Knots Untied

Of Baked Beans and Ice-cream

2011-09-15T19:06:00.001Z

Your guess is as good as mine.

Looking up in the sky this week and counting I was surprised to find fewer than average full moons populating the heavens. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered me, but I’d just been offered baked beans in a wafer-cornet traditionally reserved for ice-cream. I needed an explanation that went beyond the natural sciences.

Let’s be honest about this. In general, a person who offers me the opportunity to consume “baked beans in a cone” expecting a positive response has the odds stacked against them. Tell me that I am misjudging the synergy of said baked bean combo and that the feast is God’s gift to my taste buds with a straight face, and I will tell you that you are a filthy, rotten liar. Furthermore, if you insist on eating them on a regular basis I will demand a lighter and/or better ventilation. But this was different. As I looked up at the speaker I found myself staring up at the sweetest, most naïf innocent I have seen in years. It was the face of one, whom I had told just a week earlier that the correct form of Korean greeting that should be used when meeting an older person of the opposite sex is ‘Popohaejo’, and she had immediately tried it on a nearby Korean man. His reply came quickly:

‘Did Jos teach you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. I thought so.’

‘Why? Isn’t it nice?’

‘Well, yes. It’s very nice.’

‘Oh good.’

‘It means, “Kiss me.”’

She went quiet. She didn’t even tell me off. Now, Hong Kong Chinese are not necessarily famed for their love of Baked beans, and I looked her in the eye carefully after she offered me the beans. Blank innocence stared back at me.

‘It’s nice,’ she said.

‘Are you sure this is nice? Because, you know, baked beans themselves aren’t know for their gourmet flavor.’

‘I like it. The two go really well together.’

‘Really? Really really?’

‘Yes, You should try it?’

I looked at her.

‘Okay. I’ll give it a go.’

With great care she spooned baked beans into a waiting cornet and handed it to me.

‘I have to say, it doesn’t look that great.’ I said.

‘It tastes really good though.’

I nibbled a corner.

‘What do you think?’ She asked, eagerly.

‘Honestly?’

She nodded

‘It tastes exactly like baked beans in a cornet.’

‘Isn’t it nice?’

‘Well I’ve tasted worse, but normally when you stick a cornet in front of my face my mouth is watering for ice-cream, not lukewarm beans in tomato sauce. What on earth made you put these together?’

‘It’s nice.’

I thought for a second.

‘Actually, I know why you did it. Aren’t you doing a project in product design with Heinz products?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re just trying every possible combination, aren’t you?’

‘No. I happen to like baked beans.’

‘Maybe. But not in an ice-cream cone, surely.’

‘I did also try making baked bean jelly.’

‘Oh. Nice?’

‘Horrible. The ice-creamed baked beans were nice though.’

‘Baked bean ice-cream?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s really nasty.’

‘No, it was okay, as long as you didn’t know what it was. But then I remembered that most people eat them on toast, so I thought of how I can adapt that idea into a desert.’

‘Hence the cone.’

‘Yes.’

At work the following day I took time out for lunch, and since it was a nice day, decided to accompany a colleague to eat in the hospital garden. It’s quite a small garden, so when the sun is out it’s often difficult to find a seat on one of the benches to eat lunch at. However, on this day the raised wooden dais in it was remarkably free of people. We cheerfully approached it. But, then, noticed a possible reason why might have been left free.

Someone was sitting on one of the tables without a head.

Do you know Jack?

Or at least they were sitting at a table with a large plastic shopping bag over their head. They looked like Jack(-in-the-Box)’s twisted cousin. Looking around the rest of the garden we noticed it was full of nurses, clinicians, and various ancillary staff. None of them sitting on the dais. None of them wishing to be anywhere near someone screaming, ‘psychiatric patient’.

A few days after this I had a meal with “baked beans in a cone”, and a couple of other Hong Kong friends.

‘Oh, B…. If you want to say in Korean that the food is good you say, “micheseoyo”.’ Considering that we were in an Italian restaurant at the time, this probably wasn’t of immediate use. But, in my defense, there was a Korean at the table. He nodded in agreement to my words.

Daniel – who knows me better – then said, ‘B – you know when Jos is talking. 90% of the time it’s good solid stuff. But then there’s another 10% where he is winding you up. I think this is one of those times.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really.’

She looked at me with fawn-like eyes.

‘Well, “mashiseoyo” does, in fact, mean “delicious.”’

She looked reassured.

‘On other hand, “micheseoyo” means, “I’m crazy” or, “You’re crazy”, depending on how you say it.’

Jos

The Tree of Life

2011-08-29T16:47:00.002Z

Writer: Terrence Malick

Director: Terrence Malick

Stars: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain

Wow - It's been months since I posted. This one is simply to write out a few thoughts about Terrence Malick's most recent film that I finally got around to watching. At the end of watching the Tree of Life I was left with the overwhelming impression that Terrence Malick had just shared his most personal thoughts with me[1]. Whether or not the Tree of Life fully resembles the vision he had in his head, it seems to have gone through a long development process before final release, so it’s as close as he could get. The final product is so replete with philosophical musings that it’s easy to recall that Malick studied philosophy with a particular focus on the works of Heidegger.

But the movie is not a description of the director’s education; rather it is an invitation to wonder at the universe brought to fruition through cinematic poetry. This is achieved through the characters’ words, through the images on the screen, and through his accompanying music. The world view behind the images might be open to interpretation, but the fact remains that there is a philosophy there to be considered and viewers of his previous movies, such as The Thin Red Line, may well wonder whether the Tree of Life brings a number of themes into the foreground that were present previously. Thus ‘love’, ‘grace’, ‘sin’, ‘nature’, ‘suffering’, ‘hope’ and ‘wonder’, and ‘eternity’ each emerge from the narrative at various points in the movie. The Thin Red Line opens with a crocodile submerging within leafy water, accompanied by a voice-over that states:

What is this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power but two?

And one of its characters will muse:

This great evil - where’s it come from How did it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?

Put another way, Malick used the framework of James Jones’ Pacific War novel to ask the audience to visualize larger questions about the quality of nature and man. It is clear from it’s beginning that death and life are a theme intrinsic to the story, so that at its end a disembodied voice will ask:

Who were you that I lived with? The brother? The friend?

Although the Thin Red Line talks at some length that suffering and death are part of existence and that a cycle of death and rebirth are intrinsic to life[2], it never explicitly addresses why. Even at a broader level, the source of the movie’s contemplation remains unclear. The language used in the various voice-overs and dialogues hints at origins in Biblical consciousness, but much of the visual imagery in the movie borders on panentheism[3]. In the end, death and life remain a mystery.

Tree of Life is more explicit with its sources and it opens with a quotation from Job 38 that implicitly refers to God:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

The quote is a prelude to a movie in which the issues life, death and suffering will openly preoccupy much of its contents. ‘Does anything remain deathless?’ asks an Episcopalian minister, once again focusing on Job, before, as if in answer, the movie cuts to an image of Christ in a stained glass window.

We meet the movie’s protagonist, Jack, in adulthood played by Sean Penn, living in a world of steel and glass, cut off from Nature; its smells, its sounds, its sights[4]. Then there is an almighty shift of focus and, the audience is taken on a journey through Creation, an act driven by a great existential force that speaks only through the glory and wonder of the aeons since the universe’s beginning, in cycles of life and death, acts of violence and compassion. Images of the birth of the stars and planets are accompanied by a requiem that intones, ‘lacrimosa’ (‘tears’), as if the development of one requires the suffering of another. The heavens declare ‘the glory of God’[5], the film seems to say, ‘but it also shows us that death is part of creation’. An emerging cell consumes a bacterium and evolves[6]; life develops in the oceans and a flippered dinosaur moves onto dry land, injured by an unseen assailant. Yet, alongside the process of death and suffering that are intrinsic to modern neo-Darwinism[7] we see the opportunity of grace, as a dinosaur pauses by a river’s edge to watch a prey struggling under foot before deciding against killing it. This scene has understandably come under particular criticism from professional movie reviewers, who either hold the view that the inclusion of dinosaurs was unnecessary and holds up the narrative, or lends a certain speculative corniness to the creative sequences of the movie. Whether-or-not this is the case, Malick has deliberately included this sequence to allow the concept of Grace to be included alongside suffering throughout creation, and is therefore this scene, or one like it, is crucial to his overall thematic structure.

A cataclysmic meteor strikes the Earth and we return to Waco, Texas, where Jack and his younger brother live as children with their parents: a father who wants them to grow up fighting against the world, and a mother who lives by grace. And, while we see glimpses of his brother growing in imitation of his mother, we see within Jack a spirit that experiments in cruelty and transgression, a boy who acts without comprehending the consequences, and a nature where aspects of each parent struggles within him. He recalls the words of Romans 7:

Why do I do the things I hate and fail to do those things I want to do?

During a moment of reconciliation his father mentions that Jack has both his father and mother in him. Jack replies: ‘I’m more like you…’

Throughout, we are reminded of the death of Jack’s brother from drowning[8] and images of water punctuate the movie, often in the context of death and rebirth: a dinosaur is spared by a river, an infant is baptized, a spirit hovers over the waters, Jack’s younger brother is seen to emerge from an underwater door and swim towards light above. Jack ponders all this and whispers:

Guide us… to the end of time…

Before long we return to the adult Jack, who bookends the story, and the closing scenes of the movie provide a sequence of scenes that is structurally, if not visually, reminiscent of the scenes of the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Jack finds himself in a land of desolation on the threshold of life and death, before passing through a ruined door. He emerges in the new earth to be reunited with his family on a beach scene[9] that perhaps felt a little misplaced, or unnecessary, but lends to structural similarities with 2001. Both begin with man’s origin and end with man’s future, however, as 2001 takes the protagonist, Bowman, beyond time so that he is seen at various states of physical age before finding himself reborn as the ‘star baby’, and the next phase of human evolution[10], so did Tree of Life take the protagonist, Jack, to the end of time and the next phase of existence. Arthur C. Clark once stated about 2001 (a film he codeveloped with Kubrick):

If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.

Malick remains silent on the purposes behind his movie, but it would be fair to say that the Tree of Life too wishes to outline a series of questions concerning our existence without providing answers.

That is not to say that the movie makes no statements. Much of the movie may have the beating heart of expressionism and many scenes are designed to show an emotional heart rather than a mere description of data, but within this canvas it paints a bold picture: (1) It describes an evolutionary process over millions of years and indicates that this process is divinely controlled; (2) It implies that death has been part of the world order from the beginning of Earth’s history and contrasts this with Christ’s eternity[11]; (3) It is plainly shown that Grace will ultimately triumph over ‘nature’; (4) It wants to reveal the breath-taking beauty of nature that helps us to see the Divine[12] – a message that is lost by closing ourselves off from big cities; (5) It suggests that suffering may have a divine purpose. In other words, it challenges both those who believe in God and those who do not to look at the universe in all its vast expanse of space and time, and think.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the movie also feel very much like it was an exposition of Malick’s personal thoughts, and with this in mind it can certainly polarise audiences. There are so many elements within it to disconnect an audience: some have mentioned dislike of the dinosaurs, others have found the end sequence unsatisfying, some have even found the story of Jack’s childhood too weak a narrative to sustain its length. To my mind the story is appropriate to its subject, and I never found myself bored by it, but while I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, it’s a movie I’d happily watch again.

Jos.

[1] However, innermost thoughts don’t necessarily give you the measure of a man, because not only is it easy to deceive ourselves or present only a small aspect of our thinking, it takes no account of our lives: either how we practise the ideas we present or live our lives in a broader sense.

[2]Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, sun to shine? Elsewhere Sargent Welsh comments: One man looks at a dying bird and sees nothing but unanswered pain. But death’s got the final word – it’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird and feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.

[3] Panentheism is never explicit in the dialogue - the closest line of dialogue to it is possibly, Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man. We must also remember that read incorrectly a verse like Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him (1 John 4) could be read panentheistically.

