Category Archive: Bible – OT – Deuteronomy
Saying the Name
Does the Third Word prohibit pronouncing the name “YHWH”?
That can hardly be the case. As Carmen Joy Imes (Bearing YHWH’s Name at Sinai) writes:
“The Psalms are replete with exhortations to know YHWH’s name (Ps 91:14), call on the name (Ps 63:5[4]; 105:1; 116:4), declare the name (Ps 22:23[22]), cause his name to be remembered (Ps 45:1 [17]), bless the name (Ps 100:4; 145:1), sing to his name (Ps 66:2; 68:5[4]), and praise and exalt the name (Ps 7:18[17]; 34:4[3]; 54:8[6]; 96:2; 113:1; 148:5)” (26n87).
But then she adds this:
“In addition, people of faith deliberately used the name by including YHWH theophorically in personal names. Biblical texts testify that Yahwistic theophoric names were common in Israel from the monarchic period forward. These echoes of the name ‘YHWH’ suggest that its pronunciation was not considered taboo, even in the exilic and post exilic periods” (26n87).
For instance, consider names like Joshua (“YHWH saves”), Hezekiah (“YHWH is strong”), Elijah (“My God is YHWH”), and, after the exile, Nehemiah (“YHWH has comforted”).
There’s no reason to think that godly Jews went around naming their children “Nehemiah” and then refusing to pronounce the last syllable because it is the name of God.
Taking YHWH’s Name
What does the Third Commandment mean when it says not to “take the name of YHWH in vain”? It doesn’t say “Do not say the name.” It says not to take it in vain, using a verb that normally means “to pick up, take up, bear, carry around.”
Many treatments of this commandment assume that “take up the name” is an ellipsis, that is, that there are missing words. The full form, they say, should be “take up … on your lips,” so that the commandment has to do with swearing oaths or even just with speaking the name “YHWH.”
Others think it’s an ellipsis where what’s missing is “your hand,” so that the expression in full form is “lift up your hand in YHWH’s name.” Lifting up the hand in the Bible is sometimes a way of taking oaths. And again, this commandment is taken to prohibit certain kinds or ways of using YHWH’s name in taking oaths.
But what if there’s no ellipsis? What if it really is speaking of bearing or carrying around the name?
What’s interesting is that that exact expression does occur elsewhere in the Bible. As Carmen Joy Innes (Bearing YHWH’s Name at Sinai) says,
“The high priest was to ‘bear the names’ of the 12 tribes on his person to signify his role as their authorized representative before YHWH (Exod 28:29)” (2).
Innes goes on to explain the parallel:
“While he physically carried, or bore, their names, he served as an analog of Israel’s bearing of YHWH’s name, which was conferred on them by the high priest when he blessed them (Num 6:27). As YHWH’s chosen people and ‘kingdom of priests’ (Exod 19:5), they represented him among the nations” (2).
I learned to read the Third Commandment this way from Jim Jordan, and it’s also found in John Frame’s treatment of the Ten Commandments.
But — surprise! — you don’t find this passage about Aaron’s garments discussed in most treatments of the Third Commandment. In a footnote, Innes writes:
“Most interpreters routinely overlook these passages. For example, Miller … dismisses Exod 28 as ‘not relevant’ to the interpretation of the NC [Name Command] without explanation, even though the description of Aaron’s high priestly garments offers the closest lexical and contextual parallels to the NC” (2n5).
Divorce in the Pentateuch and ANE
David Instone-Brewer’s comparison of the biblical laws relating to divorce and other laws in the Ancient Near East (ANE) reveals that “women have greater rights in the Pentateuch than in the ancient Near East generally” (Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible, 21).
What rights? Instone-Brewer points to these two in particular:
(1) While other ANE lawcodes did allow women to divorce their husbands in some cases, few allowed a woman whose husband has failed to provide food and clothing to divorce her husband. A Middle Assyrian law does, but only after the wife has been abandoned for five years.
“The Pentateuch was more generous to the woman because it did not prescribe time constraints while it allowed women to divorce their husbands on the same grounds of neglect” (26).
(2) Only in the Pentateuch do we hear about a certificate of divorce being given to the divorced woman. The certificate would likely have said something like “You are allowed to marry any man you wish.”
“It would have been a most valuable document for a woman to possess,” says Instone-Brewer, “because it gave her the right to remarry. Without it she would be under the constant threat of her former husband, who could claim at a later date that she was still married to him and thus charge her with adultery” (29).
After all, “in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, the man could neglect his wife and then reclaim her within five years, even if she had remarried in the meantime” (30; cf. Middle Assyrian law # 36).
