Old Testament Source Criticism

I spend quite a bit of my life digging into details of the text of the Bible. I love doing it, but I didn't love studying large parts of the OT at university, and I don't like the way it's often taught today. The main reason comes down to two words: source criticism.

Source criticism is about trying to understand the history of a text. A source critic might read Lord of the Rings, for example, and try to work out how the text came to take the form it did. It's much easier if you've got copies of earlier versions, or of the author's working. We don't have those in the case of the Bible, though.

Source criticism can be a useful tool to have when studying the Old Testament. There are a few places where it produces helpful insights. For example, Psalm 89 seems to have been a Psalm about God's goodness in creation, to which someone has added a bit in a different style about God's goodness in making promises to David, to which someone else has added in another style a complaint that God isn't keeping those promises and prayer that he would. Or Amos 4 & 5 seem to be a speech Amos gives in the (Northern) temple, interspersed with some verses of a hymn that's being sung, creating an effect a bit like Simon & Garfunkel singing Silent Night over the evening news. Seeing those aspects of a passage actually help us to understand the meaning of the passage better.

Where Source Criticism gets annoying is when scholars treat it like the main tool they should be using to understand a passage. This is especially true in the Pentateuch, and especially with a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP). In that theory, Genesis - Deuteronomy somehow contain the full text of four older documents, called J, E, D and P, and probably the majority of non-evangelical Pentateuch scholars seem to spend most of their time (and most of the space in commentaries) arguing about precisely which bit comes from which source. The result is rather as you'd expect if you read a novel with your main concern being trying to work out how the author had drafted it - you completely miss the point.

C.S. Lewis, who was both an author and an expert on old texts, writes this on Biblical source criticism:

This then is my first bleat. These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.

...

My impression is that in the whole of my experience, not one of these guesses [of reviews where others try to reconstruct how he wrote things] has on any point been right; that the method shows a record of one hundred per cent failure. You would expect by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit.

...

They assume that you wrote a story as they would try to write a story; the fact that they would so try explains why they have not produced any stories.

(from Fern Seed and Elephants)

Let's backtrack for a moment. The main reason that the JEDP hypothesis came about in the first place was because the Pentateuch really doesn't read like history as written by a modern westerner. Here's an example:

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’

6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?’ 8 Moses also said, ‘You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, “Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.”’

10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked towards the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, “At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”’

Exodus 16:4-12, NIV

The passage clearly says things more than once. It reads like there are two accounts of the same event with slight variations in the same passage. It does not read like it was written by a modern western historian. But there's a simple reason for that - it wasn't written by a modern western historian - it was written by an ancient Israelite, and they wrote rather differently from us.

Take the Psalms, for example. The basic literary technique in Psalms is that you say something, then you say it again using slightly different words - sometimes giving a little more information, sometimes not.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

3 For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

Psalm 95:1-5, NIV

No-one in their right mind would suggest that "the Lord is the great God" must have been written by a different person from "the great King above all gods". That's how Hebrew poetry works. So we shouldn't be surprised if Hebrew prose shows some of the same structures. There's often repetition; there's often clarification. It may well be linked to the fact it was originally written in a non-literate culture, so was written to be remembered easily.

But they don't just repeat randomly; there are all kinds of interesting structures in Hebrew prose. One of the most common is the chiasm, where the passage repeats itself in a mirror image around a central verse. Exodus 16 is one of those:

The whole section is exposing the fact that the Israelites are doubting that God is with them. The passage points to the fact that God will show his presence among them by providing them food. It's a carefully constructed work of literary art rather than a badly meshed together group of extracts from sources.

Now a decent commentary will spend more time on the important aspects of the structure rather than JEDP, but most won't. Decent teaching material on the Pentateuch will spend more time discussing structures like that than JEDP, but most doesn't. And that makes me sad.

Pet Peeves - Misusing "Quantum"

One thing which annoys me is when people who don't know what they're talking about abuse scientific language. One of the most egregious examples of this is the word "Quantum". It sounds cool, I know, but it really doesn't mean what most people seem to think it means.

This is what "Quantum" means:

Quantum: the smallest possible non-zero amount of something

It was actually quite a revolutionary idea to start with. There is a smallest possible amount of water - you can't take a jug of water and keep pouring half of it away - eventually you will end up with the smallest possible amount of water, and you either pour it all away or keep it all. Or I guess you could try splitting it and if you did it really cleverly you might end up with two beryllium hydride radicals which aren't water at all. Quantum is weird because we're used to the real world, where there are normally so many lumps of stuff that it looks smooth to us.

