What Bible Translation Says about People Who Oppose Abortion

What surprises me about people who describe the Bible as “the word of God” is how blasé they seem to be about questions of translation.  Even a renowned scholar like Northrop Frye begins his book about the Bible, The Great Code, by glossing over the issue of translation quite glibly.  The translation process is always challenging and complicated.  It is very easy to translate inaccurately, to misconstrue meaning in the translation process, and very difficult to get a translation just right.  In fact, it is generally conceded that a perfect translation is an impossibility, some meaning is bound to be lost or changed as we move from one language and culture to another.  Even when the same word or expression exists in two different languages (which is not as common as you might think, and can create another problem called “false cognates”), the connotation of those words can be quite different in different cultures.  Apparently, describing someone as “a politician” in Mandarin is a complement, in North America, not so much.  As I learned living in Portugal, “ambitious” might be a compliment in English, but in Portuguese it almost invariably implies corrupt.  The ways to go wrong in the translation process are multiple; the ways to get it just right are slim to none.  If you are really unaware of the problems of translation you might consider this old joke (or maybe it’s a true story):  

A translation machine was used to translate the expression “out of sight, out of mind” from English to Cantonese.  The Cantonese translation was then fed back into the machine to translate back into English.  The result:  “invisible, insane.”

Of all the translation controversies, none have been greater than those surrounding translations of the Bible.  Just to review the basic (if approximate) facts:  the texts which eventually became the Old Testament were written in a dialect of Hebrew.  The New Testament was written largely in Greek.  Eventually, the 80 books of the Bible were translated into Latin.  Latin remained the principal language of the Bible for centuries, but the number of accepted books, the canon, was reduced to 66.  John Wycliff produced a hand-written version of the Bible in English in 1380.  Gutenberg produced the first printed version of the Latin Bible in 1450.  The Bible was subsequently reproduced, re-edited and re-translated into other editions in English and various other languages.  The first complete Bible (both Old and New Testaments) was produced in 1560, and is known as the Geneva Bible, and was the basis of most of the versions of the Bible which followed.  In 1605, King James of England commissioned a new edition/translation of the Bible and it was published in 1611.  Although hundreds of other versions of the Bible were/are available, the King James Bible has generally become the authoritative version of the Bible in English.

So, what about abortion?  Here’s what the King James Bible says about causing the death of a fetus:

22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

It seems quite clear to me that the author of this passage did not consider a fetus to be equivalent to a human life.  

On the other hand, according to the passage immediately preceding this one, if a man beats his servant or his maid to death, he should be punished but not for murder.  If the servant survives for a couple of days following the beating, then the master escapes any punishment:  “he shall not be punished: for he [the servant] is his [the master’s] money."

(If you find this last bit curious, you might want to have another look at Graeber’s Debt:  The First 5000 Years where he discusses how people, especially women [or “cumal”], were used as money.)

On the other hand (yeah, I’m running out of hands), to compare with the punishment for causing the death of a fetus, the punishment for cursing your parents is death:  “17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Not to lose the simple basic point, according to the King James Bible a fetus is not a human life nor is it equivalent to one.  The King James Bible does not support the basic foundation of the anti-abortion, pro-life movement. For people who might find the language of the King James a bit tough to follow, here is the New Revised Standard Bible’s version of the same passage which spells things out in more common English:

22 When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

And finally, I get to my point.  Here is the same passage as translated and adapted by a committee hired by Thomas Nelson Publishers to produce the New King James Bible in the 1970s:

22 “If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23 But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Notice how “miscarriage” and “her fruit depart from her” are now being translated as “she gives birth prematurely.”  There are lots of passages in the Bible that I don’t completely understand, but this time it seems obvious that we have gone from a fairly clear, coherent passage to a stretch that doesn’t make sense in a modern context and would have made even less sense at the time the Old Testament was being written.  Imagine you bump into a pregnant woman (today or thousands of years ago) and no “harm follows,” she gives birth to a healthy baby (even if premature).  Would there be any discussion of a crime, or penalty or punishment?  For what?  The Biblical passage only makes sense if what is at issue is a miscarriage.

People who claim that the Bible is sacred can’t have it both ways.  You cannot claim that the Bible is “the word of God” and then change those words to suit (or accept those changes which suit) the political agenda of the moment.

