Month: June 2010

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

The odds that it is being infringed went down this week when, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (.pdf)in which it held that the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms applies not only to the federal government but to state and local governments as well.

Because this isn’t a legal blog, I’m going to pass over the legal intricacies and arguments that the case involved (though they are fascinating) and go to the moral issue in question: Is it a good idea for people to have the right to own guns?

Of course, we are not talking about all people without exception. As the decision in this Supreme Court case as well as the previous one noted, lawmakers can reasonably bar felons and the mentally ill from owning guns. (Personally, I would change “felons” to “violent criminals,” due to the absurd extent to which federal law has started classifying things as felonies; I’d also shore up “mentally ill” to make sure that only those who pose a danger to themselves or others are intended, due to the tendencies to classify everything under the sun as a mental illness, but those are other issues.) The question is: Should ordinary, law-abiding, mentally stable individuals be allowed to own guns?

And by “guns” I mean “firearms that are in functional condition,” not “pieces of disassembled metal that could be taken out of a locked container and/or assembled and/or unlocked and/or loaded and so be turned into functional firearms in a few minutes time.” (Sorry for the verbal gymnastics, but that is the state of affairs to which opponents of gun rights have pushed things.)

So: Should ordinary people be allowed to own guns?

Guns are marvelous tools. That’s why we fight wars with them. On a smaller scale, we also defend ourselves with them, we hunt with them, obtain food with them, control dangerous predators like bears and mountain lions with them, control animal populations like deer that would otherwise suffer unless culled, signal the start of sporting events with them, and use them in marksmanship competitions.

The last two cases are atypical. Starter pistols are loaded with blanks or caps and are or are used in a deliberately non-lethal way. Similarly, marksmanship competitions are not the main use for which guns are intended.

The situations we are concerned with are those in which guns are aimed at their primary targets: animals or humans.

What about animals?

The Church acknowledges that animals do not have rights the way humans do. Consequently, it is never murder to kill an animal and we have the right to eat animals, use their skins, etc. Unnecessary cruelty toward animals is a sin, but this involves an abuse of human nature rather than a violation of an animal’s rights. Activities like hunting, obtaining food, eliminating predators that pose a danger to humans or livestock, and culling animal populations to keep them in balance are morally licit in principle.

Still, these considerations don’t go to the use of firearms that gun control advocates are most concerned about, so let’s look at the issue of using firearms against other humans.

What we are talking about, essentially, is war on the individual scale.

The Church views war as something that is always a tragedy, but it acknowledges that the use of warfare is mortally legitimate when a nation needs to protect its (or others’) interests and there is no less destructive practically way to do this.

In the same way, the Church recognizes an individual right of self defense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor…. the one is intended, the other is not.”

Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful…. Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.

Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life. Preserving the common good requires rendering the unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm [CCC 2263-2265].

So we have a right, and at times a duty, to use lethal force in defending life. Does that translate into a right to own guns?

Well, guns are remarkably good tools for administering lethal force—and by extension they are remarkably good tools for keeping aggressors at bay. They are also tremendous equalizers.

Put on your Father Brown hat for a moment and think like a criminal—a home invader. Whose home do you want to invade? One with a bunch of people in it, including at least one large adult male? Or a home with only one person in it, who happens to be smaller, female, and perhaps elderly? If you are a home invader, you stand a better chance at holding your own in the latter circumstance than the former, making it the logical (if monstrous) choice for you.

But suppose the little old lady has a gun! And goes to the range regularly! And has carefully thought through what she would do in the event of a home invasion!

Suddenly you’re on a much more equal footing with your potential victim—even if you, the home invader, yourself have a gun.

And, of course, criminals often do have guns. If the one attempting to victimize you has one, and if you have a right and/or duty to defend yourself against him (which the Church acknowledges you do) then that right entails the means you will need to perform the act of legitimate defense. In other words, it entails a right and/or duty to use a gun—unless you have some other means of effectively defending yourself against an attacker with a gun (e.g., maybe you’re Wonder Woman and can do bullets and bracelets).

Or suppose that your attacker doesn’t have a gun but that he’s just much more physically powerful, agile, and skilled at violence than you are. To exercise your right to or fulfill your duty to perform legitimate defense in such a situation, you need something to equalize matters, and a gun is a very good option. Perhaps the only one.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world in which all weapons could be beaten into ploughshares and nobody would make individual war any more, but we’re not in that world, yet, and ordinary people still have that right and/or duty to defend themselves and others, using lethal force if necessary.

So there is a significant case to be made that ordinary, law-abiding, mentally-stable people ought to be able to own guns.

Of course, there are arguments against this—that having more guns around increases gun violence, that there would be gun accidents, etc.

Such claims should not be taken uncritically.

