Older, Richer, Closer

The book began with three words on the cover. Older. Richer. Closer. The cover didn’t explain them. The introduction didn’t explain them. The forty chapters that followed worked through their meaning one passage at a time, one small word at a time, without quite stopping to say what the three words on the cover were doing there.

Now, at the end, the reader has read the book. The three words are no longer a title. They’re a description of what she has been doing for forty chapters. What follows is brief — a naming of what the book has been about all along.

older

Older has meant, throughout this book, the reading that comes before. Before the centuries of linguistic drift that softened the English words. Before the cultural distance that made the first audience’s instincts foreign. Before the modern assumptions that read the text through frames the original setting never had. Older has meant Hebrew before Latin, Greek before English, first-century Jewish before twenty-first-century Western. Older has meant what was said, before all the helpful and unhelpful things the centuries have said about what was said.

The older reading isn’t always different from the modern reading. Much of what the church has been teaching for two thousand years has come down faithfully. The modern reader, on most pages of her Bible, is reading scripture the way her ancestors did — perhaps with a few small words flattened, perhaps with a few cultural cues missed, but substantially the same text receiving substantially the same message. The book hasn’t been arguing that the modern reader has been getting it wrong. It has been arguing that, on the specific pages where the centuries have drifted, the older reading can be recovered.

And it can be recovered. That is the first claim. The recovery isn’t the work of specialists alone. It’s available to any reader who is willing to slow down at the small word, to ask what the first audience heard, to look up the Septuagint reading, to notice the cultural distance. The older reading sits inside the modern text, waiting. The modern reader, with a little patience, can hear what was originally said.

richer

Richer has meant the fullness the original languages could carry, which the English has had to choose between.

Yirah is richer than fear. The Hebrew word holds awe, reverence, trembling-near-but-not-fleeing, the posture of the small in the presence of the large. English has fear and awe and reverence, and translators have to pick one — usually fear, which has narrowed over the centuries into the running-away word. The Hebrew never had to choose. The Hebrew said all of it at once.

Hesed is richer than love. The Hebrew word holds committed loyalty, durable kindness, faithful love that has decided to stay even when it doesn’t have to. English has to scatter the meaning across many words — steadfast love, lovingkindness, mercy, faithfulness — because no single English word can hold what the Hebrew said in one. The Hebrew said one word, and the one word was the spine of how Israel understood its God.

Makarios is richer than blessed. The Greek word holds flourishing, thriving, the state of true human well-being. English has blessed, which has slowly become a polite religious word for fortunate. The Greek meant something stronger — the present-tense declaration that someone is in the right state, even when the world thinks they aren’t.

Kyrios is richer than Lord. The Greek word holds the political weight of Caesar is lord, the divine weight of the Lord whose name no human can pronounce, and the personal weight of Jesus is Lord. The first audience heard all three at once. The English flattens them into a single capitalized word the modern reader has been told to pass over without pausing.

The book has been showing, over and over again, that the original is richer than the English. That this isn’t a flaw of English translation — the translators did their best, and they did better than any modern reader could have done. It’s the nature of translation. Some of what the original languages carried, no single English word could carry. The richer reading is what the original languages were doing all along. The English is a faithful and useful door into that reading, but it’s a door, not the room.

The richer reading is available to any reader who is willing to look through the door, into the room.

closer

Closer has meant three different kinds of closeness, all of them gifts.

Closer to the text — to what scripture actually says, in the languages it was given, in the settings where it was first received, with the layers of meaning the original audience would have heard. The reader who has done the work of recovery has come closer to the text than the surface reading would have allowed her. The text she holds in her lap is the same text she held forty chapters ago. But she’s closer to it now. She can hear more of what it has been saying the whole time.

Closer to the original audience — to the first-century Jewish peasant who heard Jesus speak the Beatitudes, to the Roman house-church member who heard Paul’s letter read aloud, to the Greek-speaking Jew who knew the Septuagint by heart and heard the apostles preaching the gospel inside its vocabulary. The reader can’t fully become that first audience. She lives in a different world. But she has come closer to standing in the room with them than she was when she started. And standing in that room, even imperfectly, lets her hear what they heard, even imperfectly. The first audience isn’t a barrier the modern reader has to overcome. They’re the people who first received this gift. Coming closer to them is part of receiving it well.

Closer to the God scripture testifies to — to the One whom every page of this book has been finally about. This is the closeness that matters most. The other two — closeness to the text, closeness to the first audience — wouldn’t be worth the trouble if they didn’t lead to this one. They do lead to it. Reading scripture more carefully isn’t, in the end, an exercise in historical reconstruction. It’s one of the ways the church has always known of drawing nearer to the God who gave the scripture. The older reading is richer because the God of the older reading is richer than the flatter English alone can show. The richer reading brings the reader closer because what the richer reading reveals is the God who has been speaking through every word the whole time.

The book has been about closeness. That is the invisible thesis. Every chapter has been, in some quiet way, an attempt to bring the reader nearer — to the words she was reading, to the people who first heard them, and through both of those, to the God whose word they are. The recovery isn’t for its own sake. The recovery is for closeness. And closeness, finally, is what the book has been hoping to give her.

handing it back

The book closes by handing the reader back to her own Bible.

The book has done what it can. It has walked her through forty chapters of investigation. It has shown her some of what was sitting inside the text the whole time, waiting. It has handed her a small toolkit. It has named, at the end, what it has been about all along.

What is left is hers. The reading is hers. The practice is hers. The Bible is hers. The book on her bedside table — the same Bible she had before any of this — is the Bible she will now read. The text is what it always was. The reader is the one who has changed. She has slowed down. She has learned to listen. She has the tools and the practice and the time, in whatever measure she has been given, to keep reading.

She isn’t reading alone. She hasn’t been reading alone at any point during this book. The cloud of witnesses — the prophets and apostles and fathers and reformers and monks and translators and scholars and pastors who have been reading these texts for three thousand years — has been reading with her the whole time. They’ll keep reading with her after she has put this book down. They’ll keep reading with her after she has read her Bible for another fifty years. They’ll keep reading with her until she joins them on the other side of the page.

What she has, in her hands, is the older, richer, closer reading that has always been there. Older than the English she is reading it in. Richer than any single word can carry. Closer to the One who has been speaking the whole time. The reading was waiting for her. The book has been pointing to it. Now the book steps aside, and what the book has been pointing to is what is left.

The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.

— Numbers 6:24-26