By Susan Meier
When it comes to understanding words used in a religious context, looking up their denotative meaning in a dictionary is like trying to capture the majesty of Niagara Falls by staring at a molecule of water. H20 may begin a perfectly acceptable explanation, but it certainly doesn’t convey the thrill and magnitude of the Falls. In addition, if we consider that Hebrew words were yanked out of the Torah and dragged through various translations of Greek, Latin, and every other offshoot of the Indo-European mother tongue, we might never find our way to the Falls.
Nevertheless, to understand what the Purity Pledge signifies to those involved, we can start with the dictionary definition, which states that the word, “purity,” first surfaced in writing around the year 1200 in Old French and meant “simple truth” (Harper). If the fathers who prompt their daughters to take the Purity Pledge specifically mean for their girls to cling to “simple truth” in an ever-turbulent, complex world, there probably wouldn’t be many objections to the Pledge (unless we, like the ancient Sophists, question whose simple truth the fathers mean ― but that’s a topic for Rachel to wrestle with). Obviously, “truth” and the etymology of the word “purity” cannot be “simple” and to track down what the Old French believed about “truth” would take us far afield.
The water gets even murkier when we consider that the Old French word “purity” was used rather late in time as a translation for much older words. Specifically in the Torah, (written about 1900 years before the Old French stuck their nose into things) the word translated from Hebrew as “purity” is actually niqqayon. According to Bible Study Tools online, “the basic sense of the Hebrew word for purity [niqqayon] is probably an emptying out” (Dunnett). A similar word used in the Torah is chaph meaning, “’scraped,’ or ‘polished,’ therefore ‘clean’” (Forrester).
Both words reveal a fascinating aspect of the Hebrew language: words in Hebrew do not necessarily stand for other words, rather, Hebrew words stand for mental pictures. We cannot fully understand a Hebrew word without visualizing the picture, and in the case of the Hebrew use of “purity,” the mental images of “emptying out” ― a bowl, for example ― or “scraping” ― for instance, a pot ― offer startling insights into the original meaning of “purity.” For instance, the noun conveys a verb or action in which contaminants are already present and must be removed; whereas our Western connotation for “purity” implies an innate, tenuous state of being that applies only to young girls. The early Hebrews must have viewed “purity” as a process for everyone to constantly work at, whereas our modern concept of “purity” signifies a vulnerable state that must be owned and constantly guarded, lest it be snatched away and lost forever. This later connotation of ownership and guardianship of a girl’s “purity” is central to Rachel’s blogs about the Purity Pledge. The Pledge is used to refer specifically to a girl’s virginity and celibacy, whereas the Hebrew word is much more expansive and refers to many aspects of life, the three primary realms being food and animals for eating, cleanliness for religious rituals, and the state of every individual’s “heart.” According to John J. Parsons, writer and teacher of Hebrew for Christians, “the heart (lev) is the inner person, the seat of the emotions, thought, and will” (Parsons).
So don’t blame the early Jews for making sex naughty or impure. From my limited research, the Torah appears to consider sex just dandy, thank you, and not impure as long as it’s within marriage. And it’s not just for procreating. In fact, as Tracey R. Rich explains in Judaism 101, “Sex should only be experienced in a time of joy.” And here’s a real mind-bender for our patriarchal friends: according to the Torah, “Sex is the woman’s right, not the man’s” (Rich).
So when and where did this twist in the connotation of “purity” occur? Enter the Greeks.
Around the year 246 BCE (BC), the Greek-Egyptian emperor Ptolemy ordered 72 Hebrew scholars to translate the Torah into Greek. This work became known as the Septuagint, meaning “of the seventy” and was undoubtedly known by the writers of the New Testament because, “Greek became a significant second language among Jews [around the time of Jesus] as a result of this translation” (“Friday, January 6, 2017”). Here, we see that the Hebrew word niqqayon was translated into the Greek word hagneia, meaning “purity, chastity” according to Strong’s Concordance (“47. Hagneia”). Hagneia also means “sinlessness of life” according to the New American Standard New Testament Greek Lexicon (“Hagneia”). This is evidently when “sin” and “sex” became solidly associated with “purity.” Evidently, modern Christian fathers skipped right over the early Hebrew’s concept of “emptying out” a bowl, disregarded the Old French idea of “simple truth,” and zeroed right in on the Greek additions of “sin and sex.”
