A piece back, someone was asking about what it means when Scripture says that God "hates" something.
One possibility that was raised was the idea that the term for "hate" may at times only mean "to prefer something else to," as when Jesus says that we can’t be his disciples unless we "hate" our family members.
In that passage, it’s clear that what Jesus means is that we can’t be his disciples if we prefer others to him, but it isn’t clear that that’s what the word means in this case. Jesus may be using hyperbole to make a shocking statement that is intended to provoke thought and encourage us to tease out his meaning (the way God often lets us figure things out for ourselves so that we will use the intellects he gave us and thus glorify him).
I said that I’d check with my Aramaic instructor, who is a native speaker of the langauge, and see what he had to say.
I did.
Unfortunatley, I failed to report back in a timely manner, so when I got together with him this week, it jogged my memory.
Here’s the deal:
He says that the relevant verb in Aramaic means what it does in English. "Hate" means "hate." It doesn’t mean "to prefer less than." Jesus is using the word in the shocking, hyperbolic way suggested above, and his original audience would have been as shocked and hyperboled (to make up a word) as we are when we hear the statement.
Of course, my instructor is a native speaker of contemporary Aramaic, not first century, but he does have a familiarity with classical Aramaic (which he also teaches), and my money is that he’s right on this. Jesus is being deliberately provocative with what he says (i.e., he’s trying to provoke thought).
