“I am Yahuweh, and
there is no other,” replied the God of Samaritans, Jews, Hypsistarians, Karaites, Christians, Mandaeans, Sabaeans, Muslims, Druze, Bahais, and Rastafarians in answer to the above question. Whether he was being a stand-up kind of deity
covering for his co-conspirators or just a glory-hog is a question never
answered.
The following is
more about accurate and precise translation and studying one’s task thoroughly
enough to render one that is true, and the truth.
Translation and bad grammar
This is about one
of the most difficult and discomfortable passages in the Tanakh for religious
believers over its assertion that Yahuweh, the deity worshipped by Jews and Christians,
and by Muslims under the name Allah, creates both darkness and evil.
The passage in
question is in found the book of Isaiah, verse 45:7, a verse comprised
of three distinct clauses. In
transliterated Hebrew, this reads:
Yotzer ohr u-voreh hoshekh, oseh shalom u-voreh et ha-rah,
ani Yahuweh oseh et kol eileh.
Without attempting
to translate the putative object nouns (I’ll explain that in a bit), the way
that passage is most often translated is:
I form ohr and create hoshekh, I make shalom and create
rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these things.
For the first two
clauses, that is the exact translation found in the Orthodox Jewish Bible. For the third clause, only a handful of
translations include the actual name of God, the rest preferring to utilize
some euphemism in its place. None of
those euphemisms, however, are translations but substitutions, and this is
about translation. That’s a subject for
a whole other essay, so we’ll just leave the third clause there.
I left those object
nouns in the original language because their proper translation into English is
a matter of dispute and the afore-mentioned source of discomfort that is the
main focus of this essay. The subject at
immediate hand is something I discovered researching this passage.
The first two
clauses of Isaiah 45:7 are not, in truth, clauses at all, because their
verbs are not actually verbs. The
purportedly object nouns of purportedly transitive verbs are in reality
prepositional objects modifying subject complements. The passage should
actually read:
Producer of ohr and creator of hoshekh, maker of shalom
and creator of ha-rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these things.
Since hanging
phrases like that are like hanging chads in a Florida election, I offer the
immediately preceding passage, Isaiah 45:6, or at least its part b:
I am Yahuweh, and there is none else.
The Geneva
translators in 1560 who originated the current chapter-verse system of the Hebrew
and Christian scriptures appended this onto the end of a clause belonging to
the sentence in verse 45:5, so that the whole passage (45:5-7) reads, in the
KJV:
I am Yahuweh, and there is none else; there is no God
besides me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know
from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none besides me. I am Yahuweh, and there is none else. I form ohr and create hoshekh, I make shalom
and create rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these things.
Better grammar and
sentence structure renders this passage as:
I am Yahuweh, and there is none else; there is no God
besides me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me, that they may know
from the rising of the sun, and from the West, that there is none besides me. I am Yahuweh, and there is none else; I form
ohr and create hoshekh, I make shalom and create rah; I, Yahweh, do all these
things.
Returning the
afore-mentioned faux verbs to their original noun form renders the relevant
sentence:
I am Yahuweh, and there is none other; producer of ohr and
creator of hoshekh, maker of shalom and creator of rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these
things.
Which now makes
sense, grammatically speaking, more so than simply quoting Isaiah 45:7 by
itself with its words in their proper forms of speech.
One God to rule them all
An even better
rendering of the above sentence, translating the exact meaning rather than the
exact words, might be, and taking into account the clause ‘there is no God
besides me’ in verse 45:5, this might be a better translation, particularly
if standing alone:
I am Yahuweh, the One True God, producer of ohr and
creator of hoshekh, maker of shalom and creator of rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these
things.
This passage is one
of the very, very few in the Tanakh, even the whole Christian Bible, which
states there is only one God. Even the
Ten Devarim (or ‘Ten Statements’, the often misnamed “Ten Commandments”, so
dubbed by the same Geneva translators who numbered the verses and split
sentences) make no such statement.
