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June 15, 2005
Hello everyone,
In the English language, like many other languages, we have certain idiomatic expressions that we frequently hear and understand. For example, if we say we’ll “play it by ear,” we know that means we are waiting to see what happens before we make any definite plans; conversely, if we say “he’s wet behind the ears,” we know he is perceived to be naïve. If we’re going to “wing it,” we know that we are going to improvise; if we say that we’re “flying by the seat of our pants,” we know that we are essentially “winging it” by trusting our instincts. Or maybe we can set up a “fly-by-night” scam and get rich quick? Perhaps some of these expressions are more familiar to us than others, as such phrases are more common in some areas of the English-speaking world than others. However, there are surely similar expressions we have heard many times before and never given much thought. We know what they mean of course, but have we ever stopped to consider why they mean what they mean? That is a subject that has occupied many hours of my own thought, perhaps because I work so closely with words. Let’s take these expressions in order.
The first two, regarding ears, come from playing music and from giving birth. If we “play it by ear,” we are not using sheet music and thus we must listen before we can perform. Conversely, on the day that we were born, we were “wet behind the ears” and thus (to put it mildly) we were exceedingly naïve. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the “[v]erbal phrase wing it (1885) is from theatrical slang sense of an actor learning his lines in the wings before going onstage, or else not learning them at all and being fed by a prompter in the wings.” It also reports that “[t]o do something by the seat of (one’s) pants [, that is,] ‘by human instinct,’ is from 1942, originally of pilots, perhaps with some notion of being able to sense the condition and situation of the plane by engine vibrations,” and that fly-by-night is a slang expression from 1796 “said to be an old term of reproach to a woman signifying that she was a witch; extended [in] 1823 to ‘anyone who departs hastily from a recent activity,’ especially while owing money.”
In the same way that I wonder at the etymology of our idioms, I also wonder how some of Biblical metaphors have come to mean what they do. We tend to throw these expressions around rather glibly and we usually have a relatively good grasp of what they mean, but we don’t always know why they mean what they mean. For example, several days ago, I read the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well recounted in John 4:1–42. In particular, Jesus tells the woman in verse ten: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” Why the expression “living water”? When was the last time you used or thought about the term “living water” in any sense other than purely Biblical?
Now there are some things “living water” probably doesn’t mean. For example, the Gaelic phrase uisce beatha (pronounced ish keh ba ha) literally means “water of life.” The English couldn’t quite pronounce it correctly—perhaps because they’d had too much of this so-called “water of life”—and we now know the word better today as their misspoken “whisky.” Surely Jesus is not telling the woman at the well, “If you knew who was asking you to give him a drink, you would have asked him the same question in return and he would have given you some whisky (that’d knock the socks right off those sheep of yours).” To put it mildly, the many and varied pictures this scene conjures seem rather jarring to the overall sense of the text. Of course, the Apostle does admonish us in Ephesians 5:18 “not to get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit,” so if this “living water” Jesus speaks about has anything to do with being “filled with the Spirit,” Paul contrasts it with “spirits” as though the two share something in common: rather than the one, he says, do the other. We concluded in a Sunday school class some time ago that just as being drunk takes control of the entire person affecting his passions and his instincts, so too does the Spirit take control and re-orient a person: be ye drunk on the Spirit.
No, I knew that by “living water,” we meant the redemptive action of the Holy Spirit, that we meant eternal life; I was aware of many of the concepts that are inferred in the idea of “living water.” But my question was, how did “living water” come to signify these things? Why this particular metaphor in the first place? Part of my difficulty may be as Bart D. Ehrman, the author of our A Brief Introduction to the New Testament text this semester, writes:
You can’t understand something if you take it out of its context. And so we begin our study by situating the New Testament in its own world, rather than assuming that it fits neatly into ours. . . . . . [F]irst-century traditions do not “translate” easily into the twenty-first century, where our commonsense assumptions, worldviews, values, and priorities are quite different from those shared by the early followers of Jesus. Contrary to what many people think, it is very difficult for us today to understand the original meanings of the sayings of Jesus and the stories about him. This is one reason that modern people have such deeply rooted disagreements over how to interpret the New Testament. It comes from a different world. And many of the ideas and attitudes and values that we take for granted today as common sense would have made no sense in that world; that is, they would have been “nonsense.”
