By the Rev. WILLIAM BINNIE, D.D., Stirling.
This is the first of a series of articles which appeared in the Family Treasury for 1866.—Editor.
IT would not be a very formidable task to set forth a complete catalogue of all the words and phrases in the Bible which have fallen obsolete, and which, in consequence, suggest to the unlearned reader of the present day either no meaning at all, or (which is worse) a meaning different from the one which the translators intended to convey. A single page of the “Family Treasury,” or two pages at the most, would afford space enough for the exhibition of every word and phrase entitled to demand admission into such a catalogue.
The list of obsolete Bible words is astonishingly small when one remembers the antiquity of the Version, the infancy of the English language at the time when the Version was executed, and the vast changes which have passed upon the language during the eventful generations which have intervened. It is now a little more than two centuries and a half since King James’ translators set forth the Bible in the form in which we now possess it. It is to be noted, moreover, that those venerable men were quite as much Revisers as Translators. They found printed and in general circulation several older versions of great
merit; and so careful were they to limit themselves to the function of revision, that the style and flavour of those older versions have been transmitted unimpaired. It is the unanimous testimony of the most competent authorities—including such writers as Mr. Froude, and the late Rev. Christopher Anderson, the historian of the English Bible—that the English of our present Bible is substantially the English which flowed from the pen of the first translator, the saint and martyr William Tyndal. It was most providential that the first who undertook the task of transferring the Word of God direct from the original languages into English was a great master of the English tongue; and it is to him we owe the inimitable style of our present version, the remarkable combination of simplicity, strength and melody, which have won for it the heart of all the English-speaking nations. This carries us back more than eighty years beyond the publication of the Authorised Version. The first edition of Tyndal’s New Testament is to be seen in one of the glass cases of the British Museum—the only copy known to exist being among the treasures of that great national collection—and it is known to have been secretly printed on the Rhine in 1526.
It would detain us too long from our proper subject if we were to investigate the causes of the character of permanence which so happily distinguishes the English of the Bible. Doubtless they are mainly these two. On the one hand, the translators, and especially Tyndal, possessed in a high degree the poet’s faculty of seizing on the best elements in the spoken dialects of the country. Rejecting what—with the sure instinct of genius—they felt to be the wood, hay, and stubble of the popular speech, and fixing on the gold and silver and precious stones, they fashioned out of these more honourable elements, enduring vessels in which to set forth the Word of God. On the other hand the general use of the Authorised Version has done much to impart fixity to the language. The words and idioms of a book which has all along been daily read in myriads of families, which has been generally taught in schools, and the reading and exposition of which has everywhere been the most prominent part of the Sabbath services of the Church—the words and idioms of such a book could not fail to fix themselves in the speech, especially the graver speech, of the whole people.
The obsolete words of the Bible, then, are few. But the fact that they are Bible words invests them with importance. Among readers of the “Family Treasury” there are not many who would like to be convicted of inability to explain a number of words in the Holy Scriptures, especially if these should be such as express plain everyday ideas. Of course it is no shame to any reader to be non-plussed with some of the strange terms that occur in certain chapters of the Old Testament. None but a learned naturalist could explain all the names of birds in the Levitical law of clean and unclean meats—and even he might have to confess himself puzzled with some of them. We shall not meddle with words of this necessarily recondite order. There will be matter enough for a useful paper or two on the obsolete words of the Bible which stand for objects or ideas in themselves sufficiently common and trite.
Some of these old Bible words are very much of the nature of curiosities. Such, for example is the binary word ALL-TO. It occurs only once, namely, in Judges ix. 53: “A certain woman cast a piece of a mill-stone upon Abimelech’s head, and all-to brake his skull.” The impression which the statement, as thus worded, leaves on most readers, is, that the woman not only cast the stone upon Abimelech’s head, but that “it was all to brake his skull.” Indeed, the very printers themselves have been sorely deceived by the sound of the verse. Before sitting down to put these notes on paper, we had the curiosity to examine the editions of the Bible lying about on our shelves, with the view of testing their accuracy on this minute point. Out of twenty editions, the half, as nearly as may be, we found to be in error. They printed the words thus—”all to break,” as if the verb had been in the infinitive; whereas a glance at the Hebrew is sufficient to show that our translators must have set it down in the preterite, inasmuch as the meaning is, that the woman “utterly brake his skull;” or, as Bishop Patrick explains, “made such a fracture in it that he concluded it to be mortal.”
