Every time I listen to Jeremiah I pause at Chapter 5 and savor verse 8:
They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.
It is my favorite example of polyptoton, though strictly it doesn’t fit the definition because neigh and neighbor aren’t forms of the same word (like “the mission with which I have commissioned you” (D&C 88:80)).
So it’s an auditory or homophonic polyptoton, and I feel like a fed horse when I hear it. This last time I was listening on the platform at the Lehi Frontrunner station. On the platform a few days later I heard another fine example and decided to cross reference the two. On the train I pulled up my scriptures on my MP3 player to make a note, and glanced at the footnote.
Hmm, it glosses the phrase fed horses as “HEB lusty stallions.” So why didn’t the KJV translators choose “lusty stallions” since lusty would play off the lust of neighing after your neighbor’s wife. Was fed horses an Elizabethan or Jacobean euphemism with sexual overtones?
The other example I had found was in Jeremiah 10:14:
every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them.
At first this looks like another homophonic polyptoton, but think about what a founder does in a foundry, confounding–mixing–molten metals.
Polyptoton is not the only device scripture writers used to make their writing and speech memorable, able to hold in memory, keep in mind, but it is one of my favorite because it reminds me of how many words and ideas can spring from the same root (like that long birch springing back and forth under the weight of a swinger.)
Other rhetorical figures also remind me of the richness of language, the possibilities, but rhetorical figures are not the only aspect of rhetoric and scripture. Rhetoric also involves how we expect scripture to act. And that’s complicated because our expectations are often transparent to us.
Mormons have expectations much different than other people of the book, centering around the idea of additional scripture and revelation. But we share a vocabulary with people who don’t believe in additional scripture, or in scripture at all.
The Sunday School lesson a couple of weeks ago was on Hebrews. I pointed out that the first sentence is four verses long.
1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; 4 Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
and the subject, God, is separated from the verb, hath spoken, by an 18 word appositive, while hath is separated from spoken by an adverbial prepositional phrase.
The first two verses are an elevated way of saying God spoke to the ancients through prophets, but has now spoken to us through his Son.
It occurred to me, so I pointed it out, that these are verses some Christians point to to explain why revelation ceased with the apostles.
A Mormon, particularly a missionary in the heat of a scripture battle–a Bible-bash as we called it–might reply, “Well, if Jesus were the final word of God why do we need the writer of Hebrews to tell us that? Why do we need epistles from Paul, Peter, Jude, James , or John ii Jesus was the final word? Why don’t we have a saying from Jesus himself saying he’s the final word?
An atheist might say the same thing–presumably with a different aim from the Mormon, but a Bible-bashing missionary and an atheist bashing religion both would have the spirit of contention, and a Christian committed to a closed canon might see both as equally threatening.
The odd thing is that the closed-canon Christian and the canon-denying atheist share an assumption about scripture that the Mormon doesn’t. The both accept the definition of scripture as something tied to a closed canon. The Christian may seek to defend the integrity of scripture as complete, while the atheist may seek to discredit faith in God by showing that the canon is riddled with imperfection.
A Mormon would sidestep the argument by saying God has always spoken through “crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language,” the language of his crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect servants. God is more concerned that the witness be true than that it be perfect.
If there’s some ambiguity about whether Alma Jr and the sons of Paulsiah saw the voice but heard not the light or voice-versa, a prophet can inquire on the matter and the Lord can reveal it. That reasoning might not satisfy the atheist or the closed canonier, but it is a way to avoid a fruitless argument–or add to one if the Mormon forgets that Mormons have different expectations of scripture than others.
And yet, for all our differences we share common vocabulary about sin, redemption, and atonement with other Christians, and common tropes with atheists.
Several years ago, after my second listen to Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgmesh I came across his Jesus, What He Really Said and Did. He adopts Jesus as an honorary Zen Buddhist atheist in the same way Mormons adopt C. S. Lewis and others, calling him one of the most beautiful people who ever lived because Jesus understood so deeply that the kingdom of God is within you.
I wondered for a long time how Mitchell’s love for Jesus’s spirituality squares with his atheism. One day in the Murray Deseret Industries I found Mitchell’s recording of his novel Conversations with the Archangel. At one point the narrator explains that when you do the very hard work of reaching for and becoming enlightened you realize that the kingdom of God is within you and you don’t need anything external, including a teacher or a God. You don’t need a savior, since salvation comes from opening yourself to the kingdom of God within you.
I disagree fairly strenuously because that idealizes the kingdom of God, turns it into an idea rather than a community of individuals seeking to lift each other up, to help each other along the way Jesus trod.
And yet, the idea that we can become the kingdom, that God is within us, resonates profoundly with Mormon ideas of exaltation. We have more in common with those we might call our enemies than we would suppose. Opposite of the way early messianic Jews who joined with gentiles to become Christians focused on their differences with other Jews, assuming they had less in common than they did.
We can see Christians splitting away from Jews in the book of Acts, and yet all the way through Acts Paul attends synagogue and observes Jewish law and custom, including his desire to get to Jerusalem for the holy days. Many of the gentile converts in Acts are righteous gentiles who congregate around synagogues. So just as Christianity came to us as a gift from a rabbi, many of the early gentile converts came as gifts from the synagogue.
Neigh your neighings, yeigh, yeigh, or neigh, neigh.