# Talk:Fear and trembling (biblical phrase)

@UndercoverClassicist: I think the acute accent should be retained here. Although there was a pitch accent (probably in decline) at the time of Paul's writing, two considerations bring me to believe in using the acute for this article. First, while tonal markers such as the circumflex are usually absent from transliterations, the acute, for whatever reason, is usually retained, at least in the linguistics literature. Second, WP:GREEK, particularly WP:GREEK § Tagging with the lang template, shows retention of the acute, but the other tonal markers are removed in WP:GREEK § Common Latinizations. Let me know what you think. ThaesOfereode (talk) 22:51, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Hm -- honestly, I don't see clear guidance in WP:GREEK on the matter of transliterating accents -- only examples, which if you look across FAs and so on vary quite substantially. I don't think the fact that they have written e.g. phílos allows us to differentiate "accents should be used" from "accents may be used" and "use accents only in particular situations". Frankly, I'd be surprised if whoever wrote that note knew much about diacritics and accent in Ancient Greek, even assuming they are expert in modern Greek. In classical and theological literature, as far as I've read, you practically never see accents or macrons in transliteration, and my sense is that this article is closer to those fields than to linguistics. I wouldn't be terribly upset to see the accents come back, but at the moment I don't think they should. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:23, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

I think a similar phrase is mentioned in the quran in Quran 7:144-156 (specifically 7:150). Just in case if y'all want to promote this to FA 𐩣𐩫𐩧𐩨 Abo Yemen (𓃵) 11:23, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

Opening this since there's no corresponding discussion for the tag, but I second the due weight challenge raised by AnandaBliss. This aspect from the United States is given more weight than any other idea in the article, and it seems to depend at least to some extent on sources specifically about slavery, which doesn't indicate broader relevance for those parts. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 22:30, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

To give a bit of context: the section in question is 401 words, by my count, which includes a brief summary paragraph. The section summarises about two full pages of discussion in Schipper (as well as isolated comments elsewhere), and at least five in Harrill. These discussions both hinge directly on the phrase "fear and trembling"; we're not talking about a general discussion of the role of religion in slavery here, so I think their relevance to the article is difficult to dispute. Harrill in particular is available from TWL, and I'm happy to provide more extensive quotation if the point is in doubt. I count the section on scripture at 874, and the other parts of the Reception section at 406. We tried to find additional Christian reception during the GA review (see below) -- there were a few quotations in papal bulls, but as far as we could see, no secondary scholarship on them, and so no citeable sources.
WP:DUEWEIGHT has Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. I see the point above that Schipper's book is historical rather than theological, but that doesn't have any bearing on DUEWEIGHT: it's unquestionably a reliable, scholarly source (it's published by Princeton University Press), and therefore must be counted under reliable sources as identified in the policy. There's no requirement under DUEWEIGHT for individual details to be mentioned in sources of different genres. Indeed, we would have to delete most of the article if that were the case, since the theological commentaries don't establish the phrase's relevance beyond theology, the Jewish exegeses don't establish its relevance beyond Judaism, and so on.
More generally, I think the policy has been misapplied here. The purpose of DUEWEIGHT is to make sure that minority viewpoints are not stressed at the expense of majority ones. On this particular topic, there is a scholarly view, expressed in print separately by Schipper and by Harrill, that the phrase "fear and trembling" was part of the religious/ideological justification of American slavery, that this became important during the trial of Denmark Vesey, and that it sparked a wider debate on the question of biblical literalism which was itself an extension of the debates over slavery within American Christianity. DUWEIGHT states that if that is indeed a minority view, and that other viewpoints exist in scholarship which have not been presented here, then those viewpoints should also be added. I don't believe that's the case: in writing this article, I included just about everything that I could find on the topic outside primary sources. Pinging ThaesOfereode, who conducted the GA review and assisted in finding additional sources. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:59, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, there's not really much for me to add here; as usual, UC has explained policy than much better than I could. I will add that biblical textualism is so critical to the justification of slavery in the American South that, honestly, I think its absence from this page would be strange, especially given that – as already explained by UC – the sources provided are from reputable publishers and that it was fairly prominently used in an independently noteworthy execution. ThaesOfereode (talk) 12:05, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
What I had in mind with the Due Weight tag was not that it overemphasized minority viewpoints (and perhaps it was not the exact policy that I should have cited), but that it overemphasized how importance slavery was in the US to the verse. That is, if someone were studying biblical history, slavery in the United States likely would not have such prominence in a textbook. The reverse, however, (the importance of the verse to Antebellum slavery) seems more factual. I also thought that it should be separate from the "In Christianity" heading, rather than a subsection of it, but I din't want to rock the boat too much. AnandaBliss (talk) 13:38, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
The standard set in policy for whether the article overemphasized how importance slavery was in the US to the verse is WP:DUEWEIGHT -- and, as above, that standard is that the article needs to express views all which are expressed in reliable scholarship. I do see , if someone were studying biblical history, slavery in the United States likely would not have such prominence in a textbook, but Wikipedia isn't a Biblical history textbook (or indeed a Jewish literary study, an American history book, or a commentary on Kirkegaard) -- our article here needs to cover all aspects of the phrase, and its reception and post-Biblical use is as legitimate an area of study as any other.
Wikipedia articles are meant to strive for completeness and comprehensiveness, and are not limited to the key facts or what we as editors consider to be the most important areas -- if a certain facet of the verse or its reception has made its way into scholarship, policy requires us to include that. To make explicit what I made implicit above, there is far more discussion in the sources on this particular bit of the article than there is on just about any other individual component of it, so it stands to reason that that particular section should be reasonably substantial -- though, as I noted above, it's far smaller than that on the theology and only about half of the reception. From the quantity and detail of sources on each topic I came across while writing, that is, if anything, a bit low. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:39, 17 July 2025 (UTC)