Robert said
We could spend months on this topic, but I will, of necessity, try to keep it simple.
Thank you. Simple is way better when your immediate audience speaks zero of the relevant languages yet continues to insist on asking you to parse them into finer and finer slices…
I’m still chewing on this, but one question for clarification, if I may.
What’s the difference (rendered in English) in meaning between the two Aramaic phrases you lay out:
– אֲנָא יהוה (‘ana’ YHWH), and
– אַהיַה יהוה (‘ahyah YHWH)?
Is there a verb in either?
Okay, that’s two questions…
Robert said
For my money, despite what some scholars say, the etymology of YHWH that the author of Exodus 3,14 has in mind is “He is,” using an older Aramaic form of the verb for being/becoming HWH, and he illustrates this in his story where Moses asked God what his name is. God’s response is basically, “No. You cannot know my name. “I will be who I will be’, using the Hebrew verb for being/becoming HYH. So in this instance, in Hebrew, where God says, “I will be who I will be” God very much uses the verb ‘to be’:
אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה I will be who I will be (‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh)
Funnily, on Bart’s rec, I recently finished Jack Miles’s God: A Biography on audiobook (quite interesting, but more literary than historical). In it he had a very accessible (for those like me who are Hebrew language-impaired) treatment of this topic – how the phrase could be treated the conventional way, or the way you have framed it (I will be who/what I will be), or in a differing progressive tense rendering: “I will be what I will do.” The final one seemed more like an interesting literary twist than a deeply researched linguistic theory. But I digress.
Your explanation above makes the “I will be who I will be” crystal clear, in a way he left fuzzy. Thank you.
Robert said
But still only one answer. Yes, there is a verb in the second expression. אַהיַה is the first person singular imperfect of HYH, of the Hebrew (and Jewish Aramaic) verb ‘to be’. Imperfect in the sense of continuing action as opposed to perfect in the sense of completed or status action, thus not necessarily imperfect in the sense of a past tense, put imperfect in the sense of continuing action or being, typically best translated with the English present and future tense unless the syntax of the waw-imperfectum or waw-conversive dictates otherwise.
Ah, ok. So:
– A conjugated verb in Aramaic can also function as a noun; and,
– “I am continuing to be [is] the Lord” is what the second one says in English.
This makes something (in application) clear now that wasn’t clear to me before. The no-verb-in-Aramaic issue also had me curious how “I am the bread of life” and “I Am is the bread of life” might be rendered the same or different in Aramaic (not the Koine in the gospel). [Not to blend two blog forum threads.]
Robert said
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Dose someone interpret the ‘I myself am the bread of life’ statement in the Jn 6 discourse as meaning ‘I am’ or ‘I will be’, ie, YHWH is the bread of life?
No, no exactly. Sorry, this is where your command of the actual language outstrips my very limited ability to express myself in it. I’m in no way surprised you aren’t following me. I’m not sure I am following me myself…
The no-verb aspect of “I [am] the bread of life,” in (the putatively underlying) Aramaic of Jesus (not the Koine in the Greek gospel’s verse) got me wondering if that phrase might sound or write the same as “I [Am] [is] the bread of life” in Aramaic – at least as a country bumpkin Galilean night day it. Again, given the lack of verb in the subject-[is]-object sentence constructions we’ve discussed of late. A somewhat whimsical wondering if they were somehow the same expression in Aramaic, and perhaps that’s how the later redactor of the beloved disciple might have gotten to the (just a bit narcissistic) Bread of Life discourse.
Robert said
Hngerhman said
…So:
– A conjugated verb in Aramaic can also function as a noun; and,
– “I am continuing to be [is] the Lord” is what the second one says in English.
Not typically, but in this particular context of Exodus the author refers back to ‘I will be’ part of the previous verbal expression as encompassing the person of YHWH who proclaimed himself to Moses as ‘I will be who I will be’.
Sorry – to make sure I’m clear, which one of my two (errant?) thoughts is your response in reference to?
Robert said
OK, so it seems you may be thinking of something like אנכי לחם הי: ‘I (am) living bread’ or אני לחם החים ‘I (am) the bread of life’ as an underlying Semitic expression of ‘John’s Greek?
The second. Precisely. Or more precisely, I was wondering if one were to reconstruct what that sentence would read like in Aramaic, were it to exist, would it read the same as “I Am is the bread of life.” Not that I think the John we have is directly from Aramaic, but more the counterfactual of if it were.
Robert said
I think John is too late to be preserving any Hebrew/Aramaic expression of Jesus’ actual words. John sometimes betrays a fairly good background understanding of Jewish customs and practice, but I don’t think he is usually close to the historical Jesus and his actual words, and I’ve never gotten the impression that he has tried to construct his Greek on a putative reconstruction of Jesus’ Aramaic.