[4] In the first draft of Tree of Life, the intention is obvious, since the city is described: “A World that would excluded the transcendent, that says: I am here, there is nothing else. A world without Love.”

[5] Psalm 19. See also Romans 1.

[6] This idea of endosymbiosis is fundamental to modern understanding of the evolution of life, first proposed in 1905. There are a number of pieces of evidence to support this idea. In the case of human mitochondria, it has been observed that have their own DNA genome, which shares similarities to bacterial DNA and not to human DNA.

[7] I.E natural selection that operates to allow some altered cells to survive and proliferate more successfully than others. However, as Lynn Margulis, the scientist who produced a seminal 1967 paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology that enlarged our understanding of the development of cells through endosymbiosis, has said, too large a focus on negative selection may miss the emergence of cooperation.

[8] At age 19 - the same age that Terrence Malick’s younger brother died from drowning.

[9] The screenplay is helpful here, since the published first draft includes descriptions of the end of earth and the transposition of our known universe beyond death where Jack is reunited with is family on the shores of eternity.

[10] In 2001 Bowman passes through a monolith or ‘star gate’ where he sees many worlds, before finding himself in a strange, sterile, hotel room. Scenes then proceed in a series of successive cuts, and he is seen at different phase of life and different positions in the hotel room, before finally meeting his death, where the mysterious monolithic alien watches over his final transition.

[11] Although Christ experienced death, his nature is eternal and he is placed in the movie as a direct contrast to death.

[12] While the Christian God is only ever mentioned as a platitude in the film (near the beginning after receiving news of Jack’s brother’s death), the Divine is behind statements like, ‘Guide us to the end of time”. Many of the visuals within the film seem to hint at thinking from Psalm 19 or Romans 1.

2011 and All That...

2011-05-06T18:15:00.005Z

'Shakespeare's' Globe Theatre on London's Southbank.

2011 certainly seems to be a year for celebration in the U.K. First, the royal wedding, and now the 400^th anniversary celebrating the publication of the King James Bible translation[1]. Anyone who knows anything about Brits knows that the UK film ‘industry’ thrives on period drama. Talk to them about any event further back in history than yesterday and it will appear in costume at some point. Hence the upcoming production, ‘KJV – the Book that Changed the World.’

Alas I was not able to attend the screening at All Souls Church on Thursday, since I was not in London, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not. I guess I’ll catch it at another time.

What I did see was something put on at the Globe Theatre over Easter. In case you’ve not been to it, this is the theatre that is almost, but not entirely, unrelated to the Globe Theatre in San Diego. Both theatres, however, have the same evolutionary ancestor – the Globe theatre that existed on the Southbank of London some 400 years ago. And, despite what you might expect, the San Diego Globe is actually older than the London version[2]. It also has a considerably larger diameter, cushioned seats, and, while both are open to the air, you are a lot less likely to get a severe drenching in the summer months of Southern California than Southern England.

A winning combination, apparently.

But the London theatre wins in this regard: it looks older. A lot older. It is an exact replica of Shakespeare’s theatre, built on the original site and hand-crafted from the same materials using 16^th century techniques. It’s got a genuine thatched roof and everything.

That makes it cool.

Especially in winter.

You feel like you’re living the genuine Elizabethan life.

You have to get something for your money, because, frankly, it’s not the most comfortable experience in the world.

If you go for the full-on authenticity of the pit, expect to find yourself subjected to three or more hours of back-wrenching agony as you stand, paralyzed in front of the stage, open to every element God flings at you. Plead for mercy, and the smiley faced attendants around you will simply say, ‘It will all be over soon. If you really need to find a position less than the vertical, try fainting.’

I have met one individual who actually enjoys standing while watching a play there. He’s Chinese, and has been in the UK for a few years developing his English language acting skills. I once saw him perform one the most unforgettable renditions of Hamlet’s soliloquy I’ve ever witnessed.

He used nunchuks.

As I said.

Unforgettable.

No-one else I’ve met has willingly done this more than once. [3]

Assuming you have strummed up the £30 ($50) or so to get a seat, then sit back, relax, and embrace three-plus hours of romantic butt-numbing, back-pulling agony in your backless wooden bench.

No wonder the plays were good: You needed something spectacular to take your mind off the ergonomics.

Er…

Where was I?

Oh, yes…

The King James Bible.

For a measly £10, during Easter week, the Royal Shakespeare Company performed at the Globe Theatre a recitation of the entire King James Bible.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

‘The entire Bible? In King James – ye olde - English? Shoot me first.’

You, may, understandably, have just undergone a flashback to bad memories of Bible readings in a church.

Remember those monotone voices, stumbling pronunciations, misplaced emphasis?

Inside the Globe, during recital of KJV

None of that here.

Despite what you might think of King James English it is entirely understandable for contemporary audiences, even, for the most part, to those for whom English is a second language. Indeed I would go so far as to say that as rendered here it sounded fresh and vibrant.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some interesting pronunciations on display. There were. Levite pronounced ‘Lev-ite’ rather than ‘Lee-vite’ comes to mind, and Jeroboam pronounced, … well, I can’t quite get my head around how exactly it was pronounced, but it sounded like someone was saying the word who had never seen a Hebrew name before. Which, when all is said and done, was quite likely. And for all I know, the alternative pronunciations on offer were more correct than my well-honed sweetmeats.[4]

Nor was the Bible read. It was recited by professional actors, who rotated a chapter at a time.

It was brilliant.

Some of you may be wondering how these actors managed to memorize the entire Bible. Well, let me tell you. Just before I saw the recitations I was attending a discussion on the value of narrative in the Arabic culture, when the person giving the talk said, ‘Arabs will think nothing of memorizing whole chapters, or even books, of the Bible.’

Wow.

That puts me to shame.

It is, quite possible, then, for it to be done!

Of course, some of you, who actually saw the performances, may point out to me that each of the actors wore an earpiece.

Cynics.

The lot of you.

The fact that I could sometimes hear Bible passages tinnily drifting out the resonating heads of the actors is utterly irrelevant.

If you didn’t get to see any of these performances, it’s a great pity.

[1] As an interesting aside, while the King James Bible was first printed in 1611, the translation made use of a great deal of William Tyndale’s translation around a century Earlier. William Tyndale, translated the Old and New Testaments from their original languages, and got burned at the stake for it in 1536 under the orders of Henry VIII and Thomas More (yes, the hero of the movie, ‘A Man for All Seasons’, and author of ‘Utopia’). Tyndale seems to have been a powerful linguist and translator, inventing words like, ‘Passover’, ‘scapegoat’ and (possibly) ‘atonement’ for his translation.

[2] That’s not saying that much though, because the one in London is little more than a decade old. You can see it in the movie, ‘Shakespeare in Love’ shortly after it was completed. The San Diego Globe Theatre was completed in 1935.

[3] They have however done it for economic reasons, since standing costs only £5. And for social reasons – particularly when someone of the opposite sex is involved.

[4] Don’t ask me how to hone a sweetmeat. I have no idea.

The Tea Ceremony

2011-04-30T15:04:00.004Z

An uncommon sight in Korea: A traditional home

The UK is in festive mood. The Crown declared a national holiday to allow the population to celebrate the marriage of Prince William with Kate Middleton. You know what that means?

Yes.

It’s time for a cup of tea.

Not that the UK is as obsessed with tea as some might think. Walk along the Mall from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square, or deviate off it to either St. James’s Park or Green Park, and you’ll be far more likely to find a café than a teashop. And this isn’t just a recent phenomenon. I remember reading Samuel Pepys’ diaries a few years ago, and, apart from his descriptions of coffee shops, drinking chocolate and consuming pints of wine over lunch[1], I was struck by this sentence:

To the office, where Sir W. Batten, Coll. Slingsby, and I sat for a while. … And afterwards did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink which I had never drank before)…[2]

It seems that coffee, and even chocolate, were more widely drunk in the 17^th century than tea. Still, there’s no denying that once it arrived in the UK it certainly caught on. And the English have become notoriously ritualistic about drinking it.

Kinda.

Leastways there was an article on ABC news all about it.

However, these days, where patience is low down on the list of the population’s character traits, the most common way to prepare tea is to throw a teabag into a mug and add boiling water. Still, tea-rituals are still present and active. Hand a Brit a teapot and immediately they will heat it through with boiling water before adding tea leaves to it. Most likely they will add milk to cups in readiness for the tea, and search for saucers to put cups on.[3] A few will even discuss the rights or wrongs of adding milk to a cup of Earl Grey.

But the Brits are not the only people to take tea seriously. On a visit to France a few years back I met a lady who ran a small café in Alençon, Normandy, who tried to teach me the proper way to make tea (with spring water).

Needless to say I ignored the advice completely.

Not only that, I went on to explain to her the correct way to cook duck.

You boil it. Obviously.[4]

Anyway, in general the French are not big tea drinkers.

The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, on the other hand, take tea to another level.

Wave a carton of milk in front of a Korean and they’ll froth it up for a cappuccino.

A green tea cappuccino.

Take the milk away and tea becomes a ritual. Not just the Koreans of course, but also the Japanese and Chinese.

The modern Chinese one goes like this:

‘Hey! Get me tea![5] I’m dying of thirst over here!’

Something like that, anyway.

As Hong Kong and Singaporean friends have said:

‘What’s the point in messing around with all that ceremony? All we want to do is drink the stuff.’

When the tea arrives, some nano seconds later, there is a little etiquette concerning pouring the tea for others, banging your fingers on the table appreciatively, and balancing the lid on the handle of the teapot.

So, yeah… I’ve never been in a Chinese tea ceremony.

Koreans up the ante somewhat, at least when they’re not drinking green tea lattes and cappuccinos or getting plastered on soju.[6]

Breakfast in Korea

I was fortunate enough to be able to stay in a traditional Korean house briefly on a visit to Korea, and be treated to some of the most amazing Korean food I’ve ever tasted where even the tofu was hand made. Just as memorably, my hosts organized a tea ceremony.

I felt humbled by the kindness shown me.

And by the loss of circulation in my legs: The ceremony lasted something in the order of three hours and required sitting cross-legged on a hard wooden floor. Despite the family taking mercy on me, and providing a kneeling stool, by the end my feet had turned blue and been reduced to mere vestigial appendages.

It was an unforgettable experience.

Jellies for Tea Ceremony.

My friends and I sat on the floor around a low wooden table while the mother of the home hosted the ceremony. Jellies were arranged on plates and laid on the table. Pots with cleaned wooden twigs were placed nearby, for picking them up.

We stared hungrily.

Meanwhile our host took handmade clay cups, bowls and pots and prepared the tea, heating the various pieces of crockery through before use and discarding the first wash of tea.

We sipped the tea slowly, ate the jellies (to balance the flavor of the tea) and chatted. Drank some more. After finishing this we were then offered a second tea to cool us down before bed. The only sad aspect to the occasion was that the closing of the tea ceremony seemed to signal a formal farewell to my friend’s family. The next morning I left.

The Tea Ceremony: Me on a prayer stool; tea preparation; Tea; Drinking Tea with friends.

The only other tea-ceremony I’ve been around is a Japanese tea ceremony I saw enacted as part of a friend’s farewell from London.

Actually, this is an ongoing thing. Japanese tea ceremonies, it seems, last about 3 years, and since this one only began last month I’m not expecting it to finish until sometime in 2014. I went along to it with Hong Kong and Japanese-Brazilian friends, hoping to meet a Japanese friend before he returned to Hokkaido. Unfortunately he had organized a promotional event for Japanese culture, so it was difficult to really talk, and this kicked-off with a tea ceremony. The whole procedure is being narrated with otherworldly grace, in case you miss anything. It began thus:

‘You need to prepare white and red napkins, tucking the white one into your Kimono. Each guest wears a red napkin to distinguish who is serving the tea and who is the guest.

‘Bow to your guests and present the cup in two quarter turns to the first guest, so that he can appreciate the art-work on the cup. Once the guest has nodded with suitable appreciation you will turn the cup to yourself in two quarter turns so that you, yourself, can appreciate its glory.’

