And I Thought the French Translation Would Help. Silly Me.
In order to understand the meaning of “head” as used by the apostle Paul, it is helpful to determine its meaning within the language spoken by Paul. The authors of works such as A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1968), or Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1965, 10 volumes) have thoroughly investigated biblical and contemporary extra-biblical writings and reported that the word kephale was used in the secular and religious Greek contemporary to Paul, with the meaning of source, origin, sustainer, and not of ruler. The second century B.C. translation of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament into Greek provides a case in point. The Hebrew word for head (ros), commonly used for leader, ruler, or supreme is translated in the Septuagint by a Greek word other than “head” (kephale) over 150 times. It was much later that the word kephale began to be used as “authority” under the pressure of Latin usage, as evidenced in the writings of some post apostolic church fathers. For Paul and his correspondents the use of the word kephale as a synonym for ruler or authority would have been as meaningless as attempting to do the same today with tete in French, or Kopf in German. – From Beyond Sex Roles by Gilbert Bilezikian, pp. 277-278, quoted at Just a Berean. Emphasis added.
Since I speak a little French, I began lately to wonder exactly how French Bibles did translate the Greek word for “head,” transliterated “kephale.” In English, “head” can mean “that thing on top of your neck,” or it can mean “ruler/leader.” It can also mean “bathroom,” and also “the thing above, on top or coming first” — as in “headstone” and “headwaters.” So it’s not all that difficult for us as English speakers to look at “Christ is the head of the church, which is his body” in Ephesians 5:23 or Colossians 1:18, and consider the idea that “head and body” here might be a metaphor which meant something other than “leader and follower” or “ruler and subordinate” in the original text. However, “ruler” or “leader” being a legitimate meaning of the word “head” in English, some people insist that this has to be what it means in these passages.
So I wondered if in a language where the word meaning “that thing on top of your neck” doesn’t contain the meaning “ruler” or “leader,” there might be less difficulty with this issue. I decided to look up the passages in my French Bible. I have an old La Bible de Jerusalem which I picked up in Paris when I visited it on a student tour right after my graduation from high school. I opened it and was pleased to find I could still read it fairly well.
And here’s the odd thing. In Colossians 1:18, the passage says, “Et Il est aussi la Tete du Corps, c’est-a-dire l’Eglise.” It does actually say “And He is also the “tete” (that thing on top of the neck) to the “corps” (body), that is to say the church.”
But when I turned to Ephesians 5:23, the word changed. “Le mari est chef de sa femme, comme le Christ est chef de l’Eglise, lui le sauveur du Corps.” Instead of “tete” (that thing on your neck), the translators actually chose “chef,” which means “chief; ruler.” Christ, then, according to the translation of this passage, is the “sauveur” (savior) of the Body– but not “head” to the Body. Instead, He is the “chief/ruler” of the Body — and the husband is the “chief/ruler” of the wife.
It seems, then, that while the translators of La Bible de Jerusalem in French were quite willing that the head-body metaphor should be accurately reflected in Col. 1:18, which is only about the Christ-church relationship, without the husband-wife relationship being in immediate view, they willingly jettisoned the head-body metaphor in Eph. 5:23, which is about husband-wife relations. Eph. 5:23 refers to the church as “du Corps” (the body), but Christ and the husband do not appear as “head” at all. They are, unequivocably, rulers.
I guess the translators were certain the word “kephale” there was supposed to mean “ruler,” so they simply substituted that and lost the metaphor. How is the French reader supposed to see a head-body metaphor in that passage at all? It turns out that the translators’ decision as to what the text means actually obscures any other possible meaning for the word “head,” and thus makes it harder, not easier, for a French speaker to see that Eph. 5:23 might not be speaking of husbands as rulers of wives.
I guess I’ve decided that the ability of the English word “head” to mean “ruler” isn’t such a problem after all. At least I get to still see that there’s a body, and a thing on top of its neck, in the Ephesians text.
Sigh.
BLT 
What an odd decision by the French translators. It seems that it’s not only the translators for La Bible de Jerusalem but also the translators for La Bible du Semeur, Nouvelle Edition de Genève, and Segond 21. Are they all just simply merely following Louis Segond?
At least La Bible du Semeur adds footnotes respectively in Col. and Eph. that seem to help some:
Where it gets really tricky in the French is when the Greek written to the Greek-reading Corinthians includes kephale (κεφαλη) 9 different times in a very short context (I Cor 11:3-10).
