Audio only:
Joe demonstrates how common English translations of the Bible don’t capture the whole reality of what ancient Jews and Christians understood about “love” and “hate.” Understanding the old world meaning of these words will make you see the Bible in a completely new context.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe, Heschmeyer, and one of the things that can startle readers of the Bible is when we read that God loves one individual or group and hates another. For instance, St. Paul explains the plan of God by saying that Jacob I loved, but he saw I hated. And Jesus talks about us needing to hate even our own families to follow him. Now, this kind of language is usually explained away as a hebrewism or a turn of phrase that to love one and hate another simply means to love one more than the other. Now that is half right, but it isn’t quite there because the deeper problem is that when the Bible speaks of love and hate, it typically doesn’t mean an interior emotional state as if God really likes some of us and others of us get on his nerves.
Instead, as scholars have been emphasizing for decades, these words frequently are being badly translated and probably shouldn’t be translated as love and hate at all. That’s the argument that scholars like Dr. Sarah Milstein make in her journal article The misleading nature of love and Hate and Biblical translation. And I think she makes a very compelling case that we need to change how we view the Bible. So I want to unpack her argument and the arguments of several other scholars and then use some biblical examples to show how we can get a better understanding of what the Bible really means by the words translated as love and hate. Now, what I can promise isn’t a mistranslation is my love for all my supporters over on shameless joe.com. This channel doesn’t take sponsors, so your direct support helps us to keep this apostate going. For as little as $5 a month, you can get access to ad free videos, a community of like-minded people and exclusive live streams with me that I’m sure you’d hate to miss.
So if you aren’t a member, head on over to shameless joe.com and sign up today if you’d like. And as always, a huge thank you to those of you who already support Shameless popery. Okay, so the whole debate turns on how to define a pair of Hebrew words, a habe, which often means love and sana or sene, which often means hate and a whole host of associated words coming from those two roots. And as Milstein points out, scholars have long since shown that depending on the context, a habe is often better translated as describing loyalty, protection, favor attraction, even sexual intercourse rather than love in some emotional sense. In other words, it’s less about an interior emotion and more about some kind of exterior action or actions. The same goes for Sana, which often means illegal repudiation or a divorce or the break of a contract or the dissolution of a covenant rather than hate.
And all of this is quite clear from both the Bible itself and from looking at contracts from these surrounding countries of the Near East, which is why Dr. Milstein is annoyed that Bibles continue to translate these terms in emotional terms even though we now know better. And those translations often make no sense or even lead to false or even heretical conclusions don’t show. You might ask yourself, why does this matter? Well, once you see some examples, I think you’re going to see how significant it is. I want to start with some of the passages about people who are allegedly hated. For instance, in most translations of Deuteronomy 21, 15 to 17, it purports to be about how inheritance is going to be divided up in a case in which a man has two wives, one wife that he loves and one wife that he hates. Now that’s odd for several reasons.
First, it appears to be condoning bigamy. Second, it creates a special set of legal obligations, but only if you hate one of your two wives. It’s very strange. And third, given that the Mosaic law permits divorce, why is this guy married to a woman whom he openly hates? Well, because none of that is true. This man isn’t married to two wives. He doesn’t hate one of them, at least not necessarily rather. This man has been married twice and he’s still married to one of the women the one he loves. The other woman has been repudiated, that means she’s been divorced. In other words, this line mistranslated as saying there’s a guy married to two women, he loves one and hates the other, is better translated as just saying a guy with a wife and an ex-wife. And in that case, if your firstborn son is the child of your ex, you still owe him his rightful inheritance.
Feelings have nothing to do with this at all. This is stone cold inheritance law. So what is going on here as Dr. Alejandro Botta points out, the English term hate describes an internal feeling, whereas the Hebrew word refers to something active and dynamic. When God says that he hates the Israelites sacrifices in Isaiah one, he’s not saying they make him feel bad or they bum ’em out. He’s saying that he rejects them. You can also see the difference between Sana and hate in Genesis 26. For context here, Isaac has tricked King ab bialek by claiming that his wife is really his sister. Now, Bialek finds out he’s angry about this, and after Isaac and his clan grows strong, ab bialek expels Isaac from the land, but notably Aek still treats Isaac justly. He forbids anyone from harming either Isaac or Rebecca upon pain of death.
Now later Aek reaches out to Isaac. He wants to create a covenant with him, and Isaac says to him, why have you come to me seeing that you sah allegedly hate me and have sent me away from you? Or at least that’s how it reads in most English Bibles. But of course, what he really said is that Aek exiled him. There’s no hard feelings between the two. Isaac is actually perfectly willing to have a feast with ab bialek and they form a covenant the next day. Clearly, AEK doesn’t hate Isaac in any sense that we would use that term in English. In fact, as a bilich himself points out, even though Isaac deceived him, we have done to you nothing but good and have sent you away in peace. Does that sound like hatred to you? So okay, so much for the false translation of hate.
