Language as incubators of theological ideas (Kotzk Blog 497)

This Episode – based extensively on the research by Professor Edward Ullendorff (1920 -2011) – examines languages as distinct incubators of theological ideas. In other words, we are going to see to what extent “different languages reflect different realities” (Ullendorff 1966:273) which, in turn, reflect different theologies; and how translations, in this case from the Hebrew of the Torah into English, can project different meanings from those of the original language. I then take this a step further and propose that sometimes the reflected theologies can impose themselves back onto the original source language, creating a double distortion.