There are two sides to this story, as there are to so many, and people on both sides of the issue need to have their facts and arguments vetted.

Statistical arguments are interesting and need to be given their proper weight. So does the question of what you, personally, would do if you (God forbid) find yourself in such a desperate situation.

Because the saying is true: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is it? (Pt. 2)

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let’s look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I’d like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term anti-Semite. This is a misnomer. It is used to refer to hatred of Jews, though the category “Semite” properly includes people who aren’t Jews. Nevertheless, that is how the term is used. I suggest that we not fight about the word and just note that it is a misnomer that is in popular use and move on.

Now: What claims besides revelation might one appeal to in support of the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory of Israel?

1) The legal argument: This would involve asserting that some entity or entities that had legal title to this territory in the 20th century lawfully gave it to the present Israeli governing entity as a Jewish homeland. And, in fact, many people do make this claim.

While it would be an interesting legal debate to thrash this out, we’re not going to do that on this blog. I am not an expert on the law, especially as it pertains to this question, and it would exceed the capacity of a multi-issue blog like this to review all the relevant information and arrive at a firm conclusion. Therefore, aware that there is more than one side to this argument, I would suppose that reasonable people could take different views on the issue.

Further, regardless of whether civil (or international or whatever) law supports does not deal directly with the question of what is ethical. Human law can support all kind of wicked and unjust things, and so even if human law supports something, that isn’t itself decisive for the question of whether the thing is moral (which is the kind of question this blog is more interested in).

So let’s look at other grounds.

2) The ancestral argument: Some in the combox have asserted that the Jewish people have a right to the land of Israel based on the fact that their ancestors lived there a long time ago.

This strikes me as the least convincing argument on this issue. The fact is that human populations move all over the place during history. Often they are forced out of one land, and at some point any claim they have to it lapses. That fact that modern Jews’ ancestors had title to the property 1900 years ago doesn’t mean that they presently do any more than I have title to where my ancestors lived 1900 years ago.

In view of the historical memory of the Land and in view of the biblical promise regarding it, it is understandable—especially after the Holocaust—that there would be a desire to immigrate there and create a Jewish haven state there, but this is a natural desire—not a moral right to do so. Based on our individual and corporate histories, there are all kinds of desires we might naturally have about the way we’d like the world to be, but that doesn’t give us the moral right to go out and try to bring them about. Whether we have a moral right to take action regarding a wish or desire is a separate question than whether is it natural for us to wish it.

Human migration is so extensive in history that all of our ancestors have been kicked out of lots of places at various stages. In fact, if the Out of Africa theory is true, all non-Africans’ ancestors at one point must have gone through the very territory currently occupied by Israel. That doesn’t give all non-Africans title to this plot of land, either.

So . . . where your distant ancestors lived doesn’t mean that you get to reclaim the place today.

(Unless God has said you can, but that’s a different ground. It’s the revelation claim, not a “we used to live here” claim.)

3) Right of conquest: Historically a lot of people have felt that if you conquer a land, it’s yours. The fact you conquered it gives you a right to it.

One problem for using this argument in the case of Israel is that it works contrary to the legal argument that many wish to use. If the land was given to the Israelis legally then it wasn’t obtained by conquest—at least in the traditional sense (we’ll get to an untraditional one, below).

The conquest claim might, however, be used for territory like the West Bank since that was obtained in war.

But the right of conquest isn’t generally acknowledged today. The fact you conquered something may have given you title to it in the middle ages (or even more recently), but it doesn’t today. America conquered Iraq, but that doesn’t mean we own it. In fact, there is a widespread sentiment that America should get out of Iraq as soon as practical.

Today if you want to claim moral title to a land, you need something more than “We militarily defeated the people who were living there.”

4) Right of self-determination: The argument here would be something like: Since the legitimacy of government depends on the consent of the governed, the majority of people who actually live in a land get to determine how it is governed and by whom. Therefore, since the majority of people currently living in the territory of Israel are Israelis and, it would seem, support the existence of Israel, they have title to the land.

You might also call this the right of present possession and, as the old saying goes, “possession is nine tenths of the law.”

This is a more persuasive argument than the ones we have considered thus far in this post. Some version of the right of self-determination in conjunction with the present possession of a territory must underly the moral right that every nation state has to its territory. Whether Israel’s case is justified is a question that has to be answered, but at least this argument presents us with a potentially successful argument.

Note, however, that it only addresses the question of whether the Israelis now have moral title to the land, not whether they did so in the past or whether they will in the future.

If we consider the past, it is quickly recognized that in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries there was a massive migration of Jewish people into the territory of Palestine—with an eye to potentially founding a Jewish state or haven state there, which would mean displacing or making some other arrangement with the people who were already living there.