 

Addendum from

That's not what the Bible says

 

 

“Critical Thinking Skills” and “Family Values”

“Critical thinking skills” and “family values”:  these days it is typical to imagine that these concepts are dichotomous to one another.  In the binary thinking of those people who espouse strident opposition to binary thinking these expressions are in mutually-exclusive opposition to each other.  In other words, it is assumed that if you have any “critical thinking skills” you cannot believe in “family values.” What strikes me is how much these phrases have in common.

What these locutions share is the fact that their literal, obvious, word-for-word, face-value meanings are no longer what they mean.  “Family values” doesn’t mean that you value family.  "Critical thinking skills" as taught in most universities aren't skills and rarely show signs of clear thinking, though they are invariably critical.  In both cases, these expressions have taken on a level of meaning that the essayist Roland Barthes calls “mythology.”  In simpler terms, their connotations (what these phrases suggest) have become more important, more widely and significantly understood, than their denotations (the literal meanings of the words).  

These days the expression “family values” tends to suggest (more than anything else) the value system associated with the evangelical, religious right in the USA.  This domination and precedence of connotation over denotation is confirmation of the theory associated with Mikhail Bakhtin that how words are used over time affects their meaning as much as the dictionary definition.  In fact, how they are used eventually becomes the dictionary definition. What “family values” has come to mean is a result of the fact that the expression has historically been used to oppose family planning (at the turn of the 20th century it was a crime to send contractive devices through the mail, for example) and as justification for denying employment to women.  “Family values” was another, nicer way of saying “a woman’s place is in the home.”  “Family values” could be used as a basis to attack not only abortion, but homosexuality, lesbianism and various forms of non-procreational sex.

Just as the expression “family values” has come to signal an attitude more than what the words themselves mean, “critical thinking” has become code for left-wing, materialist, feminist thinking and attitudes.  As it happens, I have always been of the opinion that if you exercise critical thinking skills they will eventually lead you to left-wing, materialist, feminist thinking and attitudes.  The problem, of course, is that if I as a professor profess my left-wing, materialist, feminist leanings and conclusions to my students and they follow along and agree with me, at no point are they actually exercising their own critical thinking skills.  I am understating the case.  In fact, university students are measured by the degree to which they reject and rebel against right-wing ideologies, patriarchy and idealism or dualism.  The problem isn’t with the conclusions, but with the process, which is basically that they are being taught a series of opinions as if they were religious dogma.  Having absorbed this teaching, students are encouraged to expect good marks for having the “right” opinions without having demonstrated the logical reasoning skills which led them to these conclusions.

The causes of this malaise are not abstract or purely academic.  The demise of what “critical thinking” should be was provoked by the rise of deconstruction and the concomitant, haphazard decline of university departments of philosophy.   Most of the theory which paraded under the banner of deconstruction was nonsensical.  I saw Jacques Derrida being interviewed on French television a couple of years before his death, and he seemed honestly embarrassed to be the father of deconstruction.  He insisted that it was not a theory of any importance, not even a theory, not even a word that he used anymore.  However, in true Derridean, deconstructionist fashion he subsequently used the word at least a half dozen times in answering the final question of the interview.  I came to understand what “deconstruction” was (and more importantly what it wasn’t) by reading John Ellis’s succinct monograph Against Deconstruction, published in 1989. 

As Ellis points out, when the promoters attempted to define it, they typically defined deconstruction as a attack on or opposition to “logocentrism.”   The challenge then became to try and understand what “logocentrism” was; only to discover that deconstructionists were as foggy and obscure about defining logocentrism as they were about deconstruction itself.  Here is Derrida’s comment on logocentrism from the opening sentence of his seminal work, Of Grammatology. 

[ . . .]  “le logocentrisme  : métaphysique de l’écriture phonétique (par exemple de l’alphabet) qui n’a été en son fond -- pour des raisons énigmatiques mais essentielles et inaccessibles à un simple relativisme historique -- que l’ethnocentrisme le plus original et le plus puissant, [. . .].”

In English, without the multiple parentheses:  “logocentrism:  the metaphysics of phonetic writing [ . . .] which was at its base [ . . .] not but the most original [meaning earliest] and most powerful ethnocentrism [ . . .].

