Posts tagged "":

Journal Entry

I have been mulling over the last bit of Zephaniah 3:15.

The Lord is in your midst, You shall see evil/harm/disaster no more.

This is an amalgamation of several translations all of which have their nuances of meaning. The Hebrew word is ra'ah as in the tree of tov (good) and ra'ah. But ra'ah embraces more meaning than evil.

Zephaniah 3:15 is a promise, not necessarily a reflection of the current state of affairs. Someday this will be true.

I choose to stick with the literal see rather than the expansive fear though there is plenty of fear to go around today with the bombing of Iran underway. If you see a thing it is so. Fear can be imagined when it is not so. See is factual; fear is an emotion.

Perhaps modern translators are trying to put their contemporaries in the frame of mind of the ancient people who read Zephaniah. They would have seen evil with their own eyes. They were surely afraid as they lived through the disaster of the destruction of their city and political organization. They were told by their surviving prophets that God was punishing them for their behavior toward God and their neighbors.

By contrast, fearing disaster may include natural disasters or personal economic disaster, for example. The ancient mindset would attribute these occurrences to the divine but we would not.

I'm not prepared to call the bombing evil at this point. Certainly ill-advised and illegal. It is likely to be a disaster for the Iranians and perhaps us, too. But it is causing harm to them and to our constitutional system.

Lord have mercy!