Locke, Babel, Africa, and the Flood

St. Robert Bellarmine and Pius X vs Rationalism

John Locke, Noah and the meaning of ‘Tebah’

When John Locke (1632-1704) attempted to discuss the relationship between faith and reason, he could find no better subject for his skeptical discussion than the Noahic Flood. “For the knowledge we have that this revelation came first from God can never be so sure as the knowledge we have from the clear and distinct perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas,” he says, thus pitting faith and reason against each other—a pattern that will repeat itself in his many other essays under numerous subtle claims. For him, faith and reason do not exist as supports, but are even many times opposed to each other. If reason can demonstrate a truth, revelation becomes unnecessary or rather, there is no need for faith to reaffirm truths accessible through the light of reason and perhaps reason faith and reason may not exist in harmony. For him, supernatural truth doesn’t seem to protect natural truth, religion has ‘extravagancies’ and so on. But what we learn from Locke is in se the bedrock of institutionalized rationalism: even if one were to admit the truth of divine revelation, one cannot so exalt it as to give it a status exceeding the capacity of reason to attain. Here is where the seeds of the Documentary Hypothesis are sowed—or rather, where the falsehood that faith is either equal to reason in some instances and in others, perhaps even superior to it: for, if the thesis is admitted that we can access the truth of an event like Noah’s Flood using entirely the prowess of historical reason, we are then left with a problem that would not have been the case if the account of the deluge had perished in some historical records which is to explain the causality behind so important an event.

Locke says, in addition to the statement cited above (my Italics):

The like holds in matter of fact knowable by our senses; v.g. the history of the deluge is conveyed to us by writings, which had their original from revelation; and yet nobody, I think, will say he has certain and clear a knowledge of the flood as Noah, that saw it, or that he himself would have had, had he then been alive and seen it. For he has no greater an assurance than that of his senses that it is writ in the book supposed writ by Moses inspired; but he has not so great an assurance that Moses wrote the book as if he had seen Moses write it. So that the assurance of its being a revelation is less still than the assurance of his senses.

In other words, John Locke is the first in naturalist agnosticism and systematized doubt of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It is this thread that the likes of Voltaire, Paine, Colenso, Reuss, Graf, Kuenen, and Wellhausen will pick up according to a certain Bible apologist. For Locke, a lived experience, eye witness and historical reason is superior even to revelation. And yet it is the begging of the question to suggest that history itself will always give us the most accurate report of events that may not be contested. We can argue that if the veracity of account of the Deluge is to be demonstrated, we need not just to focus on the narrative itself but the whole of the text into which it is placed. This means we should not look at it as an isolated account with no relationship except a functional one to the rest of the Pentateuch, that serves perhaps the purpose of genealogical significance and chronological ordering of events. There should be words, motifs, genres and figures that create an intertextual bond within the whole, and these do exist.

Luckily for us, the intertextuality in the Pentateuch as a body of text doesn’t just demonstrate its own coherence but also a form of interculturality determined at the philological level. This element on a personal level, makes divine revelation our heirloom too. There is a word that Gesenius did not etymologize completely and whose origin and meaning is still sort of a mystery. This word occurs both in the account of Noah’s Flood and the narrative concerning Moses in the book of Exodus. If Biblical Hebrew, at the point where Gesenius left it, could not etymologize this word, it was perhaps a suggestion that the roots of the word might be embedded in other spoken languages which might shed light on the Biblical account. One can opine that the word tebah which is used twice by Moses in reference to Noah’s Ark and the basket where the little Moses was laid to conceal him in the waters (Gen 6:14; Ex 2:3) could not be sufficiently understood without sourcing for suggestions from other languages. In the Runyanore-Rukiga dialect (a Bantu language in Western Uganda), this word for ‘basket’ in the latter instance is pronounced eki’tebo (eki = ‘a’) literally meaning a basket. But for certain readers, this doesn’t seem to make so much sense—that a word can mean ‘basket’ or ‘baby-cot’ in one usage and an enormous ship in another. To understand the problem at hand, we have to make use of John Locke’s argument not necessarily against the man, but against the myth of evolutionism.

