ON A BREAD HUNT

      I honestly thought this blog post would be a quick look at five tricky Bible verses that might baffle readers even when translated into perfectly understandable English.

     Five?  As my grandma would have said, I had los ojos más grandes que el estómago – eyes bigger than my stomach.  Five were too many, so I’m tackling just one.  Maybe I’ll double up monthly posts to squeeze more in.  For now, though, come on this single, short journey with me.

 

The Verse:

Ecclesiastes 11:1 – Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (KJV)

 

     Huh?  If I cast bread on water, won’t it get soggy and dissolve?  Am I casting with a fishing pole, or just tossing it willy-nilly?  Is it my goal to find it again?  If so, why toss it in the first place?  And how many days are we talking?

     Before you say, “Stop being silly, Yolanda, it’s a verse about giving so that you’ll receive,” bear with me for a bit.  If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know I’m a language geek who likes to play with the words on a deeper level.  It’s my weakness.  Well, one of them.

 

RESOURCE ONE: My husband

     Mr. Yolanda (full disclosure: not his real name) is usually my first stop when I have ideas bouncing around my head.  He’s patient.  He almost never rolls his eyes at me.  I appreciate that.  I asked him how he’d interpret this verse and, to keep things in context, gave him the follow-up verse with it:

Cast thy bread upon the water: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.

     “It’s about responsible investing,” he told me later that day.  “The bread is your worldly goods.  You cast them out, maybe internationally since it’s over waters.  You’ll diversify the portfolio, portioning it out safely to seven, maybe eight types of risk levels, since you don’t know whether one or two might yield negative outcomes, the 'evil'.  Be patient in the bear markets.  You won’t get stable returns until many days have passed.”

     Not bad.  Maybe not the exegesis you’d dig out of your Scofield notes, but solid nonetheless, given his point of view as a funds professional.

     Me, though, I’m in education.  In my mind, the “bread” is the knowledge I dole out to students.  I’m scattering seeds, not loaves.  Do the students listen to me?  Yes.  And no.  There are many of them – seven, eight, two dozen, a whole sea of faces, and I toss out my knowledge and, I hope, my wisdom, never sure which portion will be a benefit to the many who need it.  Will they come back one day to tell me they’ve benefited from what I tossed them?  No idea.  But I believe.

     So, my husband was wrong.  It’s not a finance metaphor about personal gain.  It’s a teaching metaphor about giving of yourself.  I mean, right?

     Or did we each bring our own bias to the verses?  Sometimes we humans can read our own pre-existing ideas into Bible texts, “finding what we sought” rather than seeking until we find.  Maybe I needed to look closer.

 

RESOURCE TWO: Into the Weeds

     My inner linguist steps up.  She wants to know why there’s bread being tossed on water in the first place.  She knows that words don’t always have just one meaning (which is why she’d never pound on her puppy for eating seven pounds of British pounds, but would instead send the puppy to the pound). So, let’s pick through the words a little.

     Lechem is a transliteration of the Hebrew term shown in this verse as “bread.”  A little earlier in Ecclesiastes, the same term is translated as “meal.”  The KJV also renders it “seeds” or “loaves” or “food” or “provisions” in Isaiah, Job, Psalms, and (literally) thousands of other places in the Hebrew text.  From seeds to full meals is a wide range of translation options.

     Mayim is the waters.  All waters.  We’re talking big or small here, from the skins of refreshing H₂O carried in Hebrew camps, to the rising and receding overflow of the Jordon River, all the way up to the vast, primordial seas of creation found in Genesis.

     And salach is the action word – “cast,” for sure, but with dozens of other translations from the KJV team, even translated as “divorce” in a couple spots.  All these English renderings have a sense of sending something away from yourself.

     Great.  I’ve got my imperative-mood verb, my direct object, and my indirect object all aligned, but the possible literal renderings are many.  Exactly what kind of lechem am I salach-ing into those mayim?  If I’m “shipping away provisions overseas for a return,” then my husband’s trading-foodstuffs interpretation is winning.  But if I’m “scattering seeds upon the soil of receding river banks,” then my talents-sharing interpretation may have more backing.

     Too many word-by-word options – lobbing loaves into lagoons, pitching pitas into ponds, chucking ciabattas into channels, whipping Wonder bread into wadis (yeah, wadis are a thing, look it up).  Perhaps I’m just spinning my wheels here.  I need to go deeper on this.

 

RESOURCE THREE: Hitting the Histories

     Moving past my semantics approach means it’s time to tackle the sociolinguistics of the verse.  Put simply, I need to ask: Did any other society use “casting bread upon waters” as a metaphor?

     Eureka!  It turns out (my books tell me) that ancient Greeks had the phrase σπείρειν ἐπὶ πόντῳ, “to sow on the sea,” which was apparently used to indicate a useless, meaningless act of labor.  We’d say something along the lines of “just spinning my wheels here” (you knew I wasn’t mixing metaphors up there just for giggles, right?)  Casting seeds on the water meant a task was thankless, profitless.

     The Greek poet Theognis of Megara uses the saying just that way when he writes: “He who does good to the lowly gets little thanks.  He might as well sow seed on the salty waters.  You’d no more get any benefit back by doing good to the lowly than you’d get full-grown grain from throwing seeds on the water.”

     If that sounds familiar, it certainly should.  It’s the exact opposite of what the Ecclesiastes writer Qoheleth says about casting lechem, bread or seeds, upon the waters.

     Despite his own pessimism in other parts of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth turns this cynical Greek saying on its head.  Our verses, the opening to chapter 11 of Ecclesiastes, read like an argument crafted directly and specifically against the very words of Theognis quoted above.  “You’re wrong, Theognis” Qoheleth seems to say.  “Given enough time, your seeds will bear fruit, even if landing among the good and evil alike.  So, give what you’ve got to seven, eight, to more, whether they're good or evil.  Then wait a while.  You’ll see that good can come.”

 

SO, YOUR HUSBAND WAS WRONG?

     Nope.  I realize my husband and I experienced the words differently, but many Bible scholars agree with him (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and Midrash commentaries among them) that the verse applies to wise overseas investment.  Other commentators agree with me (Ellicott, Benson, and more) that the bread is “seed” and the seed is any good thing or act given to the needy.  Still more commentators take slightly different angles.

     Remember what I said earlier about “finding what I sought” vs. “seeking in order to find”?  It may be a misguided bias of mine to expect that a verse of Scripture means something, some THING, one thing and one thing only.  Who am I to say that the All-Powerful God who inspires Scripture can’t layer it to reveal multiple experiences to multiple people?  Would that be too hard an approach for the Creator of a whole universe?

     My husband, ever prudent, thoughtful, and generous in his financial and charitable activities, experienced the verse within the context of his own Christian journey.  Lechem is provisions crossing oceans, and his philanthropy flows from that.

     I, always striving and praying to be a source of knowledge and wisdom for my students, experienced the verses in my own walk’s context.  Lechem is seeds cast on wet, ready soil, filling hungy minds.

     Ours aren’t personal interpretations of Scripture.  Instead, they are personal affirmations crafted by the Spirit for individual children of God.

     And you?

     Seed or slice or loaf or meal, your life’s lechem is for you to discern.  When you find it, child of God, you’ll see you have plenty of lechem to go around.  Don’t be afraid to toss it out there.

 

Marana Tha,

 

Cosmic Parx (a.k.a. YoYo Rez)