The same is true of pretty much anything - there's a smallest possible amount of light (one photon), of electric charge, of electricity, whatever. Maybe even of space, which I find quite weird as an idea. This leads to a couple of other common phrases:

Quantum Mechanics: the study of how quantum stuff behaves.

Quantum Leap: a jump between two states with no intermediate stages - i.e. the smallest possible change in something.

Quantum leaps can be big (I guess), just usually they're really small. A legitimate example would be to say that moving from DVD to Blu-Ray is a quantum leap, because there are no intermediate stages. But the fact it's a quantum leap doesn't imply anything about the size or the significance, just that there's no intermediate step. "On the 100-question multiple choice physics exam, Tony went from 35% to 36%. That's a quantum leap.

Misusing the word "quantum" is like claiming that Shakespeare was a great novelist. It's a basic error which just makes people look stupid.

Examples

Quantum of the Seas is a boat. Its name means "smallest possible amount of the seas", and it claims to be the smallest possible step forwards from its predecessors. On that basis, I wouldn't bother.

Almost every single use of the word "quantum" in relation to the social sciences or arts subjects I've read has demonstrated major misunderstandings - even C.S. Lewis in Miracles. The big exceptions are when the author themselves has a masters or better in physics - e.g. John Polkinghorne.

Quantum of Solace is a film. I think they actually got the title about right - it's like a crumb of solace only much much smaller as Bond continues the transformation from hard man to killer to utterly ruthless and remorseless suave super-agent.

Quantum Leap can be forgiven just about anything.

The De-Churched and God's Judgement

Here's a graph I find absolutely terrifying. It shows church attendance stats for the UK (I think it's for 2005).

On the horizontal axis is a breakdown on the population by age. And on the vertical axis is the proportion of the population as a whole. The three colours on the chat represent those who are currently regular attenders at church (at least once a month), those who used to attend church but no longer do so and those who never attended church.

Roughly 60% of the population have never attended church. Roughly 30% of the population used to attend church but now no longer do so.

What terrifies me is what this means for those who have been leading the church over the past few generations. God entrusted the care of his people to them, and they presided over the decline of the church so severely that nearly 75% of those who are now 85-year-olds were once part of a church, but only 15% or so of children currently are. Roughly 80% of living Brits who have been part of a church are no longer part of the church.

42The Lord answered, "Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? 43It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. 44I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. 45But suppose the servant says to himself, 'My master is taking a long time in coming,' and he then begins to beat the menservants and maidservants and to eat and drink and get drunk. 46The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. 47"That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

Luke 12:42-48, NIV

I can hear in my head the sort of conversation God will have with people who were ministers during that time. When God tells them of the privilege it was to be made a steward over his household and family, and asks them what they did with it. When they try to make their pathetic excuses for how they did their job so poorly that 5 out of every 6 people in their churches left and the church went from being seen as the foundation of society to being a boring irrelevance in just two generations.

And the church leaders today who carry on the trend - who don't see that their job is about bringing people to know Jesus - it is about saving lives rather than making sure the few already in the lifeboat have more comfortable cushions as they watch the rest of the world drown. Is their lot going to be any better?

God's judgement and wrath against the vast majority of British church leaders over the last few generations is going to be terrible. And that scares me, because God has called me to follow after them, and I am beginning to see something of what an awesome responsibility it is...

"Man flu" and sexism

I'm genuinely happy that TV ads which are sexist against women aren't allowed any more. But it still seems ok to do ads which are sexist against men. Take for example a recent Boots ad, which presents a man as malingering in bed with a cold, and his wife with the same cold carrying on doing shopping and looking after children. This seems to be presented as a typical situation.

I am aware of the myth of "man flu", but I have never come across a single case. When I worked as a teacher, women were (it seemed to me) slightly more likely to be absent with illness than men. However, I suspect that was because the few departments where people shouldn't carry on working if they had a slight cold (e.g. food technology) were mostly staffed by women, and the departments where there were more men (e.g. chemistry) were departments where teachers could carry on working with a cold.

I find it odd that adverts which are sexist and demeaning to women are (rightly) banned, but adverts which seem sexist and demeaning to men, and particularly to the role of father, are allowed...