I looked at my Hong Kong friend.

He looked back at me.

Behind his eyes I saw fear.

He was Chinese, and, in all fairness to the Japanese, has the patience of a squirrel.

The chances of talking to our Japanese friend vanished as we saw an evening encumbered with ceremony.

‘You hungry?’ I said.

‘Starving.’ He replied.

We slipped out the back.

Jos.

[1]A theatre addict, he wrote about contemporary plays and actors, the Great Fire of London, the Plague, the poisoness nature of tobacco, the severity of his wife’s periods, a South African habit of cutting off one testical (!), eating turkey, importing wood from New England, and numerous other events both in his life and the political world around him.

[2] September 25, 1660. The use of the word, ‘Tee’ is interesting, because the word in most Chinese dialects is, ‘cha’, as it is in Japanese, Korean, and many other Asian languages. ‘Cha’, or rather, ‘char’ is preserved as the word for ‘tea’ in some dialects of British English (notably, Cockney).

[3] Believe it or not, there is debate about whether it is more correct to add milk to cups before the tea or after (and whether it’s a sign of high social status to do one or the other). However, adding milk first does prevent tannin stains on cups.

[4] At least if you believe the Asterix books. As most people who know me will tell you, I’m more likely to add soy sauce. Or freshly squeezed orange with honey and Port.

[5] Interestingly, in both Chinese and Korean you may ask for ‘water’ rather than tea, since in days of yore it was impolite (i.e. deadly) to bring water.

[6] ‘Gasoline’, in Korean. Look it up.

Egyptian and Chinese

2011-04-27T18:52:00.001Z

Okay. I'm feeling guilty. It's been over a month since my last blog entry, and I’ve been itching to finish writing pieces of Hebrew. I’m afraid I became a tad overwhelmed with my commitments, blah, blah blah... I will try to get back up to speed (though I have a few things in the next couple of weeks that might interfere - we shall see). Nothing on Hebrew today though… This is a really just a quick entry on something that caught my attention

I bought a second-hand copy of a two-volume work describing the culture of the ancient Egyptians by the 19^th century Egyptologist John Gardener Wilkinson, really just to familiarize myself with the state of knowledge of Egypt in the 1850s (only 30 years after the key to hieroglyphics was given through the decipherment of the Rosetta stone). Loved it. Well illustrated throughout, it gives a much better insight into ancient Egyptian life than many of the books I see on the shelves today.

It also gave me a little of a surprise. As I was reading through it I noticed this choice sentence:

Among the many bottles found in the tombs of Thebes, and other places, none have received greater curiosity and surprise than those of Chinese manufacture, presenting inscriptions in that language.[1]

I don’t mind saying that I did something of a double take at this point. Then I remember that Egypt had been trading with Afghanistan as far back as 4000 BC, from whence it obtained Lapis Lazuli - the blue stone that adorns so many artifacts from Egypt. According to Gardiner one of these had been reportedly found in a previously unopened tomb.

‘Odd,’ I thought, ‘I’ve never heard about this before.’

I checked Google.

Nothing.

Don’t believe me? Check yourself.

It was at this point that I decided to examine the vases in question. Fortunately, there was a handy little illustration on the next page of the book, describing the vases in detail.

‘Ah.’ I said. Out loud to the other members of the train carriage I was on at the time.

‘I see.’

I stared at the illustration. No doubt about it – the style of Chinese script depicted in the illustration was far too developed to be contemporary with the ancient Egyptians – even those of the Ptolemaic period.

I read on.

Although it was not established at the time, it is most probable that these vases were brought by Arab traders to Egypt after the Muslim conquests.

So, not that exciting from an Egyptologists point of view. But still interesting.

Jos.

[1] J. Gardener Wilkinson: The Ancient Egyptians – Their Life and Culture, volume II, Chapter VII.

And you thought Wong Kei Was Rude

2011-03-17T21:36:00.003Z

Pick your own, Asian style

I’ve written about Wong Kei before. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about you can either check the Guinness Book of Records or read my previous blog, but a quick précis is this: It’s a large restaurant in London’s China Town that many would claim to be the rudest restaurant in the world.

Little do they know.

For sure, Wong Kei might be a little brusque, but as one of my Hong Kong friends says, ‘You gotta expect that. It’s part of the show. It’s not like they mean it.’

Actually, they might mean it.

But what do you expect when you’re paying $5 for meal and free tea in the heart of London [1].

Speaking of free tea, there is a restaurant not far from Wong Kei called ‘Young Cheung’ [2], where I once went with another Hong Kong friend. The meal was pretty good, but when the bill arrived my friend noticed that the tea was more expensive than it usually cost. She turned to the waitress and spoke in Cantonese.

‘Why does the tea cost so much?’

‘Guai Lo price.’ Said the waitress, also in Cantonese.

‘Guai Lo’ (鬼佬).

I was pretty sure this didn’t mean ‘sales tax’ [3].

As revenge I perform eye-kwondo on the waiters whenever I order tea at that restaurant now.

But my most fiendish of glances are reserved for Sakura.

‘Cherry Blossom,’ in Japanese.

Until recently I knew it as that little restaurant near Oxford Circus, with little salt piles by the doorway [4], in which patrons sat around black-topped tables on black raffia-backed chairs, staring up at black walls, the latest Japanese baseball or Sumo, and one scary-ass fortune bear.

All that has changed.

Now it’s that mid-sized restaurant off Regent Street with little salt piles by the doorway, where patrons sit around natural wood tables, listening to conversation and staring at the scary-ass fortune bear.

Now, I don’t know whether or not the owner-manager has a reflection [5], but he scares the living daylights out of me. He looks like a cross between Christopher Lee and the fortune bear. Maybe there’s a connection and maybe not. Who am I to say? And why do I even mention him?

Well, I’ll get to that.

Have you ever arranged with a few friends to go to a restaurant, and then after sitting down realised that someone else wants to join the group, or someone couldn’t make it, so the number of places you imagined were going to be filled changed.

Don’t let that happen at Sakura.

The owner will remove your manhood. [6]

In general you’re not allowed to sit until the entire group is present, even if it means waiting an hour. And don’t try to engage him in light conversation, because he hasn’t got any. A friend hit the issue on the nose:

‘Wong Kei is an act. This guy means it. He’s just plain rude to his customers.’

There’s a reason I never give a tip at this restaurant.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, check out this Facebook page someone put together.

It’s a shame the food is as good as it is, really.

Jos.

[1] Apart from diarrhoea of course.

[2] In fact there are 3 restaurants with this name nearby. I’m referring to the one in Shaftesbury Avenue.

[3] Literally, ‘ghost man’, and equivalent to ‘gaijin’ in Japanese, it’s considered a little offensive in Hong Kong, though the expression is used in Singapore without the assumption of insult.

[4] I’ve written about this before (even taking a picture of the doorway to this very restaurant. However, it’s possible my earlier reasoning was wrong and the salt was placed there to tempt passing hell hounds to stop and have a lick.

[5] Presumably. Then again, is it coincidence that the restaurant has no mirrors?

[6] Usually this happens figuratively. But I wouldn’t recommend telling him about the change when there are any sharp objects within reach.

Sumerian Part 4: Gender differences, tonality and Chinese

2011-03-08T01:19:00.010Z

3000 BC Gold Helmet from Ur

Okay, this is a little longer than I intended (and also a little later than I intended). What can I say? I got a little carried away. Also, I needed to check a few things and I've been a bit short of time to write this beast. Hmm. I'm just making it longer by a waffling introduction, huh. So, let me get into this thing. The first words I remember learning in Japanese were a greeting:

‘Konichiwa Yumiko-chan.’ … ‘Hello Yumiko.’

Yes, this is basic. Actually, ‘konichiwa’ is so well known around the world that hoards of Asian girls are beset by annoying Westerners yelling it in their faces, whether or not they are Japanese[1]. It is tantamount to yelling, ‘Hi! I don’t know anything about you or your culture whatsoever, but I need an icebreaker to find out if you will come around to my place for a coffee.’

The only thing I want to talk about however is the word ‘-chan’ that is suffixed to names of people who are younger. Along with ‘sensei’, ‘sushi’ and ‘geisha,’ it is also relatively well known in the West, and it’s a title that means something like, ‘younger one’. Or at least when I first learned it that’s what I was told, and that’s what I assumed it meant. But, the thing is, it was a Japanese woman who taught me this phrase, and she failed to tell me its full meaning. I found this out when I met a Japanese male friend, and used it on him, whereupon he got a little offended and I was reminded that ‘chan’ is generally reserved for women, not men.

So I fell afoul of the common mistake that Western men often make: to learn Japanese from a woman and use vocabulary that is only used by women in Japan[2]. Actually, the Japanese script, ‘kana’ was originally designed as a simplification of Chinese script for women to write[3]. Spoken Korean is even more defined than Japanese. A Korean woman who meets an older woman will refer to her as ‘Onni’, and refer to an older man as ‘Oppa’. A Korean man will never use these words, instead using ‘Noona’ to address an older woman and ‘Hyoung’ to address an older man.

See where this is going?

Yep.

Sumerian.

It seems that in Sumerian there existed a spoken form of the language known as ‘Emesal’ (a word meaning, ‘fine speech’) that was only used by women[4]. Emesal words look quite different from their standard (‘Emegir’) counterparts, and utilised a slightly different phonetic system. So, where the word for ‘wood’ is ‘gis’ in standard Sumerian is ‘mu’ in Emesal. Similarly, the word for ‘I’ is ‘me-e’ in Emesal, compared to its counterpart in Emegir, ‘ge’. Does this suggest different expectations of women in Sumerian society? Quite possibly, though many of the texts that use Emesal are divine texts, and the words are being uttered by goddesses, not humans.

Was it a tonal language?

Today, Chinese is not so much known for its deferential forms of address as it is for its tones.

Yet, even though Chinese love to mention the antiquity of their language, did you know that the first reference to tones in Chinese wasn’t until around the 5^th century AD[5]? Is that significant?

Not, necessarily, no[6].

However, an examination of languages related to Chinese has produced the theory that tones may have arisen as a result of the loss of consonants, and that very early Chinese was not tonal (or had very limited tonality). Some of those who look at the language, however, think like this: ‘There are only 400 syllables in Mandarin, a largely monosyllabic language. That’s not a lot of words to play with. This surely demands the use of tones to add a level of differentiation to the vocabulary’.

It is true that there are a rather limited number of syllables in modern Chinese, but there are languages with fewer available sounds that are not considered tonal[7] – though these tend to be polysyllabic languages. The truth, of course, is that no-one knows for sure whether archaic or primitive Chinese was spoken with tones or not.[8]

The limited vocabulary and monosyllabic nature of Sumerian[9] had led to the suggestion that it too was a tonal language. But, whereas Chinese belongs to a family of languages that can be compared for evidence, Sumerian stands alone, with no surviving relatives. This makes it tough. Very tough.

There is absolutely no way to know whether Sumerian was spoken with tones in it or not. You almost need to go on intuition. My personal feeling is that it was quite possible, though the evidence is entirely circumstantial: (a) there are a limited number of phonemes available in the language; (b) the number of words that sound the same, but may be drawn with different characters and have different meanings is quite significant; (c) it is known that the Sumerians would often drop the pronunciation of final consonants when speaking (this the word ‘dug’ would be pronounced ‘du’). This is interesting, because studies in the Vietnamese language strong suggest that it developed tonality developed to differentiate sounds that had been reduced by the loss of consonants.

I am no Sumerologist or Assyriologist of course, so in no way do I claim my thoughts are an authority on this matter.

Sumerian and Chinese.

Many attempts have been made to find linkages between Sumerian and aspects of modern languages: the two most famous being perhaps the Turkic and Altaic language groups. National pride at stake, and you have to admit it would be really cool to say, ‘Word up, losers! My language is derived from Sumerian!’

None of these ideas have been met with great favour by the academic world[10], and don’t get your hopes up that I’m going to succeed where the professionals have failed. I’m not. I simply want to present one hypothesis that intrigued me.

