The NWT translates the Hebrew world "rephaim" as used in Job 26:5 and Isaiah 14:9, as "those impotent in death".
Insight reports the following:
*** it-2 p. 778 Rephaim ***
The Hebrew repha·´im´ is used in another sense in the Bible. Sometimes it clearly applies, not to a specific people, but to those who are dead. Linking the word to a root meaning “drop down, relax,” some scholars conclude that it means “sunken, powerless ones.” In texts where it has this sense, the New World Translation renders it “those impotent in death,” and many other translations use renderings such as “dead things,” “deceased,” and “dead.”—Job 26:5; Ps 88:10; Pr 2:18; 9:18; 21:16; Isa 14:9; 26:14, 19.
In other words, simply another word for "dead person".
However, the various lexicons I've seen go further. They all translate the word generally as "ghosts of the dead, shades, spirits".
Who is right?
You would figure that a word definition should be derived first by its apparent context and usage. The word "rephaim" is used in passages which appear to indicate consciousness and activity. In particular, the passage from Is 14:9-20 speaks of Rephaim in Sheol being awakened to meet those the people of Israel who will soon be dying, and joining them. These dead people include those who were kings--pretty high powered people while on earth, now weak in their present condition in Sheol. v 16 shows that these "rephaim" will be gazing at the newcomers, commenting to each other in a jeering manner about how the mighty have fallen.
Couple this with the fact that the writings of the peoples occupying the region in and around Canaan during that time specifically use the word "rephaim" to mean a ghost or shade of a dead person. There are in fact direct parallels in phrasing and usage of the word between such writings and the biblical instances.
The WTS argument against all this would thus have to be that
(1) all that language about the dead in Sheol welcoming newcomers to their plight and poking fun at them, is simply figurative and poetic language. and
(2) that examining the parallel usage of the same word by the surrounding peoples is not a reliable way to determine how the Hebrews would have used it.
Rolf Firuli, in a post from the b-hebrew archive, below, uses argument #2 and a bit of #1. I find his argument rather weak. More on that later...
(I know, kind of heavy for a Friday afternoon...)
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2002-December/014487.html
RE: Rephaim [meaning of]
Whether the noun is connected with RP) = "to heal" or RPH ="to become feeble", "to sink down" cannot be known with certainty. The Ugaritic evidence regarding the meaning of RP)Y is uncertain, and the Hebrew word need not signify more than "the one who has sunk down in death".
To interpret Hebrew words in the light of Ugaritic is possible, but never conclusive (cf. all the criticism M. Dahood got from his extensive use of Ugaritic in his Psalm Commentary, The Anchor Bible).
The most balanced treatment of the word of which I know, is Harris, R. L. et al (1980) "Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament" II:858. There is no place in the OT which definitely show that dead persons are "alive" after death, and the idea that the dead exist as "shadows" is simply fictional "the shadow-idea once occurred in the mind of someone, and afterwards it has been uncritically repeated".
Even for Ugaritic I am not aware of any hard evidence showing that the word "shadow" should be used as a designation for the dead; absolutely not in Hebrew, and not in Accadian (the *opinion* of Gordon or anybody else cannot be used as evidence).
Another example of how mythology is introduced in Bible translations, is the word )I++IM in Isaiah 19.3. This is a hapax, and it is quite dramatic that the translators of the Norwegian Version of 1978/85 have introduced a new doctrine on the basis of a word occurring once and having an obscure meaning. It is translated by as "de dodes ander" ("the spirits of the dead", NIV and others have done the same). In this case Accadian is used to interpret the Hebrew word, because Accadian has the word ETEMMU, which can refer to the spirit of a dead person. We cannot take for granted that the religion of the
Hebrews were similar to the one of the Babylonians, and we note that ETEMMU also has the meaning "enchanter". The parallel words of Isaiah 19:3 suggests that enchanter is the reference here.
Best regards
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
meaning of Rephaim...Firuli's argument
by M.J. 7 Replies latest watchtower bible
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M.J.
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M.J.
Yup, 'bout what I expected...Have a great weekend.
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Narkissos
Leolaia had a great thread on this topic: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/68224/1.ashx
Biblical Hebrew lexicography is far from hard science, especially because the linguistic corpus is small (little more than the OT itself). The meaning of words cannot always be ascertained from context alone -- to take one trivial example, if I only knew the word "barber" from the sentence "the barber paints the wall," I could easily be misled to conclude that "barber" is another word for "painter". In that case, the use of etymology and comparative philology (cognate words in kin languages) is precious but it doesn't always lead to secure conclusions (because there are such things as homonyms and faux amis, i.e. related terms with very different meanings).
In that case, however, the fact that both the apparently "ethnical" and "underworld" repha'im in BH can be explained satisfactorily enough in reference to the Ugaritic rp)y rather than being unrelated and twice unexplained (as per the WT) weighs in favour of the former imo.
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Leolaia
In principle, the caution that Furuli recommends is good, but the correspondence between Hebrew rp`ym and the Ugaritic and Phoenician parallels isn't really comparable with Dahood's conjectural excesses, as we are dealing with multiple attestations, the same root (why Furuli suggests that rp` may not be the relevant root is beyond me, unless of course he is trying to defend the translation of the NWT which presumes rph as the root), similar reference and context (e.g. postmorten dead), and similar associated motifs (such as a kingly link of rp` with localities in Bashan). Aside from expressing hesitation, Furuli does not provide evidence in favor of rph being the root, or evidence against the correspondence with Phoenician and Ugaritic usage. Thus he only asserts that there is "no place in the OT which definitely show that dead persons are 'alive' after death" without showing why Isaiah 14 is not such a place. But to be fair to Rolf, this looks only like a brief comment, so I am sure he would have expounded this in greater detail if he were so inclined.
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M.J.
Just got back online here. Thanks for taking time to respond.
Narkissos, could you explain what you meant by "ethnical" repha'im, as well as what "BH" means? As well as expanding a bit on what you meant by it being "twice unexplained" if there is no correlation? Could be that I'm still a bit braindead on a monday morning. Thank you for the info on lexicography, btw.
Thanks Leolaia for listing the reasons one could be swayed in favor of a correspondence. -
Leolaia
BH = Biblical Hebrew
My thread that Narkissos linked discusses the use of "Rephaim" as both an ethnonym (name of a people) and a mythological term referring to the dead, particularly, dead kings in some texts. This term occurs with "Nephilim" in the conquest narratives to refer to the (legendary) race of giants who inhabited the land prior to the Israelites, as the mighty heroes of old. Both senses are related, as the Ugaritic material shows. The older Canaanite notion posits the Rephaim as dead kings of the distant past, who as "gods" may be appealed to, prayed to, for all sorts of things (hence, "healers"). The king lists refer to the earliest kings as Rephaim. Since the biblical traditions construe the inhabitants of Canaan prior to the rise of Israel as a different ethnic people, the Rephaim of the distant past become a distinct people, the heroes of old, legendary giants, who were also known as Nephilim, Zamzummim, the Emim, and other names that did not originate as any real ANE ethnonyms. The earlier Ugaritic texts also refer to the Rephaim of the underworld as "Didanites". This may represent a development in the opposite direction, an ethnonym that becomes associated with mythology. The name is that of an actual people who lived in the Levant in the third millenium BC -- the distant past for the Canaanites of the Late Bronze Age (and beyond the limits of memory for the Israelites of the Iron Age).
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M.J.
Thanks! I should have done my homework and read the link.
One thing that strikes me as a similar issue is the question of what "tartarus" means to the Christians in 2 Peter 2:4. -
skyking
When I got out of bed this morning I never thought I would learn anything. Thanks