Of Sages & Prophets
The Grammar of Wisdom & the Rhetoric of Prophecy
The relationship of the passage of time to the flow of human speech is so obvious, perhaps, that we seldom think of it. In general, we do not speak in disjointed sounds. What we say has, in varying degrees, the quality of sequence. We link our words together in a certain order. That is to say, our normal speech courses its way through a sequence of time, each syllable falling into its place in the line.
Speech is also related to time in a more formal way through our verbs, especially in the past tenses of those verbs. After all, most things, when we talk about them, have already happened.
I say, “past tenses” because our sundry languages provide very different ways to speak of the past. In English we distinguish among past tense, perfect tense, pluperfect tense, and imperfect tense. In addition, there is the aorist tense in Greek and (they tell me) Sanskrit. These different ways of expressing the past give shape to what George Steiner called “geographies of remembrance.”
Because they refer to the past, it is obvious that these tenses are our only ways of thinking historically. Again, I believe George Steiner put it best: “It is the past tenses, in their bewildering variousness, which constitute history.” Anytime we speak of the past, we are engaged in “history.”
I offer these comments because of their application to the study of Holy Scripture. The entire idea of the Bible is historical; it is a long structural narrative, running from the Creation of the world to the founding of the Church. Salvation history is not simply an aspect or theme of the Bible. Book by book, it is the Bible’s foundational substance. With respect to either matter or form, not one word of God’s revelation can be separated from history.
In the following reflections, I have in mind to consider a few ways in which biblical language is related to biblical history. I propose to begin with simple ideas about grammar and finish with certain patterns of biblical rhetoric.
The Past Tense & a Tense Future
It seems reasonable to begin on the Bible’s opening page, with God’s first recorded words to the human race. We observe that this newly created man understands what God is saying. Indeed, language is already present in the world before man’s existence. The precedence of language is implied from the start. In the Bible, a first quality of language is its prior—even parental—authority over the human mind. Before he is anything else, wrote Karl Rahner, man is aHörer des Wortes, “a hearer of the word.”
We observe, as well, that when the Lord began to speak to man, he first used the imperative mode. Man, in his relationship to the Almighty, is first summoned to the obedience of faith. The imperative mode, as its primary grammatical structure, is surely the most appropriate to that relationship. Thus the Creator, inaugurating human existence within a moral universe, first delivers a series of five apodictic imperatives: “Be fruitful . . . multiply . . . replenish . . . subdue . . . have dominion.” Speech begins with the assertion of authority.
The other aspects of language—its need to predicate, for instance, its ability to question, and its capacity for hypothesis—all these become evident in due course, and they will be the wellsprings of literature and science, but above all, of history, for history is inseparable from syntax. From the moment God addressed man’s conscience, history was espoused to grammar; the twain were joined together as one flesh.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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