BLUF: Words have meaning, and while that meaning can change over time, we need to take the time to understand. This means looking at words in context, at the time they were written, while still using a modern eye to examine them.
A number of years ago, I was attending a local church service, and the pastor alluded to the idea that shepherds were dirty social outcasts who everyone thought poorly of. His proof for this was that, when Samuel called David in from the sheepfold, he was filthy when he arrived, that David was, “just a shepherd.” I was a bit taken aback by this, because that’s not what history (or Biblical literature, btw) teaches us. I first learned about this from a Jewish scholar named Joel Hoffman, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning. I went to a talk he was having at a local synagogue, and the history of shepherds was the first thing he talked about.
Shepherds were tasked with protecting their flocks of sheep, out in the wilderness at the edge of the farmland surrounding their cities and towns. So you had a social center, a city or town, and outside that was farmland, and outside that was grazing for the sheep. Out there, shepherds had to contend with wolves, panthers, hyenas, feral pigs, foxes, jackals, and lions. Today, when we face up to those kinds of odds, we go armed with an AR-15 or other firearm. They had, and I kid you not, a stick (shepherd’s staff) and a sling with whatever rocks they could find (and the shepherd’s staff became the king’s scepter, and the rocks became the orb, later in history). That was it. Shepherds were, to say the least, bad ass.
In Biblical times, shepherds were seen as a form of superhero. They were the combat veterans, the first line of defense in case of an attack (by animal or human enemy). They had to defend their sheep with their lives, because those sheep were literally their livelihood. They were, indeed, dirty fellows because they lived out in the fields with greasy and filthy sheep. They slept in the open. They didn’t bathe often. So yes, when Samuel called David in to proclaim him the new leader of Israel, he was probably stinky and dirty. When the High Priest of your people summons you, you don’t stop long enough to grab a shower and a change of clothes; you hightail it to his presence, at all speed. No one thought David was stupid or idiotic. He was just young, the youngest of all his brothers, with a lot less life experience.
The implication by the pastor above was that David was amazing because he had JUST been a shepherd and now he was King, and therefore anyone could become king. This extremely subtle twist on the meaning of the word “shepherd” (from the modern perspective) changed the story dramatically. Originally, we had a young but capable and trustworthy person from a good family, working at a hard job that was dangerous and probably terrifying at times. That young man, devout and well brought up despite the dirt on him, was chosen to be King. There are lots of reasons to choose him as king, as evidenced in the rest of that particular chapter of the Old Testament. The pastor’s twist on the meaning of the word shepherd changed the story. In the new version, we have a boy (not a young man) who is dragged away from a job that is implied to be less challenging than burger flipping, utterly unprepared and thrust into the presence of a high official. He’s then told he’s going to become king.
In the original story, David’s protestations are because he has older brothers, likely more experienced and certainly with more rank than he had, as the youngest son. It had nothing to do with his abilities. In the pastor’s version, David’s just a nobody, a dirty person who sits and watches peaceful fluffy animals all day, suddenly catapulted into stardom. Look, anyone can lift themselves up with the help of God!
Those subtle changes in understanding can cause real problems. This might look like something minor, but when you observe how words have been twisted over the centuries, you can see how one small tweak becomes a minor misunderstanding, and that morphs into an error, which ends up being just plain wrong.
Words have meanings, but those meanings sometimes get lost over time. “Union,” for instance, was once a word that was synonymous with helping workers get necessary gains, such as weekends, no child labor, limits to the number of hours one might be forced to work in a row, and mandatory fire exits. It embraced the idea of “coming together” and “working together.” Today, it’s almost a swear word on the right, and on the left it’s more of a praise word, devoid of any actual meaning. All because the word stuck, but the subject changed.
Worse yet, sometimes words are forced into new meanings. Look at the mess today over the word “woman” or the over-use of the prefix “cis.” People are banging square words into round holes, and consequences be damned. It’s a big problem, because many of us are still using the words in their original meaning, while young people are changing those meanings and pulling the proverbial rug out from under us. Word meanings can organically shift, but this artificial forcing causes havoc.
There are other words that we debate. “We the People,” is one such phrase. Who are “we the people,” anyhow? Some people say that “we the people” are the citizens of America, but I beg to differ. These words first appear in the Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.“ At the time the Preamble was written, the United States were a thought, a hope, a prayer, and perhaps a paper declaration. They were not a reality, however. But the Preamble points to the power of this country: we the people. Not we, the government of these United States. Not we, the representatives of the thirteen states. We the people. Since at that time, those people were still legally citizens of the British Empire, it could not mean legal citizens of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“ In growing as a people and as a country, we’ve expanded our understanding of these words. We know that “men” refers to both women and men. We know that “men” doesn’t exclude someone based on the color of their skin, or their religion or lack thereof. These understandings have happened organically, over time, as we’ve become better and more understanding people. I believe, very strongly, that it’s what the Founders intended.
