From: jonh@david.wheaton.edu (Jonathan Hayward)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: biblical inerrancy / sign of Jonah
Date: 28 Sep 92 01:14:06 GMT
Organization: Wheaton College, IL

In article <Sep.23.01.33.58.1992.1187@athos.rutgers.edu> dike@rs054.intel.com (Charles Dike) writes:
>That the phrase"three days and three nights" was a Jewish idiom that
>meant anything different than approximately 72 hours seems unlikely
>to me.  Suppose a person wanted to communicate the concept of three 
>days and three nights in Aramaic, how could he possibly communicate 
>that idea if the above is an idiom? 
>
>All the english idioms that indicate time that I can come up with 
>for fairly long times are non-specific - once in a blue moon, a 
>month of Sundays - maybe someone can come up with one that counters 
>my position.   

That's a very useful piece of information if all of the original Gospels were
written in English.

We, and our language, exist in a different culture than the one the Bible came
to be in.  Looking at a language and culture together, there is no real reason
(aside from assuming "Everybody's like me") that idioms should be the same.

If you look at views of punctuality (to take one of many examples), and say
"I'll be there at 3:00 PM on the 12th", there are some situations where it
would be a faux pas to arrive at 3:10 PM, and other situations (especially in
some other cultures) where it is acceptable to arrive at 3:00 PM on the 21st.

English has idioms in the use of numbers, where a precise looking number
is interpreted loosely (a couple, a dozen, twenty or thirty, this city has 1.2
million residents). If I say "five thousand, three hundred and forty two" then
that will tend not to be interpreted idiomatically - that would not generally be
taken to possibly be 5336.  If on the other hand I say "five thousand", that
could very well be taken to possibly be 4917.  Now, is it possible to ask "What
if an English speaker wanted to convey exactly five thousand and not five
thousand and one?  Clearly that idiomatic usage cannot exist!"  It is certainly
possible to ask that, you'd just be dead wrong.

This cue to the fact that it is possible for a culture to come up with a precise
sounding numerical statement without meaning that apparent precision, should
also be a cue that it is inappropriate to assume that Hebrew idioms must
parallel English idioms.

>Another problem seems to be that we have no way of understanding 
>what was or was not an idiom unless the phrase structure would make 
>that clear. If the statement were nonsensical (i.e., in a New York
>minute) then it could be labelled as such.

No, not without studying the language...

(Hebrew of all languages should be very easy to study, because of how little
it's changed over time, again unlike English.  If you can read modern day
Hebrew, you can read the Old Testament with a minimum of difficulty - unlike
English, where an English manuscript several centuries old is barely readable)

>[One thing that I know is that "three days" didn't mean the same thing
>that it means now.  If Jesus died Friday and was resurrected Sunday,
>by 1st Cent. counting, that's three days.  The difference is that
>partial days were counted.  It's Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three
>days.  We tend to translate three days into 36 hours, and expect it to

By the way, that's 72.  (-;

>be three full days.  It's just a difference in the way cultures
>approach time.  I'm less clear on "three days and three nights".
>--clh]

The moral of this story: There are certain cultural/linguistic assumptions that
you learn.  Some of these are very difficult to see until you start to study
other cultures.  These assumptions still exist, and are not _necessarily_
appropriate to other cultures.  Just as taking an English cultural assumption
here (temporal idioms can be seen as such because they sound ridiculous) and
applying to another language causes problems, so it can be in general - and it
will not always be this obvious.

Be careful what assumptions you read into things.

################################################################################
# "God, give me mountains # "But the greatest   # Jonathan Hayward             #
# to climb and the        # of these is love."  # Jonathan_Hayward@wheaton.edu #
# strength for climbing." # I Corinthians 13:13 # jhayward@imsa.edu            #
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[Duh... It's well known that computer scientists can't do simple
arithmetic.  That why we use computers.  --clh]