About 100 years ago, in 1913, a linguist at Oxford University, C.J. Ball, proposed that there were links between Sumerian and archaic Chinese. This was a little out there, because our knowledge of archaic Chinese isn’t spectacular, and when we get right down to it I doubt anyone would be prepared to argue that Sumerian and Chinese have a great deal of similarity. So, what can we say about this proposal?

I have to admit I’m intrigued by the idea. One reason is because, as I was looking into the Sumerian language, I immediately noticed its monosyllabic nature and wondered if, like Chinese, it had tonality. I also saw that, like Chinese, it tended to use aspects rather than tenses[11], and there were a few words with concepts tantalisingly reminiscent of ideas I have seen expressed in Chinese. But I was aware that any similarities I saw might have been coincidence, and I wanted to be wary of over-reading what I knew of the language.

Professor Ball noted that Chinese has evolved and sought to find root Chinese vocabulary by comparing words in different Chinese languages, Mongol, Japanese and Korean.

He proposed (a) there is evidence of common pictographic roots in the characters of Sumerian and Chinese, (b) there is evidence of common phonetic roots between Chinese and Sumerian vocabulary, and (c) there is evidence of shared concepts in the language.

I will be discussing Sumerian writing in more detail in the future, but it’s fair to say that the writing most usually associated with the Sumerians, cuneiform, doesn’t look a whole lot like any accepted Chinese script. Cuneiform writing, however, was developed as a highly efficient script for use in writing on wet clay, and evolved from the simplification of earlier, more easily recognisable characters. It is to these characters that C.J. Ball found comparison.

My initial thoughts are that we should be wary that we exclude shared universal concepts. It has been noted that certain words, like, ‘mama’ for ‘mother’ seem to exist in the vast majority of languages. Finding that these words are similar between any two languages wouldn’t be particularly surprising, or go very far to establishing a strong relationship between the two. Similarly, drawing their individual anatomic features to represent ‘male’ and ‘female’ hardly represents proof of shared linguistic heritage. I mean, you’ve got to admit, it doesn’t exactly represent thinking outside of the box, huh.

That said, is there anything in it?

Segments from C.J. Ball's book on Chinese and Sumerian.

Let’s take the characters first. A direct comparison between Chinese and cuneiform will be difficult, because the nature of the materials being used to write the texts is so different that different approaches have been used to develop the characters: One presses wedges into wet clay, while the other scratches or inks characters onto hard objects. The development of cuneiform forced the written characters in Sumerian to change markedly from their original forms. Therefore it might be best, if it is possible, to compare the pre-cuneiform Sumerian characters with the earliest known Chinese characters. Very few pre-cuneiform characters survive from ancient Sumerian, but perhaps there are just enough to get an impression. Let’s have a look.

Chinese characters scratched on bone

Prof Ball picked around 100 characters for comparison and demonstrated that Chinese and Sumerian characters have similar thinking behind their construction, and that derivatives of the characters occurred in each language with logic that suggests a level of parallel thought. I’ve not shown all of these, but simply given a few to give you an idea.

Well, yeah, I can see some connections here.

I guess.

If I squint.

And bang my head off a brick wall a couple of times.

There’s no denying that the primitive Sumerian characters for ‘mountain’, ‘grain’, ‘well’, and ‘vase’ look similar to their Chinese equivalents. But, since these are essentially direct representations of objects, it would be grossly unwise to use this similarity to substantiate a linguistic connection. Similarly, although the representation of ‘woman’ can be argued to be similar, it is quite clear that in each case the character is an anatomical drawing (this is clarified further in the ideogram for ‘wife’). A couple of characters seen here do make me curious: there seems, to me at least, to be a shared logic behind the characters for ‘not’, ‘gold’, ‘pig’, and ‘father’, as well as a looser connection to the more conceptual word, ‘great’. If I can pick on the character for ‘gold/precious metal’ briefly, this is particularly interesting because the Chinese seems to suggest something like, ‘earth under mountain’, or, I guess, ‘mining’[12]. The Sumerian is less clear in this regard, but does not immediately strike me as having this underlying meaning. The negative character, ‘not’, however, shows clear similarity, but without understanding the underlying intention behind these characters it is difficult to directly connect them[13].

What about the phonetic language? Are there any similarities there?

When we come to look at these we perhaps need to be wary, because Prof. Ball was working with an early 20^th century understanding of Sumerian and that it has become clear over the last few decades that some of the meanings assigned to Sumerian words have changed. I’ll try, therefore, to give both the traditional and contemporary understanding of the vocabulary for a few words. The prof gives us a long list – a few hundred words for comparison, and there is no way you are going to entice me to write them all out here. For a look see here are a few:

Sumerian	English	Archaic Chinese	English
An	Heaven (Halloran)	Tien	Sky/heaven
Dug/Zag	Foot (Ball)	Tuk/tsuk
Du	To walk (Ball) To walk (Halloran)	Du	To walk.
Ge	Ear (Ball)	Ngei, ngi, ng	Ear
Ge	To write (Ball)	Ki	To write
Gen	Muscles (Ball)	Ken/Kin	muscles
Gi(n)	To seize	Kin/Kem	To seize
Idim/Idem	Sky/heaven (Ball) Underground spring/water (Halloran)	Tien	Sky/heaven
Ide Ku	To the eyes = at the moment (Ball)	Yen hia	Under the eyes = at the moment
Ir/Er/Ish	Water/tears	Er	Water/tears
Kiel	Place-clear (pure?) (Ball)	Ket/Kieh	Pure/clean
Ku	Sweet (Ball) Sweet (Halloran)	Ko/Kaa/Ken	Sweet
Ku	Fish (Ball) Fish (Halloran)	Ngu/Ku	fish
Ma	A standard weight (Ball)	Ma (stone+horse)	weights
Man	Companion/friend/two Partner/comparion/equal/two (Halloran)	Peng/bang	Friend/companion/a pair
Me	Water (Ball)	Mi/Me/bi	An expanse of water
Mu	To mill/grind (Ball) To mill/grind (Halloran)	Mwai/mu Mo-me	To grind To grind flour
Sa	To emulate (Ball)	Sai/soi/saui	To emulate
Gis/Gaz/Is Izi/nemur	Fire (Ball) Fire (Halloran)	Ka? (old Chinese) Gal (old Mongol) Fo (Cantonese/Hokkien) Fu (Hakka) Hwa (Korean)	Fire

I think his work is flawed, but within the long lists of words given us, I think we must say that Prof Ball has provided a case to answer. He rightly argues that words can have a similar origin, “though not a letter is shared between them”. Thus, in his word lists, ‘g’ in Sumerian often becomes an ‘h’ in Chinese, and an “n” may shift to a “t”. We are given a large number of tantalising clues that certainly draw us to wonder and question. However his work is far from a proof of a direct connection between the two languages. There are too many unanswered questions for that: I don’t think we can safely conclude similarity in the character development; nor can we conclude that Chinese and Sumerian share a grammatical structure: they most certainly do not. On top of this, I wouldn’t want to be the person who conclusively states the pronunciation of primitive Chinese words. But I will admit that perhaps the larger Altaic and Sino-Tibetan language groups share some overlapping origins in vocabulary[14].

A section from C.J. Ball's proposal

Jos

P.S. The Sumerian Helmet shown here is a replica in the British Museum- the original was battered from a single piece of solid gold, and I'm not sure of its current whereabouts.

[1] Ask a Korean girl sometime. Walking around cities in Europe they often have men come up to them and say, “Konichiwa!” … and when that fails to get a response they are then the unfortunate recipient to an atonal, “Ni hao ma?” Koreans know full well what these mean, but usually avoid dignifying the greeting with a response. Similarly, if you brandish your knowledge of Asia in a Korean restaurant by calling a waiter using the age-old cry, ‘sumimasen!’ not only will you be ignored, you may find the suspicious taste of urea in your food.

[2] The communist revolution, did, at least, act to equilibrate the rights of women in China, which were poor under Imperial rule. Differences do exist in the contemporary spoken Chinese of men and women in China, though this is by no means a simple issue. Women tend to speak with different phonetics, pitch (women’s speech is ‘high-accent’ (sajiao)), and word usage compared to men, though these are not so-much the result of a formal imposition of language, but a preferred projected demeanour.

[3] Less well known is that Chinese women were denied language education, so secretly developed their own script: Nushu.

[4] It is difficult to be certain, since the language is no longer spoken. However, there are sufficient clues from Sumerian texts and Akkadian that it was a spoken form of Sumerian, and it was used predominantly by women.

[5] Chinese history credits Shen Yue and Zhou Yong with stating that Chinese had 4 tones in the 5^th century.

[6] Various emperors – most memorably the Qin emperor - developed a bad habit of burning texts.

[7] Japanese for instance. It is also notable that Shanghainese has few tones.

[8] An 18^th century Chinese scholar Duan Yucai, studying rhymes in old Chinese poetry, declared that there were no ‘departing tones’ in Old Chinese (‘古无去声’), and work by some scholars since has favoured the theory that tones arose gradually during the first millennium BC.

[9] For example, the word ‘ur’ can mean, amongst other things: ‘a dog’, ‘roof’, ‘entrance’, ‘spleen’, or the verbs ‘to tremble’, ‘to wipe-out’, ‘to chew’.

[10] Of course, most Sumerian experts are from countries outside of Turkic and Altaic-speaking areas, are well aware that English isn’t a good choice for Sumerian linkages. That makes them relatively unbiased in this issue. Or, alternatively, gives them a vested interested in crushing the hopes of wannabees. Take your pick.

[11] This is hardly convincing, of course. It is entirely possible for two languages to have aspects and be unrelated, as it is for two languages to differ in this regard and yet have a common root.

[12] To my modern eyes it looks a little like a picture of a mountain covering the modern symbol for ‘earth’.

[13] I mean, for all I know these characters represent arrows denying an opponent, in which case the similarity would probably be coincidental thinking.

[14] There is little doubt, for instance that the Mongol culture not only penetrated deeply throughout China and Korea, but as far westwards as Turkey and Hungary.

Sumerian Part 3: Grammar Shmammer.

2011-02-28T10:31:00.011Z

From Ur with love

I’m sure no-one wants a blow-by-blow account of Sumerian Grammar. If you wanted that, you’d have bought or downloaded a textbook, huh. Yet, in order understand a little more about Sumerian beyond the brief introduction given in part 1 we need to know something about the different grammatical structures that languages use. Let’s take the English phrase, ‘I love you’. In this sentence there is a verb (‘love’), a personal pronoun who is doing the believing (‘I’) which serves as the ‘subject’, and a personal pronoun receiving the action of the verb (‘you’) acting as the ‘object’. If I wanted to change the subject to a third person (‘He’), then I would need to change the ending on the verb, so the phrase becomes, ‘He loves you.’ If I wish to put the phrase into a past tense I would again do this by changing the verb (‘He loved you’).

English verbs change to some extent according to the subject and tense, and the pronoun can also change according to its status (‘I’ used as an object becomes, ‘me’, and in possessive forms becomes, ‘my/mine’).

This form of changing is known as inflection, and can be used to establish the relationship of one-word-to another in a sentence, as well as the mood and tense of verbs. English is certainly not the only, or even the best example of an inflected language. There are many languages that exhibit higher degrees of infection than English. Languages such as Greek, or Semitic languages like Hebrew are highly inflected beasts.

