Words Have Meaning
BLUF: Words have meaning, and while that meaning can change over time, we need to take the time to understand. This means looking at words in context, at the time they were written, while still using a modern eye to examine them.
A number of years ago, I was attending a local church service, and the pastor alluded to the idea that shepherds were dirty social outcasts who everyone thought poorly of. His proof for this was that, when Samuel called David in from the sheepfold, he was filthy when he arrived, that David was, "just a shepherd." I was a bit taken aback by this, because that's not what history (or Biblical literature, btw) teaches us. I first learned about this from a Jewish scholar named Joel Hoffman, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning. I went to a talk he was having at a local synagogue, and the history of shepherds was the first thing he talked about.
Shepherds were tasked with protecting their flocks of sheep, out in the wilderness at the edge of the farmland surrounding their cities and towns. So you had a social center, a city or town, and outside that was farmland, and outside that was grazing for the sheep. Out there, shepherds had to contend with wolves, panthers, hyenas, feral pigs, foxes, jackals, and lions. Today, when we face up to those kinds of odds, we go armed with an AR-15 or other firearm. They had, and I kid you not, a stick (shepherd's staff) and a sling with whatever rocks they could find (and the shepherd's staff became the king's scepter, and the rocks became the orb, later in history). That was it. Shepherds were, to say the least, bad ass.
In Biblical times, shepherds were seen as a form of superhero. They were the combat veterans, the first line of defense in case of an attack (by animal or human enemy). They had to defend their sheep with their lives, because those sheep were literally their livelihood. They were, indeed, dirty fellows because they lived out in the fields with greasy and filthy sheep. They slept in the open. They didn't bathe often. So yes, when Samuel called David in to proclaim him the new leader of Israel, he was probably stinky and dirty. When the High Priest of your people summons you, you don't stop long enough to grab a shower and a change of clothes; you hightail it to his presence, at all speed. No one thought David was stupid or idiotic. He was just young, the youngest of all his brothers, with a lot less life experience.
The implication by the pastor above was that David was amazing because he had JUST been a shepherd and now he was King, and therefore anyone could become king. This extremely subtle twist on the meaning of the word "shepherd" (from the modern perspective) changed the story dramatically. Originally, we had a young but capable and trustworthy person from a good family, working at a hard job that was dangerous and probably terrifying at times. That young man, devout and well brought up despite the dirt on him, was chosen to be King. There are lots of reasons to choose him as king, as evidenced in the rest of that particular chapter of the Old Testament. The pastor's twist on the meaning of the word shepherd changed the story. In the new version, we have a boy (not a young man) who is dragged away from a job that is implied to be less challenging than burger flipping, utterly unprepared and thrust into the presence of a high official. He's then told he's going to become king.
In the original story, David's protestations are because he has older brothers, likely more experienced and certainly with more rank than he had, as the youngest son. It had nothing to do with his abilities. In the pastor's version, David's just a nobody, a dirty person who sits and watches peaceful fluffy animals all day, suddenly catapulted into stardom. Look, anyone can lift themselves up with the help of God!
Those subtle changes in understanding can cause real problems. This might look like something minor, but when you observe how words have been twisted over the centuries, you can see how one small tweak becomes a minor misunderstanding, and that morphs into an error, which ends up being just plain wrong.
Words have meanings, but those meanings sometimes get lost over time. "Union," for instance, was once a word that was synonymous with helping workers get necessary gains, such as weekends, no child labor, limits to the number of hours one might be forced to work in a row, and mandatory fire exits. It embraced the idea of "coming together" and "working together." Today, it's almost a swear word on the right, and on the left it's more of a praise word, devoid of any actual meaning. All because the word stuck, but the subject changed.
Worse yet, sometimes words are forced into new meanings. Look at the mess today over the word "woman" or the over-use of the prefix "cis." People are banging square words into round holes, and consequences be damned. It's a big problem, because many of us are still using the words in their original meaning, while young people are changing those meanings and pulling the proverbial rug out from under us. Word meanings can organically shift, but this artificial forcing causes havoc.
There are other words that we debate. "We the People," is one such phrase. Who are "we the people," anyhow? Some people say that "we the people" are the citizens of America, but I beg to differ. These words first appear in the Preamble: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." At the time the Preamble was written, the United States were a thought, a hope, a prayer, and perhaps a paper declaration. They were not a reality, however. But the Preamble points to the power of this country: we the people. Not we, the government of these United States. Not we, the representatives of the thirteen states. We the people. Since at that time, those people were still legally citizens of the British Empire, it could not mean legal citizens of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In growing as a people and as a country, we've expanded our understanding of these words. We know that "men" refers to both women and men. We know that "men" doesn't exclude someone based on the color of their skin, or their religion or lack thereof. These understandings have happened organically, over time, as we've become better and more understanding people. I believe, very strongly, that it's what the Founders intended.
Hagar, who prefers most things to be organic