The desirability of creating a Jewish haven and the understandability of wanting to creating it here doesn’t mean that it was automatically moral to do so. What this amounts to is a non-military invasion of the territory with an eye to claiming it for yourself—the nontraditional form of conquest mentioned earlier.

Certainly one can see how the then-present inhabitants of the territory would object to this project, just as Native Americans could reasonably object to the mass migrations of European colonists with the same designs . . . or the way Mexicans might have viewed with suspicion the immigration of lots of potentially rebellious Anglos into Texas in the early 1800s . . . or the way Americans in the modern Southwest might view with suspicion the Reconquista sentiments expressed by some recent immigrants.

I don’t say that to pass judgment on any of these groups. It’s just a fact of history that immigrants can overwhelm and eventually take control of the lands to which they migrate. Whether they were justified in doing so is a complex moral question to which there is no automatically right or wrong answer. People do need places to live, and sometimes they need to migrate. When they migrate, some places are more rational to migrate to than others. And if enough of them migrate, over time it will have a natural impact on the governance of the region.

Because there is a natural tendency for everyone to identify their own interests with what is morally right, those who are doing the migrating have a natural tendency to think that it is morally right for them to do so, and those whose territory is being migrated to have a natural tendency to view the situation with concern or alarm and to think that it is morally wrong.

So it is reasonable for Jewish immigrants to the territory of modern Israel to view the migration as justified (or even necessary), and it is natural for Palestinians (then and now)  to view it as unnecessary and unjustified.

In other words: People can have different views on this subject.

There does come a point, if a migration is big enough, where a new governing situation becomes rational or even obligatory. The situation of a tiny nativist group holding all governing authority in the face of a disenfranchised majority class is going to lead to really bad situations (think: Apartheid, only with the natives being the rulers and the immigrants being the disenfranchised). The immigrant class must have its say in determining the governance of the region, and if it is big enough, it’s going to end up exercising that governance itself.

When that happens, a new civil order has been achieved. Hopefully it will be a just order (often it is not). Hopefully it will be achieved bloodlessly (often it is not). But the immigrant class will be the new rulers, and legitimately so.

One can hold, then, that this is the situation that applies in modern Israel, and that the common good is best secured by allowing the state to continue to exist. This would mean that the Israelis have a moral right to the territory (or at least some of the territory) now, regardless of whether they achieved this by legitimate means.

Or one can deny this and argue that the presence of modern Israel is a destabilizing element that will ultimately harm the common good of the parties involved—or that is presently harming the common good of the parties—and that it would be better to peacefully dismantle it.

I don’t see that as happening any time in the near future. A more likely scenario to my mind is that nuclear proliferation in Muslim states may at some point lead to the destruction of Israel.

That’s not at all something I wish for, but it is an eminently possible occurrence in the imminent future.

One could thus argue that, while Israel for a time held the land legitimately, it could cease to do so in the future, should the situation grow more unstable and the presence of Israel lead to great harm to the common good of the parties involved.

So just as this theory does not mean Israel achieved its title to the land through moral means, it also does not mean that it necessarily will keep its title in the future.

All of these are positions one could entertain legitimately. I’m not going to tell you which you should believe. I’m just trying to point out the scope that exists for diversity of opinion.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is It Anyway? (Pt. 1)

Recently we were discussing the Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism ipso facto makes one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply not true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

Just to eliminate potential confusion at the outset, let’s define our terms. I will be using the term “Zionism” in two senses: (1) The belief that the modern state of Israel should have been founded and (2) the belief that the modern state of Israel should continue to exist. There are other ways in which the term can be and historically has been used, but these are the two ideas that we will interact with here.

Note that one can be a Zionist in one sense but not the other. One could be a Zionist in sense (2) only and hold that, while the modern state of Israel should not have been created, now that it has been, it has a right to defend itself and to continue to exist. On the other hand, one could be a Zionist in sense (1) only and hold—for example—that, while it was right to create the modern state of Israel, that state has morally forfeited its right to exist due to human rights violations or that while it may have been right to found the state of Israel in the 20th century, if unstable Arab states start getting nukes and a regional nuclear war is about to start then the best thing for the welfare of the Jewish people would be to leave the region.

Many Jewish people today are Zionists in both sense (1) and sense (2), though not all. There are quite a number who are sense (2) only Zionists, and an even-more-nuclear-future could give rise to a significant number of sense (1) only Zionists.

Some Jewish people are Zionists in neither sense (1) nor sense (2). This is the case, for example, with the gentlemen pictured, who are members of Neturei Karta, who hold a view that was quite common among Orthodox Jews prior to the founding of Israel.

This view is that the Jewish people should not try to control the land of Palestine on their own and that they should regain statehood there only through the coming and the actions of the Messiah. Trying to take control of Palestine prior to that point, on this view, constitutes a usurpation of God’s plan and is viewed as a violation of the three oaths held to regulate relations between the Jewish people and the nations during the present age.