It strikes me that the differences Instone-Brewer points out between the laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy and the laws in the rest of the Ancient Near East concerning divorce indicate that the Pentateuch is not making a concession to the culture (e.g., “The ANE generally allowed divorce, and so the Law goes along with that, but it wasn’t ideal and God wanted to tighten it up later”).
No, as a matter of fact the Law goes beyond what ANE culture normally allowed, allowing speedier divorce in the case of neglect and making it clear that a first marriage really was over and the divorced wife was free to remarry.
Put another way, it’s one thing to say “The ANE was ‘loose’ on divorce and so, by way of concession to the culture, the Bible is correspondingly ‘loose’ … for a while.” I don’t buy it, but it makes a certain sort of sense.
But it makes no sense to me at all to say “The ANE was ‘loose’ on divorce and so, by way of concession to the culture, the Bible is even ‘looser.'”
Translations
On Sunday afternoon, my Scripture reading (as background for the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 41, dealing with the Seventh Commandment) was Deuteronomy 22:9-30. In preparing for that sermon, I noticed two major translation problems.
In Deuteronomy 22:9, the NKJV reads, “You shall not sow your vineyard with different kinds of seed, lest the yield of the seed which you have sown and the fruit of your vineyard be defiled.” The KJV, NASB, and NIV all have the same thing: “be defiled.”
But the word in Hebrew is a form of the verb qadash, and everywhere else that word appears it means “to be or become holy.” A quick glance through my Hebrew concordance reveals that nowhere else in the whole Old Testament does the word refer to something defiled, and my lexicons do not give “defiled” as an option for qadash.
Later on in that same passage, the NKJV has this: “A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor uncover his father’s bed” (Deut. 22:30). The NIV gives up translating completely and settles for a paraphrase: “he must not dishonor his father’s bed.” The KJV has “… nor discover [i.e., uncover] his father’s skirt,” which is much closer. The NASB is similar: “he shall not uncover his father’s skirt.”
The word rendered “bed” by the NKJV and “skirt” by the NASB and KJV is the word kanaf, and it’s the word for a bird’s wing. By extension, it applies to the wings or corners of a garment, which is how it is used earlier in the passage: “You shall make tassels on the four corners of the clothing with which you cover yourself” (Deut. 22:12, NKJV).
By translating kanaf as “bed” as the NKJV does or by paraphrasing as the NIV does, the connection between Deuteronomy 22:12 and 30 is lost. The reader can no longer see that all the laws in Deuteronomy 22:13-30, which deal with fornication, adultery, rape, and seduction, are bounded by laws about the corners or wings of a man’s garments. But those corners or wings have everything to do with the laws about sexual morality which they surround.
In the Bible, taking a bride is spreading one’s wing (or the corner of one’s garment) over a woman. That’s what Ruth asks Boaz to do for her (Ruth 3:9). That’s what God did for Israel (Ezek. 16:8; cf. Ruth 2:12). The husband-to-be would symbolically take his wife-to-be into his cloak so that she is covered by his garment’s corner, that is, by his wing.
The corners of Israel’s garments had tassels on them, which represented and reminded Israel of her holiness (Num. 15:38-41). To uncover someone’s corner or wing, then, is to violate the holiness of their marriage bond. And that’s what Deuteronomy 22:13-30 is all about. But you’d never know it if you read most translations.
Furthermore, you’d never know from most translations that mixtures become holy. If you sowed field seed in your vineyard, both the produce of the seed and the produce of the vineyard become holy, which would mean that you couldn’t eat it. (The Berkeley Version takes this stab at a paraphrase: the produce will “be confiscated to the sanctuary.”) As Jim Jordan points out in his essay, “The Law of Forbidden Mixtures,” there are mixtures in God’s sanctuary, the most notable of which is that the priests wore linen garments embroidered with coloured wool (all coloured cloth in the Bible is wool: they couldn’t dye linen). Ordinary Israelites were forbidden to wear mixtures, but the priests wore mixtures. Mixtures in the Old Covenant become holy.
And the tassels that the Israelites wore on their garments had a blue (and therefore woolen) thread in them. Each Israelite had a little mixture, a little bit of holiness, on the four corners of his garment. So the corner or wing that a man spreads over his wife has a tassel symbolizing holiness.
But you’d never spot any of this symbolism if you just read the standard English translations. Instead of reproducing what the text of Scripture actually says, the translators have attempted to give their own interpretations. They read that the produce of mixed seed is holy and they say to themselves, “Nope. That can’t be right. Mixtures are bad, so … let’s make that defiled instead.” They read about uncovering a father’s corner and they assume that readers won’t be able to figure it out. It’s an obscure idiom, they think, and so they simplify things by speaking about uncovering the father’s bed or they simply paraphrase to try to “get the meaning across.” But the ironic result is that in so doing they fail to get the meaning across, because the meaning is bound up with the words God uses.