However, not all languages exhibit inflection. Verbs in present day Mandarin, for example, cannot express tenses by inflection; similarly, nouns and pronouns cannot inflect, but remain static.[1] ‘I love you,’ is therefore expressed as, ‘wo ai ni’ (我爱你); he/she/it loves you is ‘ta ai ni’ (他/她/它爱你); and ‘you love me’ is, ‘ni ai wo’ (你爱我). Rather than expressing a phrase in a past-tense words such as le (了) and guo (过), known as ‘aspect markers’[2], are included to indicate whether the phrase is a completed action or not (e.g. ‘wo ai-guo ni’ -我爱过你 - ‘I loved you’) [3]. To express the time of action additional words are added (such as ‘yesterday…’). To express the possessive form of a noun, a word like ‘of’ is added next to the noun doing the possessing[4]. This kind of language, where individual, uninflected words provide the meaning and relationship of words to each other is called an isolated language.[5]

Sumerian does not fit into either of these forms; it does not use separate words to convey the relationship of words to each other. Nor does it use inflection per se, but rather it exhibits another method of identifying the relationship of elements in a sentence to one another: ‘agglutination’ [6]. This means that it builds up word elements by the addition of prefixes and suffixes, each of which act as individual meaning units, to build up word-relationships in a sentence. Let’s quickly look at one example[7].

SUMERIAN	ENGLISH
Du-mu	Son
Du-mu-tur	Small son (diminuitive element, ‘tur’, added)
Du-mu-tur-ne	Small sons (plural ‘ne’ added after diminuitive)
Dumu-tur-re-ne-ra	For the small sons (plural, with reduplicated consonant, +dative ending-‘-ra’)

A Very, Very Brief Introduction to Sentence Structure

In English a verb (V) tends to immediately follow the subject (S) of a sentence, after which you find the object (O) (e.g. ‘I ate the food’). Biblical Hebrew, on-the-other-hand, had a tendency to put the verb first in a sentence followed by the subject and then the object, giving a ‘VSO’ sentence structure. Unhelpfully, the Sumerian language didn’t follow either of these structures and generally placed the verb at the end of the sentence. In other words ‘I ate the food’ might read like, ‘I the food ate’. This may seem a little odd, but it was also a common construction in Latin, and contemporary languages such as Korean, have a similar habit.

Whereas it is possible to drop the subject of a verb in many languages[8], it is not possible to do this in Sumerian. A noun therefore will not only have attached to it its case and plurality, but its associated adjective (which comes before the case of the noun). Verbs, similarly, are built up from units. On the other-hand, the object (‘patient’[9]) of the sentence may not be explicitly stated.

In a nutshell

The upshot of this is that not only do there appear to be few words in Hebrew that can be said to have come from Sumerian with any degree of confidence[10], both the sentence structure and the method by which different words in a sentence were defined in each the two languages was quite different. Actually, as is often been pointed out in literature, Sumerian is a language isolate, and is not known to be related to any other language, either in the surrounding geographical area, or further afield.

Origins

Since the Sumerian language seems unique in the area, the question arises: Were the Sumerians indigenous to the area, or did they migrate from elsewhere?

It is clear from the academic literature that there is some uncertainty. What is known with some degree of confidence is that there is a style of pottery that can be found in the region that has entirely disappeared (the ‘Ubaid’) before any evidence of writing occurs. This pottery may-or-may not have belonged to the Sumerians, but finds in areas not believed to be occupied by the Sumerians[11] have questioned the link between it and Sumer[12]. On a more concrete level pottery at Samarra, a little further north in Mesopotamia predates the pottery at Ur, and seems to be its immediate predecessor.

What other evidence there is rests on how one understands the various words that make up the Sumerian language, since the people themselves weren’t considerate enough to leave a written history of their migration. Or at least not one that has survived and anyone actually believes. That their earliest building methods involved timber may also imply that they migrated from one of the surrounding mountainous areas, perhaps in the Russian steps or the area towards Afghanistan (who have been argued to ethnically resemble their paintings and description) [13]. Lots of ‘mays’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘possiblies’ there. It’s all speculation. Which leads us to the next point…

Jos.

[1] It is easy to believe Mandarin cannot inflect, because the characters are not amenable to change. However, we should remember that the method of writing does not necessarily tell us rules for the spoken language. It is believed that archaic Mandarin, did have some degree of inflection, using different characters to express different forms of pronouns (so, for example, the subjective first person pronoun, ‘I’, was ‘wu’, ‘吾’; the objective form, ‘me’, was ‘wo’, ‘我’).

[2] ‘Le’ has many functions, but is usually used to indicate a ‘change in state’. When used with verbs it commonly indicates an uncompleted action (‘imperfective), whereas ‘guo’ is used to indicate completed action (‘perfective’).

[3] Strictly, this is not a tense in Chinese.

[4] Though sometimes no word is added, as the relationship between the words is deemed clear without it

[5] Over its history English has become increasingly isolated: possessives, for example, are usually formed by either ‘–‘s’ or ‘of’ constructions, with very limited inflection. The case of the pronoun is rarely used (I/me, he/his/him being examples of when they are used), and there is a tendency in the U.K. to regard the objective word, 'whom' as redundant, and replace it with 'who'.

[6] For all you immunologists out there, you’re going to need to think outside the box for this one

[7] This example is taken from ‘Introduction to Sumerian Grammar’ by Daniel Foxvog

[8] E.g. In conversation, the English sentence, ‘Are you well?’ can be shortened to, ‘Well?’, since the subject is implied by the context.

[9] Sumerian sentences are not restricted to standard subject-verb-object relationships, but the language also exhibits ergativity, where intransitive verb-clauses may define the ‘agent’ that is conducting an action and a ‘patient’ that is the recipient of the action.

[10] There is, however, a connection that requires more explanation that I hope to come to when I specifically discuss Hebrew at a later date.

[11] i.e. at Carchemish

[12] See also the Samarran culture.
[13] This is reminiscent of the Old English verb, 'betimberen', meaning, 'to build'.

Sumerian part 2: Estruscan't do it captain!

2011-02-24T00:53:00.006Z

Friday night 'clubbing' in Etruria

All right ... I'm back to what I intended to post a couple of weeks ago. When I was at high school, part of my curriculum included art-history lessons. These wandered different places, but amongst them were lessons on Roman Architecture, which, we were authoritatively informed, was heavily influenced by Greek and Etruscan architecture. Greek wasn’t a surprise to me, since I already knew that the Romans had pinched the Greek gods wholesale[1]. They had also busied themselves colonising parts of Italy, and, if you believe the Aeneid (which, frankly, I don't[2]), played a major part in the establishment of Rome. Etruscan threw me a bit though, because I’d never heard of the Etruscans at that point. It turns out they lived in Tuscany. Should have guessed, really. They also spoke Estruscan. So, no surprises there. A few of them, such as Tarquinus, ended up as kings in pre-republican Rome. And they were kind enough to write in a script (basically, Greek) that was nice and readable.

Hurrah!

It’s something of a shame, then, that it makes no sense.

It just sits there blowing raspberries at you, daring you to take another stab at it, waving bilingual texts in your face that have you scrabbling for dictionaries. Eventually you go purple in the face with effort and public humiliation.

So, what has Etruscan got to do with Sumerian?

Not a lot.

What is interesting though is that some 17th Century efforts at decoding the language revolved around proving it developed from Hebrew. Hebrew, being, of course, the first language.

God's language, if you will.

These efforts failed miserably.

It’s funny though, because time-after-time I come across the assumption that Hebrew must be the world’s first language. I’ve even seen websites that argue from this viewpoint.

Yet the Bible gives no indication that Hebrew is in any way a 'divine' language. Even when God reveals the tetragrammaton, YHWH, to Moses, he then says that Abraham didn't know him by that name[3]. We have no good reason whatsoever to think that first man spoke Hebrew. Quite the opposite, actually. If one wishes to reason that the only valid arguments on Biblical issues must reside within the Bible itself, then we need to look no further than Genesis 11: even prior to Abraham the language of peoples had become mixed.

Getting back to Etruscan, then, we can still learn something from the efforts to decode it.

Zacharie Mayani, an Etruscan specialist, demonstrated one of the problems with attempting to decode languages without knowing the key to them[4]. He noted the word ‘enqten’ written next to a warrior on a vase, and speculated that modern Albanian may preserve the roots of a language that would provide a key to unlock Etruscan. He tried to distil the roots of the word, ‘enqden’, and, believing that the ‘e’ may be redundant, he played about with a dictionary, until he noticed that there was an obsolete Albanian word for conquest, ‘ngadhim’, related to ‘ngadhnoj’ (‘to conquer’) and, ‘ngadhuer’ (‘victorious’). However, he then found that ‘en’ was a prefix in Albanian, leaving the stem ‘qden’ (assuming that the Estruscans had not contracted the word and written all vowels[5]), and his previous efforts had been flawed. While Mayani has made valiant efforts to get to grips with Etruscan, the language still keeps its secrets. The lesson we need to learn here is to be careful that when we look at words that we are properly dissecting them: we are not just looking for words that confirm what we want to see.

What about Sumerian?

In an earlier blog on Hebrew, I suggested that Abraham’s roots may have resulted in traces of Sumerian and/or the Babylonian language being found within Hebrew[6]. Our picture of Abraham isn’t that clear, however. He may not have been Sumerian or Babylonian and his birth place is not the only reason to find traces of Mesopotamian languages in Hebrew. We must also remember that our existing copies of the Old Testament Scriptures date from a considerable time after the events they depict, and it is entirely possible, for example, that the language might have been ‘updated’ to render it comprehensible to a contemporary audience[7]. As if that wasn’t enough, it is not an easy thing for a single individual to introduce foreign vocabulary into a language (i.e. Mesopotamian into Canaanite) and for it to be sustained over centuries.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting hypothesis, and one that shouldn’t be ignored.

Sumerian was a language of fundamental importance in the Middle East and, just as Latin retained academic importance centuries after it ceased to be a spoken language, so Sumerian exerted influence long after it ceased to be spoken in the Middle East.

However, while Latin’s influence can be seen in languages that have incorporated various degrees of Latin vocabulary within them[8], this is not so obvious with Sumerian. So, though one might hope to see its vocabulary scattered within neighbouring languages, it requires a fair degree of probing to see. The Sumerian culture predates known Hebrew culture by some considerable time so, even if Abraham knew the Sumerian language it is quite possible that little of it passed into surviving Hebrew. Indeed, in part 1, I briefly mentioned that the Sumerian word for ‘water’, a fairly essential element for a people, didn’t seem to be related to the Hebrew word. Let’s quickly look at a few more words, just to establish that this isn’t a solitary event.

ENGLISH	HEBREW	SUMERIAN
God	El, Eloha	Digir[9]
Sun	Shemesh	Ud
Moon	Yareach	Itud
Day	Yowm	Uzala
Soul	Nshamah	Zi
Farmer	Ikkar	Engir
Heaven	Ariyph	An[10]
Man/human	Adam	Lu
To create	Bara	Tud

A rough glance over these doesn’t seem to allow too much of a relationship between the vocabulary of the two languages[11]. Nor does a more thorough one. When it comes right down to it, the structure (or ‘morphology’) of Hebrew words is quite different and there appear to be few Hebrew words that can be linked to Sumerian in a concrete manner. Whereas Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Akkadian, often use verbs where the root consists of 3 consonants (such as the Hebrew verb stem, q-d-s ‘to set apart/be holy’)[12], Sumerian verbs tend to consist of a single syllable which is either consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) or consonant-vowel (CV). Multi-word verbs are not uncommon in Sumerian: like many languages, including Chinese, German, Greek, and even English, it tends to stick whole words together to create meaning groups. Thus: ‘lu’ (man) + ‘gal’ (big) = ‘lugal’ (big man/king); ‘mu’ (to grind) + ‘hal’ (to divide/portion) + ‘dim’ (to create) = ‘muhaldim’ (baker/cook).

It seems like the two languages have very little in common in terms of vocabulary. How about on a broader scale? Do the two languages share an underlying grammatical structure? Well, let’s have a little look at Sumerian to see…

Jos.

[1] Herodotus admits as much in his ‘Histories’

[2] Partly, I must confess, because I find the whole thing a bore-fest in comparison to ‘The Iliad’.

[3] Exodus 6: 2-3

[4] Z. Mayani: The Etruscans Begin to Speak

[5] Which they did on a regular basis, it seems.

[6] Abraham’s ethnicity is debated and I will discuss this in a little more detail when I return to the specific discussion of the roots of Hebrew.