I have done my best not to play games with the translation.  It is clear that “logocentrism” is like “ethnocentrism” and, therefore, to people like me who live in and admire multicultural society, logocentrism must be something bad.  The single sentence from which I have taken this quotation runs for 400 words.  (Okay, I only counted the first 175 and estimated the rest.)  No, I still don’t know what logocentrism is, but I do know that “logos” is the Greek word for “reason” and “logic,”  and that in the opening sentence of Of Grammatology, as run-on and gobbledygook-ish as it is, Derrida, by attacking reason and writing as Western prejudice, digs himself a hole that neither he nor anyone else can dig out of.

At exactly the same moment, that Derrida was turning logic, reason and clear writing into an object of suspicion, universities were following the established business model and downsizing the study of philosophy on the grounds of a lack of sex appeal.  Logic and reason, of which departments of philosophy were the crucibles, were being hammered from both sides.  The remnants of the collision are the glib or purple descriptions of “critical reasoning skills” on university web sites which bury logic and reason somewhere in the hinterland of a third paragraph or fourth priority.

When Should You Repay Your Student Loan? How about . . . Never!

  To Owe Is to Own

Do you remember this line:  “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title.”?  “Owes” used to mean “owns.”? 

I’ve been reading David Graeber’s book Debt:  The First 5000 Years.  It begins with the American proverb:  “If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you.  If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank.”  I can remember my father telling me this.  I thought he made it up.  

Avoiding Debt

I’ve always had an aversion to debt.  I think it has something to do with when I was five and my mother, as she was leaving to go to work, telling me, “If there is a knock at the door, just sit on the floor and be quiet.  Don’t answer the door; they might be bailiffs.”  Of course, like everyone else, I’ve understood that it is impossible to get on in the world without a car loan, a mortgage, a credit card and a line of credit.  Nonetheless, I’ve always been fairly obsessive about paying my debts and as soon as possible.  You too I imagine.

Why Must Debts Be Paid?

Graeber is an anthropologist and he must have been a good teacher because the book is full of those “dumb questions” that a student might ask which turn out to be really profound, epiphanic, inspiring and unanswerable.  For example:  “Why should we pay our debts?”  And the corollary:  “Why are we so absolutely convinced that we should pay our debts?” Or, “What is money?” 

Is Barter Really the Root of Economics?

Graeber’s ambition in the book is to dispel all those preconceived notions that come to us through the study of economics--that discipline created by Adam Smith in 1776 at the University of Glasgow--like that “barter,” people exchanging one commodity or service for another, is a primordial, primeval human activity as well as the historical basis of economics, and that we are morally obliged to pay debts.  It intrigued and amused me to learn that economists (and anthropologists) are unable to trace the historical origins of money or agree upon a definition of what it is.  The camps divide into those who think of money as a commodity (meaning that it is worth something, like gold and silver coins) and those who think money is an IOU (a way to contract and measure debt).  These days it seems obvious that money is either paper or pixels, and not worth anything in itself.  Graeber argues that money and debt are pretty much the same things:  money is a measuring system (like meters and feet) and debt is what money measures.  If you have a twenty-dollar bill on you, it means that the government of the country that issued it owes you twenty dollars worth of something.  The problem these days is “of what?”  

The "Yellow-Brick Road":  The Gold Standard

In the old days, the government was supposed to have enough gold in storage so that all the money it issued could, in theory if not practice, be exchanged for gold--what was known as the “the gold standard.”  It was interesting for me (I’m a lit prof remember) to discover that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was an allegory in opposition to the gold standard.  Farmers in Kansas needed government loans, but the treasury refused them because the USA didn’t have sufficient gold reserves.   The “yellow-brick road” was the illusion of the gold standard leading to a fraud, the Wizard of Oz, who was just an ordinary old man (Oz is the abbreviation for ounce, the typical way gold was measured).  The gold standard came to an absolute end in the USA in 1971 when Richard Nixon announced that American dollars could no longer be redeemed for gold.  

