When the Bible Gets Vulgar  🔗 **Source:** [When the Bible Gets Vulgar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1RA3ougj7w) Does the Bible contain any profanity or vulgarities? Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion, and I want to talk about an example of each, one from the New Testament, one from the Hebrew Bible. And we're going to start in Philippians 3:8. Here is this passage from the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version. More than that, I regard everything as lost because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ. And my concern here is the Greek word that is rendered rubbish. Here is the Greek and I've highlighted in the red box skibala. Now, if we look in the Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature, in the red box we've got the entry for skibalon, and the definition is useless or undesirable material that is subject to disposal. And the two glosses that are provided here are refuse and garbage, thus rubbish in the NRSVUE. But I want to go down to the third to last line where you see the bold Phil 3:8, and we have this quote from a scholar who says, "To convey the crudity of the Greek, it's all crap." And I think we could actually get even more strong than that in our language. I think you could say that Paul is intending to use a term that we might consider profane. I think you could translate this, "It's all shit." Now, there's actually a scholar who has made this argument in The Bible Translator, a journal that is for the Bible Translation Industry. John David Punch in this 2014 article, Skibala Happens: Edification from a Four-Letter Word in the Word of God. And I want to read the abstract and then a paragraph from the conclusion. "Saint Paul's use of the term skibala in Philippians 3:8 seems to contradict his prohibition elsewhere of unwholesome speech. This article compares debated etymologies of the term, considers evidence of the term's use in antiquity, and evaluates the warrant for its usage in contrast with other available terms. Lastly, it offers a conclusion about the appropriateness and inappropriateness of similar uses of coarse language by those who follow Paul in the Christian Church. Now, from the conclusion, much like his well-documented use of Greek philosophers in Acts 17, Paul's use of slang or obscenity may have awakened his original readers to hear what they otherwise might have missed. We too might miss the benefit of what Paul is saying if we domesticate this Pauline text as some have warned. I do not think the use of skibalon is indicative of Paul's daily speech, but it does serve to make his point in Philippians 3:8. He likely would not have said it in mixed company unless he expected a reaction. I think Paul succeeded with his plans. His words are still ringing in the ears of those who continue to debate the significance of what he said. Might they ring a little louder if, as the evidence above seems to suggest, translations were to use the more accurate and more forceful translation of crap or for skibala. And so, the idea is that Paul is intentionally using an obscenity profanity in order to evoke a visceral reaction from his audience. This is unexpected. This is profane. This is obscene. Pay attention to what's going on here. So, this is an argument that has been put forth for some time now, but we don't really see it making its way into a lot of Bible translations. I think the strongest we get is crap, but there's a spectrum between garbage, crap, and And I think if we want to convey the full force of the rhetorical intent of the author here, if we want it to come across the way the author wanted it to come across, I think we need to be more toward the latter end of that spectrum and maybe even render for skibala. Now, I also want to talk about an obscene vulgar passage in the book of Ezekiel. And now, Ezekiel is full of a lot of um quite coarse language, quite uh explicit language. In fact, there's a substitution for the word Elohim that is used by Ezekiel, gillulim, which could be translated gods. It's intended to sound at the end of the word kind of like Elohim, like the word for God or gods, but is using a root word that refers to dung or crap or So, we can see some profanity, some obscenity in Ezekiel's language, but I want to focus in on a couple of verses in chapter 23, specifically verses 19 through 21. Here we have the NRSVUE's rendering, "Yet she increased her prostitutions, remembering the days of her youth when she prostituted herself in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions. As she longed for the lewdness of your youth when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts." Now, the NRSVUE is kind of domesticating, so to speak, the language a little bit here. Here's the Hebrew and the words I want to focus on here are in the red box, the zirmatsusim zirmatam. And zermat here is coming from the word zirma, and I've highlighted the entry for zirma in the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, hallot. The word only occurs this once in Ezekiel 23:20, and the gloss provided here is phallus based on the understanding that this is actually metathesis from Zamora, which would be a word that means a branch and so figuratively could refer to a phallus. But notice parenthetically they say alternatively ejaculation from Zaram and if we go to the page above this one, we see Zaram a verbal root meaning to unload clouds, water accompanied by thunder. And then under that entry you see Zaram the noun form, which we see here refers to heavy rain, a cloudburst accompanied by thunder. And if we go to Klein's dictionary of classical Hebrew, Klein's doesn't endorse the metathesis understanding. Klein's just says, "No, this is from Zaram as you see down at the bottom to pour or pour out." And Klein's renders here ejaculative of horses for the specific phrase in Ezekiel 23:20 and Klein's bases it on the verbal root that he glosses pour rain, be squeezed, be wrung out. And then the noun form downpour, rainstorm. And you can check out all the different ways that occurs there if you would like. But this is a very kind of shocking explicit uh use of this language to refer to the Egyptians as particularly well endowed. Uh this is using animal imagery actually to represent the Egyptians and as some scholars have pointed out this has less to do with actual female desire and more to do with male obsession with the phallus. But uh if you'd like some scholarship that's talking about how this imagery is functioning within Ezekiel's rhetoric, this is a wonderful book Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Uh lots of good stuff in that book, as well as Rosanne Lieberman's more recent Exile Incorporated the Body in the book of Ezekiel, which talks about what's going on with the references to the bodies of Mesopotamians, of Assyrians, of Egyptians. Why are the bodies of Egyptians represented in very different ways than the bodies of Mesopotamians and others? It's a fascinating look at what is going on in Ezekiel with the othering of the ethnic groups beyond Israel and the use of their bodies as a way to kind of facilitate accomplish that othering, which is something that still goes on in a lot of ways today with a lot of racist rhetoric that is used around the world. But that's a more vulgar passage that we find in Ezekiel representing Judah and the Judeans as women who are longing for this time when they were allied with Egypt and comparing that to lusting after the discharge, the emission, the ejaculate, the load of the Egyptians and talking about lusting after their members, their falluses as the falluses of horses. And again, Ezekiel uses a lot of vulgarities. And there are other passages in the Hebrew Bible that deploy vulgar speech, that deploy what we might refer to as an obscenity, as profanity today. It's a lot more common in the Hebrew Bible than in the New Testament. But as we've seen with Philippians 3:8, it is not absent from the New Testament. And I think that Bible translations do their readers a disservice when they use euphemisms and when they soften the language. It's really just glossing over what the authors were trying to do, what they were trying to accomplish with their use of vulgar and profane language. I think we need to include it if we want readers and listeners to actually experience these texts the way they were intended to be experienced by the authors and editors. So, do the biblical authors use profanity and vulgarity? Absolutely, they do and I think we should allow this to come through in translation. I think this makes the Bible a lot more interesting, a lot more engaging. I think it makes for a lot more honest translation and I think it just makes the Bible do what it was intended to do rather than do what we allow it to do. And the fit for this video has been Spawn., When the Bible Gets Vulgar, YouTube, 01ky2n5nhmgvwndr49hadzgb9a.