A Scandal in Spiritual Illiteracy

The other day, I was at a gathering of curates. (What's the collective noun for curates?) We were discussing a book which was partly about the Charismatic movement. And it came out in conversation that half of the people in the room had no experience of charismaticism at all. I think that's a scandal.

Consider this - roughly 1/3 of the world's Christians are charismatic or Pentecostal. Among regular church-attenders in this country, the proportion of charismatics and Pentecostals is probably about 20% and growing fast. And half the people in the room had no experience of them at all, and we were all ordained ministers in the Church of England.

When I was considering training for ordination in the Church of England, we discussed my experience of the breadth of the Church, and I was told to spend 3 months worshipping at a high Anglo-Catholic church. I did, and I found it helpful. When I was at college, I made an effort to broaden my experience as much as possible. I spent time at churches in difficult UPAs and in the countryside because I was more used to the suburbs. I spent time at an Anglican church in the developing world because I've lived in the UK all my life. I got to the point where I've got a decent level of exposure to pretty much everything that happens in the C of E. Some of it I disagree with; some of it I think is wrong or mad, but at least I'm aware of it and have spoken to people who do it and got to know a bit about where they are coming from. Much of that was expected of me as part of my training; some of it was me wanting to understand where different people were coming from.

So how on earth have people got through selection and ordination training and even got ordained and through a decent chunk of their curacies without any experience or understanding of the charismatic movement? I'm not blaming them at all - it's the job of those providing and overseeing their training to make sure that that happens, and I think it's a scandal that they have been allowed to do so.

(As it happens, I think the charismatic movement tends to get some things wrong and a lot of things right - not least the expectation of personal experience of God's action. But that's largely irrelevant to this rant...)

A Socially Responsible Government

It's great knowing that the government is really responsible, uses taxpayers' money well and always thinks through the consequences of its actions.

For example, they've released a new game, which encourages road safety.

"Teach 'em a lesson - hit the kids who aren't wearing helmets!" - that's exactly the right message to send to people, isn't it? I wonder how many focus groups it took to come up with that one?

Notice anything wrong? Anything that might possibly be contrary to government policy or anything like that? If not, have you ever considered a career as a politician?

The one encouraging thing about this is that it helps me realise that the government aren't really nasty and malicious, just really really incompetent...

Hat tip to Greg.

Beds

Beds puzzle me. There are loads of different widths of bed available, but they are all the same length. I was even in a hotel recently where they gave me a triple bed (I don't know what they were expecting me to do there...) But actually, I don't mind how wide the bed is - I just want to be able to stretch out without my feet going off the end of the bed.

So why don't beds come long enough so that a reasonably tall person (and I'm only 6ft!) can stretch out? Or if they do exist, why aren't they much more common?

As far as I can tell, either there isn't the demand for longer beds, or it's a conspiracy by evil dwarves. Personally, I think the latter seems more probable.

Bizarre Retail Practices

I was looking for Christmas cards for family in a well-known high street shop the other day. They had some really beautiful cards. But all the best cards were in boxes of 10 identical cards for £4.99 or £6.99, which just seems totally bizarre to me.

People buy the nicest Christmas cards for the people they are closest to. And the people they are closest to often know the other people they are closest to and spend time in their houses. So I don't want the same design of Christmas card for my parents (for example) as for my sisters. I want to show that individual thought has gone into it.

Had these cards been selling at £1.50 each, I'd probably have bought quite a few. If they'd been in boxes of 10 mixed cards, I'd have been delighted. But when the smallest quantity buyable was a box of 10, and they were all identical, I'm not going to do it, and it wasn't surprising that there were so many of these boxes of nice Christmas cards still on the shelves a few days before Christmas.

Immigration Law

I should confess a slight personal interest in this rant - my sister and aunt both married Americans. At college, two students have already been forced to leave the country (one of them came back), another one got refused entry, one staff member nearly got refused entry and another student currently has 7 days left to appeal or leave.

British immigration law is stupid.

The Biblical perspective on it is that Jesus was a refugee in Egypt for a bit, thereby massively dignifying the status of refugees, and meaning we should treat them well. In addition, in the Old Testament, Israel's law stresses the importance of treating foreigners who come to live in the land well, as long as they don't do stuff like inciting people to worship false gods or anything.

In fact, that seems like a good model. What's happened in Britain of course is that we've got scared of immigrants as a result of international terrorism and so on, and so have massively tightened up the law, without massively tightening up on enforcement. So now any terrorists wanting to come and live in the UK have to do it illegally rather than legally, which I'm sure will put most of them off because terrorists are good, law-abiding folk.

