Re: PEIRASMOS - the meaning of the word

From: Jeffrey B. Gibson (jgibson000@mailhost.chi.ameritech.net)
Date: Thu Jun 17 1999 - 20:22:23 EDT


"Maurice A. O'Sullivan" wrote:

> , At 15:03 17/06/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
> Personally I find that Nigel Turner's exegesis of the meaning of PEIRASMOS as
> "temptation to sin" begs the question. He sees that meaning there because
> he wants to see that "temptation" in our sense of the word is part of the noun's
> semantic range.
>
> I'm puzzled --- where does the LXX , and its " semantic range " come in
> your scheme of things?
>
> To quote Spicq:
>
> "In preference to the denominative PEIRAOMAI the Koine uses PEIRAZW which
> is rare in secular Greek. but to which biblical language gave an altogether
> singular density, with the basic meaning "trial" and always translating
> the Piel of the Hebrew n-s-h. Its secular meanings are rare but always it
> is a question of trial and exploration. Hence the religious and moral
> meaning .'temptation'. which is a trial of virtue by means of affliction or
> adversity or even by Satan's intervention."

> And, as he later points out,
> " the suhstantive PEIRASMOS dlid not appear in secular Grcek hefore the
> first century, but it remained unknown in the payyri. The LXX gave it the
> meaning "temptation" --"they called the place Massah ( PEIRASMOS ) because
> there they tempted God "...............NT theology and _language_ [ my
> emphasis ] inherit these conceptions of PEIRASMOS "
>
> Spicq, Ceslas. Theological Lexicon of the New Testament. 3 vols. Peabody,
> Mass: Hendrickson, 1996.

> Maurice A. O'Sullivan [ Bray, Ireland ]
> mauros@iol.ie

I'm "tempted" to answer this, but to do so would be a matter of reinventing the wheel
-- as I contributed an extremely lengthy post on the semantic range of both the noun
PEIRASMOS and its cognate verbs PEIRAZW and EKPEIRAZW as exemplified in Greek
biblical and related writings (including the Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, Aquila,
Symmachus, etc.) to B-Greek some time ( what, two years? ago). And there I think I
showed sufficiently, despite what Spicq claims above, that that the noun and the
verbs were never with the meaning "temptation" -- in so far as this word is
understood to mean something like "enticement" "the inner psychological experience of
allurement, brought on by the prospect of pleasure or advantage, to do evil". So I
refer you to the archives for this -- or to the a draft of my SBL paper on Q 11:4b
that is still available to be read on Synoptic-L , since there is much of this
argument as well as the evidence for it set out in several of that paper's endnotes

But what I will do here is to draw your attention to two things in your quotes from
Spicq that need to be noted. First, nothing about seduction or enticement to sin as
part of the semantic range of PEIRASMOS can be made from the "fact" that

> The LXX gave it [PEIRASMOS] the
> meaning "temptation" --"they called the place Massah ( PEIRASMOS ) because
> there they tempted God "...............NT theology and _language_ [ my
> emphasis ] inherit these conceptions of PEIRASMOS "
>

Apart from the fact that "temptation" as a bad translation of Ex. 17:7, influenced
more by habitual usage of an English word that originally did *not* bear connotations
it now does, and should instead be rendered "testing", the testing that is remembered
here is not only a "putting to the proof" rather than a seduction to evil, it is a
testing of God, not of human beings. Strictly speaking it doesn't give us much to go
on regarding what the phenomenon of human beings under PEIRASMOS was thought to
entail.

Even less can be made in this regard from the fact that:

> In preference to the denominative PEIRAOMAI the Koine uses PEIRAZW which
> is rare in secular Greek. but to which biblical language gave an altogether
> singular density, with the basic meaning "trial" and always translating
> the Piel of the Hebrew n-s-h. Its secular meanings are rare but always it
> is a question of trial and exploration. Hence the religious and moral
> meaning .'temptation'. which is a trial of virtue by means of affliction or
> adversity or even by Satan's intervention."
>
 Since there is absolutely NO connotation of enticement to evil in the the verb
n-s-h, but only, as Spicq himself notes, the idea of a putting to the proof with the
purpose of discovering what the character of the tested object or person was like
(the example of Abraham in Gen 22 and of Israel in Deut. 6-8 being the exemplar for
the "testing" of persons) , there is no reason to see that the Greek equivalent to
N-S-H has taken on any other sense. True enough, as Gerhardsson has pointed out in
his _The Testing of God's Son_, the biblical witness differs somewhat from the
secular one by noting that the experience of PEIRASMOS or of PEIRAZEIN takes place
within the context of covenants to be faithful to certain stipulations. But when
Spiqc refers to the "secular meanings" of the terminology vs. the religious meaning,
he is, one should note, not contrasting "trial" or probing with "temptation
(=enticement). He is contrasting "to try to do something" "to make an attempt" with
"to put to the test".but NOT "to seduce to evil". So while at first he seems to be
saying that "temptation" or "to tempt" as we understand these words was part of the
semantic range of PEIRASMOS and PEIRAZW, a closer inspection of his language -- and
the wider context from which the quotes above are drawn, reveals that he is sasying
no such thing.

Yours,

Jeffrey

--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000@ameritech.net

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