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Oct. 21, 2009 Anyone who studies ancient Hebrew, especially Hebrew of the vintage of the Torah, will inevitably be struck by the coarseness, illogicality and inarticulateness of that primitive language. One feels, both in the inadequacy of the Hebrew system of writing, which had only consonants, and in the bumpkin-like mode of expression, that he or she is dealing with a tribal cant framed by recent nomads if not cavemen. This feeling is of course understandable, as the Israel in which Hebrew first came into being was a land of poverty and ignorance. But since the Bible has come to be thought by many to be the word of God, it is sometimes maintained that the Hebrew language is a nearly perfect edifice, fully worthy of the lips of the Creator. This attitude was typified in the writings of the great nineteenth-century German Hebraist, William Gesenius, who would have you believe that Hebrew is an instrument of such precision that it puts Greek and Latin to shame. It took me years to understand that this is pure claptrap, and that Gesenius was probably merely safeguarding his professorship in a Christian university. At any rate, over the centuries, a horde of rabbis and other exegetes has been at pain to translate, define and embellish Hebrew vocabulary in such a way as to make it seem more plausible that God spoke it when he created the world. So if you take a word like 'pesel', translated variously as 'statue', 'idol' or 'graven image', it is easy to dodge the conclusion that the Statue of Liberty violates the Second Commandment. Someone might say that 'pesel' means 'idol' and that the Statue of Liberty is not an idol. Another might say that 'pesel' means 'graven image' and that the Statue of Liberty was founded (in a foundry), not graven (in a quarry). These casuistries obtain only in English though, because 'pesel' does indeed mean 'statue', if the modern Hebrew name of the object, Pesel T'herut, is to be taken seriously. These casuistries and dodges were the kind of explanations that I was given by parents, nuns and priests as a child. Below is a translation of the Second Commandment that I got from Wikipedia's article on the Ten Commandments. "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments#Traditional_division_and_interpretation If you can read Hebrew, click on Ivrit in the left-hand sidebar of the Wikipedia page cited above, and you will find the exact Hebrew text, starting with the second sentence of Entry 2 here: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/עשרת_הדיברות#.D7.94.D7.A0.D7.95.D7.A1.D7.97_.D7.94.D7.A8.D7.90.D7.A9.D7.95.D7.9F Here is a very precise transliteration: Lo taaseh l’cha pesel v’chal tmunah asher bashamayim mimaal vaasher baarets mitachat vaasher bamayim mitachat laarets. And here is a precise translation, without grammatical corrections and without embellishments: "Don't make for you statue and every picture that in the heavens above and that on the earth and that on the water under the earth." Any more sophisticated rendition is an imposition. So does this diction sound like the voice of God? Not to me anyway. It sounds like some primitive rabbi trying to lay down the law for his tribe. But, if it is the word of God, there certainly is no sophistry in the world that will enable anyone to maintain with a shred of credibility that the Statue of Liberty does not violate the Second Commandment. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! 
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