To Be or Not To Be...an Idol
I got stumped. Truth is I get stumped all the
time, often in study and research, so my friends do not often see it, but I am
open about this. Getting stumped means only that I did not have the answer at
the moment, but I knew where to find it. A friend of mine, who is Atheist,
looked at me in disbelief when I told her that God speaks to me. She could not fathom
my expression as I clarified that I do not hear His words by the usual means of
auditory perception, but that I perceive them in my mind and in my heart, as
real as any personal communication made to me. More so even. I am not asserting that
such communication is daily, at least not in the most powerful of my personal
examples, but in softer tones, like wavelets lapping at my furrows, relaxing
their contractions and shedding clarity and peace where once there was
perplexity and anxiety. This experience is daily, and it feeds my faith.
2.
I digress. To the point. The Latter-day Saints
are familiar with a doctrine that is unique to our faith, one we do not frequently
dwell on even in discourse among us Saints (Mormons). Subsequently when we do
find ourselves discussing the topic with others, more often than not the dialogue is with our
fellow Christians outside our faith. Then we are often on the receiving end of their
inquiries, some of which are designed to put us on the defensive.
3.
The teaching in question was revealed by Joseph
Smith in early 1844. The doctrine was made an aphorism by one of his prophetic
successors (a man who in his boyhood knew Joseph Smith personally), Lorenzo
Snow:
a.
As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.
4.
It is no exaggeration to state that there are
often gasps at this declaration. In fact, I have never written publicly about
this because of a concern that “meat should precede milk”. However, I would
like to frame the discussion, set a simple context, and that is all. I am not
undertaking in this blog posting to defend the tenet, but merely to clarify
what a particular scripture says.
5.
I said I was stumped. The missionaries had
invited me to visit with an investigator, and as it turned out she and I had
had prior business contact. That reconnection was an enjoyable experience. She
posed points that focused on various aspects of the Law of Moses and how it
seemed to her that the Book of Mormon character, Nephi, had perhaps not abided
the stipulations of the Mosaic Law. Those concerns were easily addressed, and
perhaps I could write on them as they are interesting.
6.
Then she posed the following, Isaiah 43:10:
Ye are my witnesses,
saith the LORD,
and my servant whom I have chosen:
that ye may know and believe me,
and understand that I am he:
before me there was no God formed,
neither shall there be after me.
7.
Well, there you have it. This verse, attributed
to the prophet Isaiah (which is also my belief and that of my fellow Latter-day
Saints), seems not to accommodate the teaching on Godhood put forward by Joseph
Smith and his successors, a doctrine which they declared was not outside the
Biblical canon but no longer understood until restored in plainness, a doctrine
that had been taught by the ancient prophets and the Savior himself (clearly a
topic for another posting).
8.
I reiterate, my intention in this posting is not
to defend the Latter-day Saint teaching on Godhood, but to set a textual
framework, to wit, does Isaiah’s scripture, which we Saints also accept as true
and inspired, contradict Joseph Smith’s teaching? Well, the matter hinges on what Isaiah
wrote. Here I share my own personal aphorism and essay to lay the matter before
the curious reader:
a.
“Never trust a translation.”
9.
That is to say, reliable translations are an
interface between the source language text and the intended target language
rendition. I hope to make the case for careful comparing between the source
language texts and their renditions in other languages, perhaps more than
addressing the Isaiah passage itself. So here goes:
10.
Step 1:
Get acquainted with a little Hebrew. The Ancient Israelites had three terms
that denoted “God”. These are they in transliteration:
a.
Él:
God, masculine singular in form, denoting a “powerful leader who held a staff”,
or “power and authority”. Note:
Hebrew, like Aramaic and Arabic, has never had capital letters. Thus it is only
in translations to languages that distinguish between upper- and lower-case
letters that the distinction is made, and then according to the translator’s
prerogative.
b.
Eloah:
God, masculine singular in form, from the root Él extended by the addition of
the suffix –ōh to form “Eloah” meaning
“God, Deity, one of the Godhead.”
c.