In the early Christian world, there was no such thing as a middle class as we know it, let alone a Protestant work ethic, with all of its promises of education and prosperity for those who labor hard. In that world, only a few persons belonged to the upper class; nearly everyone else was in the lower. Few people had any hope for social mobility, slaves made up perhaps a third of the total population in major urban areas, and many of the poor were worse off than the enslaved. There were no cures to most diseases. Many babies died, and adult women had to bear, on average, five children simply to keep the population constant. Most people were uneducated and 90 percent could not read. Travel was slow and dangerous, and long trips were rare: most people never ventured far from home during their lives. In the world of early Christianity, everyone, except most Jews, believed in a multiplicity of gods; they knew that divine beings of all sorts were constantly involved with their everyday lives, bringing rain, health, and peace—or their opposites.
People living in the ancient world would have understood the stories about Jesus in light of these realities. This applies not only to how they reacted to these stories and integrated them into their own worldviews but even to how, on the very basic level, they understood what the stories meant. For you can understand something only in light of what you already know. (A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, 14–15)
While I frequently find myself arguing with aspects of this textbook, I very much agree with this particular passage and believe it illustrates a hurdle that many people face in fully understanding what Jesus meant; even more so when a person not only wants to understand the New Testament historically as this textbook purports to do, but spiritually as well. So why did Jesus refer to living water? The footnote in the NAB from which I was reading at the time reminded me of something I vaguely remember from long ago, perhaps from the That the World May Know video series I presented over seven years ago to the teenage Sunday school class I was teaching at the time. It reports:
4, 10f: Living water: Jesus is speaking of the water of life: the woman thinks of flowing water, so much more desirable than stale cistern water. This is a typical example of Johannine use of a hearer’s misunderstanding, cf note on 3, 3. [See He Who is Not Against You is For You where we cited this very reference to 3:3 between born again and begotten.]
Jesus was undoubtedly speaking of “the water of life,” as He makes plainly evident in John 4:14 (considered in a moment). However, He certainly also knew that this woman would interpret what He meant as referring to fresh, flowing water and His metaphor was surely not unintentional. Further, perhaps something of the sense has been lost in a day and an age where all we have to do is turn on the tap when we are thirsty, streams of “living water” flowing freely and (almost) without cost. In fact, in a day of soft drinks, fruit juices, teas, mochas, and coffees in proliferation, most people would be incensed if they thought they were being restricted to a “diet” of mere water. We can, or course, look back and reflect (that is, after all, what we are attempting to do at this very moment), but Ehrman is correct in stating “it is very difficult for us today to understand,” for we have never faced those kinds of conditions or lived in that world.
Now then, we do find in John 4:13–15 that Jesus is speaking of “the water of life,” for He continues His conversation with the woman who still does not appear to understand His deeper spiritual meaning:
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.”
Here, we have a clear reference to water “springing up” and leading to “eternal life.” That is certainly our “water of life,” but now, my curiosity was piqued in a different way, because I wanted to learn more about this “eternal life.” Specifically, the NAB featured a footnote on John 3:15, stating: “Eternal life, used here for the first time in John, stresses the quality of life rather than its duration.” I first interpreted the footnote to suggest that “eternal life” did not apply in any way to the duration of life, which was certainly a new perspective to me. That is not the case, however: a closer reading shows it merely states that the author of John “stresses” the quality of life as opposed to its duration. I soon discovered that bible commentators suggest that the Greek word aionios (“eternal,” or, as in the King James Version, “everlasting”) denoted in these verses refers to both the qualitative as well as the quantitative aspects of the concept. Thus, Jesus tells the woman not only of life without end, but a certain quality of life without end. It is possible to be a human zombie, a member of the undead walking, and such eternal life would be its own hell. But Jesus is referring to being filled with Divine life, as opposed to merely earthly life, just as He speaks to Nicodemus about being begotten from above as opposed to merely being born from his mother’s womb. Virtually everything Jesus says in the book of John stresses the Kingdom of Heaven versus the temporal kingdoms of earth.