Although I've heard people annoyed or scared about immigrants from countries such as Pakistan (some of which is fear of terrorism, some of which is racism) and Poland (but they're citizens of an EU country, we can't really keep them out), I haven't heard anyone annoyed or scared about immigrants from countries where the culture and population are essentially descended from Brits.

You don't see scare stories on the news about Australian or American immigrants, whatever their ethnic background. You don't find people being all worried about the Canadians or New Zealanders who just moved in next door.

But the British government, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have managed to make life difficult for the very large number of immigrants from former colonies, who no-one is worried about. And that is the main substance of this rant, because it looks like incompetence rather than partially justified fear.

I don't know exactly what the forms ask or how the system works, but it seems to me sensible on a purely human level, without even bothering to do theological reflection on it, to partially filter applicants according to the country they are from. Do nationals from their country have any history of causing social problems in the UK or similar countries? If no, I don't see the problem with granting them indefinite leave to remain. Under the current system, Barack Obama might find difficulty in getting permission to work in the UK long term. I don't see any reason whatsoever why that should be the case.

And nor am I saying that people with Pakistani nationality, for example, should all be kept out, just that if we're worried about terrorism, maybe we should stop putting so much effort keeping out people who aren't going to be a problem, start genuinely welcoming immigrants who need out help and spending all the extra time concentrating on discerning which of the people from potentially problematic countries will cause trouble, and keeping them out.

Proposal: give automatic leave to remain indefinitely to all citizens of stable friendly countries with sufficiently similar cultures, and welcome genuine refugees.

Swimming

Ah, the Olympics. Which raises my question about swimming...

I can understand why swimming is an Olympic sport. But a simple analogy with running demonstrates the injustice. If swimming in different styles is considered a separate discipline, why not running in different styles? If someone can get medals at swimming in backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle, etc, why isn't there a medal for 100m running backwards or 100m running with hands in pockets? Given that, it's hardly surprising that there's always some swimming bloke up for winning a ridiculous number of medals.

And, for that matter, if there are different weight classes in weighlifting, so you can have a medal for the weedy guy who can lift the most, why aren't there weight classes in the shot-put or height classes in the long-jump?

It just seems unfair. It looks as if the athletics, which after all is the really headline-grabbing Olympic stuff, is being deliberately discriminated against when it comes to awarding medals.

My preference? Scrap weight classes and swimming styles and everything. Have medals for mens and womens swimming, at 100m, 200m, etc. And they can swim however they want to, same as with the running. Or with the weightlifting or fighting or whatever, they can be whatever weight they want.

Things that Seem Obvious - Biofuels

Back to more stuff that seems obvious...

Biofuels are a good idea, primarily for two reasons. 1) We can grow more of them a heck of a lot quicker than we can grow more oil, which also then gives us better control of prices. 2) The CO2 they release into the atmosphere is CO2 they took out of the atmosphere only a short while before.

However, growing biofuels on land previously used for agriculture is a less good idea because 3) the conventional ways of making biofuels (grow complex plant, harvest it, crush bits of it, maybe ferment them for a while and purify) is pretty inefficient, it would force the price of food up and it would take an awful lot of land to grow enough fuel to make a significant difference. So I'm not sure why sugar-based biofuels, for example, are being touted at all.

What seems much more sensible is something along the lines of GM algae (small organisms, photosynthetic), which either produce the fuel directly, or which do the first stage of an integrated, single-site process. Algae make sugar, yeast change sugar into alcohol, distillation of the alcohol by energy produced on-site.

And the obvious places for this are on land we are not currently using - i.e. deserts or ocean.

Hydrogen fuel cells are nifty, but they just store energy, so shift the producing problem elsewhere.

Marginalisation of the Elderly

This video just seems typical of the way society treats the elderly. It's meant to be funny because it is so close to the truth. When the government gave free TV licenses to all the over-65s, I think that said a lot. They want old people to die slowly in front of the brain-draining machine, without troubling anyone, interacting with other people, etc.

Contrast that with the Biblical view where the elderly are valued for their wisdom and experience, and where grey hairs (I've got a few) are valued for that rather than covered up by dying it and where people who don't look after their elderly relatives "have denied the faith and are worse than unbelievers".

