confessing to the Lord sheds important light on what it really means to confess one's sins. It cannot primarily mean admitting that one has in fact performed this or that action. God obviously already knows what you have done! Acknowledging or hiding one's sin cannot be a question of letting God know or trying to prevent him from knowing. I think confessing to God does not mean telling him what you have done but rather recognizing that what you have done was sinful -- rather than making excuses or trying to justify or rationalize it.

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Minor synchronicity:

When I said that obviously no one would literally try to prevent God from knowing what they had done, Cain came to mind as a possible exception. When God asks him where his murdered brother Abel is, doesn't he lie and say, "I know not"? Then I realized that, while this was clearly an evasion, it was probably not actually a lie. Cain really didn't know where Abel had gone, only that he was no longer in his body.

Just after thinking that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read this in his latest post: "Men die and their spirits leave the world, and go... nobody knows where."

As a further synchronicity, the title of the post is "Tolkien's Elves and Men both need to trust in God." The pre-Christian David's trust in God is similar in nature to the kind of trust Tolkien's Men, similarly ignorant of Christ, would have needed.

I have expanded and revamped by 2010 analysis of English translations of Dante and published it as a page so that I can update it by adding more translations in the future.

Here is a passage in the King James Version of 2 Samuel that rather arrests one's attention.

And David gathered all the people together, and went to Rabbah, and fought against it, and took it. . . . And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance. And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem (2 Sam. 12:29-31, KJV).

This certainly makes it sound as if King David practiced the most barbaric tortures on the civilians of an already-conquered city -- one thinks of Genghis Khan executing prisoners by pouring molten silver into their ears, or King Manasseh having Isaiah stuffed into a hollow tree and cut to pieces with a saw -- and there is not the slightest indication in the text that this was sinful or that the Lord disapproved.

Here's the Douay-Rheims version of the pertinent part of v. 31.

And bringing forth the people thereof he sawed them, and drove over them chariots armed with iron: and divided them with knives, and made them pass through brickkilns.

And here's the Wycliffe version.

And he led forth the people thereof, and sawed them, and did about them iron instruments of torment, and parted them with knives, and led them over by the likeness of tilestones.

However, most modern translations render the passage very differently. Here's the now-ubiquitous New International Version. (A footnote warns, "The meaning of the Hebrew for this clause is uncertain.")

and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes, and he made them work at brickmaking.

Recent translations almost universally follow this interpretation -- that the people were enslaved rather than tortured and killed. The New American Standard Bible followed the KJV as recently as its 1995 revision, but the 2020 revision follows the NIV.

Does this change represent some advance in the understanding of the Hebrew text, or simply a desire to put a more palatable interpretation on a shocking passage? My default assumption would be the latter, since recent decades have been rather more notable for their sensitivity and willingness to bowdlerize than for their sound linguistic scholarship.

I know basically no Hebrew, but based on an interlinear translation with grammatical notes, I think a literal reading is "and put them in a saw and in iron 'cuts' [also 'things cut' or 'cutting instruments'] and in iron axes and made them pass through in a brick-mold."

In defense of the enslavement reading, I note that Exodus 1:14 uses the same preposition-prefix ("in") to describe the kind of work the Hebrew slaves did in Egypt: "they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field."

In defense of the torture/murder reading, the various Old Testament references to idolators making their children "pass through the fire" to Molech -- pretty clearly a reference to human sacrifice or a ritual simulation thereof, not child labor -- use the same Hebrew verb for "pass through" as 2 Sam. 12:31. It's difficult to think what this verb could mean in the enslavement reading, even considering that it can also mean "pass over" -- maybe passing over the Jordan from Ammon to Jerusalem? Did David set some of the captives to labor with saws and axes in Ammon or elsewhere in Transjordan (perhaps because there was timber there?) and bring others back to Jerusalem to make bricks?

There's also the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 20:3 to consider, but it is less helpful than it might be in resolving the question. The KJV reads, "And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes." (There are no brick-kilns in this version.) The verb cut seems to clear things up, but in fact it is a hapax legomenon, occurring nowhere else in the Bible, and the translation "cut" is just a guess. Strong's says it means "saw, cut," but also says it is identical to the word for "have power, reign"  -- saying that the original sense of the latter was "vanquish," which is connected to sawing "through the idea of reducing to pieces." To me, though, the connection between reigning and forcing people to work is even clearer, so the ambiguity remains. English Bibles always translate it in keeping with their translation of 2 Sam. 12:31.

So, no final answer. I lean toward the KJV interpretation but have little confidence in that judgment.

What brought this passage to mind was 1 Kings 11:33.

Because that they [Solomon and his people] have forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon, and have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in mine eyes, and to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David his father.

And I thought, Is this saying that worshiping pagan gods is worse than torturing people with saws and axes and burning them in a brik-kiln? Or just worse than enslaving them?

The Tetragrammaton ("four-letter word") is the proper name of the God of the Hebrews, spelt yod-he-waw-he, and supposed never to be pronounced. Observant Jews, when reading aloud from the Bible, replace the Tetragrammaton with "my Lord," "the Name," or some similar expression. In keeping with this custom, English Bibles generally replace it with "the Lord."

How might the Tetragrammaton be transliterated in the modern Roman alphabet? "YHWH," reflecting the hypothesized ancient Hebrew pronunciation of those letters, has become conventional, but here's another approach.

Yod, the first letter of the name, is genetically related to I and J. Because yod is the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, we prefer J, the 10th letter of the Roman alphabet, as the closest equivalent. He is genetically related to E, and each is the 5th letter of its respective alphabet. Waw is genetically related to five different Roman letters: F, U, V, W, and Y. But because waw is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, our preferred equivalent is F, the 6th letter of the Roman alphabet. Thus the Tetragrammaton is rendered JEFE.

Jefe, as it happens, is a word in Spanish, meaning "chief, head, leader, boss" -- astonishingly close in meaning to the conventional substitute "Lord." But, as in English, grammar demands the use of the definite article -- el Jefe, "the Chief" -- and El happens to be another of the Hebrew names for God!

In fact, Spanish Bibles generally use el Señor for the Tetragrammaton. It's a pity that such a perfect equivalent was passed up.