Neturei Karta is by no means the only Jewish group holding this view, BTW.

These people are not anti-Semites. They don’t even deny that the Jewish people have a special title to the land of Palestine. They simply see the legitimate control of this land as an eschatological reality that should not be confused with contemporary Zionist aspirations.

I thus hope that the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a little more clear and that we can discuss the issue without people wanting to automatically play the anti-Semitism card.

That said: Who owns the land?

There are two main perspectives from which this question needs to be evaluated: the prophetic and the ethical. In this post we’ll look at the prophetic perspective.

Many here in America have reflexively treated the prophetic aspect of the question as unambiguous and definitive: God promised Israel the land in the Old Testament, and so it’s theirs. Case closed.

But prophesy often is not so straightforward in its interpretation or application. God also made it clear that, if Israel committed certain sins—or sins of a certain character and magnitude—that it would be dispossessed of its land, at least for periods of time. And there are passages warning the Jewish people to submit to their conquerors and that they will not be restored to the land for a set time and things like that.

There is also the question of the way in which many Old Testament prophesies have found fulfillment through Christ in ways that would not have been expected previously. The impact that this phenomenon has on the promises regarding the land is something that cannot be ignored.

For its part, the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Jewish people still have a special role in God’s plan. That’s something I’ve written about before. But the Church does not teach that the Jewish people have a right to possess the land of the modern state of Israel in the present day by divine promise. In fact, the Holy See has studiously avoided saying that.

It has even gone so far, in its 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, to state:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that, owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders [art. 11:2].

In its specific application, this passage is referring to disputed territories like the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the territory of Israel as a whole, but the same principle applies in general. The Holy See treats the question of what people have title to what territory as a temporal affair and thus something that goes beyond the Church’s purview. The Church can certainly raise moral objections to various courses of action, like trying to forcibly kick out the people who currently have title to a territory. But the question of who has title is treated as a temporal rather than theological issue. The Church does not hold that any particular people has an immutable divine right to a particular territory.

This is not to say that a Catholic could not hold that Israel does have a right to the land in the present day due to God’s promise. That is an opinion within the realm of permitted theological speculation. But it is not something the Church has signed off on. The Church has remained conspicuously neutral on that theological question as it applies in our age.

One could thus hold the opinion that the Jewish people have a right to that land in our day, that they have a right to the land but not in our day (perhaps at the Second Coming or near it, if we are not now near it), or that they no longer have a special right to the land. Each view is permitted.

This deals with the subject from the prophetic perspective. What about the ethical one?

That will be the subject of our next post.

In the meantime: What are your thoughts?

Antichrist Update!

In my previous post, I took on a silly video that has more than a million views of different versions of it. The video centered on Jesus’ statement in Luke 10:18 that, after the disciples had come back from a preaching mission, Our Lord had seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven” and claimed that if you back translated this statement from Greek to Aramaic and then to Hebrew that “lighting from heaven” would come out as “baraq o baw-maw” or “Barack Obama.” This, the nameless creator of the video suggested, might mean that Jesus was telling us the Antichrist’s name would be Barack Obama.

I greeted the logic of this video with a great big gift bag full of “Nope.”

Whatever Barack Obama’s role may be in the great scheme of things, whether he’s The One who will cause the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal or whether he’s just the one who went golfing while the Gulf filled up with oil, Luke 10:18 doesn’t establish him as the Antichrist.

One reason, as previously explained, is that this passage isn’t a prophecy at all. On its face, it appears to be Jesus congratulating the disciples on a well done evangelization mission.

Another reason, as previously explained, is that if you translated “lighting from heaven” back into either Aramaic or Hebrew, you wouldn’t get “baraq o baw-maw.” Instead, you’d get something like “baraq min ha-shamayim” (Hebrew) or “barqa min shmaya” (Aramaic).

After posting my post, I thought, “Hey, this isn’t the first time somebody has translated this phrase into this pair of languages. Let’s see what we find if we look it up in a Hebrew New Testament an an Aramaic New Testament!”

So that’s what I did.

Consulting this Hebrew New Testament [.pdf] online, we find that the phrase in the passage is this:

 

Transliterating that from right to left, it reads “kbaraq min ha-shamayim” (ignoring the effect of a few Hebrew punctuation marks that don’t transliterate well into English). The “k” on the front of this is actually a different word. It’s a preposition meaning “as” or “like,” which is part of what Our Lord was just saying: “like lighting from heaven.” But if you just want the phrase “lightning from heaven,” you’d leave off the “k.”

So the translators of this Hebrew New Testament bore out what I said: If you translate the phrase into Hebrew, you’d expect to see “baraq min ha-shamayim,” not something that sounds like “Barack Obama.”