He says in this regard:

It is not enough for the perfection of language that sounds can be made signs of ideas, unless those signs can be so made use of as to comprehend several particular things; for the multiplication of words would have perplexed their use, had every particular thing need of a distinct name to be signified by. To remedy this inconvenience, language had yet a further improvement in the use of general terms, whereby one word was made to mark a multitude of particular existences; which advantageous use of sounds was obtained only by the difference of the ideas they were made signs of, those names becoming general, which are made to stand for general ideas, and those remaining particular, where the ideas they are used for are particular.

What, then, is the tebah? This word translates smoothly into Runyankore-Rukiga as eki’tebo or conveys such a notion, even though vernacular translations of Scripture do not use this very word to denote the cot in which the infant Moses was laid. Some versions use the word akagyeyo which in se doesn’t do away with the notion we have talked about. Yet, the same versions when it comes to the obvious and smoothly translating word for ‘laughter’ in the explicit naming wordplay for Isaac (Hebrew Yitschak), use the same word taken as is from the English, with slight modification to make it read as Isaaka yet the word for laughter in this same language is Yasheka which is ultimately closer to the Biblical Hebrew by all accounts. The better option would of course be to use the Hebrew transliteration since by that it is shown that a Hebrew woman gave a name to her son which echoes in a Bantu language conveying a particular idea: laughter. Back however to the word tebah. It definitely from the twofold usage in the Pentateuch, denotes a sort of craft that had common property or function—that is, in my opinion.

This sort of craft might be extended to everything that is formed like a meshwork, whether of reeds, of wooden poles or planks and so on. One can even imagine that the same word applied for mud and wattle houses which a made of poles joined together using twisted rope (Rukiga, empotore), huts, palaces and woven stretchers. In many cultures South of the Sahara, this sort of craft has been extended to such usages. The very first mission stations were built in this manner, and burial sites for royal personages have also been fashioned thus. But if we agree that the word tebah is that elastic as to accommodate such a range of implications, we still have to answer something about Noah’s Ark. It must have been of such an impressive size. The claim would certainly be false that it was made of the same material as the wicker basket in which infant Moses was laid. It is not impossible however, that compartments within the Ark were partitioned using the craft described above such as by tying poles together and so on. In any case, the word denotes a vessel of some kind. One thing is however certain: we can say without hesitation that Moses the subject of Sacred Scripture and most important prophet of the Old Testament is the author of the Pentateuch. Already we have evidence of words which look like Hebrew derivatives in Bantu languages which convey the same idea or meaning as Biblical Hebrew terminologies. There are also words known to be Egyptian in origin, particularly the word that begins the law: anokhi. We have the epicene pronoun in Genesis 3:15 and so on.

The linguistic evidence shows the contrary, and one argues against evidence by claiming a different author for the Pentateuch other than the character shown therein to have been raised and trained in Egypt. Biblical Hebrew is certainly related to many African languages and culture by the fact of sharing genres, entire words or cognates and even customs. If words like or (with ayin) and erwah (Leviticus 18:6-19) come so close to the equivalent term in Lukhonzo and Runyankore-Rukiga (oruhu, skin), and commands to Abraham to “take leave” (Genesis 12:1) or to leave (lekh-lekha) sound the same in the latter of the two Bantu languages already mentioned (okuleka, to leave whereby the particle oku means ‘to’) and so on, then we cannot doubt that the rich relationship between not just Coptic but also Bantu languages and Biblical Hebrew especially in the Pentateuch, truly points to a human author that had a close interaction as possible to such cultures. This of course remains something that can be further studied and developed, but one would have to agree with St. Robert Bellarmine that the author of the Pentateuch is none other than Moses. He argues that had it not been the case, we would have words from other cultures, say Chaldean in the Pentateuch—much like the books of Daniel 2: 4-7:28 and so on. It is for St. Bellarmine a point of common sense that a book written by Ezra should have had traces of the language most used by him. On account of this, he concludes that Ezra could never have been the author of the Pentateuch, and the Torah as handed down by Moses can never be said to have perished.

