Language seems simple but it’s not. Language is a living thing. Not alive in the sense of people or animals or even plants but nevertheless, as a part of the collective expressive ability of living entities, language is a living thing not like a static stone. It’s always changing and evolving and because of that it becomes problematic to try to understand it years or even centuries later. 

Language gains and loses meaning, it morphs and evolves and merges with other languages through marriages and migrations and conquests. 

Words are misheard or mispronounced. Words acquire new association do to historical events. And words can hold meanings of nuance: sarcasm, irony, poetry, euphemism, colloquialism, slang, and curses. 

One of the major problems also is what is called semantic expansion and semantic narrowing. These are words which remain in use whose meaning is related to its archaic function but which has changed over time due to associative usage. In other words a word for a specific category like the words “place” or “thing” or “literally.” 

“Place” once referred to a broad street or a courtyard in Latin and now can imply any location. “Thing” was once old English for a council or an assembly but now refers to any object imaginable. 

Some examples of semantic narrowing would be “meat” meaning any food but now only flesh. “Deer” once spoke of any animal but now only the specific kind. Same with “hound”, the old term for dog but now only one breed.   

Why do such things matter? People change. Words change. It’s just how it is right? Who cares? 

The reason it matters is because of how people understand those words once they have changed without the knowledge of the fact their meaning has changed and how they changed. 

The apple is a lesson in caution - caution in understanding. 

We know that our first parents ate some sort of fruit against the commandment resulting in the fall from grace. But the Bible doesn’t say that fruit was an apple as we know it today. It only says it was a fruit. Yet it has long been thought especially in western culture that our first parents ate an apple. 

A hasty person might conclude that a mistranslation occurred somewhere but once upon a time “apple” refered to all fruit but now only one, malus pumila, making apple a perfect word at the time for that language. How then did it become narrowed to this specific kind of fruit we currently associate with an apple? Artistic license, and association by popular imagery. 

Medieval European depictions of the Genesis story portrayed repeatedly our first parents eating the type of fruit we now call apple. And due to the constant connection between visual and auditory of the word apply with the fruit we call apple today, especially among none English speakers. That one fruit became apple singularly and as the language evolved and French culture dominated Great Britain after the Norman invasion, the French word fruit from Latin fructus became anglicized and accepted as the entire category of food as we know today. 

Does it really matter so much if folks misassociate apple as we understand it today with the fruit eaten in Eden? Yes and no. It’s not exactly a problem that will alter and entire person’s religion or understanding of the world. But it is a single example of presentism or anachronistic interpretation which exists throughout our translations of the Scriptures and alters our view of Scripture itself. 

This inappropriate perspective on language and its evolution over time changes our understanding of the text we are encountering making us believe differently than the author’s intent and believe we are understanding it perfectly.

If it’s a major issue then it can change our faith in substantial ways. And if it’s many small matters it can do exactly the same. And both examples exist throughout scripture. Misunderstandings of large singular issues and many minor ones. 

Language is tricky. And we must be shrewd. 

Second Guess First Assumptions 

Question Everything

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