And if you don’t happen to know the Hebrew alphabet, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!

Of course the whole Hebrew thing is really just a red herring—or maybe that should be a red lox—because Jesus wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew in this combination, but in all likelihood Aramaic. The video maker just jumped to Hebrew because he knew even less about Aramaic than he did about Hebrew.

So what happens if we check an Aramaic New Testament?

The standard Aramaic translation of the New Testament is the Pshitta, a version of which is online here. This version happens to be an interlinear, with the English words appearing over the Aramaic ones they correspond to. Just remember that the Aramaic letters read right to left rather than left to right.

Here’s the phrase from Luke 10:18:

 

 

This edition isn’t pointed for vowels, but transliterating it you get “barqa min shmaya” (there is no “k,” as in Hebrew because the Aramaic uses a separate preposition for “like” here).

Again, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!

(BTW, these other alphabets may look different, but they aren’t that hard to learn. Give ‘em a try!)

Anyway, either way you go—baraq min ha-shamayim or barqa min shmaya—neither sounds much like “Barack Obama.”

What are your thoughts?

New *Bible* Evidence that Obama Is the Antichrist!

Just, y’know, not good evidence.

Consider the following video, which has been going around the Internet, with over a million hits on YouTube between different versions.

Okay. So that kind of settles it.

NOT.

I don’t know who is behind the video, but whoever it is clearly has only the most rudimentary understanding of the things he’s talking about, and he makes mistakes left and right. (Put another way: He’s totally out of his depth.) This is made clear by the annotations that start popping up in the video (you can shut them off with the controller in the lower right hand corner) that, among other things, advertise an updated version of the video, in which he tries to eliminate some of the most blatant errors that critics have pointed out.

The new one doesn’t work any better. It’s just got a few of the worst mistakes cut out.

Like this one: The claim that Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is the most ancient form of Hebrew.

NOT.

While Jesus did speak Aramaic, Aramaic is not an ancient form of Hebrew. It’s a related language, but neither is an ancestor of the other.

What he’s done is the equivalent of saying that English is the most ancient form of Dutch.

It reveals how utterly devoid of basic competence in the biblical languages this person is.

His overall strategy then becomes clear: He knows that the New Testament is recorded in Greek, but he wants to get back behind that to Aramaic so he can jump (quickly!) back to Hebrew. This is where his real interest is: Talking about Hebrew, because he’s got access to a rudimentary Hebrew dictionary. He doesn’t really know or care about Aramaic. It’s just a way of getting quickly to the Hebrew dictionary he’s discovered.

And by the way, it is evident that this man has no training in biblical Hebrew or he never would have made the mistake of saying that Aramaic was a form of it. You can’t take a class (or even read a whole book) on biblical Hebrew without learning how the two languages are related, since they’re both used in the Old Testament. He’s just some guy (possibly a minister, possibly not) who has access to a Hebrew dictionary.

A particularly, old, problematic Hebrew dictionary.

In fact, what he really has is a copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. As its name suggests, it’s not really a dictionary; it’s a concordance—a book that allows you to look up where words occur in the Bible. For example, if you looked up “faith,” you’d find a list of all the verses in which the word “faith” occurs in the King James Bible.

Strong’s happened to assign numbers to the words, and it offers a numbered word list to give a basic idea of what the original Greek or Hebrew word meant.

The problem is that Strong’s definitions are (a) more than a hundred years old, (b) extremely brief and lacking in detail, and (c) very, very prone to misuse.

Whenever I hear anyone starting to use Strong’s numbers when making an argument, I cringe because I know that misuse of the original languages is almost certain to occur.

The problem is so common that the Wikipedia entry on Strong’s Concordance devotes two paragraphs to warning people not to misuse the numbers:

Strong’s Concordance is not a translation of the Bible nor is it intended as a translation tool. The use of Strong’s numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English by those with formal training in ancient languages and the literature of the cultures in which the Bible was written.

Since Strong’s Concordance identifies the original words in Hebrew and Greek, Strong’s Numbers are sometimes misinterpreted by those without adequate training to change the Bible from its accurate meaning simply by taking the words out of cultural context. The use of Strong’s numbers does not consider figures of speech, metaphors, idioms, common phrases, cultural references, references to historical events, or alternate meanings used by those of the time period to express their thoughts in their own language at the time. As such, professionals and amateurs alike must consult a number of contextual tools to reconstruct these cultural backgrounds.

I don’t know who wrote that in Wikipedia, but whoever it was, God bless him (or them)!

So let’s see how the video manages to botch things with Strong’s numbers.

First, it cites Hebrew words number 1299 and 1300, which Strong’s lists respectively as meaning “to lighten (lightning)—cast forth” and “lightning; by analogy, a gleam; concretely, a flashing sword—bright, glitter(-ing sword), lightning.”

