Titles & Translations

Isaiah 62:1-5

5For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, (NRSV)

—compared with—

⁵ as a young man marries a young woman, your sons will marry you; (CJB)

Revelation 19:11-16

¹¹ Next I saw heaven opened, and there before me was a white horse. Sitting on it was the one called Faithful and True, and it is in righteousness that he passes judgment and goes to battle. ¹² His eyes were like a fiery flame, and on his head were many royal crowns. And he had a name written which no one knew but himself. ¹³ He was wearing a robe that had been soaked in blood, and the name by which he is called is, “THE WORD OF GOD.” ¹⁴ The armies of heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. ¹⁵ And out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down nations — “He will rule them with a staff of iron.” It is he who treads the winepress from which flows the wine of the furious rage of Adonai, God of heaven’s armies. ¹⁶ And on his robe and on his thigh he has a name written:

KING OF KINGS

AND

LORD OF LORDS.

Matthew 1:18-25

²² All this happened in order to fulfill what Adonai had said through the prophet,

²³ “The virgin will conceive and bear a son,
and they will call him ‘Immanu El.”

²¹ She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Yeshua, [which means ‘Adonai saves,’] because he will save his people from their sins.”

I keep finding odd discrepancies in translations, and discovering real insights when I take the trouble to research them. As to the Isaiah passage, I found that the translation “builder” instead of “sons” appeared to be entirely due to squeamish translators not wanting to imply anything improper. The Hebrew is most definitely “sons,” and the Septuagint and the venerable King James Version emphatically agree on that point. The Hebrew language in Scripture is metaphorical, as well as pithy, earthy, lusty and full of vigor. The meaning of the phrase “your sons”  in Hebrew is intended to evoke not just husbandmen who will “marry” the land and bring it back to fruition, but also to bring to mind the enthusiastic manner in which a teenage boy throws himself into sexual relations with gusto and delight. The ancient Hebrews were definitely not squeamish or prissy!

Revelations is troublesome. I couldn’t help reading an inversion into the usual meaning. I intended to abandon that notion, but then as I looked into the weirdness of a name being written ‘on his robe and on his thigh’, I kept getting brought back to it. I’m not going to insist on my interpretation, because I find myself disturbed by it. The thing is, I often garner insight from things that disturb me. I decided to go ahead anyway, mostly because because I found out that in the ancient world it was very common for artistic images of famous and important people to have an inscription placed on their thigh by the artist. There is even a reference to the words of a contemporary historian (Diodorus Siculus) regarding a great man named Sesostris, (who predated Christ) that his monument was inscribed thus:  "This province, Sesoosis, (Sesostris), King of Kings and Lord of Lords, conquered by his own arms.” The really interesting thing is that the phrase ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords’ was apparently in customary use before the birth of Christ, and also that there was an established custom of putting inscriptions on the garments or body parts of people or gods depicted in statues, carvings and paintings, especially among the ancient Egyptians.

(I found the reference here: https://www.studylight.org/commentary/revelation/19-16.html)

Reflecting on this historical perspective, and noticing that the language in this passage seemed to be all about titles, and not given names or use-names, I couldn’t help but imagine that the language in the passage was meant to be a description of that sort of image, not of a living reality. It hit me hard, because the image in Revelations is definitely that of a merciless conqueror in blood-soaked robes riding at the head of a fearsome army, who claims the title of ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords’ for himself. How do we reconcile that portrait with the reality of a loving God? I kept wanting to read the passage as ironic; almost a caricature. Was the author of Revelations trying to show us what it would be like if God erected triumphal monuments to brag about his conquests? Could he be trying to show us how weird that would be? Could it be that he was holding up this ‘image’ to us because he trusted his readers to make that connection? The trouble is, his original readers would have recognized the association, because they had seen exactly that kind of image erected in public places. They lived in a conquered land, and suffered under exactly that kind of ruler. My world is just not like that, nor is the world that most of my readers live in, and we don’t have any reason to imagine the image of our God as if it were presented in contrast with the offensive images of our conquerors which we would see every day if we did live in such a world: in the mall, or at the post office, or in the foyer of City Hall. That missing association leaves us with an appalling temptation to step into the caricature and imagine ourselves as the conquering army riding behind our brutal God to take what we want by force, and reap the bloody rewards. I really, really don’t think that we want to do that.

Matthew again presents us with a similar thing—the difference between a title, and a given name. Joseph named Mary’s son ‘Yeshua’ because his title would be ‘Immanu-El’. Simple: his name had to match the title it was foretold that he would bear. It mattered for it to match. Given how much it mattered for things like that to match, it’s even more arresting that ‘things like that’ don’t match up at all well in the passage from Revelations. I am not going to try to explain or interpret the reasons why, I am just going to sit with the discrepancy and let it really sink in.

I’m also going to make a mental note to always pursue peculiar differences between different translations of the Bible.

Claiming titles is only worthwhile

If there is going to be a butler to announce our arrival.

Let’s just say we’re here and the butler is waiting—

What title do we mean to choose?

Will it match our true name?

The label no-one knows about but us?

Or will we second-guess, in order to impress —

Ourselves?