Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 197

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PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
commonplace in the Scriptures,9 but this is not what is happening
here.
A conventional strategy would be to assume that the ancient
texts were more ready to employ metaphor and analogy than their
late medieval and renaissance translations, and that this is one of
the symptoms of the tension between Latin and English. But
‘tension’ is hardly the right word: something has already snapped.
If we turn to our dictionaries we find lists of several ‘meanings’ for
ancient concepts of this sort. Thus ruach is given in 15 pages of
Volume VII of Clines’s Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Clines 2010:
427–440) as having the primary meanings ‘wind, breath, spirit,’ all
of which have a host of secondary meanings (as these three terms
would do in modern English). Clearly, however, this elaboration of
meaning is not a feature of the Hebrew word, but of its English de-
finitions, which suggest an apparent fragmentation into the broad
semantic range of our time. This is usually explained with the idea
that primitive plodding man, who already had a word for the wind
in his hair, later acquired a spiritual bent and invented an unseen
world of spirits that needed a new terminology. However, instead
of making new words for new concepts, as he had always done
before, he invented metaphor and poetry to voice his emerging
spiritual imagination. If, with Owen Barfield, we cannot bring
ourselves to accept this contrived scenario,10 we might be tempted
to assume that the ancients simply had a more limited vocabulary,
making few words do for a wide range of ideas.
But this would be to see things from a very parochial perspective.
Perhaps the most heartening development in Western thought over
the last few hundred years has been the slow dawning of an under-
standing that other people think differently, and that this means
that we think differently too. This is a major departure, although it
is still hardly more than embryonic. In this territorial world it is
natural that it should occur primarily as a spatial understanding,
between opposing factions; but we must also learn to apply it in the
dimension of time. This is the hermeneutic approach, the attempt
9 See for instance Holquist 2001: 62–65 on Peter, Babel and the Tetragrammaton. On the
Tetragrammaton, see for instance Barfield 1988: 113–115.
10 See for instance Barfield 1988: 79–83 and 122–125; and Barfield 1985.
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