Hagar,
who prefers most things to be organic
the world has been severely polluted with political correctness.. many twist words to suit thier personal agenda.The constant dividing pushed by the ignorant is a Yuge factor. the “elite” want to remain elite and belittle those they deem beneath them.
some religious leaders suffer from personal agendas and use the words to enable thier personal agenda. We the People are smarter than they think we are.
minor nitpick, When the Preamble to the Constitution was written, the nation was under the articles of the confederacy, not British rule, thus the phrase “in order to form a more perfect union”; they were looking to fix the issues that were becoming evident with the Confederate States of America. However, you are correct that those people were not citizens of the United States of America, as that legal governmental entity had not yet been established.
I’ve had my own exposure to Bible translation and how the original meaning of the original language can be obscured. That can be simply because a distinction the original language can express isn’t found in the translation’s language.
Case in point, a plot element I helped Rolf Nelson with for his novel “Heretics of St. Possenti”. It’s about “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword”. That has, at times, been used as support for the notion that Jesus opposed armed self defense. And in English perhaps you could make that claim (though the particular translation I quoted doesn’t really do so). But the original Greek makes a grammatical distinction between “you do x all the time” and “you did x (perhaps only once)”. And the statement about the sword uses the former and not the latter syntax.
Another example I read about some time ago (but can’t verify myself because I don’t know Hebrew): the Commandment “thou shalt not kill” is not a correct translation; the correct translation is “thou shalt not murder”. Needless to say, there’s a world of difference between those two renderings.
RE: Bible translations – I’ve read the same about the “thou shalt not kill” vs. “thou shalt not murder”. In context, the Law is multiple books in the Old Testament. Contextually, the Commandment cannot simply be “thou shalt not kill”, because further on there are dozens of laws for which the prescribed penalty for violations is to be put to death! How does that reconcile with “thou shalt not kill”?
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Plus, the book of Joshua is a book of military conquest. Whole nations were killed in the battles and raids. And it was all sanctioned — nay, commanded — by the Lord through His angels. Again, how does that reconcile with “thou shalt not kill”?
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If the Commandment is more correctly translated as “thou shalt not murder” — IOW, you shall not kill unlawfully — then the execution of criminals and slayings in battle are legal killings, not murders.
Another example is, if I understand right, from the Talmud — the Jewish commentaries on the Bible. I think I saved this quote from one of the writings of Dovid Bendory, spiritual advisor of the JPFO.
“If he come to slay thee, forestall by slaying him.” — Sanhedrin, folio 72a.
Re Sheppard, there is also the obvious symbolism of the Sheppard cares for the flock as the king cares for his people.
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Re words and changing meaning, south park explained how it works best IMO in the “F-Word” episode.
When reading a writing from history, one must get out of their reader’s chair and do the research necessary to sit in the writer’s chair. It is not just a matter of grammatical context, but also of the character, societal, and religious elements of the environment in which the writer’s chair existed.
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For instance, fair and commonsense points are made concerning the OT character David in the days of his youth in the profession of a shepherd. A Jewish Shepherd had to be trained in all things sheep, which first and foremost was manage their feeding progress–not allow them to eat the grass to the sweet roots where parasites existed, and to counter the tactics of predators, which was derived from “Dress and Keep” both words taken from the farming and military realm in the days of Moses who wrote Genesis under the command of Jehovah.
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The third and what most Jews would emphasize as most important, was that sheep were needed for temple practices in the worship of Jehovah God. The best of the best had to be cared for in strict disciplines for Passover. Specifically, the Spring Lambs had to be preserved perfectly for this most holy day.
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Therefore, when having been commissioned to appear before Samuel, he did what he was most familiar with already, he purified himself through the requirements of the law and prepared himself spiritually and physically to be perfectly clean for his summons before the High Priest. This process was achieved in the morning and in the evening. he was travelling to Samuel, ready to offer the respect due the High Priest.
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To understand a Jew, one must become a Jew, and for a gentile in American in 2024, this is not quickly achieved–it took David less than a half day to become prepared, but it would far more time for a person today to become “prepared’ to understand the exact meaning of the OT text. And without doubt, knowing the language of the time of the writing and the cultural and religious customs is essential to arriving at the writer’s intentions for the reader at any time in human history to understand.
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Moving on to the founding documents, “We the People”, when it was written meant, all people who defied British rule and endeavored to be a part of the foundation of a new nation under God. And it was penned within the context of the various formations of people, both in social, ethical, and spiritual realms shared by those in agreement, unified under a common existence–the many birthing’s of a people’s new nation. Each geographical area proclaimed they were “The People” included within “We”—My Scottish American Clans raised an American Flag to signal solidarity, as did all the other ethnic peoples across the geographical landscape who fought everything to take up land here in this great land.