[7] Compare a New Testament in Biblical Greek and modern Greek. The language is quite different – and that is not surprising, because the words have changed meaning and nuances over 2000 years.

[8] Aside from the Romance languages - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian & Romanian – the scientific classification of anatomy and species is undertaken within the framework of Latin.

[9] Pronounced, ‘Dengir’ from ‘di’ decision + ‘gar’ – to deliver, and associated with the heavens. While not related to its surrounding Semitic languages, there is an interesting parallel to the Sakha language of Siberia, in both concept and phonetics, where the word for ‘God’ is ‘Tengir’. Various Turkic languages have variations of this word. It is also worth nothing that during the Zhou dynasty (first millennium BC), the Chinese adopted the use of the word for sky/heaven, ‘Tian’ (天), as a word for ‘God’. Whether any relationship exists between this word and the Sumerian word Dingir – even assuming loss of the final syllable (not unheard of in Sumerian) – would be an interesting thought exercise but difficult to substantiate.

[10] Archaic Chinese seems to have used the word, ‘An’ for the heavens.

[11] My limited experience could imagine a possible relationship between Ikkar and Engir, but without investigating the concepts further I wouldn’t be firm on the matter.

[12] A number of ‘basic’ verbs in Hebrew, however, have bisconsonantal roots. E.g. b-w, ‘to come’.

HIV/AIDS: The World and the Church.

2011-02-18T11:11:00.009Z

Dances with Death - a ballet about AIDS

Most people know something about HIV. You get it from having sex with the wrong kind of person without being careful. And I rather imagine most people would rather the emphasis on that sentence should fall on the you rather than on an I. If you walk through a U.S. airport you may see posters that declare, ‘In the U.S. one person is newly infected with HIV every nine minutes,’ but for the purposes of life, that sort of statement can be ignored. It’s easier in Europe because you won’t even see these sort of posters. So either (a) Europe is way too, um, ‘civilized’ to be vulnerable to HIV, (b) talking about it would scare Europeans beyond their brains' ability to remain sane, or (c) it has been cured. Uh huh. Admittedly, if you have access to the latest antiretroviral drugs, can afford them, and are disciplined about taking them, then, yes, you can live with HIV. But the drugs can have quite serious side-effects, there is the constant risk of the virus becoming resistant to them (especially if you aren't disciplined about taking them), and they are unable to fully reverse the damage done by the virus. Alas, HIV is far from being cured. Enrol yourself into an HIV conference and you will regularly hear these words:

There are no correlates of protection from HIV.

In other words, we don’t even have the tools that allow us to be sure that anything we do has any effect whatsoever on an individual’s ability to fight off the disease. Regarding the search for a vaccine, or some sort of immunological cure, we are running blind. Nevertheless, everyone’s hope remains pinned on science to affect a cure [1]. Science, it seems all too often, is the answer to everything. Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime-minister of post-colonial India, famously stated:

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger, of poverty, on insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by a starving people.

For many these isolated words will ring with truth, and we may, perhaps, find sympathy for them with the recent focus of the Obama administration on developmental policy in poverty stricken areas. In fact, I have no doubt whatsoever that science, and notably, medical science, has played a crucial role in improving the lives of many. John Snow’s discovery of the water borne nature of cholera opened the world’s eyes to questions of sanitation. The introduction of pasteurisation stemmed the epidemic of TB in Europe; vaccines against smallpox and polio have all but eradicated these illnesses, and combined with the development of antibiotics have eased the huge economic burden on national health and the economy that diseases incur. It is difficult to deny that advances in the natural sciences have contributed to improvements in quality of life in first-world nations, and enabled them to become materially wealthy. And now, emerging from the same part of the world that seems to bear the brunt of the world’s disease burden we have the rise of HIV.

In October 2010, delivering a keynote speech at an International Conference on AIDS, a leading HIV researcher from South Africa, Salim Karim, dogmatically declared:

No behavioural studies have been shown to decrease the incidence of HIV.

Such statements place the weight of hope for the containment of the HIV epidemic firmly in the hands of medical science. Added to this is the knowledge that the Roman Catholic Church forbids non-procreative sexual intercourse [2], and the belief that the wider Church is insensitive or unsympathetic to serious matters concerning sexual practise. It is easy to hope that such issues should be absent from a church environment, but there is a danger here of both oversimplifying the issues and burying our heads in the sand, as well as catastrophically failing to properly grasp the Biblical picture of mankind. Combine thinking such as this along with the difficult social and political landscapes that exist within of a number of countries where HIV is rife seem simply to bolster thoughts that it is science alone will solve the world’s health and poverty .

And Yet…

I think the world needs to remember that scientific method is only one tool in our armoury.

A London tabloid reports the Thai Vaccine Trial

In his speech Salim Karim went on to explain that out of 39 clinical trials that have been conducted in HIV prevention only 3 approaches have shown even partial success:

The Thai Vaccine Trial, RV144, hit the news last year when it was widely reported to be the first successful AIDS vaccine [3]. However, this vaccine showed no protection amongst high-risk individuals, and questionable success in others, with its efficacy declining fairly rapidly with time.

In addition to this, there are efforts to use antiviral drugs to prevent the spread of infection, such as the CAPRISA 2004 trial noted in the handout, where women in South Africa were offered a pill or a gel containing the antiretroviral drug Tenofovir. These do have some potential to halt the spread of the virus, yet the serious side effects that antiretroviral drugs induce, the need for disciplined lifetime compliance taking them (or, in the case of a gel, correctly applying it before each sex act), the difficulty of isolating everyone who is infected, and the enormous economic cost they entail, make it extremely difficult to implement them on a large scale.

In the last few years, some studies have found that male circumcision can reduce the incidence of HIV up to 60%. While, perhaps, encouraging, this research has been accused of being poorly controlled; at least one study has shown that circumcision can result in greater HIV infections in men who have sex with men; and those regions of the world where the incidence of HIV seems to be increasing include areas such as the USA and Sub Saharan Africa, where circumcision is widely practised. Moreover, the South Africa government has expressed concerns that a national circumcision policy might result in decreased condom use; and health professionals have expressed their concerns that the insanitary conditions under which circumcision might occur in some rural areas of Africa may be the cause of infections. Also, intercourse before the circumcision’s wound is sufficiently healed is likely to increase the risk of infection for all involved. So, while seemingly a quick fix, physical circumcision may actually represent a poor substitute for a circumcision of the heart, and a change in behaviour.

While those in the medical community seek further headway into more effective HIV treatment and prevention, I believe that the Church has the capacity to make a significant contribution towards HIV disease control and the social problems that aggravate it, by loving service and the transformation of unjust structures of society.

It is easy to dismiss behavioural change as an effective method of containing the HIV epidemic, claiming it is unachievable. In fact, as I was writing this on a train, a Ghanaian man sitting next to me saw I was discussing HIV and said: ‘Abstinence is unrealistic. No-one can seriously think it would work! When kids’ hormones get up, they get close. You have to expect that.’ I would never deny that it is a difficult issue that everyone has to wrestle with. However there is evidence that it can and does reduce the spread of HIV. Following a great increase in the incidence of HIV in Uganda, president Museveni, backed by churches and schools, instituted a policy of ABC: Abstinence from sex outside of marriage, Being faithful within marriage, and the use of Condoms, should ‘A’ or ‘B’ fail. In the 10 years following its introduction the incidence of HIV in the country fell from 15% to 6% (or 30% to 14% in urban areas). Similar programmes in Kenya and Zambia have also been accompanied by a reduction in HIV incidence. Other factors may also contribute to the reduction in HIV in these countries: Improved access to sterile needles and antiretroviral drugs will have played a part in this. And it is also true that a strong emphasis on abstinence has led to the use of condoms being associated with certain stigma [4]. Nevertheless the effectiveness of promoting abstinence in reducing the spread of HIV cannot be idly dismissed.

Furthermore, Museveni has rightly emphasized the plight of women in this epidemic:

In Sub Saharan Africa, most women have not been empowered and men dominate sexual relations. To fight this epidemic the women must be empowered to take decisions about their sexual lives…

We have a Biblical imperative to speak up for women’s rights around the world, whether we are in Europe, the U.S, Asia, or Africa, for in this fallen world women too often bear the brunt of man’s abuse. We can increase our efforts to prevent the practice of bridal inheritance, which only serves to promote polygamy in rural communities and increase infection rates. We can increase the general education standard of young girls, and we can promote the importance of sexual intercourse as an expression of love rather than the quenching of desire; we can act to transform cultures where female genital mutilation is present [5], and see that this evil is not perpetuated into future generations.

Side-by-side with preventative strategies we must not neglect those in the community who already suffer from the disease. There is a great need to meet these people in love – not to ostracise them, but to extend to them Christ’s Love, in recognition that each of us is guilty of sin before God. In the words of Njongonkulu Ndogane (Archbishop of Cape Town):

No one should care alone. No one should die alone. For we are all living with AIDS [6].

Do you know what it is yet?

In a country like the U.K., the HIV crisis can seem remote, a problem confined in the heterosexual world to countries with poverty; a problem that would simply go away if only others would learn to live more Biblically. Even were the picture so clear, we would not be absolved of responsibility. The specialist HIV centres in London will tell you of HIV+ individuals whose only risk factor is to have undergone female genital mutilation, or marriage, or rape. And we must realise that even amongst people that it seems hardest to reach within the infected UK population there is a role for the Church.

A survey taken amongst HIV sufferers in the UK, asked patients reasons that they considered important to living apparently healthily with the virus. One answer surprised the researchers: ‘prayer’. Prayer was the second most common answer given, just behind ‘vitamins’. Do these people pray in private without a Church community? Do they know to whom they are praying? I do not know [7] – but I do know that, where possible and appropriate, we should provide them a community where they can grow in fellowship with God and the Church, and where necessary, we can train ordained priests or lay counsellors in counselling victims of HIV.

What, then can we do? That may depend on the needs of the surrounding community, as well as needs further afield. Those in ordained priesthood may feel it’s their responsibility to increase public awareness of issues within HIV epidemic. Some churches may feel called to twin their parish with one in an area suffering more greatly, with the hope of fostering greater care and education for those in need. We may feel its right to support medical programmes, or campaigns for greater access to treatment, or educational programmes for women who are deprived of an education their male siblings more easily obtain. We may wish to include some of the issues as part of regular commitment to prayer, or provide frank discussions of sexual issues within a adult or youth setting. Whichever we chose – and you may have a better idea that me - there are many opportunities for us to act prayerfully, and effectively.

[1] Although outside of the scope of this short blog our drug repertoire for HIV management is constantly improving. A great deal of effort is being put into developing practical immunological and gene therapy approaches for HIV treatment. One that is currently in human trial is Sangamo's Zinc Finger Nuclease against CCR5.

[2] I.E. All sexual acts must have the potential to result in pregnancy.

[3] A follow-up trial, due, I believe, to start in 2014, will examine the vaccine’s effect in high risk individuals. Other preventative vaccine trials include the Tamovac trial, currently taking place in Africa. and various trials by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. Despite this and the publicity surrounding ‘neutralising antibodies’, an effective vaccine seems to be tantalisingly out of reach at present.

[4] I.E. If you use a condom it is immediately suggesting you are infected with HIV.

[5] It is estimated that 100 million women are subject to Female Genital Mutilation at the present time, focused mainly in northern Africa and the Arab world, a procedure that sometimes masquerades under the euphemism, ‘Female circumcision’, which it most certainly is not. There are good articles here: 1, 2, 3.

[6] Taken from the Church of England report on the AIDS Crisis (here)

[7] However a quick survey of the internet suggests that prayer is being used partly as a form of meditation.

Other useful material

The Church of England, that bastion of report drafting, produced another little useful report on Human Sexuality, which is worth a look-see. This book is not a discussion of marital relationships, but an ethical discussion regarding gender issues and sexual practises.

More specific discussions concerning policy, sexual issues related to HIV, including those relating to women's rights, are available in academic literature, here (or, if you want specific topics, I can probably point you in the right direction).

