Your causation is totally backwards here

[conuly]

Judges 12:6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The corrupted pronunciation of the Ephraimites is said to be not right, not just a more modern way. I think this shows God's attitude to this.

I don't even... I just... egads.

Comments

[smallhobbit]

Oh, for goodness sake!

[cosmolinguist]

Fucking hell, this is such a great example of the political implications of language being treated as absolute (or, divine!) truth! Imagine trying to use God as the justification for your prescriptivism.

[alexseanchai]

I don't think that's even the thing in the original story. I think the original shibboleth was sorting out local vs foreign accents. Or that particular foreign accent, maybe, idk.

This is not an improvement…

[jhetley]

Gotta maintain the distinction of "Us" from "Them" at any cost.

[silveradept]

What sort of linguistic changes are they railing against that they feel the need to invoke the original Shibboleth?

(They're also wrong, because of what the Shibboleth was meant to do, but I'm curious.)

[conuly]

The original pronunciation of the name of God in the Bible must have actually been Jehovah because that's what it says in the KJV.

[dorchadas]

Another situation where I think of this tweet:

CHRISTIANS: this verse in the old testament says X
JEWS: It doesn't say that
CHRISTIAN: maybe. Who knows?
JEWS: we do. That's not in the Hebrew
CHRISTIAN: no one knows what the original language means
JEWS: Yes we do. We can read it.
CHRISTIAN: It's lost forever

— Just Say Christian (@JustSayXtian) January 14, 2020

[alexseanchai]

but

(which is a different way to say the thing dorchadas quoted really)

[silveradept]

Ah, yes, the "KJV is inerrant" crowd, who would like you to forget about the Vulgate, the Septuagint, and the fact that everything but Tanakh in Hebrew and most of the Christian Foundational Writings in (Koine?) Greek are all translations and it used to be argued that the holy nature was present because the translators all agree on the translation when it's done.

Martin Luther has words for people who identify as Protestants but uncritically accept other people's words as true and holy dogma.

(Also, they're still wrong, because the holy nature of the Name means the pronunciation guides are deliberately wrong, or so I have heard, anyway, so as to remind someone reading from the text to substitute the appropriate euphemism instead of speaking the Name aloud. Jehovah is the best approximation of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton transformed into a word that could be said, I suspect, by the persons commissioned to do the translation. More modern translations take better care of indicating in the text where the Name itself is used. But most of the people reading this already either know it, or know enough that they can point out where I've messed up.)

[conuly]

It turns out to be worse than that. They also think that all of Leviticus can be summed up as "good hygiene because germs".

[archangelbeth]

If they're going to go that direction, then whole "do not lie with a man as if with a woman" thing should ALSO be "germs," because Certain Activities can cause a UTI in the otherwise well-protected long urethra of males. (And UTIs can become kidney infections, and those are potentially horribly fatal, untreated.)

[gale_storm]

And this ‘otherwise well-protected long urethra of males’ had another bit of protection removed in the bris.

[archangelbeth]

For the activity in question, I doubt that makes much difference. Arguably, a fold of skin that could trap bacteria-laden material near/next to the urethra opening could be worse.

[hudebnik]

My understanding is that "Jehovah" is what you get if you write the consonants of Yahweh with the vowels of Adonai. Can an actual Hebrew-speaker confirm or deny?

[steorra]

Wow. Ow.

[greghousesgf]

at some point I should write down all the reasons I'm an atheist but it would take too long.

[conuly]

I've only got one: "I think the existence of deities is somewhat less plausible than ghosts".

[gale_storm]

Somewhat. That’s my take on it, too.