Okay, fine. Fair enough. But here is where not knowing what you’re doing comes in. It’s true that the Hebrew word(s) for lightning come from the root BRQ, but that is not where Barack Obama’s name comes from. It comes from a different root: BRK.

We don’t distinguish the sounds of K and Q in English very well, but in the Semitic languages, they do. K is pronounced towards the front or the middle of the mouth, while Q is pronounced toward the back of the mouth, on the soft palette. In other words, these are two different sounds in Hebrew and Aramaic, and you can’t count on a word derived from BRQ to have the same meaning as a word derived from BRK any more than you can count on the meaning of the word “cab” to have a meaning similar to the word “cap” (B and P being similar sounds that English speakers use and distinguish but that some, such as Arabic-speakers, don’t).

(There are also other variants on the K sound in these languages, but we won’t go into them for simplicity’s sake.)

So what is the real meaning of Barack Obama’s first name?

It has nothing to do with lightning. But if Mr. Video Maker hadn’t been so fascinated by Strong’s numbers 1299 and 1300, he might have looked up at 1288 which is the real source of the name: barak, which can mean a variety of things, but the relevant one is this: blessing. People see their children as blessings, and they want them to be blessed by God, and so variants on the root BRK have been used in Semitic and Semitic-influenced languages for thousands of years. Which is why lots of people from Bible days down to ours have had names based on this root, even in other languages than Hebrew.

EVEN THE PEOPLE AT BABYNAMES.COM HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT.

So much for the Barack = baraq business. President Obama’s first name has nothing to do with lightning, and a native speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew would have distinguished the two words as easily as we distinguish “cab” from “cap.”

We already have plenty of evidence that the vid is a load of hooey, but let’s keep going.

To get the word “Obama” into the picture, Mr. Video Maker seems to reason like this: Jesus said something about the devil falling light lightning from a high place, so let’s find somewhere in the Old Testament (so it’ll be in Hebrew) where the devil falls in connection with a high place.

He settles on Isaiah, which he says is the source of the Christian concept of Satan (???), and specifically on Isaiah 14.

Now the thing is, Isaiah 14 is not about the devil. Certainly not in the literal sense of the text. It involves a series of prophesies against neighboring kingdoms that have been persecuting Israel: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Philistines—all of whom the text explicitly names, so we don’t have to be confused about it. The verses that Mr. Video Maker applies to the devil are, in fact, part of a taunt song directed toward the king of Babylon, telling him that although he is high and might now, he’s going to die and end up rotting, with all his pomp and glory coming to nothing.

Over time, Christians have lifted some of the imagery from this passage and applied it to the devil, but that is not what the text is literally talking about. It’s talking about the death of a Babylonian king.

So: More problems for Mr. Video’s thesis.

Now, it’s true that the word bamah can mean height or high place. It’s also a term referring to pagan shrines, which were built on elevated platforms (that’s the kind of high place the prophets often rail against). But it’s not the normal word for “heaven,” in Hebrew, which is shamayim. If you took Jesus statement that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Greek, ouranos) and you translated this back into Aramaic or Hebrew, the word you’d use for “heaven” would be shmaya (Aramaic) or shamayim (Hebrew). Bamah would not be the expected word.

So: Another problem.

Then there is the bizarre things that Mr. Video Maker does with the conjunction waw- (or vav-). This functions as the equivalent of the word “and,” and it is prefixed to words in Hebrew and Aramaic.

Video Guy tells us that this is often transliterated “U” or “O” by some scholars.

Uh . . . no. Not when it’s used as a conjunction. (The same letter can be used as an O in the middle of a word, when it’s functioning as a vowel, but not when it’s on the front of a word functioning as a conjunction.)

When it’s used as a conjunction, it’s pronounced “veh-” in modern Hebrew, and it’s pronounced “u-” (as in “tube”) in Aramaic (and Arabic).

So this is just wrong. waw as a conjunction is not pronounced O.

Mr. Video then strings it all together: baraq + o- + bamah and suggests that this would be used “in Hebrew poetry” to mean “lighting from heaven” or “lightning from the heights.”

GAH!

Okay: Here is something Mr. Video should understand just from his days in grammar school. Just from English.  Conjunctions are words like “and,” “but,” and “or.” “From” is not a conjunction. It is a preposition.

PLEASE REVIEW THE RELEVANT EPISODES OF SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS DISTINCTION: CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, BUSY PREPOSITIONS.

So in Hebrew and Aramaic, U- is a conjunction. It means “and,” not “from.”

What you want for “from” is min. “Lightning *from* heaven” would be something like baraq min ha-shamayim (Hebrew) or barqa min shmaya (Aramaic) or similar variants.