The following words are of more importance, although, perhaps, they might also be ranked among the curiosities of the subject.
BRIGANDINE
The piece of armour denominated the BRIGANDINE in two places in Jeremiah (xlv. 4; li. 3) would now be described
as a coat of mail—
BROIDERED hair
The “BROIDERED hair,” mentioned with disparagement in 1 Tim. ii. 9, is just the braided hair of the modern toilet. Curiously enough, the form in which the word appears in Tyndal’s version, “broided hair,” comes nearer the modern one than that which our translators substituted for it; doubtless under the notion that theirs was the more likely to live.
CEILING
The term CEILING is now so constantly used to denote the upper surface of an apartment—the surface facing the floor—that one is apt to miss the point of the reproach which the prophet Haggai addressed to the Jews, when he demanded of them, “Is it a time for you to dwell in your cieled houses and this house lie waste?” The ceiling here has no special reference to what we should call by the same term. This is plain from the account of Solomon’s temple in 2 Chron. iii. 5, where we are told that “the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold, and set thereon palm trees and chains.” The style of ornament shows that it was the walls that were cieled. The cieled houses, therefore, were what we should describe as wainscotted.
Wainscott, i.e., a wooden lining or boarding of walls of houses.
The sin which Haggai reproved in the people was not that they enjoyed the shelter of a roof over their heads, but that they took care to lodge in luxurious splendour, while the Lord’s House lay waste.
DEAL
So long as we employ in daily speech such phrases as “a deal of noise,” “a great deal more,” etc., it can hardly be said that the use of DEAL in the sense of a portion or part (like the German Theil) is obsolete. Yet we suspect that, in at least one class of passages, the Bible use of the word, in that sense, fails to suggest the right idea to most readers. When one reads, for example, in the law of the Daily Sacrifice, that there was to be offered with the unblemished Lamb, morning and evening, “a tenth deal of flour,” the notion is apt to be taken up that deal denoted a measure of quantity among the Hebrews: whereas the meaning of the law, of course, is, that “a tenth part of flour” was to be the meat-offering presented along with the Lamb. This Issaron, or tithe, according to the Septuagint and Gesenius, was the tenth part of the ephah, which again was the tenth of the homer.
MEAT
To a Scottish reader it is rather amusing to observe the care with which recent English commentators and critics explain that, when the disciples are said, in John iv. 8, to have gone into Sychar to buy “MEAT,” the word is used to denote food in general, and is not to be understood as referring to animal food in particular—a sense to which it is nowhere restricted in the Bible. The Five Clergymen who lately published an excellent revision of the authorised version of this Gospel, carefully substitute food for meat throughout the story of our Lord’s sojourn among the Samaritans. North of the Tweed the alteration is quite unnecessary. The word meat has not yet, in that region, become infected with any savour of the shambles.
Rooms
It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to note that in some two or three texts in the Gospels the word Rooms is used in a sense which it now no longer bears. Thus in Luke xiv. 7, “He marked how they chose out the chief rooms.” These chief rooms are “the uppermost rooms at feasts,” mentioned in Matt. xxiii. 6; that is to say, the most honourable places at table. The word still bears its ancient sense in the singular—as in these phrases, “Make room for the stranger,” “Plenty of room,” etc. That golden sentence, so suggestive of hope to the fainting soul who would fain knock at the door of the Lord’s Banqueting House, Yet there is room, has lost none of its distinctness to the most unlettered hearer. We are not sure but the plural form of the word suggests the modern sense of apartments to unwary readers.