When I looked into the matter further, looking up aionios disappointly did not reveal the qualitative/quantitative distinction. I did however find a very thought-provoking issue of Reflections entitled How Long Is Forever? Analyzing the Attributes of Aionios that can offer us some insight into this “eternal life” to which this “living water” corresponds:
The Greek word in question here is: Aionios, an adjective usually translated “eternal,” “forever” or “everlasting.” Biblical Hebrew offers several combinations of the word olam (usually translated “forever, lifelong”). The Greek aionios comes from the root word: Aion, which means “age” or “era,” and from which we acquire the word “eon.” The adjective aionios appears 70 times in the New Testament writings (with well over 100 additional occurrences in the Septuagint), and although the word does denote that which is unending in some passages, it just as often does not. “The force attaching to the word is not so much that of the actual length of a period, but that of a period marked by spiritual or moral characteristics” (W.E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of NT Words). The reality, which some seem reluctant to acknowledge (because it affects their theology), is that aionios is used in two very distinct and separate ways in the Scriptures—qualitatively and quantitatively. One must examine the context, as well as that which these words describe, in order to determine which meaning applies, or if both meanings are perhaps applicable. The Holman Bible Dictionary stresses that although “some aspects of both quality and duration appear in every context,” nevertheless in some passages “the emphasis is on the quality . . . rather than on unending duration” (p. 440). The tendency of some to view aion and aionios as only signifying “time without end” can be exegetically misleading, for these terms may also describe the quality of something, with no reference to time whatsoever! Failure to perceive this fact has led to some misguided theology.
* * * * * *
[W]hen the inspired New Testament writers speak of “eternal life,” the adjective aionios refers to “the quality more than to the length of life” (Dr. Donald G. Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology). It is life lived in an entirely new realm; life experienced in the eternal, rather than temporal, realm. This certainly does NOT detract in any way from the endlessness of this future life, however, for Scripture clearly declares (using other terms) that it will NOT be terminated. One such passage is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:17—“We shall ALWAYS (Greek: pantote) be with the Lord.” (How Long Is Forever?—emphases in original)
Dr. Baumlin, the English professor for whom I work, has had me busy converting volumes of the scholarly journal “Explorations In Renaissance Culture” into PDF files. Interestingly, just as I was turning this question around in my mind about “living water,” I was preparing an article from 1984 by Donald R. Dickson from Texas A & M University entitled “Vaughan’s ‘The Water-fall’ and Protestant Meditation.” Specifically, Dickson was tracing the motifs found in Welsh poet and mystic Henry Vaughan’s (1622–1695) poem The Waterfall, found in Silex Scintillans, Part II. Dickson writes:
. . . Just as all water streams from the fountain of living waters and then flows into the abyss where it must be purified before it can return to its source, so must man be born and then redeemed before he can be resurrected to eternal life. In the water flowing endlessly through the falls, the speaker recognizes three different biblical events that involve “living” water and the mystery of his faith. The waters flowing incessantly from “this deep and rocky grave” (11), first of all, offer an obvious parallel to the sacramental waters of baptism, which plunge the catechumen into a watery grave only to restore him to eternal life. The speaker acknowledges this when he identifies the water in the falls as “My sacred wash and cleanser here” (24). Furthermore, the water flowing from the rocks also recalls the rock of Horeb, a biblically sanctioned type of baptism. Second, he acknowledges that baptismal water is his “consigner” (25) or the “seal” that will enable him to partake of the fountains of life in the New Jerusalem. What follows these commonplace associations of springing water with “living” baptismal water and the “river of water of life” (Rev. 22:1) is an association with a third biblical event, which suggests that the speaker understands these “mystical, deep streams” (28) as part of a systematic pattern of imagery from the bible. [Dickson’s footnote suggests: “Vaughan is also echoing Rev. 7:17—the lamb who will be a shepherd guiding the faithful to the fountains of living water.”] For the speaker links baptismal and apocalyptic waters to the waters of the deep of Genesis, the material out of which the universe was created.
