Just did a half-hour radio show (Catholic Spotlight) on KWKY in Des Moines, Iowa. (Unfortunatley, the shows aren’t archived online anywhere–I asked.)
It’s a Catholic show on a Protestant station, and they sometimes get Protestant callers. One such caller tonight was very interested in Bible prophecy. Unfortunatley, she was reading some not-that-great authors on this subject (and was a big fan of The Bible Code), so I tried as charitably as I could to recommend that she not put much faith in some of the stuff she was reading.
For example: She read a passage from a book that claimed the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was what was referred to in Revelation 8:10-11, which prophesies the fall of the star Wormwood and the making bitter of a third of the rivers, killing a bunch of people. She suggested that St. John had no way to recognize a nuclear explosion and thus described it as a star. Confirmation of this interpretation was found in the fact that the Ukrainian word for "wormwood" is "chernobyl."
Well, it ain’t.
I was immediately suspicious of this claim and noted that such rumors often get started and find their ways into people’s books and they survive because people don’t take the trouble to check the original language, which isn’t that hard to do.
I also pointed out that the Chernobyl plant did not have a nuclear explosion (as I later verified, it had a steam explosion, followed by a graphite fire), and so St. John–had he foreseen the event–would not have seen a star falling from the sky or a nuclear explosion. (In fact, he apparently would have seen a nuclear power plant blow off its lid and vent steam and then, depending on the angle of his view, he would have seen a graphite fire start).
To illustrate how easy it is to check language claims of the type made above, I promised to look up the meaning of the word "Chernobyl" after the show and report back.
Here’s what I found . . .
I had a basic explanation of the meaning of "Chernobyl" within a couple of minutes of the end of the show. This explanation stood up on further checking, though I don’t (yet) have the full, clinching confirmation of it that I’d like. Nevertheless, I sent a preliminary report to the show’s host (Jack Williams) via e-mail. Here’s a slightly edited version of what I said:
Howdy, Jack!
I found the answer to the meaning of "chernobyl" in Ukrainan a couple of minutes after the show. Wish I had thought to search for it during the show! Here’s the scoop:
"Chernobyl" is the name of a plant, but it isn’t wormwood. It’s mugwort.
The reason that the confusion arose is that mugwort is related to wormwood. They are both members of the genus artimisia, but they are not the same species. Mugwort is artemisia vulgaris and wormwood is artemisia absinthium. Apparently a Russian author speaking to the New York Times wasn’t familiar enough with the words for various plants in English and got the two confused, starting the rumor.
The Ukrainian names for these plants are as follows:
The name chernobyl (Чорнобиль, chornobyl) corresponds to mugwort.
It is also called Полин звичайний (pronounced polyn zvychajnyj), which means "common polyn" or "common artemis"–Полин (polyn) being the name for artemis.
The term for wormwood is not chernobyl. Its technical name in Ukrainian is Полин гіркий (pronounced polyn hirkyj), which means "bitter polyn" or "bitter artemis." If I understand matters correctly, the name is usually just shortened to Полин (polyn), however.
So, if a Ukrainian speaker wants to refer to mugwort, he’ll say "chornobyl" but if he wants to refer to wormwood, he’ll say "polyn."
I have confirmation on this from this from two apparently independent sources:
http://www-ang.kfunigraz.ac.at/~katzer/engl/generic_frame.html?Arte_vul.html
There are a lot of other sites pointing out the same thing, but most are dependent on the Wikipedia entry, so they don’t count as independent sources.
I also have plugged the Ukrainian terms into a Ukrainian-English dictionary here:
http://lingresua.tripod.com/cgi-bin/oluaen.pl [NOTE TO BLOG READERS: Cut and paste the Ukrainian-alphabet words if you want to try this.]
And they do translate as describe above. (One limit was that the dictionary didn’t know "chornobyl" but it did know "polyn", "hirkyj," and "zvychajnyj," which translated respectively as "absinth," "bitter," and "common.") This isn’t the full and direct dictionary confirmation that I’d like, but it is significant. Will let you know if I can get full, direct confirmation of the meaning of "chornobyl" from a dictionary, a native speaker, or a linguist.
Note, however, the way the dictionary translated Полин (polyn): It translated it as "absinth"–as in artemisia absinthium. This would seem to be direct, dictionary confirmation that the Ukrainian word for "wormwood" (artemesia absinthium) is polyn, not chornobyl.
Hope this helps!
Jimmy Akin
Sounds like some of the claims of Barry Smith, New Zealander, end-of-the-world preacher, who died just two years ago. I have some of his books left over from my evangelical protestant days. He was one of those people going on about Novus Ordo Seculorum on money that you mentioned on one of those radio shows, weird ideas about pyramids, questionable aids cures, and other such things. A lot of it has been disproven simply by time, like his ideas on Y2K. He mentions not even being able to flush your toilet after 2000, which I thought was weird in 1999 because most toilets don’t have electronics in them, and I can’t think of any reason why a toilet would need to know the date. I have one book by another guy that he writes the foreward to, saying how good he is with his biblical study, but this other guy interprets the same verses as an entirely different end of the world scenario! Obviously they can’t be both right. Anyway, these conspiracy theory type books make interesting reading because it’s overwhelming how many mistakes you can manage to fit into one book.
Interesting. I’d always been more curious about about the apparent phonetic similarity between Chernobyl and Chernobog (Slavic demon, referenced in Ivanhoe and “Night on Bald Mountain). But somehow I doubt Chernobog has anything to do with mugwort!
On the other hand, here’s a web site whose author (presumably Ukrainian) claims that Chernobyl does in fact mean “wormwood” (see Chapter 2):
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/
And, in any case, the description of the folklore of “chernobyl” in the Wikipedia is consistent with the folklore surrounding wormwood (absinthe):
“Chernobyl bears poetic connotations in folklore, for a number of reasons. Various species of Artemisia are common in steppes, and its strong smell is an often token of steppe. Also, Chernobyl roots were used in folk medicine to heal neurotic conditions, but its overdose could lead to psychical distress, including memory loss.”
Actually, wormwood and mugwort, though closely related, are not identical. Rather correctly, Russian and Ukrainian Bible translations render the Greek plant name apsinthos not as chernobyl or chornobyl, but as polyn (Russian полынь and Ukrainian полин). Confused by the inherent ambiguity of that word, some Western journalist have tried to make a case that the herb mentioned in the Bible is indeed the same that is called chernobyl, which actually may be true (for a Russian or Ukrainian Bible translation), because polyn and chernobyl have indeed overlapping denotation. This is, however, a good example of a question that cannot reasonably be answered using a translated text; fortunately, the Greek original uses an unambigous term apsinthos that applies only to wormwood (and maybe other pale-leaved, highly bitter relatives like Pontic wormwood), but never to mugwort.
C’mon guys! Gimme a break! If there’s that much confusion about wormwood and mugwort now, given the similarity of these two “bitter herbs,” and given the difficulties of cultures, languages, and two intervening millenia — how on earth is John of Patmos supposed to have figured it all out? Maybe he didn’t know the difference, either — or had never seen mugwort and so described it as wormwood?
It seems we’re getting awfully literal about something that can never be nailed down so precisely.
If you’re into debunking, I’d focus on confusing a nuclear whatever-it-was with a falling star. I think you are on much more solid ground there. But keep in mind we don’t know how this “vision” happened? Did he “see” it?
He certainly didn’t get a transcript with etymological breakdowns.
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