Yeah, I too have shared the view (what for me is the general impression based on the scholarship I’ve read but not any deep mastery of the scholarship on my part by any stretch) that the John we have isn’t directly built up from Aramaic. I cannot read it myself, but I’m to understand that the Greek it’s written in has an understated elegance to it, and that this quality is retained roughly throughout the entirety of the gospel (even in places where there are literary seams) – even in the quotes of Jesus’s words (and that John’s Jesus talks like the narrator writes).
That said, John’s knowledge of Jewish customs and practices (as you point out) plus the attestation by one layer of the literary composition that the beloved disciple “testified to” and “has written these things”, does give some cause to think: “What if some of this stuff does go back to a first hand account that must be excavated and revivified from the end-state of the composition?”
So, I was, as we got going on Aramaic verblessness, starting to wonder if there was any chance that said verblessness in Aramaic ‘subject-[is]-object’ statements might help bridge the explanatory air gap between a putative first hand recollection of Jesus’s sayings (in Aramaic at the very beginning) and the later self-aggrandized version Jesus we have in John’s Greek. Kinda in the general direction of the theory that there’s a signs source and a sayings source – well, what if the sayings source was originally in Aramaic (or was Aramaic dictation that was immediately translated into Greek when first written), and as it got translated and then redacted, the Aramaic verblessness generated a sense that Jesus, when he was recorded as saying “I Am is X”, was mistakenly viewed as saying “I am X” (due to the ambiguity in Aramaic).
A whimsical thought. And one – if I understand your point above correctly about how one would have said “I Am is X” in Aramaic – whose initially faint light is dimming still…
Robert said
In the Greek it is the sin (singular) of the world, not the sins (plural) of the world.
Ordinarily, I am not tempted to look at an underlying Aramaic of the gospel of John, but it is tempting for this particular phrase.
The old Syriac and Peshitta translate this consistently with ܚܛܝܬܗ ܕܥܠܡܐ chatyteh d’olama’, which would in English most often be translated as ‘the sin of the age’.
Probably completely unrelated, but the old Syriac manuscript (Sinaiticus) of Mk 3,29 (αἰώνιος ἁμάρτημα, eternal sin) has the very similar ܚܛܗܐ ܠܥܠܡ chatha’ l’olama’, a ‘sin for the (eternal) age’, but the underlying Aramaic could have been identical.
The reason I find the putative Aramaic of this phrase tempting is that it has the nuance of an apocalyptic ‘sinful age’, which feels like it could be authentic.
This is fantastic. The flavor of apocalypticism does seep in if ‘age’ is the English word chosen.
In Aramaic, does ‘olama’ (I’m hoping I picked out the right word, Google is of little help here…) have an overlapping or disjunctive (or both) extension relative to κόσμου? To make the obvious explicit, in English ‘world’ has a distinctly spacial/physical connotation whereas ‘age’ has a much more temporal flavor to it. My (small) understanding of κόσμου is that its extension is in fact close to that of ‘world’ in English, even across the varying senses of each term.
Interesting, and agree: ontologically and semantically, it’s hard to disentangle the current ‘world’ that exists in this ‘age’ and this ‘age’ that encompasses the current ‘world’. If one were to try mapping all the entities that fall into ‘current world’ vs. ‘this age’, one would be hard pressed to show anything but a 1:1 correspondence. The practical extensions of the labels would be identical, while the sense that collects these same things under each of the two headings may be different. So, in this way, some of the sense of one can easily bleed into the other.
Forgive my ignorance, but are you aware of anything from the Mandeans or Dead Sea materials which might preserve an ‘olama’ usage in the senses we’re discussing? I ask because of the relationships (direct or potentially indirect) with JB.
Circling back on ‘olam:
– in a brief interchange with Dr McGrath (to your point, he is in fact a pleasure to speak with), he confirms ‘olam (and its cognates in Mandaic) is used frequently in Mandaean texts, and (in addition to “age”) has also a sense of “world” (world of light, realm/world above, world of darkness). So intrigued have I now become about JB in his Mandaean preservations that I’ve pre-ordered McGrath’s forthcoming master English translation of Mandaean Book of John…
– I’m currently listening to the audiobook of AJ Levine’s “The Misunderstood Jew”, and in her discussion of the Jewish roots of the Lord’s Prayer, she renders the following olam translations (as “world”):
““Your kingdom come” correlates in Jewish tradition with the expression olam ha-bah, “the world to come.” The “world to come” is the messianic age, a time distinguished from and infinitely better than “this world” (olam ha-zeh).”
— The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine
Obviously not an exhaustive study, but interesting (to me at least) in that it seems suggestive that ‘olam is the “right” backwards-translation for kosmou, and it somewhat expands the sense of the term to pick up both “world” and “age”.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)