Does it feel like we just wandered around a fence and suddenly got swept over Niagara Falls? Oh look ― there are rocks down there.
We might like to believe that most Christian fathers who engage in the Purity Pledge with their daughters are sincere in wanting to support their daughters’ self-respect in a world designed to pound it away. This particular attempt, however, is horribly ill conceived and reveals systemic disgraces in patriarchal culture, as Rachel explains. In addition, the Pledge presents a spiritual puzzle along with the many contortions of mind it already represents: many of the participating fathers adhere to the Victorian-era concept, as expressed by evangelical clergyman J. C. Ryle, that “children are born with a decided bias towards evil, and therefore if you let them choose for themselves, they are certain to choose wrong” (Ryle). At the same time, the Pledge insists that children ― or girls, at least ― are innately sinless and chaste and must be guarded to remain so. This implies that the only thing “sinless” and valuable about a girl is her sexual self, which belongs to her father. This contradiction in self-concept and personal autonomy cannot be easy for girls and their families to tiptoe around.
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the word “purity” to more closely align with its Hebrew and Old French intentions. In addition, perhaps all of us need to remind ourselves, as stated by writer Cindy Brandt, that “To posture children as totally pure and innocent is to be naïve and also unfairly strips them of their capability to make decisions according to their will” (Brandt). And, we might add, it strips them of the ability to speak up in order to guard themselves against anyone who threatens their “simple truth.”
Works Cited
Brandt, Cindy. “Are Children Born Evil? Challenges for Christian Parenting.” Sojourners. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
Dunnett, Walter M. “Purity.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 15 July 2016. “47. Hagneia.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
Forrester, E. J. “Innocency.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
“Friday, January 6, 2017.” Chabad. Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center. 1993-2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
“Hagneia.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 17 July 2016.
Harper, Douglas. “Purity.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001-2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
Parsons, John J. “Lev Tahor – A Clean Heart.” Hebrew For Christians. N.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
Rich, Tracey R. “Kosher sex.” Judaism 101. 1995-2011. Web. 17 July 2016.
Ryle, J. C. “The Duties of Christian Parents by J. C. Ryle. Grace Online Library. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
When it comes to understanding words used in a religious context, looking up their denotative meaning in a dictionary is like trying to capture the majesty of Niagara Falls by staring at a molecule of water. H20 may begin a perfectly acceptable explanation, but it certainly doesn’t convey the thrill and magnitude of the Falls. In addition, if we consider that Hebrew words were yanked out of the Torah and dragged through various translations of Greek, Latin, and every other offshoot of the Indo-European mother tongue, we might never find our way to the Falls.
Nevertheless, to understand what the Purity Pledge signifies to those involved, we can start with the dictionary definition, which states that the word, “purity,” first surfaced in writing around the year 1200 in Old French and meant “simple truth” (Harper). If the fathers who prompt their daughters to take the Purity Pledge specifically mean for their girls to cling to “simple truth” in an ever-turbulent, complex world, there probably wouldn’t be many objections to the Pledge (unless we, like the ancient Sophists, question whose simple truth the fathers mean ― but that’s a topic for Rachel to wrestle with). Obviously, “truth” and the etymology of the word “purity” cannot be “simple” and to track down what the Old French believed about “truth” would take us far afield.
The water gets even murkier when we consider that the Old French word “purity” was used rather late in time as a translation for much older words. Specifically in the Torah, (written about 1900 years before the Old French stuck their nose into things) the word translated from Hebrew as “purity” is actually niqqayon. According to Bible Study Tools online, “the basic sense of the Hebrew word for purity [niqqayon] is probably an emptying out” (Dunnett). A similar word used in the Torah is chaph meaning, “’scraped,’ or ‘polished,’ therefore ‘clean’” (Forrester).