Truly, as late a figure as Paul of Tarsus wrote in one of his letters
that, in fact, other gods exist.
One could think
such a statement would be proof of the pre-Exile monotheism of the Israelites
in Samerina and Yehud to counter the Himalayas of evidence to the
contrary. However, this passage comes
from the section known to scholars as Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55), which
dates no earlier than Exilic or post-Exilic times, and maybe both, given the
probability of multiple editors.
This chapter
begins, “Thus saith Yahuweh to his Messiah, to Cyrus…”, as in Cyrus the
Great, or Koroush Kabir, of the Achaemenid dynasty of Iran conquered the
Chaldean Empire in 539 BCE, thus inheriting its western possessions which
included Samerina and Yehud. So it’s
safe to say this passage is definitely not earlier than the latter sixth
century BCE and is probably later. Since
this passage under discussion takes aim directly at dualism as well as any other
theism but mono, it is most likely no earlier than the third century BCE. It is not simply an expression of monotheism,
but of dualistic monism as well. More on
that, and how this passage relates to dualism, below.
Yahuweh, creator of darkness
and evil
Now that the
appetizer, or ‘le entrée’ as they call it in France, is out of
the way, we can start on the main course, or ‘le plat’ in France and
‘the entrée’ in America.
Every commentary I
have read on this passage, from the Church Fathers through the twenty-first
century, has taken pains to point out that the Hebrew word here for ‘create’,
or rather ‘creator’, ‘voreh’, is the same that as in the beginning of Genesis,
a sign that the writer thereby intends to link this statement with the Creation
“in the beginning”. This elevation also
implicitly raises the importance of that which is created.
It is that which is
created that causes so much discomfort and difficulty; in transliterated
Hebrew, hoshekh and rah. ‘I, Yahuweh, create
darkness and evil’.
First, let’s look
again at the translation of Isaiah 45:7, with those Hebrew words left
untranslated, and for simplicity will leave the initial nouns as verbs:
Yotzer ohr u-voreh hoshekh, oseh shalom u-voreh et ha-rah,
ani Yahuweh oseh et kol eileh.
I form ohr and create hoshekh, I make shalom and create
rah; I, Yahuweh, do all these things.
The clause at the end of Isaiah
45:7 has never been a matter of dispute, so here we will just deal with the
first two clauses, or phrases. In fact,
we will only be discussing the second or middle clause because there is no real
dispute about the first either; every translator renders that clause in Hebrew,
‘Yotzer ohr u-voreh hoshekh’, as ‘I
form light and create darkness’. So
strike that one from the discussion also.
That leaves us this: ‘I make shalom and create rah’, or ‘maker of shalom and creator of rah’,
and this is where the problem lies. Not
so much the idea that Yahweh makes shalom as in that Yahweh creates rah, or
‘ha-rah’ to be exact. One can see the
problem from the translation in the King James Version:
I form the light,
and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I Yahuweh do all these things.
Other than
transforming nouns into verbs and cutting up sentences where they shouldn’t be
cut, the article before ‘light’ is not appropriate because it is not there in
the Hebrew. In the Hebrew, the only noun
with the article ‘ha-‘ is the last modifying its subject complement,
‘ha-rah’.
With the article
there, the only translation for ‘rah’ is ‘evil’. Of that, there is no equivocation; the only
debatable point is what is meant here by the ‘evil’ that Yahweh creates.
Many Christian
translators have chosen to translate ‘rah’, and often ‘shalom’ along with it,
into some other noun with negative connotations that do not quite approach the
affirmation that Yahweh created evil, that Yahweh created the dark side (even
though they have little problem accepting that he created darkness).
The rabbis who
wrote the Orthodox siddur, or prayer book, dealt with this when composing the
Birkat Yotzer Ohr benediction said before the Shema Yisrael at shacharit (morning,
ideally at 9 am) prayers by changing the wording so that the prayer, in
transliterated Hebrew, reads:
Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha-olam, yotzer ohr
u-voreh hoshekh, oseh shalom u-voreh et ha- kol.
