First Things First

An illustration, and I’ll try to keep it as brief and clear as possible.

In the process of editing IC’s Christmas Day post this year, I came across one of those inconvenient translation variants that scripture affirms as legitimate despite what seems to be a significant change in meaning. Matthew 4:16 has the apostle quoting the prophet Isaiah concerning the “great light” that dawned on Galilee when our Lord settled in Capernaum for a time.

To cut to the chase, Matthew writes of people “sitting in darkness”, while Isaiah spoke of people who “walked in darkness”. What might explain the change of verb? Sitting is most definitely not walking. It’s quite the opposite of walking.

Sitting or Walking?

First, let me confirm that both verbs are accurate English translations of the source languages, the Isaiah quote from the original Hebrew and the Matthew quote from the Greek. (I realize there are experts who argue Matthew wrote his gospel in Aramaic, but Greek manuscripts gave us the versions we have in our Bibles.) Isaiah uses the word hālaḵ, which means to walk, while Matthew uses kathēmai, which means to sit down. There is no debate whatsoever about that.

So why did Matthew take the liberty of revising Isaiah? Inquiring minds want to know. (No, Matthew wasn’t quoting the Greek Septuagint, as the writers of the New Testament often do. That was my first guess too, but in the Septuagint the verb is poreúomai, which means went, and seems a decent approximation by the translators of Isaiah’s “walked”).

IC was working from the NASB, which is one of the more literal translations of scripture available. I usually work from the ESV, because it’s a popular translation. It’s also a little more dynamic than the NASB, meaning that its translators were more concerned about being understood by a broad range of readers than about being rigorously literal. The ESV of Matthew has people “dwelling in darkness”. So now we have four variations on a theme, all different verbs. What gives?

I Caught You NOT Taking Liberties …

Well, let me suggest Matthew was not taking any great liberties with Isaiah. He was simply doing what the Lord himself often did when he quoted scripture, and that was to change the original wording to give the sense for his contemporaries. He was trying to draw attention to the aspects of his text that mattered most. After all, at that point Isaiah’s Hebrew version was around 800 years old, and even the Greek Septuagint was getting venerable at almost 300. All vocabularies morph over time with popular usage. Word meanings evolve, get blurrier or change entirely. Who knows what happened to poreúomai over 300 years? Try telling a fifteen-year-old you’re feeling a little gay this morning if you doubt me. That is a change in meaning that has happened within my own lifetime, but I can assure you your teen will not hear it the way you meant it when you were his age.

So a good Bible teacher explains what a passage means, not just what it says. It is well known that the Lord himself almost never quoted any Hebrew or Greek text precisely as experts believe it to have existed in his day. As one writer has put it, “His usage of scripture is allusive, paraphrastic, and — so far as it can be ascertained — eclectic.” Why? Because he wanted the meaning to be understood and to sink into the ears, minds and hearts of his audience. He was more concerned with being true to the intent of the Writer of the text than with being blindly conformed to antiquated vocabulary and syntax.

Metaphors for Existence

In fact, all these verbs are metaphors, aren’t they? Isaiah was not describing the way the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali put one foot in front of the other. He was using “walked” as a metaphor for existence, for the entire manner of life in which these people lived. After all, the darkness to which he is referring is spiritual, not literal. Likewise, Matthew is using the word “sitting” in his retranslation of Isaiah as a metaphor for existence. His word choice better evokes the futility of a life lived outside of reference to God, as IC well brought out in his explanation of the passage, and no doubt Matthew chose it out of concern for his audience, which he later describes with the Lord’s own compassion in chapter 9 as “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”.

Living in spiritual darkness is no fun at all. This is what the ESV team members were getting at when they used “dwelling” to translate Matthew, though they have only introduced yet another metaphor in the process. But the idea is that this people’s whole course of life was under a cloud of incomprehension, frustration and futility. They needed the illumination of God’s truth, and this is what Christ brought them. The difference in verbs actually broadens and enhances our understanding of their plight the more we pick the relevant passages apart.

Jots and Tittles

I know I actually used the words “as brief as possible” to describe the foregoing illustration. Silly me. What I really want to get to is this: The other day in our Saturday examination of the Yodh section of Psalm 119, I quoted from Matthew 5, where the Lord says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

Broadly understood, iotas and dots (or “jots and tittles”, as the KJV delightfully puts it) are the smallest parts of letterforms. Much to my amusement, in looking up the meanings of these words, I found that “tittles” are the source of much scholarly debate. The experts are more or less unified about iota, which is a Greek transliteration of yodh, the tenth and smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet. However, nobody can quite agree which parts of the letters the Lord was referring to when he used the word keraia, or far more likely its approximate Aramaic equivalent. Sometimes looking too closely at 2,000-year-old texts can make your head spin. However you interpret “tittle”, it surely refers to a very, very small part of the message, no bigger than an accent, a serif, or, as the ESV has it, a “dot”.

That understood, what exactly was Jesus affirming here? Let’s start with this: he was not promising that God would providentially protect the Hebrew manuscripts to which he was referring from the occasional scribal slip or casual misreading. He could not possibly have meant that God intended the original letterforms of the Hebrew Bible to remain exactly the same until everything in the Law has been accomplished. The idea that the precise original form of scripture has been mysteriously and impeccably preserved right down to the diacritical points for more than thirty centuries has been falsified by the facts in evidence. Moreover, the work of translation removes “jots and tittles” entirely, converting them into forms entirely unfamiliar to the original readers, and our Lord not only used translations and quoted from them, he made them up himself on the spot from time to time. He simply could not have meant it that way.

Meaning and Mechanics

More importantly, the way Jesus (and all the writers he used by his Holy Spirit to document and explain his life and work in the New Testament) treated the Old Testament scriptures demonstrates that some kind of magical preservation of the text in its original form is not at all what he was implying. The example we’ve used today of Matthew quoting Isaiah proves that. The apostles did not preserve Isaiah’s jots and tittles unmodified; in fact, they changed not just parts of letters but the letters themselves, even entire words, much as Ezra’s Levite friends probably had to do in their day to communicate forgotten truth to the returned exiles when they “gave the sense” of the Law.

What was the Lord saying then? I believe he was speaking of the message itself, that the truth would remain true notwithstanding the passage of time until every last declaration, implication and insinuation has been exhaustively worked out in the world. This is a statement that remains applicable to scripture in every language on earth, and the point of the two verses that immediately follow: God’s instructions exist to be obeyed, and our greatness or insignificance in the eyes of the Lord depend on our attention to whatever he instructs.

So then, it is to the meaning behind the words of scripture that we owe our diligent attention, not to the mechanical recitation of sounds derived from shapes in scripts now ancient. This is where people go sadly off the rails and begin to fanaticize about forms rather than concern themselves with content. Catholics who promote the Traditional Latin Mass as the only acceptable worship form are going down a similar road, as are those who insist the 1611 KJV Bible is the only acceptable English translation. People who care whether this world’s original language was Hebrew are wandering around the same blinkered territory. They are staring at the trees and missing the forest.

Best Evidence

Scripture has indeed been miraculously preserved over the course of history. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that we have so much freedom to spend our time arguing about these things today right down to minutia of linguistic technicalities. That said, the “jots and tittles” passage is not about the miraculous preservation of scripture, as some would like it to be, or even about having the most accurate possible understanding of the text (which is always the goal), but about the obligation its readers have to obey it once we have read and understood it.

Pleasing the Lord involves putting first things first.