So things aren’t going well for this thesis.

But now let’s pull the rug out from under it entirely.

Consider the context. Read Luke 10, where the quotation in the video comes from. Jesus has sent out the Seventy-Two on an evangelization mission and when they come back . . .

17 The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”

18 He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. 20 However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

21 At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.

So what is the context of “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”? Is it a prophecy referring to the 21st century? No! It’s a remark about the evangelization mission that the Seventy-Two have just completed!

The disciples went out, preached, worked miracles, and struck a blow against the kingdom of Satan. So Jesus congratulates them telling them that before their evangelistic effort, King Satan fell from his throne like lightning from the sky (which is where lighting falls from; “sky,” “heaven,” same word in all these languages).

He’s not prophesying the future. He’s congratulating them on the past and how effective they were by God’s grace.

So, Mr. Video Maker is just wrong on all kinds of fronts. There is no prophecy of the Antichrist here. His video is all bunkum.

What do you think?

Ten Top Books: Fiction Edition

A reader writes:

I searched your site to see if you had a list of suggested books.

I didn't find one though.

So, I was wondering if you would suggest some of your favorite books. I would be really interested in your top 10 fictions books, but also your top 10 books on apologetics/Catholic thought.

Thank you for working on your blog.

God bless

P.s. If you like, I can send you my lists as well.

I'd be happy to provide some book recommendations, only I don't know that I can provide a proper "top 10" list. So instead let me give "ten top" books (i.e., ten books that I like a lot, even if I can't rank them from 1 to 10 and even though there are others I'm not thinking of that I might put on the same level.

Let's do fiction in this post, and I'll follow up with theology/apologetics.

And I invite the correspondent, and other readers, to share ten of their top fiction picks in the combox!

Here we go (alpha by title) . . . 

Continue reading “Ten Top Books: Fiction Edition”

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

See Ya, Helen!

So Helen Thomas has resigned.

Fine with me. I always found her obnoxious, abrasive, partisan, rude, and mean-spirited.

But don’t count her out just yet. She previously resigned from UPI in 2000 but had a new gig at Hearst Newspapers within a few months, so we may see her again.

Though she is gone (at least for now), the question remains: Was what she said in the video clip anti-Semitic or merely anti-Zionist?

In the combox of my previous post, many commenters disagreed with me and said that the clip did provide proof of Thomas’s anti-Semitism.

That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with disagreement.

Other commenters agreed that the video didn’t provide proof of anti-Semitism and said that I was right to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

That’s fine, too. I also don’t have a problem with people agreeing.

Even though Thomas has resigned, the issues involved in the exchange are still with us—and will be in the future—and that makes them still worth talking about. So I’d like to explore them a little further.

Specifically, I’d like to evaluate the following claims by critics:

1) That wishing a group of people would leave a particular land automatically constitutes racism

2) That the Jewish people have legitimate title to the land of Israel

These issues were not created by Helen Thomas. They have been with us for a long time, and they will be with us for a long time in the future. I can’t treat them in a single post, but let’s tackle the racism charge in this one.

Some commenters suggested that “Go home!” is the unmistakable cry of the racist, and at first glance, this seems plausible. But does this claim hold up to careful consideration?

It certainly doesn’t apply to all racists. Some racists don’t want those against whom they are prejudiced to leave at all. The runaway slave laws that used to exist in America are proof of that.

But what about the reverse? If you do want a group of people to leave, does that automatically make you a racist?

As is often the case, a matter of principle like this can be demonstrated by changing the scale of the problem. Suppose that we aren’t talking about a whole nation full of people, like Israel, laying claim to a particular territory. Suppose it’s just one person and a much smaller territory.

Specifically: suppose that you are in your house and one night someone breaks in. Further suppose that you are a member of race X and the home invader is a member of race Y. You naturally want the person to leave. But—and here is the key question—why do you want him to leave?

Is it because of his race? Because you don’t like race Y as a whole and don’t want its members around? If so then you are a racist with regard to race Y. No doubt about it.

But the reason you want the person to leave may have nothing to do with the home invader’s race. You may want him to go because you don’t want people invading your home. In that case, your motive is not racism but anti-home-invasion-ism.

Now let’s scale the issue up to where groups of people large enough to control national territories are in play.

Suppose, that you are a citizen of Vichy France and the Nazis have rolled in on their tanks and taken control.

If you want the Germans to leave, are you a racist?

It depends. If you hate all Germans and want them to leave simply because of that fact, then yes, you are an anti-German racist. (Be sure to remember that the word “race” originally applied not just to skin color but to national/ethnic/cultural origin, as in “the German race,” “the British race,” “the Japanese race,” etc.)

If you want Germans out because they are Germans, then yes, you are a racist.

