This page was originally written 9 July 2017 To navigate up to the scripture index, see index-passages.
This isn’t any kind of deep or profound post. It’s just a little griping.
1 Samuel 25:3 reads (and I do mean reads, it’s the qere I’m discussing here), . . . vehu kalibbi. That -i is the word-ending that corresponds to the English ending -ite, so “He was a Calebite.” Short, concise, understandable, literal. But how does the KJV take this? “. . . and he was of the house of Caleb,” as though the Hebrew read, vehu mibbeit kalev. But the Hebrew doesn’t say that. It says vehu kalibbi.
The JPS 1917 translation, which usually leaves the KJV reading alone but sometimes improves upon it, follows it into error here, as does the ASV and its fraternal tribe the RV. The World English Bible, which is the best full post-thou public domain Bible (in the Protestant sense of “Bible”), copies the ASV’s error here.
Translations that get it right include NIV, ESV, NASB, Holman, NET, and of course Young’s Literal Translation, which lives up to its name here again. But wait, I hear you say. Doesn’t Calebite mean descendant of Caleb? Wouldn’t a translation which invokes the name of the well-known biblical figure Caleb be clearer for readers?
Perhaps, but such a translation might run the risk of making something clear that isn’t clear in the original text. When the author of 1 Samuel 25:3 wrote klby, was he really thinking of klb the figure, and relating Nabal to him? I don’t know. What I do know is that the only time that the word klb occurs in Samuel, it is in a phrase, ngb klb, which refers to a location. It isn’t clear that the Samuel-writer(s) is/are aware of the biblical person named Caleb at all. So Samuel-writer could just as easily be relating Nabal to a tribal group he is aware of, rather than to any individual.
To think that the term Calebite must necessarily be derived from the Caleb of Numbers is based on a naive way of reading biblical Hebrew genealogies. A more plausible reading is that Caleb is a personification of the Calebites and/or their land. This is also true for a host of figures in the Pentateuch: all the figures in the table of nations, possibly Seth and Cain, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Hagar, the various sons of Keturah, Jacob, Esau, the twelve sons of Jacob, Shechem, Mamre, Kenaz, Moses, Levi, and so on.
Consider, if you will, the following text:
And the sons of Ham were Cush, and Mizraim, and Put, and Canaan.
If you knew nothing about these names, it would be easy to think that we’re talking about some regular guy and his four regular kids. But what if we knew that Ham, and Cush, and Mizraim, and Put, and Canaan referred to countries or ethnic groups? Then we would be reading something roughly analogous to And the sons of England were America, and Australia, and Canada, and the Anglo-Indian. Then we would know that we were dealing with not with a genealogy in the modern sense, but a national or ethnographic set of relations presented in human terms. This would be confirmed if a figure in the same text were given an implausible age: and England lived 725 years, and begot America. Or, And Noah was five hundred years old, and began Shem, and Ham, and Japheth.
Our impression would be confirmed if further down in the document we read something like, And the sons of America were Massachusetts, and Georgia, and Philadelphia, and Delaware . . . or And Canaan was the father of Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, and the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, and the Arvadite, and the Sumurite, and the Hamathite. At that point the framing of the components in our “genealogy” as “individuals” has been pretty much entirely dropped.
Now, religious conservatives aren’t just acting out of ignorance when they read Genesis or Exodus as treating some of these figures as individuals. There are reasons for why they read some of these texts in the counter-intuitive way they do. But it is nonetheless true that these texts present plenty of reasons for reading some of this stuff as ethnography draped in personal terms. The genre is mixed; it’s not quite like anything we moderns write anymore.
And so, as readers of a text that is culturally alien to us, we have to make a few strange moves, regardless. But if we choose to read these as individuals, we are doing something very strange. As strange as if we knew the terms Delaware and Georgia and so on, but read the sentence about “America’s sons” as indicating that there was some individual named America from whom Americans descend, who was the son of some individuals named England from whom Brits descend, who was the grandfather of a man named Delaware who was the ancestor of the state, and so on.
Maybe this post has gone a bit beyond the simple griping I was promising. That’s enough for now.