In the last chapter, we saw that the prophets of Israel could be quite radical in their endorsement of the individual’s independent search for truth. But what did they mean by truth? When we come across this term in the Hebrew Scriptures, does it mean what it does in the writings of the Athenian philosophers? Does it mean the same thing we mean by the word truth today? These questions are important, because if the Hebrew Scriptures have a very different understanding of what is meant by truth and falsity than that familiar fusually used to translate them into English. rom the tradition of thought descended from Greek philosophy, then our readings of the Bible may involve a misunderstanding of what is meant by man’s search for truth, and, indeed, of the nature of prophecy and of God’s word more generally. At the same time, if the Bible does offer us new ways of understanding what is meant by falsity and truth, these could also have important consequences for Western thought, which has in recent years become entangled in a seemingly intractable set of difficulties in its own attempts to gain a clear understanding of what it is we are really talking about when we speak of the truth.

A famous position in Bible scholarship – one that has cast a long shadow in academic discussion of the Hebrew Scriptures for over half a century – suggests that there is not much point in asking the kind of questions I’ve just raised. On this view, there can’t be many significant differences between the meanings of basic biblical terms and their Greek- or English-language equivalents. Reality just is what it is, and the human mind will end up carving it up, with slight variations, into pretty much the same pieces no matter what language we’re speaking. But I believe this view is misguided, and that a reader who does not share an a priori commitment to this doctrine should be able to see that quite the opposite is the case, and that many crucial biblical terms in fact carry very different meanings from the terms usually used to translate them into English.