Saturday, August 3, 2019

Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - Talking About God

I want to talk about God. It’s such a loaded word. It has so many layers of social and cultural meaning that it’s hard not to imagine It to be an entity unto Itself.

I’m working on an academic project, part of which involves reading the Bible from beginning to end. I came across an interesting verse which surprised me. Without going too deep for the limited space available here, in Exodus 4:24, it describes how the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But the line didn’t make any sense to me. Why would God wish to kill Moses right after he gave him a big mission?

After a bit of research, including reading various interpretations of why God might want to kill Moses out of the blue like that, I found out that the original Hebrew of the text didn’t say Moses by name. It just had the word for the male pronoun ‘him.’ Translators had made that sentence into the first line of a new paragraph rather than the last line of the previous one and declared the “him“ to be Moses. The text actually tells us that God sought out the first born son of Pharaoh to kill him. Not Moses.

But countless modern translations of the Bible say that it is Moses whom God sought to kill, each of them perpetuating a small misunderstanding even further.

Two questions arise for me. One, how many other instances are there like this? And two, if we chose to see it through the lens of a belief in an infallible God, was it on purpose?

From a humanist perspective, this is a mistranslation which is neither surprising nor proof that we needn’t be careful about what we choose to believe. From the theist perspective, we assume there is a divine purpose to all things.

I personally believe the latter. But that does not diminish the accuracy of the humanist perspective here. This line is an important mistranslation. One can only assume it’s the tip of the iceberg. This one is only noticeable because of its grammatical confusion regarding the lack of antecedent. What else has been misunderstood through mistakes of translation such as this which we have not yet nor may ever notice? What are the unintended consequences of those mistakes? I shudder to wonder. But are they unintended?

The devout theist would say, “God must have done it on purpose.“ Which is a perplexing thought, because why would God mislead us deliberately? However, I’m not so sure we are being misled as much as we are being encouraged toward critical thought and more sophisticated ways of approaching an idea over time and through generations. We learn from our own mistakes time and time again. Sometimes considerably more than we would have learned had we not made the mistake in the first place. What might we learn from this one?

I prefer to believe in the idea of a Higher Power. That preference has implications regarding the rest of what I believe about the world. So, in that sense, you could say I believe in what common society refers to as “God.“ My mother always taught me that everything happens for a reason and that reason is always a good one. I have also been endlessly taught that God is Love. And I believe it, too. Those three thoughts are my entire theology.

Since I choose to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that the reason is good, and because I also choose to believe that what I experience is meant to help me evolve in both physical and spiritual ways, I will assume that just because I don’t understand it, doesn’t mean there isn’t love behind it. That is my faith.

What if we decided to give God a bit more credit? What if we were finally to acknowledge the implications of what we have all along been telling ourselves about the nature of God? Is the paint covering a divine long-term strategy for humanity being gently flaked away here? We tell ourselves that God is our teacher, among other things. How infinitely sophisticated might that teaching be? I guess we will only ever learn that according to how sophisticated we become over time. Some horizons can only be seen from the mountaintop. What have we not yet discovered? Is God proud of us for noticing this mistranslation? Was the ambiguity of selecting a pronoun rather than a name on purpose? The rabbit hole is too deep for that. But it makes one curious...

Ultimately, it all means this: We have to let go of what we’ve been told. Or at least loosen our grip a little. We have to be more humble about what we think is truth. We have to open our hearts to the possibility that all may not be as it appears. The best news is that you don’t have to lose your faith in God to do it. Your faith may even be enhanced. Feel free to cherish what you have learned so far, but do not expect it to be your truth forever. Because truth changes. Even God says so.

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