BTW, thinking about these Hebrew words being removed from Scripture in English, it’s hard for me to stop thinking of all the reasons this text’s deletion from God’s Word is the perfect example of the betrayal of inspiration by today’s scribes. So let me continue to hammer it home since I doubt that anyone sees this to be as serious as it is.
First, the argument has always been made about this and similar texts that it’s the job of the translator to make the meaning clear to the reader. Thus the whole scribal guild has demonstrated during and since the late nineties’ neutered Bible scandal that their goal was to render the text in such a way that readers would not need anything other than the Bible itself to understand what the Bible was “really” saying here and there. In other words, if the guild did their translation work properly, a man could read the text without needing help from a teacher or preacher. Maybe metanarrative sort of stuff would still need help; and yes, theology; and yes, certainly covenantal secret handshakes and that sort of stuff; but not the words right there on the page. Make them thangs clear!
Confusion and ambiguity were the enemy, and the idea that confusion and ambiguity could be or are inspired by the Holy Spirit and present in the original text, intentionally (speaking of God’s intent, you must understand) was a thought too deep and threatening to the scribal guild. So the prevailing principle became making clear what was unclear in the original, whether that lack of clarity was in the Hebrew itself, or whether that lack of clarity would necessarily be present by accurately rendering a Hebrew idiom that (the guild claimed) would be unclear if it were allowed to be rendered into the English accurately. (“Those who piss against the wall” is an example of this second category.)
In this second instance, the thought was something along the lines of:
Maybe the reader won’t know it’s the male sex who is capable of standing up by a wall and pissing on it, so we better just remove the idiom. It’s a gross expression anyway, and only MAGA sort of men would want God’s Bible containing such gross expressions. Furthermore, it might make our guild look bad to have our names attached to such gross expressions preferred by MAGA sort of men. Sophisticated people who speak English don’t use such gross expressions, and we want to take their delicate sensibilities into account in our production of an English text of God’s Word that is worthy of our English non-MAGA audience.
Anyhow, if any pastor wants to give back to his people what we deleted, he can do it in his sermon. You know, something like, “Now the original word here is not really ‘men,’ but the Hebrew idiom ‘those who piss against the wall.’ Some of you, of course, are too cultured and delicate to understand that, since men expel their liquid waste from a hole at the end of their penis, it has always been a defining trait of the male sex that they can expel their liquid waste while standing up. On the other hand, women not having penises, it’s a defining trait of their sex that they are not able to expel their liquid waste while standing up. So you see, dear simpletons, these Hebrew words God inspired were left out of the English translation we’re using today because the scribal guild who produce our translations, as well as the Bible publishers who sell them to us, don’t want to allow God to use such a profane, earthy, and embarrassing idiom. It would make our scribes and publishers look bad. Or worse, it would make God’s Holy Spirit look bad. So now I’ve explained it to you, and that’s that. Aren’t you thankful you have a pastor who lets you in on all the secret things scribes hide from us that God inspired to be written in His Word? Where would you be without your pastor, huh?”
What on earth?
Look, give it to God’s people straight. Give them His Words “those who piss against the wall” straight. Pissing against the wall is not rocket science. Like the male inclusive, our problem with “those who piss against the wall” is not that we are afraid women and men and children will not understand it, but that they will understand it, and that they will find it as humorous or shameful a way of referring to the first sex as it was when it was said in Hebrew and inspired to be written in the Hebrew Scriptures.
I’ll leave this theme here for now, only adding proof for how prissy Christian scribes and publishers are by posting for readers the artwork from the front of what I consider the greatest rock and roll album of all time:
Love,