EARING-TIME
Hitherto we have been commenting upon words that play a very humble part in the Bible, and properly belong to the curiosities of biblical English. More regard is due to a word which, although it occurs only twice in the Bible, is familiar to every eye. We refer to the EARING-TIME mentioned in Genesis xlv. 6 and Exodus xxxiv. 21. The latter passage contains the Mosaic statute respecting the Sabbath: “In earing-time and in harvest thou shalt rest.” We venture pretty confidently to affirm, that if ten ordinary readers of this statute were interrogated regarding its sense, the answer of nine would be something like this—Why to be sure, it means that the Sabbath was to be religiously observed, not only at those times of the year when there was no special urgency of demand for labour, but all the year through, even when the corn was in the ear, and
when the golden fields called for the sickle. There is one obvious objection to this interpretation of Earing-time. The time of the ears—that is to say, the period intervening between “the ear” and “the full corn in the ear”—is not one of the farmer’s busy times; it is rather a breathing-space before the toils of harvest. But the truth is, that except in sound there is no sort of connection between the ears and the earing-time. The Hebrew word translated earing-time denotes ploughing-time. What the statute forbids is Sabbath labour during seed-time and harvest—the two supremely anxious seasons for the farmer; the two seasons in which a hard master would be most apt to rob his servants of the rest conceded to them by the Lord of lords. Our etymologists have a liking for ancient words, and, doubtless, would fain hear the farmers speak, as our fathers did, of earing the ground. Their fondness, in this instance, is excusable, for the word is of very ancient lineage and widespread kindred. If our memory is not at fault, Professor Max Müller, in the first series of his Lectures on the Science of Language, devotes a considerable space to it, and shows that the root is one of the few that can be discovered in all the languages of the Indo-Germanic group. No doubt, it would be a pity to drop such a word out of the English Bible. But after all, it would be a degradation of the Bible to force on it the office of conserving ancient words. If the earing-time of our present version hinders plain readers from perceiving that the Seed-time is meant, it should be dropped whenever the next revision takes place.
REASONABLE SERVICE
A much more important word or rather pair of words, occurs in the noted text with which the Apostle introduces the ethical portion of the Epistle to the Romans: “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” REASONABLE SERVICE; whatever may have been the case three centuries ago, certainly these words do not now express the sense of the Greek original. The text is wretchedly misunderstood by the most. How constantly is it taken to mean, that when God claims our continual obedience, it is a “most reasonable claim;” that God’s service is “a very reasonable service!” Now this is plainly to mistake the sense of both words. In the first place the Greek term translated
Service being latreia, the English form must have been used by the translators in the sense of Divine Service, or Solemn Worship; the allusion which underlies it, is, not to the toils of a servant, but to sacred sacerdotal ministration. The title Service-Book, when applied to the Book of Common Prayer, furnishes a surviving example of the same usage. As regards the other word, it was taken by our translators from the Latin of the Vulgate, which has rationabile in this text, and was intended to mean rational or spiritual. The other usage of it, to denote that which is not excessive or unjust, is quite modern and foreign to the text. The doctrine which underlies the text is the grand Scriptural and Reformation doctrine of the Priesthood of all Christians, and the drift of the Apostle is this—That we ought to offer ourselves on God’s altar a living sacrifice, so that our entire life may be a kind of unintermitted worship of God, a rational and spiritual worship. This is just Luther’s version, euer vernünftiger Gottesdienst.
NEPHEWS AND PIETY
There is one other verse in the Bible which shares with that just commented upon the misfortune of containing within its brief compass two distinct words which have forgotten their original meaning. It is 1 Tim. v. 4: “If any widow have children or nephews, let them learn to show piety at home, and to requite their parents.” The NEPHEWS here are plainly grand-children (neptotes in Latin). It is certainly a curious change that has passed on a word of so sharply-defined a meaning. It seems a harsh and unaccountable transition from child’s child to the child of brother or sister. The other term, which has drifted from its old moorings, is the beautiful word PIETY. It is commonly used now to denote Godliness. A worthy minister, not very long ago, was so far misled by the ambiguity of the word as to entitle a volume of Family Prayers, which he published, “Piety at Home.” It is scarcely necessary to point out the mistake. The piety which this verse inculcates on the sons and grandsons is that which finds its expression, not in the keeping up of Family Worship, but in ministering to the widowed grandmother’s necessities. Ellicott makes the true sense sufficiently distinct without discarding the fine old word. His translation is as follows:—”If any widow have children or grandchildren, let them learn first to show piety towards their own family, and to requite their parents.”