The Trinity - Part 5: Final Matters

2011-02-15T13:36:00.002Z

We have briefly seen that a reference is made to God as Father in the Old Testament, and that the Holy Spirit is mentioned at different times in the Old Testament, is there any evidence of Jesus appearing there? As we have observed he certainly appears in prophesies, a number of which seem to display some understanding of the Trinitarian nature of God.[1] On top of this though, there are a few incidents where it is possible to assert that Jesus makes an appearance in the Old Testament. A couple of these, so-called, ‘Christophanies’ occur in Genesis, and so, for example, Genesis 3 makes reference to God walking in the Garden of Eden,[2] a suggestion that Jesus – the image of the invisible God – was present with Adam and Eve around the time of the Fall. However, at other times it is clear the imagery of God dwelling and walking contains an element of poetic licence,[3] though nevertheless describing the presence of God with his people. The early chapters of Genesis are notoriously difficult to fully comprehend, and it is quite possible that the Genesis 3 narrative is using literary motifs to drive home a more important message.

Other Christophanies have been argued. Isaiah saw a vision of the Lord seated on a throne,[4] and Ezekiel sees the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God,[5] reminding us of the vision that John had of Jesus in Revelation 1, and suggesting indeed the presence of Jesus. Later, the book of Daniel relates the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. When they are thrown into the furnace, king Nebuchadnezzar cries out in amazement:

Look I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.[6]

We are not explicitly told the identity of the person who joined the three men in the furnace. The figure could be an angel, or the language could simply be reflecting Nebuchadnezzar’s inability to understand what he sees, but the image is tantalising and again we cannot deny the possibility that the figure in the fire might be God’s son, Jesus.

Most tantalising of all is the story given in Genesis 18, which describes Abraham meeting with three men, during which time God addresses him in a language that suggests the three men are the Lord.[7] Some have taken this to be a specific reference to the Trinity appearing to Abraham, but while we must believe that the Lord’s presence includes Jesus, we see through a glass darkly, with no more than a hint of the truth of God’s appearing to Man. The text itself is not clear on the matter and I would not insist on a specific reference to Jesus, or God’s Trinitarian nature here (though unquestionably the Lord who spoke to Abraham was Trinitarian).

Overall, we might say with hindsight that the Old Testament gives us indications that Jesus appeared to man of Old. But we rely on the New Testament in order to place our arguments, as indeed should be the case. No doubt all references to Jesus in the Old Testament will therefore be a matter of debate for all time, and we should perhaps not insist on them in any doctrinal form

The Trinity and Sexuality of God

It has been pointed out that while many of the words used for God are masculine nouns, the words for ‘Spirit’ in both Hebrew and Greek are not, and in Hebrew it is a feminine noun, Ruach, and in Greek a neuter noun, pneuma. This being the case there are those who have tried to use the gender of these nouns to discuss the intrinsic masculine and feminine qualities of God. Not that this is a new phenomenon, and at least one ancient text with Gnostic leanings makes an argument along these lines.[8] However these attempts are hopelessly flawed. They show an intrinsic failure to understand that a grammatical feminine noun does not necessarily imbue its subject with female attributes. In English we have a tendency to address ships in the feminine – but that does not suggest they are literally a female object. They have no gender. If I were to say that ‘I have life’ in Greek I could use the feminine noun, hē zoē, but it would not mean that I am any less male, or that I was trying to express my ‘feminine side’, as indeed was the case when Jesus said, I am the way the truth and the life.[9] He referred to himself by three feminine nouns: hē hodos (way/road), hē alētheia (truth), and hē zoē (life), but as on earth no one would doubt that he was male, as a member of the Trinity he was clearly identified as the Son of God – a masculine figure.

As we have briefly seen the word spirit has much wider use than the Holy Spirit in the Bible. We have already looked at a passage in Psalm 33 which describes the breath of the Lord’s mouth:

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath (ruach – feminine noun) of his mouth (peh – masculine noun)

In this sentence both the Lord and the noun upon which the breath/spirit depends are masculine nouns, and we hopelessly muddle ourselves if we start separating the spirit’s supposed femininity from the masculinity of the Godhead. We must remember that God is not man [10] and we must not fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. God made human kind, both male and female, in his own image,[11] and when we talk about ‘God the Father’ God is speaking to us by analogy. This term of address is principally designed to be relational, and refers to the roles generally assigned fathers in a family. Rather than hacking apart the grammar, let us discuss these terms (and others, such as wisdom) at their face-value.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this I argued that there is one, singular, God and disputed the grammatical use of the words for God. There I asserted that it is dangerous to take the plural forms of the words for God and read into it Trinitarian meaning. In-and-of the grammar itself that is true, however, it is clear from the rest of Scripture that God is Trinitarian, and we must therefore read the words for God in a Trinitarian manner. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each individually, and co-equally, God. God is the Trinity. We must insist that on each occasion a word for God is used that it carries Trinitarian meaning. There are difficulties, but it is nonetheless a truth we must stick to. It is such an important truth that it is woven into words many Christians find themselves reciting from week-to-week in the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic [12] Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.[13]

[1] Daniel 7:14; Psalm 110:1; Isaiah 9:6; 11:1 together hint at this.

[2] Genesis 3:8

[3] Leviticus 26:12; Ezekiel 37:27

[4] Isaiah 6:1

[5]Ezekiel 1:28ff

[6] Daniel 3:25

[7] Genesis 18:3-15

[8] Gospel of Philip 18: ‘Some say that Mary was impregnated by the Sacred Spirit. They are confused, they know not what they say. When has a female been impregnated by a female?’ Written AD 150-300 this is named after Philip only because some words are attributed to him in verse 98. Although one of the aphorisms it contains denies one of the most well characterized Gnostic teaching by accepting the physical resurrection of Christ (verse 78), Gnosticism is a name referring to a broad range of interconnected beliefs (which becomes clear if you read Irenaeus: Against Heresies), and other verses are clearly Gnostic.

[9] John 14:6

[10] Numbers 23:19; Hosea 11:9

[11] Genesis 1:26-27

[12] I have used the traditional wording here. The word, ‘catholic’ simply means ‘universal.’

[13] Here taken from the Church of England Book of Common Worship.

The Trinity: Part 4 - Conceptual Difficulties

2011-02-08T21:56:00.007Z

It is of course one thing to declare that the Trinity is one God, but it is something else to fully comprehend it. How do we understand the cross in Trinitarian terms? It is at the cross that the fullness of God in his son was offered as a sacrifice for our sins. It is here where the son declared:

Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani? ... My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?[1]

Looking at these words it is easy to question how it is possible that Jesus, being God, can be separated from himself. However, we have already seen that there are occasions where the word ‘God’ is used to refer to the ‘Father’ in the New Testament. That is a concept easier to get our heads around, maybe, because elsewhere we read of Jesus communicating with his Father through prayer. As has been pointed out by many Bible readers, the words Jesus cries are an Aramaic rendering of the first verse in Psalm 22. This Psalm is blatantly Messianic. It tells of a man (a ‘worm’) who is despised and mocked by the people before being poured out like water; a man whose hands and feet are pierced, whose garments are divided and given away through the casting of lots; a man whose theme is to praise God and fulfil his vows before those who fear him that all nations of the earth will turn to the Lord. In writing their accounts of the crucifixion, the gospel writers draw out how each of these points is fulfilled in Jesus death.[2] Whatever else Jesus’ cry may mean, there is a strong case to be said that he is indicating that people should remember Psalm 22 and understand his identity. But we must pause here for a moment and think about this, because as we note that Jesus is crying a quotation from Scripture it is possible to argue that this is the primary meaning of these words, and that Jesus is not saying that he is separated from God but simply that God has not saved him from his fate. One might even say that as Psalm 22 develops from the anguish of the individual into the glorification of God, (a theme that is taken up by the gospel writers [3]) his cry is one of a conqueror. There are however deep-rooted flaws in this. This argument downplays Jesus’ suffering at this point of the narrative, a point after which Jesus was troubled and had sweat blood at the knowledge of his approaching crucifixion,[4] after teaching not to fear those who kill the flesh.[5] Also, as John Stott has astutely observed, we risk calling Jesus a liar, by noting that he cries out his separation from God, while arguing that there is no separation at all.[6] At other times, when it is stated that Jesus is fulfilling Old Testament prophecies, the situation described is also a present reality for Jesus.

We must conclude that his words on the cross were a true cry of anguish, and that he was truly separated from the Father.

That is not an end to our difficulties, though, because we have stated that Jesus is fully God and it is difficult to comprehend how each member of the Trinity can be both distinct and each fully God, and how full God can be separated from full God.

Conceptual difficulties are not equivalent to untruths.

While there may be conceptual difficulties with aspects of the Trinity, these are not the same as contradictions. I do not believe we can legitimately hold onto a contradiction and still say that we are holding onto truth. In the face of a contradiction we must either modify our understanding such that the contradiction is resolved without resorting to syncretism, or abandon our position altogether. [7]

The non-Christian world is of course aware that Christianity understands God in Trinitarian terms,[8] and it has been the subject of mockery. With evidence such as this in hand one-or-two famous individuals have voiced strong opinions that have attempted to place religion in conflict to science. It has been said that, whereas science bases its beliefs upon a foundation of facts, religion requires faith, and define faith as holding something to be true in the complete absence of evidence (even going on to say that faith requires an absence of fact).[9] It is inferred that science is ‘logical’ and ‘comprehensible’, ‘based on rational thinking,’ in contrast to religion, which requires a ‘leap of faith in the absence of logic or fact.’ The image is that of a pantheon of scientists representing a ‘divine’ logic that provides a true and comprehensive explanation of the world. It is argued that to bow to this god is to answer our meaning and our motivations.
It is tempting to glorify man’s achievements in the sciences or the humanities, and overstate our abilities and understanding of our world. We have looked at the smallest constituents of matter, and the largest bodies in the universe. We have used our imaginations and intelligence to probe the limits of the known world, and to invent wonderful works of art. Yet, all this talk of the glorious discoveries of the sciences often masks a greater ignorance. This ignorance may be from ambivalence or apathy, entrenchment and obstinacy, or a state of denial (regarding mortality, for example), or it may exist for a number of sound reasons. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for instance, demonstrated that there was a limit to the accuracy of our physical knowledge [10], and as Gödel has demonstrated, any science founded upon mathematics contains a level of unprovability within it, a constraint that destabilises attempts to develop Grand Unified Theory of the physical world.[11] Secondly, there is a great deal of argument concerning the limits of human scientific knowledge. Even if one puts aside the very tight constraints placed on it by those who advocate that it limit its knowledge to deductive logic,[12] and allows for the legitimacy of inductive thinking, one is still constrained by a necessary reliance on the validity of others’ testimony, and on one’s own tacit understanding. And, even when others believe they are offering truthful information, their testimonies, along with one’s own tacit understanding, can be very flawed indeed. However, though these issues are important when grappling with issues of truth, there is a third level of ignorance that I wish to think about here: the ignorance imposed by our limits of conceptualisation. This comes into play at a couple of interrelated levels, both of which can be illustrated by the mathematical understanding of the quantum world. One of these is epistemological while the other is conceptual in a broader sense. The epistemological argument concerns the meaning of the formulae we create in physics. Thus, when we learn in Classical physics that the property of force can be measured by multiplying an object’s mass by its acceleration (i.e. F=ma), or momentum is measured by the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity (i.e. ρ=mv) we are making statements that are to a great extent tautological. Physics provides a mathematical model of our world, and not an objective description of it: The thing is true because we say it is, and these are necessary starting points for further argument. In the modern world this can be illustrated by looking at the Standard Model of quantum mathematics, which has been described as one the most successful theories developed in physics. Yet a rival model, delineated by David Bohm, and philosophically opposed to the standard model, also reliably predicts quantum events.[13] While the Standard Model may be favoured, the fact that both give similar answers illustrates that we are constructing an effective and predictive mathematical description of the physical world, and not necessarily answering questions regarding the how and why of the universe.

