The Misunderstood Hell

Do you think translating the Hebrew of the Old Testament is a straight-forward task? That we have just the right word in English for every word in Hebrew?

If so, think again.

Translation is exceptionally difficult for multiple reasons.

1. The translator usually assumes his beliefs are the same as the Ancient Hebrews he's translating, or that he knows what they believed and can therefore understand what they're saying when he translates the Bible. This means the translator cannot help but translate his own beliefs into the texts without ever realizing it.

2. Translation researchers in Israel are about fifty years ahead of our translators here in America. Many wonderful discoveries have been made that change our understanding of some key words in the Bible, painting God as far more loving than our translations make Him out to be and giving the Bible verses far more depth.

3. The Hebrew and Greek words are in a completely different order than English that can be toyed with to fit into our language the way the translator wants.

4. The entire world was Eastern philosophy (not to be confused with Eastern religion) before 585 B.C. when the sophists began spreading Western philosophical ideology. Much of the world has been westernized now, meaning we have a hard time understanding the way Easterners see the world, especially since we have so much technology and the Ancient Hebrews had virtually none.

5. Language is an expression of the way of life and the concepts of the original culture. Our Westernized, sedentary, technology-dependent lifestyle is vastly different than the Eastern philosophy, nomadic culture of the Ancient Hebrews with thousands of years between us. There is much we previously didn't understand and could not relate to, but modern translation research is revealing all kinds of aspects of Ancient Hebrew life and thought that reshapes the way we translate.

A minor example would be the Spanish word for house: casa

In American culture, the words house or home have certain associations. Different associations that they do in Hispanic culture. Each culture's language has a different way of thinking, and their language is an expression of that way of thinking.

My wife grew up on the mission field in Taiwan until she turned twelve and her family returned to the United States. She spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese. One day, she laughed at something and said that reminded her of a Chinese saying. I asked her to share it with me and she said she couldn't because it wouldn't translate.

That had me confused. I asked why, and she said there are no words for it in English and it wouldn't make sense to me unless I'd grown up in Taiwanese culture.

That was when I realized translation wasn't as simple as I thought it was.

There's so much more depth in the Bible than what we see with our English translations.

You may have heard in church that there were five different words for "love" in the Koine Greek the New Testament is written in.

Eros means a sexual love, and Erotas means intimate love. Erotic is an English word that has its roots in those words.

A new word was created while Jesus was with us called agape love, meaning unconditional love that wants the good of another. Unconditional love means that what a person is or does has no bearing on where someone else loves (agape) them. It's love without judgment. It means I accept a person fully, without condition, and I give them my full attention, without condition, when they're interacting with me. It means I have a perpetual fondness of them, without conditions. In other words, I always love them, and always want to help them no matter what. This is the kind of love the Bible describes God and Jesus--if one can separate the two--have for us.

So, in our Bible translations, there are five different words that all show up simply as "love," which means we've lost the meaning of each of those types of love in our translations. I don't know about you, but I'd like to see each type of love pointed out in the texts. It would give some added depth and clarification in verses where the context isn't completely clear. This type of joining of multiple words into a single word is a step backward in the evolution of languages. And that doesn't surprise me one bit with the Dark Ages and the type of control the Catholic Church exerted during them.

To show you how major misunderstandings can come from these translation problems, let's look at Proverbs.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom..." (Proverbs 9:10a)

We're told in several places in the Bible not to be fear because God is with us. So why would we fear God to gain wisdom?

Granted, we're also taught that the word fear, in the Bible, can also mean revere or respect. So it seems to make more sense that if we respect the Lord, we will garner more wisdom. However, the verse isn't saying either one of those things.

The verse is written in a very specific way in the Hebrew which denotes ownership, just like the Hand of God or the Face of God. In the Hebrew, it absolutely cannot mean our fear. It's God's fear.

Since we know God doesn't fear, it has to mean respect or reverence, right? Does it mean that if God respects us, He will give us wisdom? I don't think that's possible because it clashes with the verse that says God is no respector of persons.

So what exactly is going on with the verse?

Solid translation work corrects the issue.

When you look into the Hebrew word for fear, you actually find that it means something entirely different than fear. It's related, to a degree, but mistranslated nonetheless.

The Hebrew word is yir'ah (Strong's
H3374), and while it can basically indicate fear, the literal meaning is "The stirrings of the stomach/gut." The gut is the emotional center of the body where all of the nerve ending begin. It is where we feel the strongest emotions such as awe and extreme fear or shock, or love and extreme disappointment. Put simply, yir'ah means the emotions. And you will not find that definition in the Strong's Concordance or the Hebrew-Caldean Lexicon. There would've been no hope of knowing that in the Dark Ages, and even in our technologically-interconnected society today, there is only a small chance people will learn it.

Now that we know two key aspects of that verse, we can translate it properly.

"The emotions of the Lord are the beginning of wisdom..." (Proberbs 9:10a)

What this verse is conveying is that if we want to get to know God, we need to get to know His heart, His emotions. And the only way to do that is to learn about Him, develop a relationship with Him, and understand our own heart and its emotions.

God speaks to everyone through their emotions, but most people don't understand the way He does this because most people repress their emotions and have several competing emotions warring in their hearts.

Understanding the heart is not an easy task, but if you truly seek understanding of God's heart and your heart, you will make progress.

I've found that doing this gives incredible depth to the Bible and to God's character that you don't see in mainstream Christianity today. Many verses and stories in the Bible require a solid understanding of the emotions in order to truly see the depth of what's occurring. Much is revealed about what happened when Jesus died for us and how it frees us if we just understand the heart properly.

In the next chapter, we're going to look at the word we translate to mean "perfect," and a well-known passage that reveals God's character and yet had been greatly hampered by our translations.

We're about to get very deep into how our translations heap shame on us and how they malign God's character to do so.

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