Idiocentrism

Y schal do awey al substaunce which Y made,
fro the face of erthe.

I recently chanced to read the Noah story in Genesis. In the King James version, Jehovah's threat reads

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. (Genesis 7:4)

The word "substance" caught my eye, and I decided to dig a little deeper. Most modern translations use the words "creature", "thing", or "being" where the KJV (like Wycliffe's translation, above) uses "substance", which comes from the Vulgate:

adhuc enim et post dies septem ego pluam super terram quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus et delebo omnem substantiam quam feci de superficie terrae

Now, "substance" is a Latin philosophical term, from the Greek ousia (also here). Thus, even though Jerome was translating from the Hebrew, he had Jehovah use a Latinized Greek philosophical term to specify what it was that he planned to destroy.

So what is the Hebrew word? I asked Talmida of The Lesser of Two Weevils, what the word translated "substance" was in Hebrew, and she very promptly replied (the below is slightly edited):

In Hebrew it is הַיְקוּם, *haykum*.

In my newer Lexicon, it is defined as "what subsists, what is living." The older Lexicon defines *ykum* as "substance, existence" which would make *haykum* that which is substance or that which exists.

I assume that the root word to it is *kum* which means "stand, arise, endure, last" but I could be wrong. *haykum* only appears three times in the Bible. Here at Gen 7:4, again at Gen 7:23, and once in Deuteronomy 11:6. In all 3 citations, the word is attached (by a hyphen-like symbol) to the word *kol* which means "all, every". That leads me to think that this might be an idiomatic expression......

Verse 7:4b contains 9 Hebrew words (3 of which are tied together by hyphens). Most of them cannot be translated by one single English word.

1. I will wipe out
2. direct object marker (attached to)
3. all, every (attached to)
4. what subsists, what exists, substance, existence
5. which
6. I have made
7. from upon
8. the face of
9. the soil.....

It would not surprise me to find out that the word *haykum* was defined as "substance" because the Latin root of substance means "to stand" as does the Hebrew root of *haykum*, and from context the word refers to things that God made and subsequently destroyed in the flood.

Elsewhere we read about "hayah", which seems to be a second root of "haykum":

"What is the basic fact of "being" for the Israelites will result from the analysis of the verb "hayah" that follows.

A) The verb "hayah": We must devote special attention to this verb not only because it occurs most frequently but also because the verbal problems discussed above are concentrated in this verb and appear in it in their most difficult form. (...) The most important meanings and uses of our verb 'to be' (and its equivalents in other Indo-European languages) are: (1) to express being or existence; (2) to serve as a copula. Now, as we have shown above, Hebrew and the other Semitic languages do not need a copula because of the noun clause. As a general rule, therefore, it may be said that "hayah" is not used as a copula; real or supposed exceptions to this rule will be cited later. The characteristic mark of hayah, in distinction from our verb 'to be', is that it is a true verb with full verbal force.

Update:

Conrad in the comments:

I think you'd have to do some work--and it might end up impossible anyway--to show that there is anything significant in Jerome's use of the word. Saying that 'substantia' is a philosophical term is like saying that 'substance' is a philosophical term: true, but 'substance' is also a perfectly good unphilosophical word.

As a technical word 'substantia' was, as you already know, utterly confused by 400. For one thing it calqued hypostasis, but commonly translated its theological opposite ousia. (Substantia being what united the three separate hypostases of the Trinity.)

The LXX, to which Jerome made reference, avoids the question by using "exanastasis", 'that which stands up [out of the earth]', but ironically which in the NT means 'removal'. If substantia is what stands beneath, exanastasis is what stands up out of.

Neither the Greek word nor the Latin, it seems to me, has much philosophical significance.

I'm not really claiming philosophical significance for the use of this word. It's more just a curiosity of the way concepts and words get passed from language to language. The word "substance" in the KJV sounded odd to me, so I followed it past Wycliffe to the Vulgate. (Augustine and Jerome's bickering is sort of fun too).

For me it's interesting that the word used in this passage by Christian translators of Genesis from Hebrew into Latin (substantia) was a calque of a Greek word (hypostasis, stands under) which iss the opposite of the word (exanastasis, stands up) used by Jewish translators of the same passage from Hebrew into Greek. And these same Christians also used the Latin word and the Greek word from which it was calqued as technical terms opposite in meaning (one substantia but three persons or hypostasis), thus expressing the granddaddy of all empty distinctions (or mysteries), arguments over which led men to their deaths, and ultimately sent the Nestorians all the way to China.

Just to confuse matters, Jerome also apparently coined the word supersubstantialem to mean "daily" in the Lord's Prayer's "daily bread".

Here's a claim that The Montanist heretic Tertullian (d. 230 A.D.) coined the phrase "substance", but Lewis & Short cite an example from Tacitus (d. 117 A.D.) with the meaning "property, wealth" (as in the English "man of substance"). Apparently Tertullian was responsible for the first philosophical use of the word, though Augustine is more often given that credit, I think.

Many thanks to Conrad, who has steered me to several interesting tidbits.

Lewis / Short: Latin Dictionary / Liddell / Scott Greek Lexicon / Hypostasis wiki / Ousia in Aristotle and Plato / Catholic Encyclopedia: Person / Bibliography of "being"

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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