O useful Element and clear!My sacred wash and cleanser here,My first consigner unto thoseFountains of life, where the Lamb goes?What sublime truths, and wholesome themes,Lodge in thy mystical, deep streams!Such as dull man can never findeUnless that Spirit lead his minde,Which first upon thy face did move,And hatch’d all with his quickning love. (23–32)Though the individual allusions are easily identifiable, the reasons why these three major images of generation and regeneration from Genesis, the Gospels, and Revelation are linked together in precisely the way Vaughan has done so have not yet been thoroughly explored. In the circulating waters, I believe that the speaker finds the decisive moments in each Christian’s life (birth, baptism, redemption) connected in terms of promise and fulfillment. In explicating this “text” he underscores the fact that these personal moments are also mirrored in the broader course of sacred history (Creation, Redemption, Apocalypse): the waters that flow through this cataract are those upon which the Holy Spirit hovered to “hatch” the universe (32, a word strongly reminiscent of the Vulgate’s incubabat in Genesis 1:2); they are the cleansing waters of baptism; and ultimately they will become the fountains of life in the New Jerusalem. The speaker, in other words, understands the waterfall in terms of a pattern of biblical events that links his own life to the course of sacred history which is progressing “through times silent stealth” from Creation, to Redemption, and inexorably to the new age. (Dickson, Donald R. “Vaughan’s ‘The Water-fall’ and Protestant Meditation.” Explorations In Renaissance Culture 10 (1984): 28–40.)
Dickson goes on to suggest that it is important “to recognize that Renaissance readers perceived in the bible more than just isolated images; much as modern readers of a poetic text do, they looked for and found unifying patterns of imagery that their own commentaries and poetry often reflect.” And of course, the reason for this outlook was the same as it is for modern readers of poetry: Renaissance readers believed that the bible ultimately had a single Author who used His symbols purposely to communicate something of Himself. And indeed, there does seem to be an Old Testament precedent for the term “living water”; perhaps the best example is Jeremiah 2:13: “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Later on in Jeremiah (17:13) we see another allusion: “O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who forsake You will be put to shame. Those who turn away on earth will be written down, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the LORD.” Psalm 36:7–9 states: “How precious is Your lovingkindness, O God! And the children of men take refuge in the shadow of Your wings. They drink their fill of the abundance of Your house; and You give them to drink of the river of Your delights. For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light.” We also see the lover praising his beloved in Song of Solomon (4:15): “You are a garden spring, a well of fresh water, and streams flowing from Lebanon.”
Now then, we have a clearer idea of what “living water” is all about and what “eternal life” means. But then we have the idea in John 7:38, in which Jesus says: “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” The New Amercian Standard Bible (NASB) is mindful of the modern reader here in its usage of “innermost being,” because the passage literally translates to “belly” (Greek koilia); for example, the King James Version reads: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” This verse is really a more specific restatement of John 4:14 above when Jesus tells the woman “the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” But why would the word literally be belly; why would that particular organ of the body represent the “innermost being”? That question was easier for me to answer, as my Ju Jitsu training emphasizes “leading with hara.” Hara essentially corresponds to the belly and happens to be the place where the center of gravity for the human body is located. The ASU Student Handbook defines hara as: “The lower abdomen. The center of life energy, physical and spiritual. All movement must originate from this point.” Indeed, from an Asian perspective, the seat of the emotions is found in the belly, otherwise known as the third chakra in Eastern systems. (To be completely accurate, hara is slightly lower and would better correspond to the second chakra; you can also learn more about the concept from the Online Etymology Dictionary.) Soke has repeatedly emphasized that to the ancients, the belly was considered the center of the body and not the heart as it typically is today. However, it seems that there is more than one word for “belly,” and even within the range of a given usage, different contexts convey different ideas, at least in the Hebrew language. Further, as we shall see in a moment, not all the ancients were clear on the distinction between belly and heart, much less between heart and mind, perhaps partly because “[f]or a great part of human history, human dissection has been forbidden and abhorred, generally for religious reasons” (The Pulse of Generations: Plato, Aristotle, and “Hippocrates” on the Heart).
