Every once in a while I post a video that gets strong reactions I forgot to expect. I try by God’s grace to speak graciously, but sometimes people out there get very offended by something I said that I simply didn’t realize was going to be upsetting to anyone.
This happened to me recently regarding two things: Jesus’ use of Greek, and my use of the word “Palestine.”
Both of these came in my “Did Jesus Speak Greek” video, which started out like most of my videos and then started shooting up in the viewership. It’s up at almost 60,000 now after just a few weeks. This doesn’t happen to me very often. When it does, it always means that I hear from commenters who don’t know me, and who bring every imaginable viewpoint—and some that I’d prefer not to imagine. Reaching new people is not bad, but I often sense that these are people I will never see again. They are coming not from left field but from a prepper bunker under the place where left field used to be back in the old Ebbets Field days.
Indeed I heard from a wide variety of voices on Jesus’ use of Greek and on my use of Palestine. As I write this script, those voices are still coming in.
There were two groups that were upset with me. One was native Greeks whose reasons for anger were a little vague to me, but who seemed to see Jesus speaking Greek as such an obvious fact that I shouldn’t have even raised the question. A not-insignificant number of these folks told me that Jesus actually was Greek, not Jewish at all. They said that his name, too, was not Hebrew but Greek. One said to me, “God spoke Greek because it was more civilized and divine than Hebrew!”
The other group—a large one—was upset that I used the word “Palestine.” Actually, I didn’t use the word Palestine. Stanley Porter did. But given the nature of the video, in which I quoted Porter repeatedly, the word “Palestine” was used eleven times. I went back and counted.
In this video, I want to talk about the theological, historical, and linguistical issues involved in these two matters of dispute. I thought about dividing up these issues into two videos, but one of them bears a fascinating connection to the other. So: one video, two questions: Was Jesus Greek? And should we use the word “Palestine”?
Was Jesus Greek?
Was Jesus Greek? A small but noticeable number of my commenters on that video seemed to suggest he was. A number pointed out that his last word was the Greek word tetelestai—and I guess their argument (they didn’t make it explicit) is that you use your heart language when you say your last word?
I don’t want to pick on individual commenters, and I often had trouble knowing just what they were saying. It’s possible I misunderstood, and they didn’t answer follow-up questions. You can read the comments for yourself to see if I’m representing them fairly.
Again I ask: was Jesus Greek? And now I answer: absolutely not. Jesus was a Jew. Salvation is of the Jews, as Jesus himself said to the woman at the well in John 4. Jesus was of the seed of Abraham on both sides of his family tree. And this fact is so woven into the entire story of Scripture that it can’t be denied without the Bible falling apart. The Jews are—are, not were—God’s chosen people. Jesus is the seed of the woman and the seed of Abraham at the same time. There is utterly no way and no Jose that Jesus was Greek.
That’s not to say he was pureblood Jew with no muggle in him. The genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew points, very preciously to me, to Rahab and Ruth as important parts of Jesus’ family line. God didn’t forget the Gentiles that he was aiming to bless through Abraham. But Jesus was a Jew.
Now let me make that little transition I promised from here through more Greek commenters and onto the question about Palestine.
A lot of the comments on this video were made by Modern Greek speakers with kind of shaky English. Hey, I’m not throwing shade. I have more than shaky Modern Greek. I honor anyone who learns another language well enough to communicate at all. I know how hard this is, because I’m kind of close to fluency in Spanish.
But reality is that I couldn’t understand them all. I think I picked up what I can only call Greek nationalism in these commenters. Again, they weren’t clear. And hardly any of them answered my questions, so I feel extra burdened to say this time that maybe I was misunderstanding.
Among those apparently Greek nationalist commenters I picked up another minor note: they weren’t keen on being called “Greek” or being said to live in a land called “Greece.” The Greek name for “Greece” is, of course, Hellas, and the people call themselves the Hellenes. (By the way, I’m absolutely Anglicizing these words, and I know I am.)