At v3, La Bible du Semeur adds this footnote to explain that the French loses much:
And at v11, there’s this explanation for going with “la tête” and not “le chef” even when the text is presumably about a sign of authority, or “un signe de son autorité”:
Thanks for the additional research, Kurk. So it seems that the translators of all these texts believe “tete” and “chef” were both signified by the word “kephale” in ancient Greek, even though there is a lot of evidence to the contrary (particularly in the choices the translators of the Septuagint made when using the word). I’m definitely seeing a bias here. . .
Kristen,
There may be bias. It is interesting, nonetheless, to read what French blogger Yvette Mailliet le Penven has written on this. She seems to have good familiarity with the Septuagint, she claims that Classical Greek is of no help (with it’s meaning of “source” for kephale), and she explains the etymologies of the French, trying to connect the two French phrases out of the Latin ambiguities (and maybe from the Greek ambiguities of kephale); and from the LXX and from more common Hebrew, she tries to justify the ambiguity. Is she biased? I think her penultimate point is probably the most important one here, as she explains that Paul is playing with his language and that he clearly had other phrases to choose from to make things much clearer, more perspicuous, for readers of what is now the Christian scripture:
http://www.y-mailliet-le-penven.net/EPITRES-PAULINIENNES-4.html
“En revanche, la LXX traduit bien le mot hébreu ראש rô’sh (que l’on retrouve dans le nom de la fête du Nouvel An juif: ראש השנה – Roch Hachana, littéralement “Tête de l’année”), désignant selon le contexte la “tête” ou le “chef”, par κεφαλή dans l’un et l’autre cas.”
I could not agree with this, except with one qualification. Rosh did mean both “head” and “leader” in Hebrew, but when translated into Greek, when it meant “leader” it was usually translated as “archon” or some such other word. Only in the case of one isolated individual is rosh ever translated as “kephale” and that individual is Japheth. Otherwise, rosh is never translated as “kephale.” So, is Le Penven unaware of this?
In all likelihood, the confusion derives from the Latin caput, which like rosh, means both “head” and “leader.”
It boils down to this in my view. In Hebrew, Latin and English, “rosh” “caput” and “head” mean physical head, and leader. In Greek, French, and German, there is a different history.
Suzanne– I agree. I was reading a quote of Tertullian that showed him going through a long explanation of why “kephale” could be understood as talking about “authority” in Eph. 5:23– which means that it wasn’t just a given meaning of the word when Tertullian was writing in Greek (about 200 AD, I believe).
Kurt– I thought I might mention that it’s probably hard for readers who don’t read French to follow our conversation; perhaps if you have time, you could give a brief translation or summary of your quotes?
Kristen — a pt by pt summary of what Yvette Mailliet le Penven writes is below. — Kurk
She first quotes Col 1:18 in Greek and in the Louis Segond translation of the early 20th century.
• That makes the Greek phrase ἡ κεφαλη (he kephale) in this one verse likely just the French phrase la tête (which is, in English, something like “Head”), just as in your old La Bible de Jerusalem.
• Whether the Greek phrase is more generally like a bodily “Head” or like an authoritative “Chief” depends on the context. (And, she says parenthetically, that the French words — the two nouns you discuss — both derive from the Latin words caput, capitis.)
She claims that a third meaning of κεφαλη (per your quotation from Gilbert Bilezikian, or “source, origin, sustainer”) is not used in human relationship contexts (as the NT and LXX has them).
She concedes that the LXX (aka the Septuagint, or the translation of their sacred Hebrew scriptures by the Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt around 250 BCE according to legend) uses the Greek noun for the Hebrew word ראש (rosh – as in Rosh Hashanah) with the ambiguity in both languages. HERE SUZANNE PROTESTS.
• My favorite point that le Penven makes is that Paul could have used with absolute perspicuity other not-ambiguous Greek words for “authority” or “leader.” Instead, he leaves to the reader of the Greek to decide which meaning(s) of ἡ κεφαλη (he kephale) he means.
• 1 Corinthians 11:3 is yet another instance, she claims, where Paul is playing with a single word that has multiple meanings.
Le Penven wrote,
“la LXX traduit bien le mot hébreu ראש rô’sh, désignant selon le contexte la “tête” ou le “chef”, par κεφαλή dans l’un et l’autre cas.”
“The LXX does indeed translate the Hebrew word rosh, meaning, according to the context, either “head” or “leader,” by kephale in both cases.”
That is simply not the case. The LXX does not usually translate rosh into kehpale when it means leader. That is very rare, and restricted to only Jephthah.