St. Robert Bellarmine also explains that before the multiplication of languages Hebrew in a primitive form was surely common to all human society:

For, as Eucharius rightly explains regarding Chapter 11 of Genesis—before the multiplication of languages the Hebrew language was common to all men, and so it did not have a definite name; but at the time of Heber, when many languages began to exist, that common language, as distinct from all the others, was called Hebrew, because it remained in the house of Heber, hence they are called Hebrews.

One can therefore understand why it is easy to find words that look like Hebrew cognates in Bantu languages. Words like zara (seed, progeny) find echoes in the Runyankore-Rukiga and Luganda vocabulary for ‘giving birth’ (okuzaala/okuzaara, Luganda/Rukiga) and birth order (eizaara, Runyankore-Rukiga). Individuals in Scripture are given names that reflect this reality like Zerubabel (offspring of Babel) which in some English translations is Zorobabel. Such is the term used to describe ‘the woman’s offspring,’ Abraham and Aaron’s descendants and so on (Genesis 3:15; 12:7; & Exodus 30:21).

Pope Leo XIII

Conclusion: Philology and the Understanding of Sacred Scripture

For Leo XIII and St. Pius X, the errors of the so-called ‘Higher Criticism’ are “nothing but the commentaries of rationalism derived from a misuse of philology and kindred studies.” Indeed, Leo XIII in particular pointed out the baneful consequences of this method:

There has arisen, to the great detriment of religion, an inept method, dignified by the name of the “higher criticism,” which pretends to judge of the origin, integrity and authority of each Book from internal indications alone. It is clear, on the other hand, that in historical questions, such as the origin and the handing down of writings, the witness of history is of primary importance, and that historical investigation should be made with the utmost care; and that in this matter internal evidence is seldom of great value, except as confirmation. To look upon it in any other light will be to open the door to many evil consequences. It will make the enemies of religion much more bold and confident in attacking and mangling the Sacred Books; and this vaunted “higher criticism” will resolve itself into the reflection of the bias and the prejudice of the critics. It will not throw on the Scripture the light which is sought, or prove of any advantage to doctrine; it will only give rise to disagreement and dissension, those sure notes of error, which the critics in question so plentifully exhibit in their own persons; and seeing that most of them are tainted with false philosophy and rationalism, it must lead to the elimination from the sacred writings of all prophecy and miracle, and of everything else that is outside the natural order.

It is telling that St. Pius X chose the same date upon which Leo XIII issued Providentissimus Deus to also give his motu proprio. And beyond reasonable doubt, Benedict XVI has vindicated them both. He points out the work of Rudolf Schnackenburg which was directed at remedying the situation for those who had lost their faith on account of the corollaries of the implicated method. He says it is open to correction and is not the ne plus ultra of exegesis. In other words, Leo XIII was prophetic. What this says however to us today is that had the efforts of those rationalist philologists and modernist theologians been well employed, they could have achieved much in preventing the spread of errors which have caused systematic doubt of the Pentateuch, bolstered atheism and its baneful consequences as well as evolutionism. Most unfortunately, these mistakes which were meant to be taught at university and other institutions of higher education can now be found packaged in Bible translations. The combination usually consists of a foreword or preface to the book of Genesis, which includes both evolutionary and documentary hypotheses—of which the former, as Richard Dawkins once argued, gives the intellectual basis for atheism while the latter undermines the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch laying the ground for systematic doubt of the entirety of divine revelation (both Sacred Scripture and apostolic Tradition). The danger is therefore present even at the domestic shelf but given adequate knowledge from the Fathers as well as the saints and Doctors of the Church like St. Bellarmine, this danger is not hard to overcome. I encourage fellow lay Catholics whose faith is undermined in the above way to get involved in the work of Kolbe Center so as to bring back intellectual honesty and doctrinal clarity to the debate on human origins, which is necessary for the preservation of our Faith.