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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2011
The Greek and other early renderings of Hebrew ḥèsed and its adjective ḥāsîd only complicate the exegesis the more because of the contradictory renderings given, e.g. in Greek ἔλεος, ὅσιος, ὁσιότης, in Latin ‘misericordia,’ ‘sanctus.’ With fine sense the translators of the English Bible invented a new word for the noun, ‘lovingkindness.’ Similarly the Christian word χάρις = Latin ‘gratia,’ coming down from the New Testament, has had its many-faceted history. The modern use of the word is complicated by the concurrence of Classical and Biblical tradition. The Christian asks for God's grace, and yet renders Him grace at meals, and indifferently speaks of the grace of physical form and bearing, while ‘gratitude’ and ‘graciousness’ have their particular denotations.
1 See the admirable discussion of the Hebrew word by N. Glueck, Das Wort ḥesed, Beihefte z. Zeitschrift f. d. alttest. Wissenschaft, 47 (1927), 68 pagesGoogle Scholar. His definition of the word in summary German, impossible to render into English, is ‘die einem Rechts-Pflicht-Verhältniss entsprechende Verhaltungsweise.’ He gives practically a concordance of all the many uses of the word, carefully analyzed in categories.
2 Moffatt gives, pp. xii, xiii, a recent bibliography of some nine treatises on ‘Grace’ since 1913, and Professor A. D. Nock notes for me a more recent work by J. C. Bolkenstein, “Ὅσιος en εὐσεβής (Amsterdam, 1936)Google Scholar. With this wider literature the writer is not acquainted, but he would be interested to learn what it might contribute to the Semitic background. For the relation of the two Hebrew words cited should be noted the discussion by Lofthouse, W. F., ‘Hen and Hesed in the Old Testament,’ Zeits. f. d. alttest. Wiss., 10 (1933), 29 ffGoogle Scholar., a useful sequence to Glueck's essay.
3 As Moffatt notes, this word came to be thinned out into ultimate French ‘piété,’ English ‘pity.’
4 For the problem of the relation of ṣèdeḳ and ḥèsed, the legal and moral obligations, throughout history reference may be made to Roscoe Pound's treatise, Law and Morals (ed. 2, 1926), e.g. pp. 103 ff.Google Scholar (citing a definition of law as ‘a minimum of ethics’).
5 For the Syriac term see Brockelmann, C., Lex. syr.2 (1928), 270Google Scholar.
6 There are, semantically speaking, two roots in the Semitic, both of which appear in Hebrew and Aramaic dialects, the one that of our word, the other with the meaning of ‘shame.’ See the Hebrew lexica, and for the interesting problem of ‘homonymous roots,’ or of roots semantically polarizing (e.g. the root 'by = ‘to be willing’ in Hebrew, ‘to be unwilling’ in the South Semitic languages), reference may be made to Glueck, pp. 67 f., with excellent bibliography. It may be that by reason of this ambiguity the tradition of the Syriac Bible avoided the transliterated term (with one exception to be noted below) because of its ambiguity.
7 For the dialect see Brockelmann, C., Grundriss d. sem. Sprachen 1 (1908), § 16Google Scholar, and the excellent Lexicon Syropalaestinum by Schulthess, F. (1903)Google Scholar; for the literature, Duval, R., La littérature syriaque (1899)Google Scholar, ch. 4, and a brief account in William Wright, Short History of Syriac Literature (1894), 17 fGoogle Scholar.
8 See Brockelmann, p. 25. There is an interesting modern corroboration of the equivalence of ḥesed and χάρις. In the Hebrew translation of the New Testament into Hebrew, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, and published at Vienna, ḥesed appears to be largely used to render χάρις e.g. at Rom. 4: 16; 5: 15; 6:1. The editor of this translation was, if I remember aright, the distinguished Professor Franz Delitzsch. For his sensibility towards Hebrew the following anecdote recurs to me. His distinguished son Friedrich, the Assyriologist, was once criticized as knowing perhaps his Assyrian, but not his Hebrew. His retort was that at his father's table the family was accustomed to speak Hebrew.
9 A postscript may be ventured on the pregnancy of Hebrew roots and vocables, making them difficult of rendering into languages of another stock. As an example the angelic song at Luke 1:14 may be cited — a commonplace at the Christmas festival: Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας (with WH). ‘Glory’ in this connection is a Semitism, is an inscription of majesty, we might say. The ‘glory’ is given by the worshipper, as that verb is used at Psalm 29:1. Anglice ‘honor’ might best translate it. The plural, ‘in excelsis,’ repeats the Hebrew plural ‘in the heights’ (e.g. Psalm 148:1); there is the sense of the storeys of heaven, which inspired the apocalyptists and Dante; heaven is not a flat plain. There is a new mathematics in the area of the heavenly Jerusalem according to Revelation 21:16: “its length and breadth and height are equal.” The word ‘peace’ is generally treated in a very mundane way, in much the same spirit as that of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. But it is the divine salutation to men on Christmas morn, the šālôm of old Hebrew, the salám of customary Arabic to this day (see the writer's note on ‘the return of the peace,’ in JBL, 1937, p. 51)Google Scholar. Finally the Semitic verse balance demands the text as given above, despite the witnesses against it (with εὐδοκία as nominative), and the genitive is objective, as common in Semitic — ‘men of (divine) favor.’ The parallelism relates the recipients to God — ‘in earth as in heaven.’