Kristen,
Thanks for mentioning the Tertullian passage. I will try to find it.
Thanks for the translations, folks! I was able to pick up the gist of the French, but missed some of the detail.
Suzanne, the book Daughters of the Church: Women in Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present mentions this Tertullian passage on page 105, and the citation they give is Against Marcion, V 8 (ANF 3:445). I hope that helps.
Le Penven wrote,
“la LXX traduit bien le mot hébreu ראש rô’sh, désignant selon le contexte la “tête” ou le “chef”, par κεφαλή dans l’un et l’autre cas.”
It seems Yvette Mailliet le Peven is counting as the person writing the following web page does — i.e., “sixteen (or even eight) instances … of kephale meaning authority over in the Septuagint”:
http://helpmewithbiblestudy.org/11Church/PublicWhichDefinitionCorrectKephale4.aspx
—
Let me just add that whoever the writer is (writing against the views of Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen, Philip Payne, and Gordon Fee), that person cannot be clear about the count. He or she says that there may be eight (as Fee counts them) LXX uses of the Greek kephale as “leader” for the Hebrew rosh, with some one-hundred-seventy-two other non-leader uses. He or she then lists sixteen. (Arguably only Judges 11:11 has the only one. Is this the passage, Suzanne? If so, this is interesting because there are two major different LXX textual variants, with a total of three different Greek words meaning “leader.” I believe there’s even an argument to be made that when kephale is used, it does refer to rosh but does not mean there “leader” but rather “head” in the sense of the top part of a body. There’s another Hebrew word, for leader, in the verse that the two different Greek Judges texts translate differently.)
To me, the critical thing to note is that kephale is ambiguous, that the LXX translators had access to other words to disambiguate, and so did Paul.
French, as you point out Kristen, does not help to carry the ambiguity. In fact, in Juges 11:11 (whether in La Bible de Jerusalem or La Bible du Semeur or Nouvelle Edition de Genève or Segond 21 or Louis Segond) the word tête and also the word chef are used for Jephthah. How does tête refer to him as “leader” there?
Thanks Kristen for the reference.
Kurk,
Just wild really. There are several references to “head and tail” in Hebrew, but to say that the “head” in this expression is a leader is a bit much. There is an assorted list of uses of rosh in Hebrew that have some metaphoric meaning and are translated as keyhole, but none refer to a tribal leader over his people, a father, or head of a family, or the king of a nation, or anything like that. They are all of them situations in which it is hard to understand the Hebrew at all, and so an over literal translation has been made.
The argument that Paul could have used an unambiguous word for leader/authority figure, but didn’t, is interesting because it makes one think about the reasons for choosing ambiguous words.
What might those reasons be? Wordplay, either with meaning or sound. Poetic metaphor. Allusion to some other text that used the ambiguous word. Any others?
Which do you think could reasonably describe what Paul was doing here?
Kristen, are you familiar with the Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary series? I did an extensive project on Paul last summer that involved working with twelve commentaries on Romans from different traditions, and the S&H commentary by Charles Talbertreally impressed me, not least for its handling of word studies.
I see there are volumes for Colossians and Ephesians in the series now, so you might want to take a look.
Which do you think could reasonably describe what Paul was doing here?
Well, the point that we have to make, over and over and over again, this late in human history is that it has been a few misogynist men (i.e., a few of the early Church fathers) who rather consistently read Pauline texts very narrowly. We have the history of textual interpretations based on fear that needs constantly to be exposed. And there are good places to start on that, like with Karen Armstrong’s The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West.
Men not so mired in the “sex war” don’t necessarily feel compelled to figure out why Paul’s writings are not absolutely perspicuous, but they at least do try to acknowledge the serious, seemingly-intentional ambiguities and wordplays.
Here are some:
C. S. Lewis reflects (in Reflections on the Psalms, page 113):
George Steiner observes (in Grammars of Creation, page 96):
Willis Barnstone suggests (in The Restored New Testament, pages 114 – 115):
Oops, I’d meant to link to my review of Talbert’s commentary.
These quotes about the deliberate un-clarity of Jesus, and the ambiguity of Paul– and Dr. Lewis’ question of “why?” leads me to answer: Perhaps the last thing God wanted for the Bible to be, is the very thing fundamentalists insist it has to be: a clear, unambiguous statement of facts and rules by which to live. God wrestled with Jacob and hid from David; God gambled with Abraham and refused to give Job a straight answer. Why do we expect that God wouldn’t want us to wrestle with this text and play hide-and-seek with the divine?