Elohim:
The stem “Eloah” is made plural by the addition of –im, the masculine plural
ending. Please note that in strict Biblical Hebrew grammar there were three
grammatical numbers: singular (one), dual (two, often for natural pairs, such
as “eyes”, “feet”, etc.) and plural (three or more). “Elohim” is masculine
plural in form, thus it grammatically, at least, denotes at a minimum three. Note: The verbal forms that accompany
“Elohim” when it is used to denote “God” (which in English we easily accomplish
with an upper-case “G”, though, I repeat, such is not possible in Hebrew) are,
with 2 exceptions (both of which are worthy of a blog posting) singular. When
“Elohim” is used to denote “gods” as in the expression “have the gods of the nations delivered” (2 Kings 19:12), the verbal forms that accompany “gods” are in the plural.
11.
While on the cross and crying out in agony to
God, Jesus employed the first term for God, Él: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” ‘My God, My God, why hast thou
forsaken me?’ Note: Él + i = “God-my”, or as we say in normative English order,
“My God”.
12.
I would not like anyone to understand me to be
saying that I disparage translations. Au contraire, I am deeply committed to
the great work of translation, at least insofar as my devotion to their study
and dissemination is concerned. What I mean is that the careful reader must,
not should, but absolutely must
become acquainted with both the source and target languages if the student’s
intent is to approximate the meaning of source language text, in its current
transmission. Take for instance the English preposition “before”:
a.
The preposition “before” has two meanings in English,
one is temporal (time) which indicates “in the period preceding”. The second
meaning of “before” is spatial (locational) denoting “in front of”. When one
reads “before me” in English, the context may not make the intended denotation
sufficiently clear: Is it “before me in time” or “before me in space/location”?
Often the ambiguity may exist only in the target language. Hold this point in
memory, for we shall return to it.
13.
Step 2:
The grand context, as I will demonstrate, for Isaiah 43:10 is Exodus 20:1-6, that
is, “to follow the true God and not an idolic counterfeit.” I will, however,
insert the Hebrew for three relevant terms—God, gods, and the spatial adverb
“before”—as the transparency of the source language will shed much clarity:
a.
1: And God [Elohim]
spake all these words saying,
b.
2: I am the LORD thy God [Elohim], which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of bondage.
c.
3: Thou shalt have no other gods [elohim] before me [‘al-pánáya ‘unto my face’, i.e. ‘right in front of me’].
d.
4: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the
earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
e.
5: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor
serve them: for I the LORD thy God [Elohim]
am a jealous God [Él], visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations
of them that hate me;
f.
6: And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that
love me, and keep my commandments.
14.
Here we see the term “Elohim” used to denote
God, except in verse 5, “for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God”, where “Él”
is used in the noun phrase “jealous God”. Just as important to note is the
usage of the spatial adverbial “before”, inasmuch as the Hebrew says “unto my
face”.
15.
Most Christians are familiar with the “Ten
Commandments” from Exodus 20, but fewer have acquainted themselves with their
alternate reading from Leviticus 19. The citation is noteworthy:
a.
(Leviticus 19:4): Turn ye not unto idols, nor
make to yourselves molten gods [elohim]:
I am the LORD your God [Elohim].
16.
The reader is reminded that it is only in the
English transliteration where “elohim”, lower-case “e”, can be contrasted to
“Elohim”, upper-case “E”. What is interesting in this citation is that “molten
elohim” are contrasted to “the LORD your Elohim”. The contrast is salient, that
Elohim, God, could be (but should not be) replaced with an idolic counterfeit.
17.
Step 3:
Even God as “Él” can be (but should not be) replaced with an idolic
counterpart, Isaiah 46:5-9:
a.
5: To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal,
and compare me, that we may be like?
b.
6: They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh
silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god [él]: they fall down, yea, they worship.
c.
7: They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry
him, and set him in his place, and he standeth; from his place shall he not
remove: yea, one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer, nor save him out of
his trouble.
d.
8: Remember this, and shew yourselves men: bring
it again to mind, O ye transgressors.
e.
9: Remember the former things of old: for I am
God [Él], and there is none else; I
am God [Elohim] and there is none
like me.
18.
Here the voice of Deity decries the formation of
él as an idol, god, and declares himself to be Él, God, and God makes
the distinction between himself, who speaks and moves, and his idolic
counterpart, which must be carried and placed, and which cannot answer when
addressed. God declares that none of these idolic counterfeits is like him, a
real and responsive living God.