Which is usually
translated: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who form
light and create darkness, who make peace and create all things’.
So now, instead of
creating evil, Yahuweh creates ‘all things’; were this in the Isaiah original,
concluding the sentence with ‘I, Yahuweh, do all these things’ would have been
redundant. That the rabbis felt it
necessary to alter this for the Birkat Yotzer Ohr makes almost certain there is
no other accurate translation.
So, ‘ha-rah’ is
‘evil’. But what exactly does ‘evil’ in
this context mean?
English translations by
Christians
Before we answer
that question, let’s take a gander at how Christian translators deal with their
discomfort over the prospect that evil comes from Yahweh.
The Geneva and King
James translators took the clause, ‘I make shalom and create rah’ and rendered
it, ‘I make peace and create evil’. In
the sixteenth century, those two words as translated may have had the same or
near meaning as their Hebrew counterparts.
But language
changes, such as the way that ‘comprehended’ as in Gospel of John 1:5’s ‘and
the darkness comprehended it not’ meant ‘overcame’ in the early sixteenth
century, but in the twenty-first century would have meant ‘understood’. Such is the case with shalom/peace and
rah/evil in Isaiah 45:7, or near so; they both have similar meaning, but
not quite all the depth and connotations they once had. Christian translators have tried in various
ways to “correct” that:
I make prosperity and create doom
I make well-being, I create woe
I make happiness and create sorrow
I bring peace, and I cause trouble
I make well-being and create calamity
I make blessing and create disaster
I make success and create disaster
I make goodness and create disaster
I send good times and bad times
I make peace and create calamity
I bring prosperity and create disaster
I bring good and I make trouble
I make weal and create woe
I bring good times and create hard times
I make harmonies and create discords
There are just the
published versions from “official” translations. Those two Hebrew words have so many
connotations, their meaning can be partially captured with a myriad of
words. Here are some of the ones I’ve
come up with on the usual model:
‘I make/shape/bring
peace/bounty/completion/consummation
and create/cause/bring
dissolution/destruction/desolation/obliteration/annihilation’
Then
I thought of a couple of possibilities if I disregarded the parts of speech of
the words as they were written, just like the translators. I got:
I make whole/complete and render
void/dissolute.
Next I threw out the
received sentence structure entirely and came up with:
I illumine and obscure, I complete and destroy, plus a few variations along those lines.
Antitheses
Pairs of opposites
like this constitute a rhetorical device called ‘antitheses’, plural because
each is the antithesis of the other.
Antitheses riddle
the Bible because that was a favorite device of the writers of the Tanakh and
of the New Testament. In the opening
scene of Genesis, you have the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, two
antitheses. Here, the two antitheses
have a parallel function of including Everything, so that the name could be simply
‘Tree of All Knowledge’.
Other Biblical
examples include the list of blessings followed by that of curses in Deuteronomy
28. These are mirrored the Gospel of
Luke 6:20-26, the list of blessing
and curses upon which the Beatitudes passage in the Gospel of Matthew
5:3-11 is based. The chapter Ecclesiastes
3 begins with the words, ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every
purpose under heaven’, after which follows pairs of antitheses juxatoposed
against each other.
At Deuteronomy
30:15, we have another passage that some translators seem to be too squeamish
about to do their job objectively. The
KJV has, ‘See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and
evil’, and the RSV is virtually the same.
The NRSV and several other versions, however, felt it necessary to alter
this to, ‘See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and
adversity’, to prevent even the whiff of evil tainting the divine.
For this passage,
the OJB has ‘See, I have set before thee today ha-chayyim and ha-tov, and mavet
and rah’, here ‘chayyim’ and ‘tov’ being without a doubt the words for ‘life’
and ‘good’, especially because of the article which anchors them thus. Under the principle of antitheses, ‘mavet’
and ‘rah’ can therefore only mean ‘death’ and ‘evil’, the polar opposites of
life and good, even though they lack the defining article. When ‘tov’ and ‘rah’ are paired or
juxtaposed, they always mean ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Translating them any other way is not simply
inaccurate, it is a lie.