Nonetheless, at present, the accepted Standard Model’s predictions have been proved by experiment, it has held up to rigorous examination and come through relatively unscathed. Successful though it has been, its predictions sometimes defy not only common sense but comprehensibility outside of the mathematical constructs from which they stem. Its statements press the limits of human understanding. So-much-so that one of the early pioneers in the field, Niels Bohr, is famous for words that have been echoed by many in the field since:

If you think you understand quantum theory, then you only show how little you understand it.

This statement is not merely a reflection of the difficulty of the mathematics. It expresses the bizarre picture of the world it demands. In this quantum universe a single particle fired towards a plate with two slits cut in it can (and does) pass through both holes simultaneously, unless one attempts to observe the slits it actually goes through, in which case it only goes through one of the slits.[14] In this universe time is affected by gravity and velocity, particles are entangled in time and space, and light has both the properties of a particle and a wave.[15] Some of these concepts represent truthful statements that not only incur difficulties in understanding they seem to be visually and logically beyond comprehension outside of the formulae within which they reside.

I have raced over this subject and done it very little justice simply to make this point: The physical world that we examine through scientific method demands an acceptance of details that seem to be both truthful and to defy logical understanding by our minds. Turning thoughts back to God again, it is important to grasp that in the same way, we can state truths about God that cannot be fully visualised by our limited minds. We arrive at this then: Jesus is fully God and although is difficult to comprehend how full God can be separated from full God, we should hold it as true. If we have difficulty comprehending aspects of the physical world, how can we fully comprehend God, who is not bound to the rules laid down for his created world?

[1] Mark 15:34

[2] John’s gospel, for instance mentions the division of Jesus’ garments. He also mentions Jesus cry, ‘It is finished’ (Tetelestai)’, which carries the connotations of ‘completion/fulfilment’ rather than ‘over’, and may allude to Psalm 22:25.

[3] John 12:27ff and elsewhere.

[4] John 12:27-28

[5] Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:4

[6] Stott: The Cross of Christ.

[7] John seems to necessitate this in John 8:32

[8] However, some do not understand it correctly. One Arab man once said to me: ‘we believe that you believe in three gods: God the father, god the mother, and God the son. That, to us, is blasphemy.’

[9] See for example ‘The God Delusion’. This definition of faith is itself based on no evidence – and, in fact, runs contrary to what the early Christians wrote. Justin (First Apology, 35), actually demanded that faith be based on reason. Scriptural passages such as Hebrews 11 contrast faith with sight, not reason. Dawkins alleges to derive his definition from Tertullian’s writings. However, Tertullian said no such thing. Dawkins definition of ‘faith’ is, I suspect, based on a desire for it to mean what is needed for furthering an argument.

[10] It states that the position of a particle such as an electron cannot be known at the same time as its momentum.

[11] His original paper is: ‘Formally undecipherable propositions of Principia Mathematica,’ Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik, 38: 173-98 (1931). In essence Gödel’s theorem amounts to the mathematical equivalent of ‘this statement is not true.’ It does not declare that truth is undiscoverable, only that it is impossible to prove the truth.

[12] Karl Popper strongly asserted that science must confine itself to things ‘real’, and could not offer proof by inference, but could only confine itself to offering disproof by deduction. See his book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

[13] The standard model is non-deterministic, whereas Bohm’s model is deterministic. I should add, however, that the vast majority of physicists reject it as contrived.

[14] This is the famous ‘double-slit’ experiment.

[15] The debate is ongoing. In an attempt to resolve this strange picture, Richard Feynman argued that the universe was particulate and the wave properties were simply an emergent property of particle behaviour. In contrast David Bohm argued that the particulate properties were an emergent property of wave behaviour.

Trinity - Part 3 - The Holy Spirit

2011-02-06T03:25:00.000Z

I don’t think it is not being too wide of the mark to say that at times the Holy Spirit seems a little mysterious. The term that we translate Spirit is a translation of either the Hebrew, ruach, or the Greek, pneuma, both of which can may be rendered, ‘wind’, or even ‘breath’ in different contexts. Because of the breadth of meaning of the words used and his lack of ‘proper name’, the Holy Spirit is probably the least understood member of the Trinity. Throughout history there have been many debates on the Spirit’s nature that have, from time-to-time, led to divisions within the Church. Here we will look at one of these, and ask the question: Who or What is the Holy Spirit? It is an individual or is it, as Christadelphians and many Jews, would hold, a force of God? Without doubt there are times in Scripture where it is right to consider ruach as a force of God. The Psalmist wrote:

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath [ruach] of his mouth.[1]

The use of ruach here is not to draw attention to the role of the Holy Spirit as an individual, but the creative power of God, and the Old Testament is replete with passages where the word ruach seems to fit an understanding of God’s nature or power better than an understanding of an individual.[2] As such it is difficult to deny that the use of ruach in Genesis 1:2 may carry the principle meaning of God’s power, rather than being a statement regarding the Trinitarian nature of God. This Spirit, we are told, is able to empower individuals, and we therefore read of David at his death-bed crying:

The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me; his word was on my tongue.[3]

The Spirit of God, then, can act in individuals, giving them words to speak. And, not only does the Spirit direct individual’s thoughts and words, as David’s cry indicates, it can also provide gifts of skill, for we are informed in the book of Exodus that Bezalel was filled with the Spirit and given the skill to make all kinds of crafts.[4] While these passages are consistent with the Spirit being the power of God, in other places within the Old Testament we begin to see hints of a personality attached to the Spirit: God’s Spirit becomes grieved because of sin,[5] and the Spirit can be sent forth into the world, both of which are attributes given to an individual and hint at a greater truth behind the use of ruach than God’s force.[6] Though hints are no grounds for developing doctrine, what the Old Testament suggests, the New Testament brings into the light. As we turn to John’s gospel we see Jesus describe the Holy Spirit in these terms:

I will ask the Father and he will give you another counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. … The counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you.[7]

John’s words give the Holy Spirit a personal pronoun and, in doing so, describe him as an individual coming from God the Father. This description may remind us of the discussion of wisdom given in the book of Proverbs, where it is personified as a woman,[8] but there is a great difference between the two passages. In Proverbs, wisdom is a supreme attribute that men should seek to live by, something that if found brings blessing, personified through the image of a woman.[9] In contrast Jesus is not personifying ‘truth’, but describing an individual who is capable of teaching the disciples.[10] This person comes from the Father at the request of the son,[11] and is described in divine language. In fact, as the fourth century writer Basil explained in great length, the language and grammar used of the Holy Spirit are the same as that used of the Father and Son.[12] Reading John 14 we are perhaps reminded of the very beginning of the gospel, where we find these words:

He [Jesus] was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. … No-one who has ever seen God, but God, the one and only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. [13]

There is a striking parallel between the two chapters: as we have failed to recognise Jesus and see God, so have we failed to know or see the Spirit; as Jesus makes known the Father so the Holy Spirit will teach and remind us of what Jesus taught. The words in chapter 14 seem quite deliberately to assert that the Spirit is none other than God.

In fact there is the potential to take such arguments a stage further. We may observe that John writes in his letters that if anyone acknowledges that Jesus Christ is the son of God, God lives in him and he in God.[14] In other places there are statements asserting that the Holy Spirit was sent by God and lives in us.[15] Therefore we can connect these statements together to strengthen our statement that the Holy Spirit is none other than God himself. But we need not force ourselves to jump through hoops to reach this conclusion, because John’s gospel states simply that God is Spirit,[16] and in the book of Acts we find Paul preaching to the Romans in these words:

The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when he said through Isaiah the prophet… [17]

The passage that Paul goes on to quote, from Isaiah 6, is attributed in the Old Testament to the words of God, telling us once again that the Holy Spirit is none-other than God himself. At the same time there seems to be individuality to the Spirit, since each of the gospels records that God’s Spirit descended on Jesus (who is God) in the form of a dove,[18] and, in an event that reminds us of Elijah’s encounter with God,[19] the Holy Spirit appears in wind and fire that rests on the disciples during Pentecost.[20]

The conclusion we are driven to is that the Holy Spirit is both God and individual. This is emphasised in other passages of Scripture, since we read that the Holy Spirit can be blasphemed against [21] and is brought to clarity in Matthew’s and Paul’s writing, which separately mention the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as if they are distinctive beings of God. Jesus’ great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel therefore reads:

Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.[22]

And Paul ends his second letter to the Corinthians in this manner:

May the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.[23]

The meaning of both these verses is to draw attention to the fact that Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and the Father are each, individually, none other than God himself. Now, clearly this teaching is at odds with that understood by many Jews, but this does not in any way reduce its validity, since Judaism was founded on God’s Word, not God’s Word founded on Judaism, and, God criticised them (as, indeed, he may at times criticise us) for founding our religion not on him, but on the rules of men.[24] This conclusion, however, opens yet more questions, and we are left us wondering whether each of these beings represents different parts of God. In the next section we will move on to examine this in more detail.

The members of the Trinity are each fully God, not parts of God.

Drawing together this survey of what Scripture has to say concerning aspects of the nature of God we can state the following: (i) there is one God; (ii) the Father is God; (iii) Jesus is God; (iv) the Holy Spirit is God. The only possible conclusion that we can draw from this is that all three of these individuals are therefore one God. This in turn leaves us with only a few possibilities. Either:

i. God exists in different modes at different moments,[25] or

ii. The three individuals are different aspects of God, or

iii. All three are fully God at the same time.

One way to come to an answer to this is to look again at John 1.1, which tells us that Jesus was with God and was God at the beginning.[26] The best explanation of these words, and the only explanation consistent with the other passages of Scripture we have examined, is that Jesus is both God and distinct from the Father and the Spirit. In other words, Jesus is neither a mode nor an aspect of God, but fully God. It is not possible that God exists in modes, since we are told that the Spirit descended on Jesus; that Jesus prayed to the Father; and that The Father would send the Spirit. Each of these events requires the simultaneous presence of different individuals, and it will not do to say that one members of the Trinity merely transforms into another. Also, the members of the Trinity cannot simply be different aspects of God, since Scripture is quite clear that Jesus is by nature God, and the exact representation of him.[27] We must, I think, agree with Augustine that the Trinity is one God, and no other alternative model will fit.[28]

Next, at the expense of my immediate social life, I'll look a little at some of the difficulties incurred by belief in the Trinity (as if they weren't obvious!).

Jos.

[1] Psalm 33: 6

[2] See for example Job 33:4; Ezekiel 37:5ff

[3] 2 Samuel 23:2. See also Isaiah 61:1; Ezekiel 36:26-27

[4] Exodus 35:30ff

[5] Isaiah 63:10

[6] Psalm 104:30

[7] John 14:16, 17, 26; see also Romans 8:26

[8] Proverbs 1:20ff; 8:1ff

[9] Proverbs 3:13-18

[10] In verse 17 the Spirit is called, ‘him’, a translation of the Greek word, auton (masculine singular accusative of autos, and translates, ‘him’).

[11] John 15:26

[12] Basil of Caesarea: On the Holy Spirit.

[13] John 1:10, 18

[14] 1 John 4:15

[15] 2 Timothy 1:14. See also 1 Corinthians 6:19; Galatians 4:6.

[16] Pneuma ho theos; John 4:24

[17] Acts 28:25-26; Hebrews 3:7

[18] Matthew 1:16; Mark 2:11; Luke 3:22; John 1:32

[19] 1 Kings 19:11-13

[20] Acts 2:2-4

[21] Matthew 12:32; Luke 12:10.

[22] Matthew 28:19

[23] 2 Corinthians 13:14

[24] Isaiah 51

[25] Something akin to the avatars proposed for the Hindu deity, Vishnu, or the different forms Jupiter is supposed to have used to seduce earthly women.

[26] Literally, ‘the Word was with the God’ (ho logos ēn pros ton theon), and, ‘God was the Word’ (theos ēn ho logos).

[27] 2 Corinthians 4:4; Philippians 2:6; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3

[28] Augustine: City of God, 11:10