What Does That Even Mean?!?
Posted by Rey
As you know I like to read, I like to write, and I like to combine both with the Bible (that is reading it and writing about it, not creating new chapters). Some people find reading the Good Book a tad too hard and sometimes, when they hear it being read with monotonous intonations (economics, supply, demand, Peter, James, and John) they find their eyes crossing, their vision blurring and visions of past movies start to replay in their mind.
Bible translators, some will say, should be looking for modern words to make it immediately understandable. Take someone like Peter the Jewish Fisherman who works with Greeks and Company and ask him what a propitiatory is, he’ll tell you right quick. Ask your smart non-Jewish accountant the same question his eyes will start to cross, vision blur—you know the drill.
Rebecca has a great post looking at that Bible word propitiation and suggested some translations. In so doing, she asks her (huge) reader-base to participate.
Where’s The Word?
The places it’s used in the New Testament are as follows: (1)
Rom 3:25 (God publicly displayed Jesus as a propitiation when He died on the cross); (2)
Heb 2:17 (Jesus became a High Priest to make propitiation for the sins of the people; (3)
1 John 2:2 (Jesus became a propitiation for the sins of the world, but especially sins of believers); and (4)
1 John 4:10 (God loved us and gave Jesus to be a propitiation for our sins)
If you look at those sentences you can fit in anything from payment or exchange through outright sin-cleaning. Webster’s dictionary says “something that conciliates; an atoning sacrifice”. Thing is, what does that even mean?
Where Did It Come From?
Back in day, when Greek was the English of the world, the word used there for propitiation meant an appeasing gift to an angry God. If you were down in your luck, everything was going wrong, you would head down to your local temple, bring some money or food and offer it as an appeasing gift for that god so that he (or she) would stop being angry at you.
Perhaps the word means an appeasement or diverter of wrath like Rebecca’s readers suggest: wrath-remover or wrath-payment.
Thing is, even wrath doesn’t mean much to us modern folk. We hear wrath we think Kahn or some sort of psychotic revenge and it would be weird to think that God has some sort of revenge vendetta against insignificant little humans.
So maybe propitiation means: an appeasement of God’s justified fury (since anger sounds too soft and rage sounds out of control). But then that seems to focus solely on that aspect of Greek culture while ignoring the Jewish culture where they had this thing that I already mentioned above called the propitiatory.
Where Else Did It Come From?
Say what? The Jews had propitiation too? Yeah, they called it the Mercy Seat but in Greek the word is the same. The Propitatory or Mercy Seat was the part on top of the Ark of the Covenant (yes the one from
Raiders of the Lost Ark) where there were
two angels carved.
Once a year, the Jewish High Priest would have the people lay their hands on an animal, kill it, take its blood and pour a little bit of it on that part of the ark. He didn’t do it because he invented it, but because God had told the Jews that if they didn’t do this, He might up and wipe them out since they were so utterly sinful (unlike the Greek Gods, the Jewish God had specific reasons for getting angry with people—they were sinful and He is not). The priests actions symbolized that the people died in the animal and God had no reason to re-kill them (it actually symbolized even more, but that’s all I’m saying for now).
Lastly propitiation can mean “an appeasing forgiveness-inducing sacrifice for justified fury“?
It’s a tough one, maybe some folk have a suggestion and maybe not. I’m going back to just using propitiation and explaining it the long way.
(I cross posted this on Rebecca’s site and on the Bible Archive, but edited it a bit to read more bloggish and clear up some things that may make sense only to people who constantly stare at the word Propitiation.)
4 Responses to “What Does That Even Mean?!?”
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February 23rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
OK, but what does pompatus mean?
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Just so people know (I just found out right now) MCF is talking about a certain nonsense word that I always took as a hard to decipher lyric.
March 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[...] from the Bible Archive plays along with Rebecca and considers some alternate wording for propitiation with two possible [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
[...] (I cross posted this on Rebecca’s site, but edited it a bit to read more like a post and clear up some things I accidentally typed sans-thinking. I also rewrote this for my personal blog to see if I can say the same things in regular English to a different audience.) [...]