But if you want them out because you don’t like people occupying your homeland—and if you would object whether they were German or British or Japanese—then you are not a racist. You are an anti-occupationist.

In the same way, if it’s 1800 and you are a Native American and you don’t like people of European descent—British, Spanish, or Portugese—occupying your homeland then you are a racist if you hate all British, all Spanish, or all Portugese—even the ones who aren’t occupying your homeland; but you are not a racist if you just hate foreign occupiers.

Or if it’s A.D. 60 and you are a Jewish person in Jerusalem, you may well hate the Romans occupying Judea and Galilee. If you hate all Romans everywhere, then you are an anti-Roman racist. But if you don’t mind Romans that aren’t supporters of the occupation then you are just an anti-occupationist.

They key is whether you want someone to leave because they are an occupier (of whatever race) or whether you want them to leave because they are of a specific race, apart from the occupation issue.

It should be pointed out that hating occupiers and lead to racism.

* If you are a Jew in second century B.C. Judea and you hate the Greek occupiers, you may be led to hate all Greeks.
* If you are a Jew in first century A.D. Judea and you hate the Roman occupiers, you may be led to hate all Romans.
* If you are a Native American in the nineteenth century A.D. Americas, you hate the European occupiers, you may be led to hate all Europeans.
* If you are a twentieth century Frenchman and you hate the German occupiers, you may be led to hate all Germans.
* If you are a twentieth century Palestinian and you hate the Jewish occupiers, you may be led to hate all Jews.

If so, your hatred of occupiers has led you into racism.

But just because occupation can lead one into racism doesn’t mean that it always does lead one into racism.

Should we assume that Maria von Trapp became an anti-German racist just because the Nazis perpetrated the Anschluss and seized control of Austria?

This seems implausible.

We can’t just assume racism on the part of a person who opposes a particular occupation. We can’t just leap to conclusions. We must strive to be fair and accurate about others, even if we don’t like them.

Specifically, we need to watch out for potential offenses against the Eighth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor”; Exodus 20:16). One commits calumny who “by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them”; also, if on the basis of an emotional reaction one leaps to an unwarranted conclusion, one commits the sin of rash judgment who “even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2477).

I understand how easy it is to get caught up with emotion when one encounters the kind of venom that Thomas displayed in her recent remarks (even chuckling—or as some have said, cackling—at her own provocation). That’s human. But it is at precisely such times that we have to check ourselves and make sure we are not being misled by our emotions (see above on rash judgment).

That’s why Scripture is full of exhortations like:

* “Reckon others better than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3)—i.e., give them the befit of the doubt

* “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12)—would you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, or to have people stop and check their emotions before lashing out at you?

* “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31)

These are part of the Jewish tradition as much as the Christian, as illustrated not just by the quote from Leviticus, but also by Hillel the Elder’s teaching a Gentile, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary” (Shab. 31a).

The ethical requirements of both Judaism and Christianity thus require us to be careful in this area and make sure that we are not being swept up by our emotions. But that’s not the only consideration here.

In America today, in the wake of the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany, there are few more damning things that one can say against a person than that they are an anti-Semite.

The only things that compare with it are calling someone a racist, a sexist, or a pedophile.

But that’s changing . . . rapidly . . . because the word “racist” is loosing its punch. The word has been so over-used that its force is wearing off, just as “Help! Wolf!” lost its punch in the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

If you use an emotionally-charged term too often, when it isn’t clearly warranted, it will lose the charge it has. People will start rolling their eyes when you use it, and their sympathies will shift from those who make the accusation to those against whom it is made.

If you don’t want that to happen to the word “anti-Semitism” then you don’t want it over used.

So there is one more reason we should be careful when charging someone with anti-Semitism.

This applies especially to Helen Thomas when you look at the things she said in the video, because she specifically suggests that Israelis who immigrated from America should return to America.

America is Helen’s native country. It’s her own neighborhood. Her own back yard.

And by saying that Israelis who came from America should return to America, she’s saying, “Let’s have more Jews here!”

If she hated Jewish people in general and wanted them to “just go away” on that basis then she wouldn’t be inviting them here. She’d want them to all die or something—or move to Antarctica, or the moon. But none of those is what she says. She just wants them out of a particular plot of ground in the Middle East, and she’s happy to have those of American origin come back to America, where she lives.

That shows she’s anti-occupationist, but it does not show that she’s anti-Semitic.

You can argue that what’s going on in Israel isn’t an occupation. That goes to the issue of who has proper title to the land in question (the subject of an upcoming post). But Helen perceives it as an occupation, and that’s what she’s objecting to.

So at least from what we see in the video, Thomas is clearly an anti-Zionist, but if you want to charge her with anti-Semitism, you’ll need to provide additional evidence.

What are your thoughts?