Context and balance are
everything
Admittedly, by
themselves the words ‘shalom’ and ‘rah’ each have a variety of meanings and
connotations. Rah can mean ‘evil’, as in
moral evil, but it can also mean ‘distress’, ‘misery’, ‘injury’, ‘calamity’, ‘adversity’,
‘wrong’, or ‘bad’.
The root word for
the noun shalom (שָׁלוֹם) is the
adjective ‘shalem’ (שָׁלֵם), which also
has a verb form, ‘shalam’ (שָׁלַם). The
core meaning of ‘shalem’ is ‘whole’, which can mean ‘complete’, ‘safe’, or ‘at
peace’.
‘Shalom’ can stand for ‘wholeness’, ‘peace’, ‘completion’, ‘soundness’,
‘welfare’, ‘safety’, ‘soundness’, ‘well-being’, ‘health’, ‘prosperity’, ‘tranquility’,
‘contentment’, or any combination thereof.
The verb ‘shalam’ can mean ‘to make whole’, ‘to make peace’, ‘to make
amends’, or, in certain contexts, ‘do justice’.
If it has meaning, the
words ‘Till Armageddon, no shalam, no
shalom’ in the line from the
Johnny Cash song, “The Man Comes Around” probably stand for ‘No Justice, No
Peace’.
The word ‘rah’ likewise has many different meanings, including ‘evil’, ‘distress’,
‘misery’, ‘injury’, ‘calamity’, ‘adversity’, ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, or a combination
of those.
In a previous essay, I posited that the best translation of the clause
under discussion here was ‘I make good and create evil’. However, I have to admit I was incorrect. At least in how people usually interpret
“good and evil”; good is another word with many shades of meaning.
In paired antitheses, the two opposites take their meaning from each
other. For example, juxtaposed against
‘milchamah’, or ‘war’, ‘shalom’ can only have the meaning into which is is most
often translated, ‘peace’. While war is
very ‘rah’, though, ‘rah’ is not war.
So, while ‘shalom’ and ‘rah’ can take on many of those alternate
meanings of the “official” translations above, none of them balance with the
other pair of antitheses with which they are linked, that of light against
darkness. For balance, the shalom-rah
pair must mean something equally basic and archetypal.
Thus spake Zarathustra
To recover a picture of the context within which the anonymous editor
interpolated this passage, this chapter, onto the prophecies of Isaiah,
we turn to the antecedent of both the monotheism adopted by both Israelite
peoples and of the dualism against which this passage speaks. In other words, we turn to Iran, to the
teachings of the prophet Zarathustra and the religion which sprang from them,
Mazdayasna.
Enter Ahura Mazda
A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away, probably south of the
Caspian Sea and north of the Alborz Mountains, that land later known as Media,
then as Hyrcania to the Macedonians after the conquest by Alexander the Great,
there lived a prophet. This prophet’s
name then was Zarathustra, and his name provided a title for a book by a
Western existentialist philosopher who quoted this ancient Aryan as saying,
“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake, eternally”. To which Gautama the Buddha replied, “I am
awake; I guess this means that nirvana
is samsara”.
The Macedonians and Greeks called Zarathustra by the name
Zoroaster. Modern Iranians call him
Zartosht. An Aryan is not, by the way, a
blonde-haired, blue-eyed fascist from Germany but a native of the land once
called “Iranshahr”, for ‘realm of the Aryans’.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a brown-haired, brown-eyed German philosopher,
liked the original form of the name best.
Zarathustra had visions, dreamed dreams, and drank hallucinogenic
potions, thus anticipating the Age of Aquarius (without Charlie Manson) by
almost three millennia. He wrote down
what he saw in what started out as just his Gathas, and later morphed
exponentially into an entire library called the Avesta, a vast collection of
scriptures in a language recorded nowhere else.