According to Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, the word koilia (“belly”) used in John 7:38 is based on the Hebrew word beten and can refer to the “seat of hunger” and the appetites, or, and more applicable to us here, the “seat of mental faculties.” Easton’s Bible Dictionary from bible.org further suggests that “belly” can be “used symbolically for the heart” (the verses listed employ the same Hebrew noun beten). I am not exactly certain why Jesus (or the Johannine author one) chose to use koilia, which here apparently means “the innermost part of a man, the soul, heart as the seat of thought, feeling, choice,” rather than the seemingly much richer, fuller word kardia (from which we get the prefix cardio, as in “cardiovascular”) used in verses like Luke 6:45: “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart (kardia) brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart (kardia).” At first I thought perhaps it was just the difference in authors, but there are other references in John that use kardia (12:40, 13:2, 14:1, 14:27, 16:6). Upon further reflection, perhaps it is because it ties in metaphorically with food and drink, for in these same passages, and particularly in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus repeatedly says such things as: “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:54). It might also tie into the idea of the womb (also implied in the word “belly”) and being “born again,” or more accurately, as we noted in He Who is Not Against You is For You, begotten from above. Thus, from a man’s belly—the place in which his food gives him sustenance and in which new life is conceived—shall flow a well of water springing up to eternal life.
In addition to this metaphoric use of “belly” as “the innermost part of a man, the soul, heart as the seat of thought, feeling, choice,” I found something interesting about the Hebrew language (which of course in turn reveals something interesting about the Old Testament):
Hebrew differs from Greek in some interesting ways. For instance, there is no separate word or concept for heart and mind, sacred and ordinary. Thus the language reflects the way of thinking; the Greek pattern we have inherited separates heart from mind while Hebrew thought does not. The same is true for sacred and ordinary, which are not separated in Hebrew thought, so all of life is to be enjoyed for God. (Hebrew)
We have spoken before about the idea that there really is no division between the sacred and the secular. However, while the abstract ideas of “mind” (nous) and “heart” (kardia) may have been clear to the Greek mind, the actual bodily organs to which they symbolically correspond apparently was not:
Through the centuries of speculation and guesswork, the heart became involved in an area of some controversy. The ancients were concerned with which organ was the seat of the soul and acted as the seat of reason. Some believed that the heart served this function; others thought that the brain did. Those in the heart faction are cardiocentrists; those in the brain faction are cerebrocentrists.
The Egyptians were cardiocentrists. They treated the heart with reverence during their embalming rituals; the brain was considered worthless and removed through the nose. Ancient Indian medicine also gave special reverence to the heart [French, R.K., 1 (1978), p. 11]. The ancient Greeks of Homer’s era brought in the idea of two souls in the body: the psyche that ensured personal immortality and the thymos that dealt with the more material aspects of life such as motion, life-energy, and heat. The thymos was the breath-soul and part of a larger “common life of the universe.” The thymos was believed to be breathed in at birth and breathed out with the last breath before death. In Homer, the psyche rested in the head while the thymos rested in the chest [French, R.K., 1 (1978), p. 11]. The experiences of ancient Greeks and Egyptians with the effects of head traumas drew attention to the cerebrocentrist idea. A person could be knocked unconscious (psyche would be affected) while the body still lived (thymos would keep corporeal functions going). [French, R.K., 1 (1978), p. 11]. (The Pulse of Generations: Plato, Aristotle, and “Hippocrates” on the Heart)
If you are not reeling by now, then perhaps my writing is clearer than the initial thought that went into it. It seems to me that in addition to having a cultural barrier to understanding the New Testament, we also have a language barrier as well, not to mention that we tend to read our current scientific knowledge into our reading as well. As interesting as such things are however, perhaps it isn’t so important to know why “flying by the seat of our pants” came to mean what it did; maybe simply knowing what it means is enough. And if not? We can always “wing it,” I suppose. No, knowing all the Greek and the Hebrew is fascinating and can provide us with valuable insights into Scripture. However, in the end, I believe it is more important to know the Lord to whom all Scriptures point, for, whether we understand it in these terms or not, streams of living water will then flow from our bellies in abundance; we’ll become supernatural irrigation systems of eternal life.
God bless,
Eric
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