What about the passages mistranslated as love? Dr. Millstein argues that in covenantal or political context, a hobb doesn’t really mean love in the emotional sense. It’s better translated in terms of loyalty, obedience, or protection depending on side of the covenant we’re talking about in English, we would express that by saying the people serve their rulers or that the rulers serve the common good emotional affection has literally nothing to do with it. Now, Dr. Milstein is not the first person to point this out. Back in 1963, father William L. Moran showed that the ancient near Eastern covenants and treaties and the lands around Israel used language very similar to the biblical covenantal language that gets mistranslated as love and hate. So for instance, when Solomon becomes the king of Israel, one of the neighboring kings, Hiram sends emissaries to him. And depending on the translation of First Kings five that you’re looking at, you’ll find in English that this is because he was friends with David or in the KJV that he was a lover of David.
But Hiram is neither David’s friend nor his lover. He’s his trading partner. And so sure enough, Solomon and Hiram negotiate a trade deal and a treaty, and this is how the nation’s surrounding Israel spoke as well. For instance, the Pharaoh was expected to love his vassals, and the vassals were expected to love their Pharaoh. It’s not that they really liked each other emotionally, we would say in English that Pharaoh served his people and the people obeyed or served Pharaoh. Well, similarly, father Moran points out that love in Deuteronomy is a love that can be commanded. It’s also a love intimately related to fear and reverence. Above all, it’s a love which must be expressed in loyalty, in service, and in unqualified obedience to the demands of the law that a requirement isn’t that you have fond feeling towards God, it’s that you serve him wholeheartedly and God likewise loves you, not primarily by having fond feelings for you, but by taking care of you.
Now, we’re going to get back to that because that’s obviously going to be a pretty important theme in how we understand passages about those whom God loves or hates. But first I want to look at a few of the other context in which hub gets this translated as love in the context of families. Emotional love can obviously play a bigger role. Sometimes it really does mean love in the sense we would use it. But even here there’s some interesting twists. We see a lot of examples of husbands loving their wives, parents loving their children, but with one possible exception, Dr. Susan Ackerman has shown there are no instances in the Bible of a woman loving a man or children loving their parents. Isn’t that odd? What’s going on there? Ackerman argues, I think correctly that this cannot just be because the Bible tends to focus on men more than women and children because we do find examples, for instance, of Rebecca loving her son, Jacob or Ruth, loving Naomi, just not of any women loving their own husbands.
But of course these women did love their husbands and these children did love their parents. And we see those things illustrated in action frequently, just not given this term. A hub Erman argues that male, female, parent, child and divine human love are construed in a way that is very one-sided and that in each of these, it’s typically the hierarchically superior partner who is characterized as loving that thesis makes sense. It actually accounts for the one exception that we see. The one woman who’s described as loving a man is Michel. She’s a woman of status. She’s the daughter of King Saul, and she loves a lowly shepherd boy named David. So something more than an emotion is going on even in these contexts, there’s some sense of one party caring for the other in some way. Dr. Milstein drives this point home by looking at some concrete biblical examples. Shockingly, Paris in the Bible never hobb all of their children. There’s one child in particular who’s given this designation, and kids never hobb their parents at all. So is the Bible really saying that parents are only able to love one of their kids and that kids can’t love their parents at all? Of course not.
CLIP:
You’re saying, I play favorites. You’re wrong. I love all my children equally. I don’t care for job.
Joe:
What’s actually going on here is that the word being mistranslated as love here means favored, but frequently in the sense of financially favored one kid is going to get the lion’s share of the inheritance because a lot of the assets wouldn’t be money. They’d be things that couldn’t be split evenly. Well. Similarly, when love is used between husbands and wives, it often actually means the marital act, but particularly with a view towards childbearing and thus future inheritance. So if you want a good example of this, take a look at Genesis 29 and 30 when Rachel and Leah are fighting over Jacob to try to gift him to love them. Now, the Hebrew is quite explicit that Jacob prefers having sex with Rachel. So God makes Rachel Baron so that Jacob is forced to love Leah. This is about the marital act, and the two sisters are fighting with one another, not primarily about how to win over their husband’s heart, but over how to get him to give them more sons and thus more of a share of the eventual inheritance.
And you can see this plainly and bluntly laid out in Genesis 30 verse 15, where Rachel trades sexual access to Jacob in exchange for some mandrakes, which she thought would help her own infertility presumably. And there’s one final piece related to some of the things we’ve talked about so far that needs to be added here. As Milstein points out. When Ana is used in a legal context, it means dissolving a legal bond just as it does, as we saw with the bond of marriage with divorce. So let’s apply all of that to the New Testament. Remember Jesus’ words that no one can serve two masters, he’ll either hate the one and love the other, or he’ll be devoted to the one and despise the other. That can be kind of a confusing passage because on the surface it sounds wrong. Not everybody who works two jobs hates one of their bosses. On the other hand, plenty of people wouldn’t say that they love their boss or one of their bosses, or worse their masters, whether they’ve got one or more than one.
CLIP:
Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy? Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.
