A Couple Thoughts On Judeo-Christianity

Vox Day has convincingly argued through numerous blog posts that there is no such thing as "Judeo-Christianity" because of the huge cultural and theological rifts between the two belief systems: particularly, in my opinion, when comparing Christianity as it developed in the West versus the Rabbinical Judaism. 

    Thus, it was with interest that I read a recent post from Day on "The Etymology of 'Yahweh'". "Yahweh", as you probably already know, is a proposed pronunciation of God's name--YHWH in ancient Hebrew--and an increasingly popular alternative to the traditional English rendering, Jehovah. YHWH literally translates as "I am". (See, e.g., John 8:58 where Christ declares himself to be the Old Testament Jehovah). 

    Day cites an article that explores the roots of the alternative "Yahweh" rendition, which is often promoted as more accurate both historically and linguistically. The author found, however, that the term doesn't make its appearance until about 200 years ago, and only became popular recently. The author also adds:

    For thousands of years, there has been debate over the pronunciation of “YHWH”–the name “I am” which God gave Himself from the burning bush in Exodus 3. Written Hebrew of course has no vowels, so with only the text, there are numerous possibilities for any consonant set. “Jehovah” itself is one such made-up word, which deliberately transposes the vowel sounds from “Adonai” onto the consonants in “YHWH”. While the intention at the time was pious, it is highly relevant that no such thing was done in Jesus’ day.

    The Greek Septuagint (LXX) is the Old Testament that was commonly used in Jesus’ day. Hebrew was already a dead language in the 1st century, meaning it was no longer spoken conversationally and most couldn’t read it. Jesus quotes the LXX, as does the NT hundreds of times.

    So it is relevant how the LXX treats the YHWH “I am”. What we find is that the word is simply and naturally translated “ego eimi”–”I am”. The 4th century Latin Vulgate also faithfully translates it simply as “ego sum”. Zero interest in it as a proper name, vs. a declaration.

    This fact is crucial to the question because it ties directly to Christ’s Divinity. When Jesus said, “Before Abraham was I am” He said ego eimi, and the jews tried to murder Him on the spot for blasphemy. He didn’t use some special Hebrew utterance, but “I am”–God’s Name.

    For over 14 centuries, every Christian believed that God’s revealed name to Moses was “I am”.

In short, the fight over the "proper" pronunciation is not to add clarity to the issue, but to confuse the issue over who, exactly, was Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was, to quote the hymn, "Once a meek and lowly Lamb, Now the Lord, the great I Am." Not only that, but Jesus came to be the savior and redeemer (i.e., Christ) of the whole world, not just the Jews. This is a fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism that has shaped very different outlooks between the two religions.

    And that takes me to the second article, "Traditional Jewish Separatism and de-Humanization of Gentiles: A Review of Stephen Bloom’s Postville" by Bernard M. Smith, which discusses an aspect of this fundamental difference between Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism. The book, Postville, is about what happens after a wealthy Jewish family buys an old meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa, to turn it into a large producer of Kosher meats. The book explores the relationship between the Hasidic Jews that move into Postville to run the plant and the Christian natives. The book's author, Bloom, is a secular Jew that, because he occupies a middle or neutral position, is able to obtain access and candid interviews with people on both sides. But what the book reveals, at least according to the review, is a community split between the native inhabitants, mostly of German descent, and their honest, straight-shooting, law following attitudes and a group of Jews that, as Bloom apparently describes them, "thought about the locals as people to be avoided, to navigate among them, or take advantage of them — but, in any event, never people with whom they would fraternize."

... There was a palpable groupthink among the Jews that refused to see the perspective of the locals, let alone empathize with them. The Jews were strictly transactional with the locals — we live here, you live here, leave us alone. But it was more than mere avoidance for the sake of toleration — it was an almost glee in deceiving the goyim that irked Bloom. The locals were essentially non-entities to the Jews — lacking any inherent value as human beings. To the Jews, however, their theology towards the gentiles made perfect sense — the Jew alone possessed a special relationship with God that required an insularity to protect it. The outside world — the non-observant world — was marked by one overriding theme: contamination and filth. The idea of fraternizing with the locals — of making nice with them — was then, at least to the ultra-orthodox mind, something incomprehensible. ...

    The most relevant excerpt:

If anything, the years that have passed have made the book more relevant than even when it was published. It is the intersection, and future, of religion in America and America itself — as it was, as it is, and as it is becoming. Not only is the story of Postville one of rural and urban, immigrant and native, and Christian and Jewish, but it is also the account of Jewish versus Jewish — the Jewishness of intense insularity versus the Jewishness of liberal cosmopolitanism, the Jewishness of tribalism versus the Jewishness of universalism. Bloom’s book about the culture clash between Hasidic Jews and rural Iowans is riveting on many levels but one that figures most prominently is the theme of Jewish inward-looking supremacism, and how this theme correlates with Jewish religiosity. Simply stated, the more religious a Jew is, the more he believes that he must turn within the Jewish community and shun the gentile (lest he, the religious Jew, is contaminated by the filth and impurity of the gentile). Not only does he not love the gentile in any conceivable way, but the religious Jew is categorically indifferent to the gentile’s existence as if the gentile does not matter in any essential way—that the gentile has no moral worth. There is then a powerful and undeniable correlation between Jewish religious intensity and observance and insularity from, and indifference to, the “other.” Of course, as I have known from experience, not every religious Jew is hostile and indifferent to gentiles per se. But the gravity exerted within religious Judaism is one that pulls towards itself — fundamentally, religious Judaism is not interested in the world outside of its narrow parameters. By contrast, the more religious a Christian becomes, the more he loves (or should love) all men as his neighbor — Christianity as a creed cannot produce anything approaching Jewish supremacism and insularity because Christianity is uniquely universal. For the Christian, Jew and gentile are essentially equal in dignity before God — for the religious Jew, such a concept would be totally unacceptable. And, as an “ultra” orthodox outpost, Postville recounts appalling episodes of indifference and hostility towards the gentiles by the Postville Jews.

It sounds like an interesting book. And it illustrates that some things never change. Christ was criticized by the Jewish elites of his day for fraternizing with sinners, and Christ likened the Jewish elites to whitewashed tombs, bright and white and clean looking on the outside, but full of filthiness on the inside.