Holy: Understanding it Better Through the Hebrew for Whole

If you want to know the definition for the word holy, it is important that you also understand the words that are used in its definition.  There are a number of words like hallow for the word holy.    Some scholars would call "hallow" a gloss (how a word is translated in a particular context) and not a definition.  But there is also words that are suggested as its definition that we must also understand clearly from the biblical text.  The  most important three are: 1) pure, 2) set apart, and 3) whole.  These are not just possible definitions for holy, but also words that are found elsewhere in the biblical text in an English translation.  What I would like to in this post is help people understand the word "whole" better as a translation for the Hebrew word "kol" (Strong's #s 3605, 3606, [see 3634]). 

One of the most significant things about the Hebrew for "whole" is its enormous frequency, but you would not be aware of it unless you know what I am about to explain or you know Hebrew and have checked it out in an exhaustive Hebrew concordance or computer concordance.  The difficulty of seeing "whole's" frequency or importance arises out the Greek Septuagint's translation of "kol" from the Hebrew.  It uses two Greek words for what is in the original Hebrew one word.  This was not necessarily a problem for the original readers or hearers of the text in Greek, but it may now be a problem for us who speak English. 

It is always interesting to hear or read something by someone who is writing or speaking in a second language that they learned after their first language.  They struggle a little with English grammar.  Maybe even more than you or I!  This is because the grammar of English is not universal to all languages.  There are changes that must be made or adapted to in order to say things fluidly in English. 

Likewise in moving from Hebrew to Greek, there are changes in the grammar and not just the change in what word or words is going to express an idea from another language.  In the case of translating "whole" from Hebrew to Greek we read in Gesenius' lexicon the following regarding the first definition of kol as "whole": 

     ...  in English this has to be expressed either by whole preceded by the article, or by all followed
     by it; when the noun is made definite by a pronoun suffixed; it must be rendered in English by all
     without the article, or else by the whole of ....

This makes perfect sense to me personally, because I had been practicing putting "the whole of" in place of "all" each time I ran across "kol" in the Hebrew.  Gesenius was aware that sometimes in one language adjustments must be made by necessity ("has to be rendered" - a quote from elsewhere in his entry) from another.  In this case, the Greek Septuagint and apparently other Western languages like English had to render things differently than the Hebrew text does.  But the issue also goes beyond just the translation or rendering to what did the people who read the translation understand.  Did the Greeks, Hellenists, or Hellenized Jews understand that "all" can also refer to "the whole of"? 

They may have understood that idea.  The meaning of "all" may also have been used to refer to the "whole" and the readers may have been aware of this.  As an English speaker this does happen where we use "all" to indicate the whole.  If someone asks me whether I have finished re-assembling my bike I might reply: "It is all done" rather than stating: The bike is once again whole".  "It is all done" does not mean that I would be unaware that the bike is also now "whole", but it could mean that I am weakly aware of it rather than strongly aware of the reference to being whole.  Maybe the Hebrews and the Greeks were strongly aware in the biblical text where "whole" is found while we are only weakly aware of the same.

The problem for us in English is that though I may have a slight inclination toward realizing I just said something about the bike being whole, I may not be as aware as those who spoke that way in Greek or in the context of speaking in both Hebrew and Greek.  The idea of "whole" may have been more explicit to them than it is to us future Westerners who speak English.  So maybe we need to re-think using the word "all" now, though it made perfect sense from the time of the penning of the Septuagint and at least until the first century,  So what about the twenty-first century?

I think in the twenty-first century we may need a re-introduction of "the whole of" in place of "all" in our translations.   The other alternative would be to train people explicitly that "all" is sometimes used in place of "the whole of", but that might be far more difficult.  In any case, if you are reading an English translation, you might be missing "the whole of" as you are reading, even while people in the first century did not. 

Here is an example.  The word for catholic coming out of the Hebrew and made up of Greek morphemes that are transliterated into English is literally "according to the whole".  When you look at the Greek Septuagint translation, you will tend to see it as "according to all".  One of the reasons that I prefer catholic over universal is because it shows "whole" in the morpheme (part of a word with meaning) "hol" and universal shows "all" in the morpheme "al".   Catholic is properly "according to the whole", when you read the original Hebrew text.  I do think that "according to all" could have meant the same thing as "according to the whole" in the first century.  I am not sure though that this works in English.  We are at least twenty centuries removed!

So let's tend toward clarity and toward being meaningful.  Let's say "the whole of", when we mean "whole" and then "all" may have to become a narrower word; unless we can make it clear to English speakers that "all" is also in some contexts a way to speak of the "whole" and we must know the difference.  Let's realize that "whole" is very frequent in the Hebrew and that "all" in Greek "pas" sometimes means in the Hebrew "kol", "the whole of".  By separating these two ideas by assigning one as part of the part-whole semantic domain (a group of words that are similar in terms of meaning) and the other as part of the amount semantic domain, we may also gain a great deal more meaningfulness behind using the word "whole" in a biblical context and in an English translation.  It may also help us see better in the original Hebrew (and translated Greek), if there is a close relationship between "holy" and "whole" not only in English, but also possibly in Hebrew.  That is the Hebrew's kol's significance in relation to Hebrew's qadosh.  Thank you for taking time to read my post.

In Christ,

Jon
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