UNCLEAN: Richard Beck's Psychology of Disgust and Bible Translation

Richard Beck's work has had a big impact on me (also his ideas of the fear of death as original sin) on my own spiritual journey and hermeneutic. It hasn't had much impact on my role as a consultant except in a few specific cases although I've been constantly wondering how it might make a difference in translation decisions. I'm definitely interested in this topic, thanks for bringing it up.

Richard Beck has posted some interesting stuff on this in just the last couple of days. http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-purity-culture-of-progressive\_12.html And the latest on the slavery of death. http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2015/03/unpublished-beholden-to-principalities.html

I have been interested in this topic since going back to Mary Douglas (in the late 1980's) to understand native translators' interest in aspects of the OT (holy/clean, for e.g.) that were totally off my radar until then. I was supposed to help the translators relate their cultural understandings to biblical perspectives which I did not understand very well at the time. I now think of Douglas as coming at the end of the story, which I believe begins with our sense of smell and our basic emotions (especially disgust). I see the connection being made via our mapping of food disgust onto a major (but largely implicit) domain of moral judgment that Douglas calls communitarian or enclavist. Others (Haidt, Shweder, Fiske) have their own terms for this domain (purity, divinity, communal sharing), but it comes down to a rather hidden domain of moral judgment that is difficult to examine as it is based on smell, disgust, purity and group identity and identification. https://map.bloomfire.com/posts/559066-the-embodied-mind https://map.bloomfire.com/posts/531961-the-embodied-mind But now it looks like I have some more reading to catch up on!

OK, great! Thanks, Bob, for chiming in. And Stuart ... my interest here parallels yours. This should be an interesting discussion. Nathan, your reference to "purity" and "hybridization" gets right to the topic of the (embodied) psychology of purity language, which is at the core of the issue for me. Given that purity language is fairly universally linked to notions of disgust, as Bob's words could twisted to mean, LOL, a reassessment of translation practices for translating this language is in order. I am assuming, of course, from the theological side, Jesus revised version of "purity" as justice (in Beck's terms) is very important. In BIBLE translation, as Christians, we would hope that our works "leads people to Christ." That said, I wonder if there is more work to be done from the cognitive linguistic side. I appreciate Bob's focus on sensation and disgust; however, there is another connection that I would also consider worth exploring and that is the connection between purity and "brillance" which has been addressed in Yitzhaq Feder, "The Semantics of Purity in the Ancient Near East:Lexical Meaning as a Projection of Embodied Experience," in JANER 14 (2014): 87 – 113. There is a link to the pre-pub version at www.academia.edu/7420930/The\_Semantics\_of\_Purity\_in\_the\_Ancient\_Near\_East\_Lexical\_Meaning\_as\_a\_Projection\_of\_Embodied\_Experience