Means and The Legacy of Meaning

As mentioned in the bio in the page header of this blog, the original text from which the King James Version of the Bible was translated lacked many clarifying elements which even modern Hebrew takes for granted. There was no punctuation. All letters were block letters, meaning: there were no uppercase letters to distinguish proper address from common referral. Also, there were lots of meaningful gaps.

Many times, verbs– which indicate the time and condition of a subject (for instance, whether a thing is happening now- and- perpetually throughout eternity; or if it is a past event which will never be repeated)-- were conspicuously absent from the original text. Thus, it became the prerogative of the translators to hazard a guess as to which set of conditions applied in a given situation and apply the terms they thought most conducive to expressing what they thought the text described, all in all.

Deuteronomy 6:20 is one passage in which the translators' discretion betrays some clumsiness, in my opinion. They add two words to the text: "And," and "mean"; the first of which is unnecessary– to the point of gratuitousness; the second of which seems to sidetrack, if not derail, the narrative.

The text of Deuteronomy 6:20 (with the translators' helps) reads: "And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you [Deuteronomy 6:20]?" The context, in this case, is a standalone. It doesn't add to the sentence before it. Thus, the "And" at the beginning of the verse is of no value to the verse or (as is implied by its usage) to that of the verse preceding it. Likewise, why the translators would choose to add the word "mean" to the text is beyond me.

In similar cases throughout the canon, such a gap would be bridged with a verb such as: "is"; "are"; "be"; "were"; "was"; etc. Here, for some reason, the translators used this peculiar verb "mean," which only further clouds the text of an already too- obscure canon. If the overall context of the canon were consulted, it would be obvious that Moses' intent in exhorting the Jewry to remember to their children the events he describes in the five verses following Deuteronomy 6:20 (to the end of the chapter) is to reinforce his legacy as "the LORD that healeth thee [Exodus 15:26h]"–: not to provide meaning to his law. This latter would be what a good parent would naturally do when fielding the request so stated.

As I read the text, "are" is a better term to use than "mean". To me the text reads less- beguilingly thus: "When thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What [are] the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you [Deuteronomy 6:20]?" This way, the text which follows to the end of the chapter is a reminder not to forget Moses while remembering his law. The historical accounts of the canon bear this up over and over again, inasmuch as, over and over again, the text of the canon states specifically that– in spite of Moses' continual warnings to the children of Israel to not forget the law– they worshipped the lawgiver and forgot the law he gave.

This seems counterintuitive, but given Moses' 'God- complex [Exodus 4:16 & 7:1]', the truth about the text of Deuteronomy 6:20 is more 'beguiling' than the flattery the translators afford the vanity of his legacy. And why should it not be so? It was, after all, none other than Moses himself who said of himself that he was "meek ABOVE all the men upon the face of the earth [Numbers 12:3]."