Mind you, society is increasingly treating the young appallingly as well - stopping them from all the normal things they could be doing and then blaming them for entertaining themselves in the only way that society seems to present as a viable option (lots of alcohol).

The Scandal of Loneliness

I had an eye-opening conversation recently, with a fellow Christian from a different social background. He spoke of his extreme loneliness living on his own in a council flat. I can identify with that - when I lived on my own, I'd have gone mad without an intensely social job, a church with a strong social life and friends I could chat to online. And of those three, only one was open to this man.

He spoke of his time trying to persuade people to let him stay in sheltered housing for the mentally disabled, because he wanted the company. But they wouldn't let him, because he was too clever. The government's assumption is that people are best off living on their own if they can, because that's society's assumption. But it's wrong.

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
Genesis 2:18, NIV

We have such a fractured individualised society. And yet so many people, on leaving university, find that the best way to live is with housemates, in order to stay sane as well as in order to be able to afford to live.

We are not meant to be alone. Why is it that in contemporary TV, there are so few stable characters who live on their own? And yet why is it that in reality, so many people do? Why is it that the biggest internet industries - pornography and gambling - are essentially solitary pursuits? When are alcoholics most likely to relapse? When are people most likely to get depressed?

We are in a society which is gradually ripping itself apart, and one of the key factors in its self-destruction is loneliness.

Helicopters

Suggestion:

With the exception of emergency services, helicopters should not be allowed to fly over built-up areas, especially at night.

And this post might in some way be linked to the difficulty I had in getting to sleep last night...

Ryle - liberalism

I feel it a duty to bear my solemn testimony against the spirit of the day we live in... It is the system which is so liberal, that it dares not say anything is false. It is the system which is so charitable, that it will allow everything to be true. It is the system, which seems ready to honour others as well as our Lord Jesus Christ, to class them all together, and to think well of all... It is the system which is so scrupulous about the feelings of others, that we are never to say they are wrong. It is the system which is so liberal that it calls a man a bigot if he dares to say "I know my views are right."...

What is it all but a bowing down before a great idol, speciously called liberality? What is it all but a sacrificing of truth upon the altar of a caricature of charity? What is it all but the worship of a shadow, a phantom and an unreality? What can be more absurd than to profess ourselves content with "earnestness", when we do not know what we are earnest about? Has the Lord God spoken to us in the Bible, or has he not?... From the liberality which says everyone is right, from the charity which forbids us to say anybody is wrong, from the peace which is bought at the expense of truth - may the good Lord deliver us!

J.C. Ryle, Knots Untied

Church Seasons

One of the things I've liked about Christmas this year is the fact it's over.

I don't mean that I didn't enjoy it; I did. But for too many years of my life, we've been following the Church Year which carries on calling it "Christmas" into January, and only starts Christmas at Christmas Day.

To my mind, this is one case where the world quite clearly has it more right than the Church. Jewish festivals are often week-long things, but there's always a big thing on the final day - there's still some dramatic tension to build up to and some energy to keep it going. Periods of celebration should end with a big do. But Christmas in the Church year doesn't work like that, unless you make Epiphany much bigger than I've ever seen it done in the West. (I think that's what the Orthodox do, but the Western way makes more sense of the significance of the festivals). It just seemed to peter out and singing carols into January just seemed wrong. Spreading forwards is natural because of anticipation and stuff (though I tend to limit it by not thinking about Christmas stuff until after my birthday at the start of December).

And yes, in the Church calendar, it's Advent right up until Christmas, which is about thinking about Jesus' coming as judge. And it's a real shame that the Church year is so messed up that Advent naturally gets eaten by anticipation for Christmas. But it's the fault of the church calendar.

The season of Christmas should end at Christmas, or at New Year at the latest (but then only if you make a big thing of New Year).

"Emergency Contraception"

I was chatting to an A&E doctor recently, who used the phrase "emergency contraception", and it struck me just how bad a phrase it is. Here are some basic dictionary definitions (from wiktionary):

contraception - the use of a device or procedure to prevent conception as a result of sexual activity

conception - 3. The initiation of an embryonic animal life; the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm to form a zygote

So contraception is acting to stop the sperm fertilizing the egg as a result of sex.

"Emergency contraception", however, is a hormone pill given to women after sexual activity, commonly called the "morning after pill". As far as I recall, the hormones don't actually do much to the egg or sperm cells; it's much more likely that they act by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg cell. And that isn't contraception.

