Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter and for your thoughtful comments on the
apparent indestructability of the British empire and the remotely
analogous indestructability of the Hebrew tradition. Your letter
is an emphatic reminder of my ignorance. My ambitions to learn Hebrew
and Arabic remain unfulfilled, ever more hopelessly so as I grow
older and older. There's no alternative for me but to extrapolate
from what little language I have. The concept of fixed languages,
English, German, French is surely an illusion contingent on a much
constricted frame of time. In a sufficiently broad perspective,
all languages are liquid. They condense, mix, merge, fuse, precipitate,
dissolve, evaporate and ultimately disappear.  Their primary function
is communication between individual human beings, and to this end they
appear and evolve spontaneously. An immediate consequence is the
integration of human beings who have speech into complex societies.  A
vital accessory function of language is to serve as the (structural)
framework of thought. We think in words, and hence language both creates
and limits our conceptions. There ensues the representation in language
of a unified, permament, reliable conceptual world - die gedeutete Welt -
ridiculously codified in encyclopedias and statute books. The
misconceptions arising from these various intertwined functions of
language then become grist for concurrent epistemology, a never
ending project.

My own knowledge of the German language is very shallow. I can't write
Middle High German; I can barely read it. Old High German and Gothic
I can't read at all. Yet in my efforts to enlarge my vocabulary with
Grimm's Woerterbuch I discover a broad spectrum of words, most of which
are no longer in use, and I can't escape the conclusion that the constancy
of the language on which I rely is also an illusion. The efforts of
(quasi-) governmental agencies to define a "standard" language are
ludicrous and are doomed to failure.

The meaning of words is not intrinsic; it is created by use. 
The words of a "dead" language lose their meaning unless they are
perpetuated by laborious scholarship.  From my outsider's worms-eye view,
where "classical" Hebrew was alive only as a ritual instutionalized
language, and even at that, only in a spotty manner, the meaning of
its words and phrases must, in the course of centuries, have atrophied
and become uncertain. I interpret the Septuagint as a revival, as a
resuscitation of a languishing Hebrew language. I interpret the legend
of 70 separated Rabbis drafting identical translations of the Hebrew
Bible into koine Greek, as concealing the fact that the meaning of the
original Hebrew was often obscure, if not indeed unknowable, that in many
instances the translation was an hypothesis, fabrication, the invention
of new text, and that the Divine Pneuma responsible for the translation
was, in fact, inspiring a second edition, a revised version of an
original that was no longer understood. Thereafter the Septuagint
became a Rosetta Stone of sorts, a dictionary from which the otherwise
forgotten meaning of Hebrew terms might be - and was - extrapolated.
It appears that the Septuagint served as the Bible of the authors
of the New Testament.  Martin Luther had no knowledge of Hebrew.
I suspect - but don't know - that all modern translations of the Bible
were collated with the Septuagint. I know my presumption to interpret
matters about which I know so little is very foolish.  Mea culpa.

Zionism has always made me uncomfortable. Theocracy is incompatible
with my need for spiritual freedom and independence. From my perspective
the genius of Judaism is the Diaspora, helping us as it did to escape
the constraints of organized religion. Arguably genuine Christianity (as
opposed to ecclesiastical Christianity) and Diaspora complement each
other by setting us free from dogma and orthodoxy. I can hear you
laughing, and I admit that once more, I've gone off the deep end.

Jochen