Money Is a Debt that Can Never Be Paid

Even today there are people who believe that gold is the only real money.  However, according to a CBC documentary I watched not so long ago, a lot of individuals and countries hold papers that say they own gold, but the gold doesn’t actually exist. So if you have an American twenty, the American government owes you twenty dollars worth of something, but not gold.  No need to worry about gold, because it is fairly obvious that the American government has no intention of paying its IOUs period.  Economics really does become the purview of literary critics, I mean people skilled in analyzing works of fantasy and imagination, when you consider that the USA currently has a debt of over 17 and a half-trillion dollars.  That’s American dollars, so it owes trillions of its own IOUs.  

You Can Create Your Own Money

Think about it.  You’re out having a beer with your friend George and he runs out of money.  You pay the bar bill and George gives you an IOU.  The same thing happens a week later and the week after that.  Instead of getting George to pay, when you go out to dinner with Rosemary, you pay your half of the bill by giving her a couple of George’s IOUs.  George keeps writing IOUs and pretty soon everyone in your and George’s circle of friends has George’s IOUs.  When does it end?  It would end when people start refusing to accept George’s IOUs, but why would they?  If they keep getting what they want (beer and meals; maybe they can even get the bar and restaurant owners to start using George IOUs), what motivation is there to stop accepting George’s IOUs?  At a certain point, everyone knows that George is never going to pay off all his IOUs, but it is in everyone’s interest to pretend that he can and will.  It will all end when George has given out so many IOUs (like say 17 trillion) that people can no longer pretend to believe in them or George himself refuses to write any more IOUs, even though he is only being asked to write IOUs to pay a debt that he owes in his own IOUs (because at a certain point George began to receive and repay in his own IOUs).

USA:  The Most Indebted Country in the World

Both of these scenarios have taken place in the US government recently.  The USA has the biggest debt in the world at 17 and a half-trillion dollars, or over $55,000 per citizen, but every single country in the world is doing the same thing and is in debt.  The only debate is about those countries that we know will never be able to pay off their debts. Even in these cases, it seems like they "own” the banks and the countries that they owe money to, and we hear constantly that they can’t be allowed to go bankrupt.  Governments are considered conservative and fiscally responsible if they announce the intention to balance their budgets and eliminate deficits, meaning to stop going further into debt, some year in the future.

Canadian and Québécois Debt Levels

In this context, should a recent university graduate pay back her student loan?  Jeez, I don’t know!  But here are some of the facts of the Canadian/Quebec case.  The Canadian debt is currently approaching 700 billion, which means we each (every man, woman and child) owe over 20,000.  (Yep, if you were born yesterday, you are already in hock for $20,000.)  The Quebec debt is at 265 billion.

History of Non-repayment of Canadian Student Loans

Beginning in the 1990s Canadian students started to borrow a lot more money and were having increasing difficulty in paying back their loans when they graduated.  In 1980 around 9% of graduates were unable to repay their student loans; by 1990 the level of non-payment was at 17%.  By 1997, non-payment of student loans reached a total of 70 million dollars.  The federal government passed a law making it illegal for a student to declare bankruptcy until 10 years after graduation.  The Canadian Federation of Students took the government to court claiming discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights but lost the case on the grounds that student borrowers were not considered a social group.  The government later reduced the length of time before a student could declare bankruptcy to 7 years (thereby falling into line with what Graeber identifies as the ancient Judaic tradition of forgiving loans after the sabbath--or seventh--year).  

In 2003-2004 Canadian student loans amounted to $1.63 billion.  The same year, 28% of student borrowers (43,600 former students) defaulted on their loans totaling 331 million dollars. The government’s solution to the student debt crisis has been to create a Repayment Assistance Plan whereby students’ loan payments will be tapered to a maximum of 20% of their gross family income and the maximum repayment period will be 15 years.  For 15 years (or until the loan is paid) you will have to fill out a form every 6 months requesting permission to only pay one-fifth of your gross family income toward your student loan.  I’m not sure that I would find myself jumping for joy at these conditions, and it seems clear that the real objective is to ensure that the government gets its money back (or at least more than it was getting when 28% of former students were defaulting).

Canadian Student Debt Is Equivalent to a Small Country

The Federation of Canadian Students has begun to maintain its own “debt clock” showing how much Canadian students owe in Canada Student Loans.  The amount is now over 15 billion.  If they keep going, eventually they will be able to declare themselves a country (they are currently between Jamaica and Guatemala in debt size), or maybe the Federation will come to the realization that it’s members own this one.