"Emergency contraception" is what those machines on the walls in pub toilets are for (as far as I can tell). If a doctor was to provide emergency contraception, it would be as a result of someone running in saying "Quick, give me something. I think I've pulled"...

So why use a misleading term? Simple - "contraception" sounds a heck of a lot better than "abortion" or "termination", which themselves are nicer names for embryocide, just the same as "family planning" sounds like something sensible rather than being largely about planning families by killing unwanted members, which is what it often ends up as.

People would doubtless argue that using language like "emergency contraception" means that the choice becomes less emotionally charged, which is true. But is being emotionally uncharged a good thing? Surely if calling a spade a spade leads to decisions being emotionally charged, then it's right that they should be.

An extreme example. Someone who shoots innocent people without experiencing some degree of emotional charge is a psychopath. That is a bad thing. Some decisions, especially decisions involving ending life, should be emotionally charged. So call a spade a spade.

Why So Little Prayer?

As I have been thinking over the last few days, it seems to me that we are currently raising up a generation of spiritual pygmies - a generation who think that ten minutes in silence on their knees in prayer is a long time. Where are the prayer warriors of the future? Why is it that so many of the books on preaching speak so little about the critical importance of prayer for understanding and applying a passage? Why is it that we look back on the saints of old who spent two hours a day in prayer and think them strange? Why is it that the more I think about this, the more I realise not only how immature I am, but how few good role models there are?

Why Don't Bible Translators Have The Balls?

1 Kings 12:10 says this:

The young men who had grown up with him replied, "Tell these people who have said to you, 'Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but make our yoke lighter'-tell them, 'My little finger is thicker than my father's waist.'"
1 Kings 12:10, NIV

Except it doesn't.

A literal translation of the Hebrew of the end of the verse is this:

My little one is thicker than my father's loins.

I think it's pretty clear what that actually means. Here's Iain Provan's (restrained) comment on the verse:

If the "little one" is a finger, this is the only place in the OT where it is so. Given the location of the loins in the lower part of the body, and the fact that power and sexual potency were very much associated in the Ancient Near East, it may well be that the "little one" is in fact the male sexual organ. It is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that young men might respond to a challenge by using language containing fairly basic sexual imagery. Whatever is the case, the claim is that Rehoboam is a bigger man than his father - a power to be reckoned with.

Iain Provan, 1 and 2 Kings (NIBC)

So why do Bible translators avoid sexual imagery when it seems to be there in the Bible? The Bible wasn't written by a bunch of prudish ivory tower academics, so why do we make it sound as if it was? Are we trying to be holier than God?

Here's the offending question in lots of different translations:

My little finger is thicker than my father's loins! (NASB)

My little finger is thicker than my father's waist. (Message)

My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins. (Amplified)

My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist! (NLT)

My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins. (KJV)

My little finger is thicker than my father’s thighs. (ESV)

Compared to me, my father was weak. (CEV)

My little [finger] is thicker than the loins of my father. (Young's Literal)

My little finger is thicker than my father's waist. (TNIV)

If I was going for a non-literal translation, I might go for something like "I've got the balls to do stuff my father could never do." For a literal translation, how about Provan's "My little one is thicker than my father's loins"? At least it leaves the probable innuendo in.

Why don't translators have the balls to translate the Bible properly? It might help people realise that the Bible is about God interacting with real people in the real world.

Breakdowns

Cars are odd things. My previous car was also my first car. It was a Fiat Punto. The guidebook to used cars said that Fiat Puntos were meant to be reliable. I didn't buy that guidebook again...

The first big problem was when the oil thingy malfunctioned. Then something made a hole in the side of the cylinder block, so I had that replaced. Then the head gasket blew in the replacement. So I got a different guidebook and bought a Toyota Yaris. Everyone agrees they are reliable.

The reliability has been great so far. I got it on an approved used car thing, so it's on warranty as well. First problem I had was a slow puncture. I took it to Kwik Fit, where they told me that the dodgy tyre was significantly older than the car. Had that replaced. Today I had a tyre blow, as in properly blow while driving down the M4.

If the steering suddenly goes both light and very difficult to control at the same time, the car starts tilting to the right and there's a huge amount of noise and smoke coming from a wheel, chances are you've blown a tyre.

That makes it three times inside a year I've had to get breakdown people out. And the only previous time in my life I've needed them was in 1982.

(Photo added 8th September, 1259 to show what a tyre looks like after such an event)