1.3 Doesn't God Speak English?

In the last episode we talked about how many books are in the Bible, and the answer is 24 for Jews and somewhere between 66 and 80-something for Christians. 

Now, if we are going to study the Bible, which is made up of words, after all, we need to talk about language off the bat, so the question for today’s episode is “Doesn’t God speak English?”  

If God is God, then the answer is of course he speaks English and every other language of the world—Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili, and even Canadian. But, if we think of the Bible as God’s word, then, for our intents and purposes, he speaks only two languages: Hebrew and Greek. Actually, he speaks a tiny bit of Aramaic, too. 

We can neatly assign Hebrew and Greek to the two major sections of the Bible. The Old Testament was written originally in the Hebrew language, and the New Testament was written in the Greek language. And, we could end the episode there, but let’s dive a tad deeper so you get your money’s worth. 

First, we’ll discuss Hebrew. Hebrew is a language still spoken today, in fact, primarily in the state of Israel. Though, it’s different from the Hebrew of the Bible. Modern Hebrew was revived in the 1800s by some enterprising language experts. In fact, it’s one of the greatest language comeback stories of all time. Once a language goes extinct, it usually stays extinct. But, Hebrew came back after about 1500 years as, effectively, a dead language. It’s a resurrection story. 

But as for ancient Hebrew, or Biblical Hebrew, it emerges as a distinct spoken and written language in the Near East around the year 1000 BC, 3000 years ago. If you know your Bible history this roughly coincides with when the nation of Israel emerges with David as its king. So, we might assume David spoke a version of early Hebrew. That means, however, that all of those Bible characters from earlier times—people like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Moses—couldn’t have spoken Hebrew because there was no such language yet.

In the same way that Spanish and Portuguese and Italian all have direct roots in Latin, Hebrew had its roots in an older language, which was Canaanite. The Canaanite language and the other languages that emerged from it—also including Phoenician, by the way—were among the first to have alphabets for writing. An alphabet has graphics that stand for sounds, which is different from hieroglyphics, like in Egypt, where pictures stood for whole words or concepts. 

So, Hebrew first shows up 3000 years ago, but languages don’t stay the same. They evolve over time, and this is one way scholars can investigate when something was written. New words get introduced, word meanings change, pronunciations and spellings change, and that sort of thing. In English, we used to say thee and thou instead of you. Spectacles are now called glasses. The word computer for a calculating machine was never used before the 20th century. Take a quick glance at Shakespeare or Chaucer or Beowulf to find clear illustrations of how languages do not stay the same. 

This was true of Hebrew, too, of course. It evolved. It lasted as the primary language of the Israelites or Jewish people for about 800 years until roughly the 2nd century BC and then slowly began to die out.

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So, if the ancient Jewish people who wrote the Bible spoke Hebrew, it makes sense that their literature was all written in Hebrew, including the books that became the Old Testament. But, why, then, was the New Testament written in Greek instead? 

The reason is essentially conquest.  

We’ll talk more about the history of the Jews in upcoming episodes, but as far as language is concerned is basically that the Jews eventually got conquered, and as a result, their language changed. They were first subjugated in the 6th century BC by the Babylonians and Persians, who spoke and introduced a language called Aramaic, which was sort of a cousin to Hebrew. Later, after Alexander the Great and his armies swept across the Middle East in the 330s BC, the Jews were ruled by the Greeks. Some Jews remained in their homeland of Palestine at this time, but many were scattered to other places. As we see often in history, the languages of the conquering cultures displace the languages of those they conquer. History, then, is not only written by the victors, it is written in the language of the victors. 

Aramaic became the everyday language of most people living in the Middle East, and is likely how Jesus and his disciples communicated. But, Greek became the language of the educated classes and people living in other parts of the Mediterranean world. In summary, by the time of Jesus, Hebrew had pretty much gone away, and Aramaic and Greek had taken its place. Also, the Romans had taken over by that point.

While it is hard to be precise, scholars estimate that only about 3% of the population of Jesus’s time and place would have been literate. Also, reading and writing were distinct skills. Only specifically-trained people could write or would have had much access to expensive writing utensils.   

So, when the books of the New Testament were written by, obviously, literate people, mostly in the late 1st century, they were composed in Greek. In fact, by this point, even the Hebrew Old Testament books had been translated into Greek so that very few people by Jesus’s time were reading important books in Hebrew any longer.

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So, if God only spoke, as it were, Hebrew and Greek, how are you reading the Bible in English? 

Obviously, it’s because you have a translation of those ancient documents. 

There’s an old joke featuring a bumpkin who’s not too keen on education or learning foreign languages because, as the joke goes, “if English was good enough for St. Paul to write the Bible in, then it should be good enough for me.” I assume and hope there aren’t many people today who think the Bible was first written in English. But, it might be helpful anyway to point out a few quick facts about the Bible and the English language.

• English is a German language with very little relationship to either Greek or Hebrew in the family tree of languages.
• Old English first showed up around the year 500 AD in Britain. 
• Old English had morphed into Middle English by 1100 AD. 
• Familiar Modern English emerged around the year 1500, so anyone speaking English more than 500 or so years ago, you wouldn’t be able to understand them. In other words, your language has a 500 year history, while the Bible was completed about 1400 years before that. 
• The first English Bible was in Middle English—translated in the 1380s from Latin, which was itself a translation. This was called the Wycliffe Bible after the translator John Wycliffe, who was declared a heretic. It was a manuscript, written by hand.
• The first printing of a Bible in English happened in 1535, after the Protestant Reformation and, of course, the invention of the printing press. 
• The King James Version dates to 1611, and for almost 300 years it absolutely dominated English-speaking Christianity. It’s actually not a particularly good translation, though. We’ll talk more about that in some way-in-the-future episode.
• There are about nine major English translations of the Bible in circulation today, including the New International, New American, the Living Bible, the Revised Standard, the New King James and so forth. The one many scholars tend to favor as best translating the original texts is the New Revised Standard version. 

A brief but super-important point to make here, English speakers, is that reading something in English in the context of 21st century America is NOT AT ALL the same as reading something in an original ancient language with the specific contexts of the ancient audiences of the texts. From one language to another and across time and space, things get lost in translation, an important fact that will become a theme of this podcast. Translation is far more an art than a science, and we’ve all played the telephone game as kids. Don’t listen to gossip, and don’t put too much stock into individual words or phrases written in books that represent layers of translation stretching back into the ancient world. This is one of many reasons that literalism could get you in trouble.  

And finally for today, a quick last bit of trivia that I alluded to at the start of the episode: The vast, vast majority of the Bible started out in Hebrew or Greek. But, there’s actually a tiny bit that originated in a third language, which is Aramaic. Chapters 2 through 7 of Daniel were originally written in Aramaic, not Hebrew like the rest of the Old Testament. By the time those chapters were written, Aramaic had already displaced Hebrew as the primary language of most Jews.  

In the next episode, we’ll talk about chapters and verses and where they came from. 

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Less thumping. More understanding. See you next time.