The Origin of Translation

"If [human beings] have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do." --Gen. 11:6

Old Testament
Book 1: Genesis
Chapter 9: Noah gets drunk and naked
Chapter 10: Genealogy of Noah's children (Moe, Larry, Shemp)
Chapter 11: The Tower of Babel, Genealogy Shem to Abram
Chapter 12: Abram pimps his wife

The Tower of Babel--As I mentioned before, Derrida makes a great deal out of this story. One of Derrida's Great Themes is translation--the impossibility of "true meaning," etc. I haven't actually read anything by him where he talks about Babel--I think I read this in "Jacques Derrida" by Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. (He had a field day with what it means to write a book named Jacques Derrida!) I'll look into it when I get back to school. But it's an interesting moment. This is the second "birth" of language in the bible. The first is in the garden of eden when God tells Adam to name everything, or according to Gen. ch. 1, language pre-dates God himself--that's a fascinating idea. Derrida places the birth of language here at the tower of babel, because it is here that meaning is separated from words. And now explicitly--it's possible for two people to say the same thing in two different languages, and not understand each other. Meaning, signifiers, signified, all of it is exploded in this vengeful moment of God's.

Which brings me to the aspect of this story that has always captured me. It's once again, here for the second time, the emotional immaturity of God. How amazing and cool are people?! For no reason but to show that we can do it, people decide to build a tower all the way to heaven. What an astounding project to undertake! As I said last time, any normal parent would be thrilled and proud to bursting to see such ambition in her children. God is completely, almost pathologically, narcissistic. If they are building the tower they are not paying attention to him, and that's the worst thing. If poor all-powerful God can't have the adulation of these little toys he created, they can all just die. Well, hooray for people, and down with God. This story shows how great humans are. We once again came that close to overtaking God and only by cheating and completely rewriting the rules could he stay in power. We people are the best. People #1! People #1!

And this is the guy that Christians claim is all-loving. What a load of crap!

Note on the NAB translation. I've read this story too many times. Always I thought what God got mad about was that they were trying to build a tower all the way to heaven--that is, all the way to God. They were trying to equal God in effect, and needed to be put down. In this version, they were doing something much more mundane--just building a tower to "reach the sky." The change completely changes the meaning of story. In translations where they want to reach heaven, God is perhaps rightfully preventing their precocious attempt to equal God. But in this translation, they are only trying to do something great. It makes God look much more vengeful and petty. Isn't it interesting that translation--the choice of that one word, heaven or sky--can have such an impact, in this story that is the origin of the need for translation!

One more interesting thing to imagine about this story. God made all the people of the earth suddenly, randomly speak different languages. Millions of people, hundreds of languages. Imagine what that scene would have been like. Suddenly everyone around you is incomprehensible. You would push your way through the crowd calling, "hello? hello?" Nothing but gibberish, until you stumble across someone you understand! The two of you can understand each other, and you start through the crowd again, "hello? hello?" until you find a third, and so on. In the mean time you encounter large groups of people who all seem to understand each other, but you can't understand anything they say. I think it is an interesting scene to contemplate how they sorted themselves out.


--bibletoenail


Future Topics:
What an a-hole Abraham, the father of Israel, is. That is a common theme of Genesis--the hero of every story is a scumbag or liar or a-hole. The Israelites (and Christians) are descended from a line of real low-lifes. God, of course, loves them, and unjustly punishes those who cross them time after time. Abram and Sarai go to Egypt. Abram tells Sarai to say she is his sister, so the Egyptians can have sex with her without killing Abram first! It happens right here. Abram makes Sarai lie, the Pharaoh innocently has sex with Sarai (Gen. 12:19), and God punishes Pharoah rather than Abram! God is insanely unjust in this book.

Textual Notes:
- Gen. 9:3 n. 1--The note says that before the flood man and all creatures were vegetarian. After the flood they become carnivorous.

- Gen. 9:13-17--The rainbow as the seal of God's covenant never again to flood the world. Physics question. Rainbows are a physical phenomenon--the refraction of light through the droplets of water in the sky. A rainbow is an absolutely unavoidable occurrence in the right circumstances. My question is, what precisely did God do to "set [his] bow in the clouds"? (Gen. 9:13) This passage obviously implies that before this covenant rainbows did not exist. So what exactly changed? God did not just place the rainbow in the sky--they are an inevitable physical occurrence. That means that before the flood, the physics of the world were somehow different. But how? Refraction is a result of some very very deep, fundamental qualities of the physics of the world, relating to quantum physics, electrons, energy and matter, photons, and I don't know what else. A physics professor would say the universe is impossible rainbows. So what did God do? But understand what this passage means. The world now, with rainbows works in an elegant, inevitable way. That means that before rainbows it had to work in some way that did not make obvious sense. Some bizarre, impossible, illogical physical laws had to be in effect if rainbows did not exist. But the question is this: why did God design the universe in this bizarro, illogical way, only to correct it later? I think this is another small detail that if any advocate of God allowed themselves to take seriously would knock down the entire house of cards. The question isn't could God make the world that defies today's physical rules--sure he could, he's God. The question is: why would he? It makes no sense. (As a simple folk explanation, of course, this is a nice story of the reason for rainbows. But remember, the bible is true.)

