Bible thumped

I recently remembered that a blog-fan had suggested I write something about a well-known passage from the Old Testament. What prompted my Total Recall was attending Sunday morning Chapel at my old college, with a thumping hangover and an unwelcome surprise. The surprise was that instead of a sermon, the chaplain announced that we would have a group discussion about the two readings (from Acts and Luke). Given that there were only four of us in the congregation, any silence from me would be well-noticed. I usually have an opinion about everything, even the Bible, but that morning I didn’t feel too bright, or brave.

As it happens, I managed to hone in on the language as being too negative for the message and would either confuse or demotivate devotees. That thought seemed to floor everyone, which means it was either an excellent point or a really daft one.

I occasionally comment on the Bible and its language, comparing the majesty of the King James Version (KJV) with the trite Good News dumb-down. The passage suggested to me by my blog-fan was Ecclesiastes 9:11, which is a humdinger as I’ll discuss in a minute.

Ecclesiastes is an Old Testament book of wisdom literature. The superscription (1:1) attributes the book to, in Hebrew, qohelet (‘ekklēsiastēs’ in Greek, or ‘preacher’ in English), who is identified as “the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” Though this has to refer to Solomon, who is believed to have reigned 970 to 931 BC, the form of language frequently used by the writer suggests it was probably written during the second half of the 3rd century BC.

Solomon, or whomever, teaches us that everything is meaningless without a proper focus on God, that it is necessary to fear God in a fallen and frequently confusing and frustrating world. Sounds like 2023 all over again. In fact, if Solomon did write this then he was a first-class hypocrite because he had many wives and concubines, and they persuaded him to worship idols.

The passage under consideration here is Ecclesiastes 9:11: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

This is the King James Version (KJV) of course. While the meaning of everything might not be immediately obvious to Joe Public, the poetry is so beautiful it enchants the reader on a deep level: you want to know what it means, really means, not just easy-peasy superficially; you want to devour it and digest it.  Hunger for more.

Compare with the Good News Bible: “I realized another thing, that in this world fast runners do not always win the races, and the brave do not always win the battles. The wise do not always earn a living, intelligent people do not always get rich, and capable people do not always rise to high positions. Bad luck happens to everyone.”

Yawnfest. The meaning’s obvious. Nothing to see here. Move along please.

Yet it could be worse. What the blog-fan also sent me was a spoof version of the KJV by none other than George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. He criticises the "ugly and inaccurate" written English of his time, that it is “in a bad way … Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.” 

Orwell’s re-write of Ecclesiastes 9:11 reads as follows: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account.”

Dear Lord, it sounds like it was composed by ChatGPT, a concept that would nevertheless have fascinated Orwell. But for his 1946 essay, it’s more timely to liken the above turgid style to that of a ‘professional’ report or a self-improvement book.

He explained, “Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

Isn't that how ChatGPT works?

To be honest, I haven't done Orwell's essay justice. I've limited discussion to language in isolation, whereas he was writing about language in the context of politics. He concludes, "Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs."

As I said earlier, it's 2023 all over again.