This raised a question for me that will soon be relevant to our discussion of “Palestine”: why do we English speakers use the words “Greek” and “Greece” instead of “Hellas” and “Hellenes”? Should we stop? Are we being rude to call people by a name they don’t use for themselves?
Exonyms and endonyms
I did a little research into what are technically called “exonyms” and “endonyms”—names people from outside call you vs. names you call yourself.
An example or two:
- The endonym for one European nation is “Deutschland.” The English exonym for this place is, of course, “Germany.” The Spanish one is “Aleman.” It’s also called Niemcy and Saksa in Polish and Finnish, respectively. All of these have historical reasons and etymological meanings—that you can track down for yourself if you’re interested.
- The endomyn for the Netherlands is Nederland, and the people are the Nederlanders, but its English exonyms are “Holland” and “the Dutch.”
And now to Greece: Greece is actually called “Greece” in English for the same reason it’s called—not kidding—“Yunanistan” by one of its closest neighbors, Turkey. These exonyms arise from the first people from that particular craggy peninsula that were met by the Romans and Turks respectively. The Romans met “Greeks” first when certain people of the Hellenic Graeci tribe colonized a portion of southern Italy. The first Hellenic tribe met by the people who influenced Turkish were the Ionians—hence “Yunanistan” in Iranian and Semitic languages.
This is a very common thing in languages, apparently: you call a people by the name of the first group of those people you meet. It’s called “synecdoche,” part for the whole. It’s the same linguistic phenomenon that gives us “all hands on deck,” when it’s not just hands you want but people. Part for the whole.
If Greeks are going to object to being named in English by only one of their ancient tribes, then they’re going to have to stop doing the same thing to others. Modern Greek has exonyms, too. The Greeks themselves call France Γαλλία (Gallia) and Belarus Λευκορωσία (Leukorosia, or White Russia), when those countries don’t use those as endonyms. The Greeks, as with literally all other Europeans as best I can tell, call Japan “Japan”—Ιαπωνία (Iaponia)—even though the Japanese do not call themselves that; they use “Nippon.” The word “Japan” is actually a horrible mangling of “Nippon” that traveled through Chinese and Malay and Portuguese if I read my sources correctly. I found it a little difficult to find clarity on this matter.
The Greeks themselves get their own name for themselves from just one of their tribal or city groups, one in Thessaly: the Hellenes.
Did you get your Flintstone nerdamins for the day? Isn’t language the awesomest? I’m going to keep calling Greece “Greece” because that’s my language’s word for that place. (Not at all incidentally, I will continue to call “James” by his English name, and not “Yaakov.”)
Palestine
Which brings us to “Palestine”—and if you stick with me till the end of the three points I’m about to give regarding this word, you’ll see the connection back to exonyms.
If the use of “Greece” raised a few small hackles, use of “Palestine” raised a whole fleet of hackles, with their angry admiral Hackleberry Suomalainen (and if you get that joke, whose obscurity is exceeded only by its unfunniness, my hat is off to you).
Not everyone who disagreed with my willingness to repeat the word “Palestine” was courteous in their disagreement. One man repeatedly insisted that I was anti-Semitic merely for using that word. But let me focus on the nicest of these folks rather than the not-so-nice. “MrPeterpat” said,
Curious why you refer to Palestine in every second screenshot when the Bible does not refer to Palestine and the area was called Judea.
If you do disagree with someone, this is a great way to do it: show that you listened (which he did by noting that I used the word “Palestine” in screenshots—quotes from Porter, in other words), and then simply ask what’s going on rather than making an accusation. Toss in a cogent counterargument, like he did, and you’re doing even better. He said that the Bible doesn’t use the word “Palestine” but the word “Judea.” And that’s true (or almost true: the KJV uses the word “Palestine” once!).