- Gen. 9:17--Interesting. More contract law, which is on my brain. In the old days, a contract was sealed literally with a seal--it was the seal that indicated that the contract was to be binding. That became too cumbersome, and eventually gave way to consideration as the substitute for a binding "seal." In this verse God says that rainbows will be the seal of his covenant never again to flood the world. This is an interesting example of a seal binding a contract--in this case, although the contract is not enforceable because it is an empty promise without consideration on the other side, because there was the seal, I think a court might find that this promise actually is binding.

- Gen. 9:24--I just realized something huge. I have read this flood story probably a dozen times in my life. I have completely misread it until this time. Noah gets drunk, and is lying naked in a stupor in his tent. Ham finds him, sees him naked, and goes out and tells his brothers about it. They then walk backward into the tent and cover Noah, without seeing him. Noah wakes up and gets angry at what happened. My whole like I have connected this story to the garden of eden. I thought Noah was made at the two brothers for covering him. I thought the point of the story was that Noah was a man of god, and hence he is not ashamed of his nakedness the way other humans are, and so was angry that his sons were ashamed of his nakedness. That makes sense, right?

I got this story COMPLETELY wrong. When Noah wakes up, he is not angry at his sons for covering him; he is angry at Ham for having seen him naked!!! It is Ham that he curses, the descendants of Ham, the Canaanites. In typical random old testament fashion, Noah makes a completely bizarre decision.

- Gen. 10:1-32--The second genealogy. This one is the descendants of the children of Noah. Note 1 here is really interesting. It says this chapter is a remarkably good classification of the various peoples known to the ancient Israelites. There are several interesting names mentioned here. First is Gomer--Gomer Pyle is an old old Jewish name--who knew? Nimrod is one of the greatest names of all time. Peleg always reminds me of Moby-Dick--is sounds like "peg leg," and "queequeg." Also interesting, Ashkenaz is a son of Gomer, so that's where the Ashkenazi Jews get their name. (Something funny. I asked a Jewish friend of mine one time if he didn't think it was ironic that the word "nazi" is in "Ashkenazi"--he said it had never occurred to him! The note says that the descendants of Japheth (Ashkenaz is son of Gomer, son of Japheth) are the peoples of the Indo-European languages north and west of Mesopotamia: Europe? That's interesting, because that's where the Ashkenazi Jews are from now. The Sephardic Jews are from the Mediterranean--Spain and Portugal. Sephar is the "eastern hill country"--that's where the descendants of Shem lived. The note says that the descendants of Shem are "the Semitic-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia [remember, that's Iraq], Syria, and Arabia." So the "Sephardic" Jews are the Jews of the middle east. (For completeness, Ham's descendant Canaan, the one cursed by Noah, are the African people. Racist moment number one in the bible.)

All this is very interesting. The two main branches of modern Judaism--Ashenazi and Sephardic, are mentioned here. But I know that the "real" "Israelites" are pruned down far from this bushy tree. I can't remember now from which branch comes Abraham, but he obviously can't come from both branches. I don't know what any of this means, I just think it's interesting when I come across something like this chapter that puts in context something I've never understood, like the division between Sephardic and Ashkenazi--it goes way back!

- Gen. 11:10-32--These are the descendants of Shem, down through Abram and Lot. Shem is Noah's oldest son, so he should be the one to continue the line. So apparently, then, Abram is Sephardic. Abram is Lot's uncle. Keep that in mind. There is so much shenanigans in the bible, and it's important to keep straight the relationships to really appreciate how lascivious God's Chosen People were.

- Gen. 11:29,30--Abram marries Sarai, who is barren. Also important to the story going forward.

- Gen. 11:1-9 n. 1--The note once again explains the artificial origins of this story. It's based on traditions about the temple towers of Babylonia (he was born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia!) (and he's got a condo made of stone-a). The purpose is to illustrate man's increasing wickedness (how great is it that only a few years after God "punishes" us by killing everyone, we are already wicked again? I love people in this book. The note readily admits that a secondary point of this story is to present "an imaginative origin" of the diversity of languages.

- Gen. 11:16 n. 7--Another interesting origin. Mentioned in this lineage is "Eber," the eponymous ancestor of the Hebrews.

- Gen. 11:28 n. 8--Ah, another one of the kinds of things that makes the truth of the bible so problematic. It mentions "Ur of the Chaldeans." The note says that "Chaldean" is an anachronism--Chaldeans were not known to history until approximately a thousand years after Abraham's time.

- Gen. 11:32 n. 10--How do you get a degree in religion? By making observations like that in this note: Terah was 70 when his son Abram was born. And Abram was 75 when he left Haran. Terah lived in Haran for 60 years after Abram left. The text here says Terah lived to 205 (Gen. 11:32). According to the Samaritan text, however, Terah died when he was 145. 70 + 75 = 145, which means Abram left Haran after his father's death, and that is the time followed in Acts 7:4. That's worth an entire dissertation, isn't it? Can't you just see it? Look, ma, we're figuring out the bible!

- Gen. 12:16 n. 5--Another odd anachronism. The text says that Abram had camels, but, the note says, camels were probably not domesticated until several centuries later.


Quotables:
"If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." --Gen. 9:6
"When he drank some of the wine, he became drunk and lay naked inside his tent." --Gen. 9:21
"If [human beings] have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do." --Gen. 11:6
"I know well how beautiful a woman you are." --Gen. 12:11
"How could you do this to me! Why didn't you tell me she was your wife?" --Gen. 12:18