Zarathustra’s visions led him to toss out the whole inherited
Indo-Aryan pantheon and declare that there is only One True God. The name of his One True God was/is Ahura
Mazda (or Assura Mazas in the Aramaic official language of the empire). Before this, there were only Zurvan (Time)
and Thwasha (Space).
As first conceived, Ahura Mazda possesses no human attributes, no anthropomorphic
or anthropopathic qualities. Mazdayansis
never refer to Ahura Mazda with gender pronouns. It is forbidden to attempt to illustrate him
in any way. In many ways, the original
concept of Ahura Mazda was closer to that of the Dao or Daiji of the Chinese
philosopher Lao-tzu than to a deity.
More like emanations from Ahura Mazda than either creations or junior partners,
and not yet personified, the spenta mainyu was the ‘bounteous spirit (or
inclination)’ and the angra mainyu was ‘destructive spirit (or
inclination)’. In a few places in the
older Gathas, the angra mainyu is referred to as the aka mainyu, or
‘evil spirit’. But the two were in
balance, and it was this which helped preserve the universe.
This theological principle, that all things, good and bad, come from
the Deity, is what philosophers of religion call ‘dialectical monism’.
A couple of centuries after Zarathustra died, Angra Mainyu grew into
the personified origin of destruction and evil.
Meanwhile, the equivalent opposite inclination, Spenta Mainyu, recessed
into obscurity as a mere emanation of Mazda, due the growth in stature of its
counterpart. The world view of Mazdayasna became divided into stark lines of light
and dark, good and evil, life and death, with Ahura Mazda head of one side and
Angra Mainyu the other.
Yahwism in transition
When we first have solid records of Israel in the ninth century, they remained
polytheistic, sharing many of the same deities with their neighbors, the
exception being their national deity, Yahweh.
At first, El, the father of the gods, the elohim, in the Canaanite
pantheon, remained their chief god. But
he was too impersonal and distant, like a king above peasants. They also worshipped and built shrines, even
temples, to Baal Hadad, Anath, Asherah, Astarte, and Mot, among others.
Gradually, for the Israelites, by this time divided into the realms of
Samerina and Yehud, Yahweh assumed more and more the role of rival to Hadad
formerly carried by the similar-named god Yam.
Soon he even replace El at the head of the pantheon, with Asherah as his
consort. But he had several forms:
Yahuweh of Samaria, Yahuweh of Teman, Yahuweh of Dan, Yahuweh of Shiloh, Yahuweh of
Hebron, etc., always with Asherah as his mate.
All of this we know from archaeology, from temples and shrines and
papyri from the period that have been uncovered and deciphered.
With the overthrow of the Chaldeans, the Jews and Samaritans in the
east gained the chance to return to Palestine, and also exposure to the
monotheism of their new overlords.
Stage one on the Road to One True God was One True Yahweh. That is the significance behind the
declaration known to Jews and Samaritans as the Shema Yisrael (Deuteronomy
6:4): ‘Shema Yisrael, Yahuweh Eloheinu Yahuweh Ehad’. (‘Hear, O Israel, Yahuweh
your God is one Yahuweh’). So, no more
Yahuweh of Samaria, of Teman, of Hebron, etc., just plain Yahuweh.
By early-to-mid fifth century BCE, monotheism, and iconoclasm, were the
rule in both Samerina and Yehud, and near the end of the fifth century, even in
the huge Israelite community in Egypt, centered on the colony at Elephantine
and its temple.
The solidity of monotheism among the Israelites of Samerina, Yehud, and
Egypt was reinforced by communication with the large communities of Jewish and
Samaritan exiles in Hyrcania, Zarathrustra’s probably home and most
fundamentalist center of Mazdayasna.
Two Ways
Though there are a few illusions to it in the Tanakh, dualism crept
into and then flooded the religion of Yahuweh in the fourth century BCE. The Essenes, who probably formed in the early
third century, made the dichotomy one of their central theses, and it abounded
in popular apocalyptic and eschatological works of the late Temple and early
Roman period. In these, which continued
to be passed on even after the turn of the era and became quite popular among
early Christians, there were Two Ways, the Way of Light and the Way of
Darkness, sometimes called the Way of Life and the Way of Death. In some versions, each Way had its own angel,
Michael at the head of the Way of Light and Beliar at the head of the Way of
Darkness.