I believe I did know, somewhere way back in the mental files, in the bulging neuron folder called “background information,” that some people objected to the use of the word “Palestine” and that they saw its use as anti-Semitic, or perhaps anti-Israeli. But I forgot.
I have now been reminded by a fair number of commenters.
The case these folks make goes something like this:
*“Palestine” is a reference to the Philistines, and it started being used to designate the holy land after the first-century Bar Kochba revolt. It was used as a slam against the Jews. The proper name of that land is “Judea.” To use the word “Palestine” today is to agree with those who wish to see the Jews cast from their land.
As Alice once said to Humpty Dumpty, “That’s a great deal to make one word mean.”
And that leads me to three points I want to make about “Palestine.”
1. Words mean what native speaker use them to mean.
First: Words mean what native speaker use them to mean.
I certainly didn’t mean all those things when I repeated Porter’s use of “Palestine.” I checked my whole, large library of notes and articles and scripts and books—which I keep in one place in Obsidian, and I used the word “Palestine” only a few times, I think solely in quotations from others.
But what I would have said “Palestine” means is “The kind of academicky and historically attuned name for the whole region centered around Israel.” I don’t see it as a rival to the name “Israel” or “Judea.” And I don’t see the use of the word “Palestine” to refer to the area as some kind of political support for the so-called “Palestinians.” That just doesn’t enter my mind. I favor Israel’s right to exist as a modern nation, and I almost always take their side, though not uncritically, in their major international disputes.
Words mean what native speakers use them to mean. And I don’t think it’s right or charitable to insist that someone means things they don’t mean when using the word “Palestine.” My favorite contemporary dictionary (NOAD) says that the word “Palestine” means, “a territory in the Middle East on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.” That’s what I mean, too.
2. Be gracious when questioning someone’s unselfconscious use of our common language.
Second, and close follow-on point to the first point: Be gracious when questioning someone’s unselfconscious use of our common language.
I once had a church member critique me for using the word “homeless.” If he had been a leftwing person, he would have said, “Call them ‘persons experiencing homelessness.’” But he was a rightwing person, so he said, “Call them ‘bums.’”
I can see both sides here: the leftwing person is right to say that summing up the identity of people with demeaning terms is the first step toward dehumanizing them. But the rightwing person is right to say that some lifestyle choices should be demeaned. The guy on the street in Seattle who told an interviewer in a video I saw recently, “I like living out here, because no one can tell me what to do anymore,” that guy is making a selfish choice that affects his relatives, especially his children. I can lend no dignity and respect to this man’s choices. (Incidentally, I read a book called San Fransicko, written about the homeless by a leftwing author who concluded that we serve the homeless poorly by refusing to make moral judgments.)
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I used the word “homeless.” That’s just the standard word in English for those people. The fact that leftwing people are now on to a new term is an example of the euphemism treadmill: if you invent nicer names for not-nice things (like “bums”), eventually those nicer names will come to take on the character and associations of the not-nice things. The fact that leftwing people object to “homeless” is itself an indication that I haven’t moved left, as this church member feared.
People love to read a whole worldview into others’ word choices. But I think they should be gracious and save their critiques for the right moments. There is something called a “self-conscious” use of language, a use of language that violates the communal agreement that is language by trying to impose ideology on it from without. I think that everyone who chooses pronouns for themselves is doing just this. They’re foisting on the language something that isn’t natural to it. They’re enlisting language in an immoral project and trying to make it a tool of condemnation against everyone who disagrees with them—which, in the case of custom pronouns, is practically everyone in the history of the planet until seven minutes ago.
Human culture includes language policing—and not just from the left but from the right. It can be hard to know when to correct others. I’d just encourage all the language police from any side to be gracious when questioning someone’s unselfconscious use of our common language.
3. “Palestine” is a now-customary exonym whose ancient associations are varied—even for those who are aware that it had them.