19.
Step 4: A temporal adverbial vis-à-vis
a spatial adverbial. We saw the use of the spatial adverbial “before”,
literally in Hebrew as “unto my face”. A clear usage of the temporal adverbial
is to be found in Jeremiah 1:5, where God declares that he both knew and
sanctified Jeremiah a prophet before Jeremiah’s birth from the womb.
a.
5: Before [be-terem
‘at-prior’] I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee; and before [be-terem ‘at-prior’] thou camest forth
out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the
nations.
20.
Here we have a clear usage of the temporal or
time adverbial “before”, and we learn two important lessons. First, that unlike
the English adverb “before” which has two usages, one temporal and the other
spatial, which duality can lead to an ambiguity, in Hebrew these two usages are separated between are two
separate adverbs. Consequently, the intended meaning (be it temporal or
spatial) is clear, in the source language.
21.
Conclusion:
As we return to the beginning of the blog posting, we are now much better
prepared to understand what Isaiah wrote in chapter 43:10:
Ye are my witnesses,
saith the LORD,
and my servant whom I have chosen:
that ye may know and believe me,
and understand that I am he:
in front of [le-fanay lit. ‘to my
face’, ‘in front of me’] me
there was no god [él ‘god’] formed,
neither shall there be behind [akhar
‘behind; after’] me.
22.
The message of this verse is quite different
when taken in the context of the Hebrew text. The preposition “before” has two
meanings in English, but the preposition used in Hebrew is clearly only a
spatial adverb, thus “in front of” is the correct translation. The Hebrew
preposition “akhar” means "after", both temporally and spatially (i.e. "behind"). Inasmuch as
the pair “before-after” begins clearly spatially, the correct understanding of “akhar”
is the spatial usage, “behind”. Therefore, usage of “god” here corresponds to an
English “lower-case” “g”, “god”, and is referring to an idol, as we also saw
Isaiah clearly describe in chapter 46:6. So the meaning of the KJV phrase “before
me there was no God formed nor shall there be after me” is correctly rendered “in
front of me there was no god formed nor shall there be behind me”, meaning, “I
have never proscribed idol worship, for no idol will stand before me (or between you and me), nor am I
in front of an idol as if in service to it.” The phrase has, consequently, no
bearing on the Latter-day Saint aphorism on Godhood, neither to promote it nor
to disallow it.
23.
One final note: Inasmuch as during the lifetime
of the prophet Isaiah the nation of Israel was moving rapidly towards separation
into two states and, of greater urgency, embracing the idolatrous religion of
its neighbors, neighbors who in many instances worshipped gods of the same
names as the Israelites, but whose worship disregarded the voice of God’s
prophets and proscribed idol veneration, one of Isaiah’s main messages was to
turn from idolatry and return to the true God (Isaiah 2:8):
a.
8: Their land also is full of idols; they
worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made:
24.
It is not surprising to find, consequently,
Isaiah decrying the worship of idols who bear the same names as the Israelite
Deity. We saw Isaiah 46:6, but the examples abound, as in 44:8 and 45:14.
a.
44:8: Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I
told thee from that time, and have declared it? ye are even my witnesses. Is
there a God beside me? Yea, there is no God. I know not any.
b.
45:14: …Surely God is in thee; and there is none
else, there is no God.
25.
I quoted the King James translations, but the
more correct rendition from the Hebrew does not leave the reader with the
perplexing declarations of “there is no God”:
a.
44:8: Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I
told thee from that time, and have declared it? ye are even my witnesses. Is
there a God [Eloah] but by me? there
is not. I know not a (cut) stone [“cut stone”, i.e. “idol”].
b.
45:14: …Surely God [Él] is in thee; and there is no other except God [Elohim].
26.
Oh my. Truly I can understand any reader’s
apprehension about delving into the Hebrew (or Aramaic, Greek, Arabic,
Armenian, Ge’ez, etc.) of ancient scripture. However, the reader proceeds is
entirely within the individual’s discretion. Hopefully, though, the reader will
have a healthy mistrust of translations (“never trust a translation…without checking
for yourself, prayerfully, humbly”). In the very least though, I have shared
only that which is actually textual.
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