In this cultural atmosphere, a scribe editing the prophecy of Isaiah
interpolated the passage in question, the point of this particular part being
that all things come from the One True God, not good things from a deity of
light and evil things from a deity of darkness, but all things from One God and
One God only. That is why the editor was
so specific about using the same word for ‘to create’ that was used in the
beginning of Genesis. It was like
saying, ‘I, Yahuweh, create darkness and evil along with light and bounty; I
alone and no one else’.
So why does everyone who translates this passage keep missing the
point? In a word, ideology.
Ideology is what religion becomes when its people forget the
message and worship the creeds, when its adherents think it is more important
to believe narrowly defined doctrine than to have faith. Yahuweh, or God, is good, and everything about
him is good, and there is no evil in him, evil cannot even approach him, or so
goes the mantra.
The creeds are more become important than the message. So, like George Lucas declaring Vergere a
Sith and asserting that the dark side and light side of the Force are absolutely
separate entities with no gray areas between them, nothing between them at all,
translators continually mistranslate the discomfortable and keeping passing out
the opiate Kool-Aid.
Despite being unable to confess that evil comes from Yahuweh
in their shacharit prayers, however, the rabbis still teach a doctrine
inherited from their predecessors the scribes, who flourished in the late
Temple period, that every human has within them from birth the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra. Representing the ‘good inclination’ and ‘bad
(or evil) inclination’, these mirror the spenta mainyu and angra mainyu that
Zarathustra taught pervades the universe and each human in it.
The best translations
I have come up with three different version which I think best
encapsulate the full meaning of both the words and their context. There are four different versions because
there are three different parts of speech into which the key words can be
translated.
‘I am Yahuweh, the One True God; producer of light and creator
of darkness, maker of bounty and creator of desolation: I, Yahweh, do all these
things.’
The verb usually
translated ‘form’ actually means to ‘bring forth’ or ‘produce’.
The meaning may be
archaic, but the word ‘bounty’, encapsulates the most connotations of ‘shalom’
of any English word I know, including most importantly goodness, abundance, and
welfare. Its most direct opposite is
desolation, a near synonym for destruction that expresses the empting out of
something as well as the devastation of that within it. This translation parallels the Two Ways
tradition as expressed by other vehicles dating from the period in which this
section of Isaiah was probably written.
This also reflects
the influence of Mazdayasna’s spenta mainyu and angra mainyu in
their early, non-personified form. One
could even accurately translate the verse as ‘I am Yahweh, the One True God, producer of light and creator of
darkness, maker of spenta mainyu and creator of angra mainyu; I, Yahweh, do all
these things.’
The meaning would
be more directly parallel were the translation ‘destruction’ rather than
‘desolation’ (‘angra mainyu’=‘destructive spirit’, remember), but in English
the latter can also represent the chaos and void that existed before bounty in
the same way that is the case with darkness and light.
That was the
version with all its words in the same parts of speech as the Hebrew
originals. The second version mimics the
English translations.
‘I am Yahuweh, the One True God; I produce light and create darkness, I make bounty and create desolation; I, Yahweh, do all these
things.’
This version changes the second pair of nouns to adjectives.
‘I am Yahuweh, the One True God; I produce light and create dark, I make whole and render dissolute; I, Yahweh, do all these things.’
The verb ‘to make whole’ captures the core essence of ‘shalom’ and is
an exact translation of its verb form, ‘shalam’.
The final version makes all the clauses into intransitive verbs.
‘I am Yahuweh, the One True God; I illumine and darken, I
complete and destroy; I, Yahuweh, do all these things.’
Any one of these four versions surpasses all available translations of
which I am aware, at least translations into English.
Translators, if your belief is more important than your faith, if the
creeds are more important to you than the message, at least have enough respect
for your craft not to falsify your work.
