More on Mistranslations of the Bible (III)

In the two previous installments of this series I told how I had opened the Bible at random and come across a verse that had NEVER been honestly and correctly translated into English. Only the Hebrew told what had really happened, but this had never been passed on to us, owing to a two-thousand-year conspiracy of silence. The passage in question is 1 Samuel 20.41, and it leaves no doubt about the Biblical David's sexuality: the hero and future King of Israel, author of some of the world's earliest and best poetry, was either gay or bi. So was Shakespeare, but we don't talk much about that, either.

Our dishonesty in translation (for some 2,000 years), and our obstinate silence about David's sexuality have served to perpetuate the social biases of millennia, and encouraged hateful violence against sexual minorities. But that is not all that they have done.

It is said that "all that lives, moves, and only what is dead, does not." "Moves," in this case, means "changes."When we put a religion into a tight strait jacket of social biases from 3,000 years ago, we, even if it is not our intention, condemn that religion to death. When we put ourselves into that same strait jacket, we condemn ourselves to injustice, mercilessness, and hate.

It is no coincidence that the Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruach, which can be either masculine or feminine, and its literal meaning is "wind." Like the wind, Spirit is invisible, but it is characterized by movement, and can be extremely powerful. Spirit, the source of our life, moves and changes. So must we.

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.