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But when we read “We the People” today we no longer have that same writer’s chair familiar to us. But the closest thought that addresses even remotely what the writer’s experienced and conveyed when they did write the founding documents, was similar to what we say today, we are Citizens of the USA. Therefore, “We the People” is synonymous to and grammatically correct with, “Citizens”.
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As to the Declaration of Independence, it strictly refers only to those “We the People” who endeavored to create a new nation because they were at the very least equal with Britian as viewed by the Creator Himself. Therefore, Britian held no power over Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, i.e. to be “We the People” and no longer subject of the crown.
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Yes, words have meanings, and the erosion of language is most volatile through the expansion and reordering of the historical meanings. For if one cannot learn from history as in the day the historical recorded was penned, he will be doomed to repeat the lessons without having access to the truth which those lessons yielded.
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In the Bible the word “Conversation” is used many times and never is it pointing to an actual event of the exchange of words verbally. Instead, it always refers to ‘One’s manner of life as others perceive it to be’, in other words there’s a sense of common accountability, willing worked at for the benefit of all around you, where you live. We refer to it as a Moral Compass a Moral Standing within the community.
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We the People is a designation signifying the identity of a person’s conversation. In the Bible the conversation pointed toward the Creator The God of Israel, in the early days of the formation of the USA “We the People” referred to the conversation of each new legal ethnic settlement across America.
Read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”.
Great Post!
Ah, shepherds! If you ever look at the Heliand, the Saxon-language gloss on the Bible prepared by missionaries in the 800s-900s, you will find that the angels announced the birth of Jesus in Bethlehmburg hill fort. They announce it to horse herders, who were out watching the horses by night.
Why?
Because in the Saxon society of the time, slaves watched the sheep. The sons of nobles took care of the horses. A king’s birth would never, ever have been told to slaves first, but to the people who mattered and who would later form part of his war band. (Yes, Jesus has a war band in the Heliand. Because he was a king, and kings have war bands.)
Cultural differences matter. The trouble is when modern people try to impose what they think culture should be on other times, places, and words. From “all men” to “all men and women” to “all people” to “all creatures” (because non-human animals are people too!) to “all presences” (because rivers are beings and should have legal standing along with the fish and critters in the water.)*
*I kid you not. Look at some of the law suits recently about the legal rights of fish in rivers and their priority in water-rights cases.
Well, the Magna Carta banned fish weirs, so it’s not a new concept.
Re “all men” to “all men and women” — the reason I object to that sort of language-mangling is that it’s unnecessary. In English as in many other languages it has always been the case that the masculine words are used in two ways: (1) when speaking of a subject known to be male, (2) when speaking generally, with the gender either not known or not significant. The people inflicting “they” as a singular pronoun on us are deliberately ignoring (2) and mangling syntax to fit their misunderstanding (or misrepresentation).
Come to think of it, some time ago AOC claimed that a certain Constitutional limitation didn’t apply to women because it spoke of “man”. That was of course a lie. It didn’t help that the actual text uses the word “person”. 🙂
Paul said: “The people inflicting “they” as a singular pronoun on us are deliberately ignoring (2) and mangling syntax to fit their misunderstanding (or misrepresentation).”
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Well… yes and no. From a *strictly* grammatical standpoint, the use of the word “they” really isn’t wrong. There are many instances where we instinctively use “they” because “he” would be misconstrued. As an example, I used this one the other day: “The mail came. They dropped it off on the porch.” The term “they” was used in reference to whomever dropped off the mail, not the mail service as a whole. English speakers do this unconsciously quite a bit. The word “they” comes down to us from the Scandinavians, I believe, with one of the earliest references to it in the 1200s or thereabout. The definition at that time was “the last person or thing being talked about.”
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All that said, the use of the word “they” is very itchy in my brain. I dislike it. I use it because if someone can go to the trouble of using my middle name instead of my first (as I do in the real world), then I can do my best to remember to call them “they”. (Note, “them” there… because the subject wasn’t defined as male or female, and could have been one, the other, or both, “they” and “them” are grammatically correct.)
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To step back to the subject above, however, to the Framers the word “man” was often inclusive to women… but not always. Otherwise, women would have voted from day one, and we did not. We were excluded, and one (though not necessarily the only) reason was because of that pesky word: man. I understand that, when I read the Preamble, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, that all of those words apply equally to men and to women, to black and to white, to gay, straight, and everything else. At the time it was written, it meant “people” rather than specifically “human beings with outward plumbing.” That’s obvious not only in the texts mentioned, but in other writings by the Framers, at and around the time.
Words no longer have prescribed meanings. Now they mean whatever is politically expedient and useful.
And whoever controls those ever shifting meanings also controls society.