Joe:
Instead, what Jesus is saying makes perfect sense. Only if you understand Jewish usage of love and hate, you can’t obey two contradictory commands. So in serving one, that’s love, you’ll have to disobey the other. That’s hate. Jesus puts this more forcefully in Luke 14 saying, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. But Jesus isn’t telling you to stop loving your kids. He’s not even saying constantly make sure you love your kids less than me. He’s telling you that you must serve God above all things. So even if it makes your other relationships harder, so for instance, if you know you need to become Catholic and are worried about doing so because of how your spouse or your family is going to react, this is the exact sort of circumstance that Jesus is speaking to, but it has nothing to do with how much you love or have affection for your family.
Okay, so what about Romans nine in which St. Paul quotes God as saying, Jacob, have I loved Issa? Have I hated this? Passage is often misunderstood as saying that God literally and maybe even arbitrarily loves some people and hates other people, and that he wants some people to go to heaven and that he doesn’t want other people to go to heaven. Now, there are several reasons to question that interpretation. First, remember the whole point of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans is to challenge Jewish believers who think that because they’re Jews, they’re owed salvation. This is why Paul spends so much of the time in the letter talking about how the old covenant in the Mosaic law can’t save you, and it’s why he talks about how the gospel will save anyone with faith, Jew or Gentile. He then says that God will judge everyone based upon their works, Jewish or Gentile, and he stresses that God shows no partiality.
So okay, he’s just said that God has not randomly divided the world into two groups and decided to save one and damn the other. Well, that’s a pretty good sign that he’s not going to get to chapter nine and say, wait a second. Actually, he did divide the world into two groups and decide to save one and not the other. So to understand Paul, in Romans nine, you’ve got to first understand the Old Testament passages that he uses, and you need to read them with that Old Testament lens because when St. Paul says, as it is written, Jacob I loved but Esau I hated, you need to go back and see, well, what was written. And if you do that, you find that Jacob and Esau don’t literally refer to Jacob and Esau and love and hate, don’t literally refer to love and hate. Paul actually quotes two different Old Testament passages.
First is Genesis 25, 23, which says, two nations are in your womb, and two people’s point of view shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other. The elder shall serve the younger. Why is that significant? Well, remember that God had made a covenant with Abraham, a covenant inherited by his descendants. Usually this would happen along the lines of prima gentry, meaning the eldest son would carry on the covenant along with all the promises and duties of the covenant. But Esau who was entitled to these covenant promises gives them up, and so they passed to his younger brother. And so Jacob’s descendants, Israel become the covenantal partner of God instead of Esau’s descendants, the nation of Edam, Esau, and his offspring are now hated, not in the sense of God disliking them, but in the sense that they have freely given up their status in the covenant, a status that remember they had a birthright too.
That’s important. We’ll get back to that. But this gives us a context for the second passage that Paul quotes and Malachi one, God reminds Israel that I have loved Jacob, but I’ve hated Esau. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert. Since Za has renounced his place in the covenant, he’s without divine protection and the mites find their nation destroyed. Meanwhile, God protects Jacob, meaning Israel from utter annihilation while telling them to turn back to him. This doesn’t mean that God hates Edomites in the sense that he would use that term. Quite the contrary. He actually reminds the Israelites, you shall not abhor mite for he’s your brother. So Romans nine is not talking about God arbitrarily disliking mites or anybody else. The point is that Esau gave up his covenantal birthright and somebody else inherited Israel.
Now, Paul is looking around and seeing the Jews of his day about to make the same mistake, which is what he’s worried about at the top of Romans nine, which is why this whole Jacob and Esau language comes in the context of reminding his Jewish brethren that they have the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the given of the law, the worship and the promises. But they can lose all of that because not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. That is being ethnically Jewish will not save you if you repudiate your status in the covenant. Paul doesn’t want to see his fellow Israelites forsake the covenant and have their nation destroyed. So love and hate in Romans nine are not about emotions, nor are they about God liking some of us better than others. They’re covenantal terms, meaning within nor without of the covenant.
And God is using them to speak of Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edem, but also the Jews and Christians of his day. And unlike the people who misinterpret Romans nine to mean that you’re going to be in one of those two groups forever and can’t change that, Paul’s point is quite the opposite. He quotes God’s words through the prophet Hosea for telling how those who were not my people, I will call my people and her who was not beloved, I will call my beloved. His whole point is that branches could be broken off if they become unfaithful, and new shoots could be grafted into the covenantal tree. So this leaves us no room for either complacency or despair in our dealings with God. So for those of you coming from more of a Calvinist background, I hope this helps you see how Romans nine is being misused because the language is mistranslated as well as stripped of his Old Testament context and placed into a reformed context that doesn’t really belong. But this is the tip of the iceberg because you think about it this way, if the apostles really did teach the kind of predestination John taught, we’d expect to find the earliest Christians teaching about it. But what do we find when we actually read their writings? Well, you’re going to have to click here to find out for yourself for Shameless Popery. I’m Joe, Heschmeyer, God bless you.