MetaCatholic

Over on Better Bibles Blog Wayne Leman asks an interesting question about translating an idiomatic phrase, and refers to these two verses (his emphasis):

Your blood be on your own head! Your own mouth has testified against you, saying ‘I have put the LORD’s anointed to death.’ (2 Sam. 1:16 NET)

Your blood be on your own heads! I am guiltless! From now on I will go to the Gentiles! (Acts 18:6 NET)

As he rightly says, this is not a contemporary English idiom, and raises questions about it’s translation. Given just these contexts, there is a real choice between the options he offers, either to translate the idiom literally and footnote its figurative significance, or to translate it into a contemporary idiom and footnote its literal translation.

However, questions of translation are not quite as simple given the intertexuality of the Bible. There are significant lexical problems to the principle that “scripture interprets scripture” – a word or phrase can profoundly change its meaning over time, and the words of the scriptures span a significant period of time. Nonetheless, the self-conscious referentiality, as well as the reader’s intertextual awareness, do make it a fundamental tool for interpretation when used with appropriate semantic awareness.

This idiom, and cognate phrases, seems to me to be one of those cases. Take the example of what is sometimes accused (somewhat anachronistically) of being one of the more blatantly anti-semitic verses of the NT:

Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us
and on our children!”
(Matthew 27:25 NRSV)

At one level, this verse employs a similar and (to the well-read scripture student) familiar idiom – providing the idiom is rendered as above in 2 Samuel and Acts etc. At another level it may well recall, in my view, the covenant ceremony:

Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” 8 Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “See the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.” (Exodus 24:7-8 NRSV)

In this interpretation, not only is Jesus the new Moses in accordance with Matthew’s portrayal, but also his blood is indeed the blood of the covenant (Matt 26:28). The mission to Israel must be complete before the mission to Gentiles can begin, and the new covenant needs sealing with them before it can go to all the nations.

The phrase uttered by the people in line with their idiom accepts guilt, but Mathew is also giving a different meaning to it, and placing them in ironic juxtaposition: drawing out the mystery of God’s salvation. If our translations of scripture lose this idiom, then our interpretative possibilities are seriously narrowed. Sometimes a translation choice is not simply a linguistic decision.