“Going to the mattresses” with ancient Hebrew was harder than you think. Or perhaps you shouldn’t expect to learn an entire ancient language and answer the debate of gender roles in the church within an hour of internet research. In the end, I spent hours poring over resource after resource to try and understand the meaning of something long obscured by translation. The word ‘ezer surprisingly came from two root words that individually meant “power” and “strength.” In fact, most of the times ‘ezer occurs in the Old Testament have nothing to do with submissive women baking bread for hungry rabbis. ‘Ezer most often describes God, and in a way that hardly highlights His feminine side. R. David Freedman points out in the IX Biblical Archaelogy Review that the word ‘ezer comes from two roots in the ancient language. One meaning to rescue or save; the other, to be strong. The roots differed only by a small nuance in the pronunciation, a guttural prefix that over time merged together to give us the word that we find in the Hebrew text.
Around 1500 B.C. these two roots began to be represented as one sign, although the original meanings were retained, similar to how the English word “bank” can mean several different things though its spelling does not change in context. Of the eighty-some times different forms of ‘ezer (help, helper, helping) are found in the Old Testament, only 21 of those are nouns. For anyone less dorky than me in high school, this is the difference between saying “I’m going to the bank” (n.) and basketball advice of banking the ball off the backboard on a lay-up (v). i.e., nouns hang together.
Two of the 21 nouns are the debut of women in the creation story. The other 19 noun-sightings refer either to God or to military allies. I didn’t believe it at first, so I used an online generator to search three versions of the Bible for the word help. I’m not kidding, in the King James Version (the first English translation of the Hebrew Bible), about 99.9% of the usages of ‘ezer refer to God, someone using a sword to fight for someone, or providing serious military aid to the Israelites. The other .1% were in the Deuteronomic laws where people are talking about helping pick up each other’s asses (donkeys, not the other kind) when they fell down. There was so much talk about ‘ezers succoring cities, that I have never been more grateful for that .1% in Deuteronomy (or asses) in my life.
Some instances where ‘ezer refers to military allies are the other side of the street, too. It’s both offensive and defensive. Besides noting God’s definitive ‘ezership in Isaiah 41, another passage in I Chronicles really struck me as a little ‘ezer-happy, and not because it’s about women. It is about David’s mighty men. If you have never read about these imposing men of glory, turn your Bible there now and do some preliminary jaw exercises to get ready for all the times it is going to hit the floor. These were the men who, beginning in I Chronicles 11, are described as the greatest warriors in a time with some pretty snazzy ancient civilizations.
The greatest of these were David’s elite chiefs, who supervised not entry-level soldiers, but a whole sub-sect of elite soliders who themselves supervised warriors that made the high cut. Check this. David had eleven chiefs overseeing his army commanders, a total of 30 elite warriors, who in turn oversaw the hundreds of high-end soldiers. These 11 chiefs were from the tribe of Gad, who were lions among men. The loser of the chiefs scored a piddly 100 kills in one battle; the greatest, 1000 (I Cor 12:8b). The Gadites stood mostly in leadership position among David’s mighty men. Take a wild guess at the name of the first-in-command. Shocking…his name was Ezer.
Considering the significance of names in Biblical times and the matchless role Ezer played, the lion of lions, is a pretty lucid cultural clue. Israelite children given birth names based on their meaning, but often Biblical names also represent the place or role of a person in the context of the story they are found in, much the same as people accrue nicknames through their characteristics and adopted roles and then carry those names with them. Ezer’s place in Scripture is not only among David’s men in a time of war and conquering, it is first among the leaders of David’s greatest men. It is also striking to me that, with six other occurrences of the word ‘help’ in Chapter 12 alone, Ezer’s name is the only occurrence not translated from the Hebrew.
I have a theory that this name was not translated because Gutenberg hired a real deadbeat to play copy editor before the original KJ went to press. They didn’t go out for lattes when they got to this chapter, say to heck with it when they got back and just hit ‘print.’ Chief Ezer was a man of unparalleled power and strength in his nation, and relegating his name to “Imahelper” didn’t quite fit the bill.
Based on this theory, I believe it tells us something about the original meaning of the word ‘ezer. I believe it tells us that it really does mean power and strength. So why do we often place a subservial role around women based on the Genesis ‘ezer’s when so many other instances this word is used in the Old Testament it talks about freakin William Wallace? I wondered.
Perhaps a more important question you have at this moment is, What does this have to do with the original question? I mean, nice useless vocabulary lesson, Nagel, but how does this really illumine God’s original intention for women?
Firstly, it puts the beat back into the lyrics “I got the power.” Secondly, however, it distills the acquired connotation of “helpmeet” from the original subtext that is surrounded by implications of power, strength and serious aid being dealt. From a linguistic perspective, we can’t just dismiss the blurb that follows ‘ezer, but we also can’t dismiss the original character simply because it modifies another word. That’s perhaps the source of a lot of confusion. If k’neged modifies ’ezer, then all bets are off for linking it back to the common theme of this noun in its OT career. If ‘ezer modifies k’neged, then its root meaning uniquely signifies something.
What it may signify will be continued in another post....
No comments:
Post a Comment