Both words reveal a fascinating aspect of the Hebrew language: words in Hebrew do not necessarily stand for other words, rather, Hebrew words stand for mental pictures. We cannot fully understand a Hebrew word without visualizing the picture, and in the case of the Hebrew use of “purity,” the mental images of “emptying out” ― a bowl, for example ― or “scraping” ― for instance, a pot ― offer startling insights into the original meaning of “purity.” For instance, the noun conveys a verb or action in which contaminants are already present and must be removed; whereas our Western connotation for “purity” implies an innate, tenuous state of being that applies only to young girls. The early Hebrews must have viewed “purity” as a process for everyone to constantly work at, whereas our modern concept of “purity” signifies a vulnerable state that must be owned and constantly guarded, lest it be snatched away and lost forever. This later connotation of ownership and guardianship of a girl’s “purity” is central to Rachel’s blogs about the Purity Pledge. The Pledge is used to refer specifically to a girl’s virginity and celibacy, whereas the Hebrew word is much more expansive and refers to many aspects of life, the three primary realms being food and animals for eating, cleanliness for religious rituals, and the state of every individual’s “heart.” According to John J. Parsons, writer and teacher of Hebrew for Christians, “the heart (lev) is the inner person, the seat of the emotions, thought, and will” (Parsons).
So don’t blame the early Jews for making sex naughty or impure. From my limited research, the Torah appears to consider sex just dandy, thank you, and not impure as long as it’s within marriage. And it’s not just for procreating. In fact, as Tracey R. Rich explains in Judaism 101, “Sex should only be experienced in a time of joy.” And here’s a real mind-bender for our patriarchal friends: according to the Torah, “Sex is the woman’s right, not the man’s” (Rich).
So when and where did this twist in the connotation of “purity” occur? Enter the Greeks.
Around the year 246 BCE (BC), the Greek-Egyptian emperor Ptolemy ordered 72 Hebrew scholars to translate the Torah into Greek. This work became known as the Septuagint, meaning “of the seventy” and was undoubtedly known by the writers of the New Testament because, “Greek became a significant second language among Jews [around the time of Jesus] as a result of this translation” (“Friday, January 6, 2017”). Here, we see that the Hebrew word niqqayon was translated into the Greek word hagneia, meaning “purity, chastity” according to Strong’s Concordance (“47. Hagneia”). Hagneia also means “sinlessness of life” according to the New American Standard New Testament Greek Lexicon (“Hagneia”). This is evidently when “sin” and “sex” became solidly associated with “purity.” Evidently, modern Christian fathers skipped right over the early Hebrew’s concept of “emptying out” a bowl, disregarded the Old French idea of “simple truth,” and zeroed right in on the Greek additions of “sin and sex.”
Does it feel like we just wandered around a fence and suddenly got swept over Niagara Falls? Oh look ― there are rocks down there.
We might like to believe that most Christian fathers who engage in the Purity Pledge with their daughters are sincere in wanting to support their daughters’ self-respect in a world designed to pound it away. This particular attempt, however, is horribly ill conceived and reveals systemic disgraces in patriarchal culture, as Rachel explains. In addition, the Pledge presents a spiritual puzzle along with the many contortions of mind it already represents: many of the participating fathers adhere to the Victorian-era concept, as expressed by evangelical clergyman J. C. Ryle, that “children are born with a decided bias towards evil, and therefore if you let them choose for themselves, they are certain to choose wrong” (Ryle). At the same time, the Pledge insists that children ― or girls, at least ― are innately sinless and chaste and must be guarded to remain so. This implies that the only thing “sinless” and valuable about a girl is her sexual self, which belongs to her father. This contradiction in self-concept and personal autonomy cannot be easy for girls and their families to tiptoe around.
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the word “purity” to more closely align with its Hebrew and Old French intentions. In addition, perhaps all of us need to remind ourselves, as stated by writer Cindy Brandt, that “To posture children as totally pure and innocent is to be naïve and also unfairly strips them of their capability to make decisions according to their will” (Brandt). And, we might add, it strips them of the ability to speak up in order to guard themselves against anyone who threatens their “simple truth.”
Works Cited
Brandt, Cindy. “Are Children Born Evil? Challenges for Christian Parenting.” Sojourners. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
Dunnett, Walter M. “Purity.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 15 July 2016. “47. Hagneia.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
Forrester, E. J. “Innocency.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
“Friday, January 6, 2017.” Chabad. Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center. 1993-2016. Web. 17 July 2016.
“Hagneia.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 17 July 2016.
Harper, Douglas. “Purity.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001-2016. Web. 15 July 2016.
Parsons, John J. “Lev Tahor – A Clean Heart.” Hebrew For Christians. N.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
Rich, Tracey R. “Kosher sex.” Judaism 101. 1995-2011. Web. 17 July 2016.
Ryle, J. C. “The Duties of Christian Parents by J. C. Ryle. Grace Online Library. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016.