And now my third and final point about “Palestine”: “Palestine is a now-customary exonym whose ancient associations are varied—even for those who are aware that it had them.
Yes, the word “Palestine” came to us through Latin, and, yes, the Roman emperor Hadrian in 135 changed Provincia Judea to Provincia Syria Palaestina, according to several serious reference works I own. Multiple serious people in trustworthy sources are saying that Hadrian did this to punish the Jews.
But think how often “exonymic” punishments and taunts become “endonyms,” as it were:
- The “Methodists” got their name from an insult; now it’s on their signage in practically every major town and city in America.
- The “Quakers” likewise—though that’s not their main name for themselves (they are the “Society of Friends”), and though it began as an insult, it’s now in the official name of Quaker institutions, such as The Quaker School at Horsham.
- The “Impressionists” and the “Whigs” and the “Yankees” the “Puritans” all got their name from critics but then adopted those names.
- Even “Gotham,” a name widely used to refer to New York City, began as an insult. I just found this out. Writer Washington Irving borrowed the name of a fabled English village of fools to mock the pretensions of New York. Now it’s an honorific.
Hadrian’s beef with the Jews was a long time ago. Maybe “Palestine” doesn’t have to mean what he meant by it.
And “Palestine” has an even older history: it came from the Greek word Παλαιστίυη (Palaistiue), which was their attempt at transliterating the Hebrew פלשת (Peleshet), which was apparently the Hebrews’ way of saying that the people who settled on the southern coast (places like Gaza and Ekron) were “wanderers” who came from elsewhere. Listen carefully to what the Jewish Encyclopedia says:
In the Old Testament פלשת is applied only to the land of the Pelishtim (פלשתים), or Philistines, and hence denotes merely the coast district south of Phenicia. It was the Greeks who began to denote the inland country as well by this term; such an application, by a foreign people, of the name of the coast to the interior is no rare phenomenon.
Hear that again: applying the name of the coast to the interior is something nations do very commonly.
That’s the connection I promised: we get the word “Palestine” as a reference to the whole region from the Greeks, whose very name we get from doing the same thing to them that they did to Palestine. They named the whole region, through synecdoche, after the people they first met—the coastal people, of course.
The Jewish Encyclopedia goes on:
As early as Herodotus, who is followed by other classical writers, as Ptolemy and Pliny, the phrase Συρίη ἡ Παλαιστίνη [Syria Palestine] denotes both the littoral [that is, the coastal] and the neighboring inland region (Judea and Palestine), as well as the entire interior as far as the Arabian desert. Josephus, however, usually limits the name to the land of the Philistines. In the course of time the term “Palestine” superseded the longer “Palestinian Syria,” and it is used with this connotation by Josephus and Philo, while Vespasian officially designated the country as “Palestine” on the coins which he struck after the suppression of the Jewish insurrection in 70 c.e., implying thereby the territory of the Jews. The name is used in this sense by Christian authors beginning with Jerome, as well as by the Jewish writers (פלסטיני), while the Arabic “Filasṭin” is more restricted in meaning, denoting only Judea and Samaria.
I’m a bit fuzzy on which Jewish writers the Jewish Encyclopedia is referring to, so I don’t want to lean too hard on this argument, but they appear to be medieval Jews. If they, who were much closer in time to Hadrian, didn’t find “Palestine” offensive, perhaps we shouldn’t either.
Maybe some people today do use “Palestine” self-consciously as a slam against the Jews or the state of Israel or both. I rather think that this can and should be discerned from other things they say, however, and not directly and solely from their use of the word “Palestine.” The fact that I—who am happily married to an ethnically Jewish woman and who never forgets that I am a wild olive branch grafted into the Jewish tree—quoted the word “Palestine” eleven times without disclaimer is itself an indication that the word can be used without meaning anything antisemitic.
Jesus was not Greek. Praise the God of Abraham, my Lord was a Jew. He is a Jew. And it’s okay to say he lived in “Palestine.”