Just Ask a Jew, Vol. 1: The Wedding at Cana

As a Christmas/Hanukkah present of sorts, I'm going to dust off this blog to demonstrate how and why reading the New Testament through a Jewish lens is important.

If you've read your Christian Bible, you've heard of the wedding at Cana. Maybe your pastor or priest called it the marriage at Cana, or the wedding/marriage feast at Cana, but whatever it was called, you know the story. It's all there in the second chapter of the Gospel of John: Jesus, his mother, and his disciples are invited to a wedding; his mother notices they're out of wine; Jesus delivers a sign of his divinity by turning water into wine at her request.

Biblical scholars and archaeologists debate everything from where Cana was* to what the beverage was**. But there's another phenomenon which, in my experience to date, no theologian is immune to. This is best described by Johannes Lehmann (as translated by Michael Heron) in his 1971 book The Jesus Report: The Rabbi J. Revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, so I'll just quote him -- and, in the process, other relevant overlooked scholarship -- on the subject:

There is an amazingly simple example in Rabbi J.'s life of how translators could misunderstand the elementary meaning of words by trying to be too profound, just because they were not Jews. One of the stories about Rabbi J. begins by mentioning a day without telling us to what it refers. The passage reads: "And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of J. was there: And both J. was called, and his disciples, to the marriage."

Nowhere in the gospel according to St. John do we hear about the first or second day, although the previous more or less connected stories are introduced on three occasions by the locution "the next day." Whichever way one reckons the "third day" is either unintelligible or unnecessary. For this reason many translators have had trouble with this passage. One of them left the apparently unintelligible words out and wrote: "There was a marriage at Cana in Galilee."

A modern German translation reads: "Three days later a marriage feast took place at Cana, a town in Galilee." While another modern translation, which says, "Two days later a marriage took place at Cana in Galilee" is talking absolute nonsense, for if Rabbi J. was still by the Dead Sea, he would have had to cover the seventy-five miles from Jericho to Cana in one day to be at the wedding the day after next.

Many theologians interpreted the "third" day symbolically. Because turning the water into wine at the marriage in Cana was Rabbi J.' s first miracle, they saw in this a secret reference to the Resurrection, the miraculous event which also took place on a third day. Thus the marriage at Cana prefigured the image of the "heavenly bridegroom."

In any case the passage is obscure, if not completely unintelligible, to a Christian; it is not to a Jew. He can translate the Greek of the New Testament back into Hebrew and see what the Aramaic original might really have meant. For all the information about Rabbi J. has come down to us in a foreign language, namely Greek. The Jewish religious scholar Shalom Ben Chorin writes about this passage in his book J. - The Nazarene from the Jewish Point of View: "But if we translate the text back into Hebrew, into the atmosphere and background to which it belongs, we read: U bayom hashlishi.... Yom hashlishi, the third day, is simply Tuesday, because the Jewish week begins on Sunday and ends on the seventh day, the Sabbath. The individual days have no names, with the exception of the Sabbath or Shabbath, which means day of rest. They are only numbered first, second, third day, etc., and the third day, Tuesday, was and still is the classical day for Jewish marriages, for it is Kephel ki tov, the day of the twice-repeated 'it was good' in the story of the creation in Genesis (1:10, 12). Although the Talmud prescribes Wednesday as the day for the marriage of virgins, Tuesday, the third, was then and still is preferred as a wedding day by simple country folk -- and those are the kind of people we are talking about in GaliIee. Twice in the Bible it says 'for it was good,' so that one ki tov applies to the bridegroom and another to the bride, and they will enjoy a doubly fortunate marriage."

That is the simple solution of the puzzling time reference in the story of the marriage at Cana. Scholars have made a tremendous mystery out of this third day, but none of them realized that it was no more than a Jewish farmers' wedding in Galilee.

For nearly two thousand years scholars laboriously probed mysteries that were no mysteries, and we may well ask why no Old Testament scholar ever drew the attention of his fellow experts on the New Testament to the Jewish system of numbering the days of the week. A New Testament scholar might even have noticed it on his own if he had visited the museum on the Acropolis in Athens. The museum is closed on Tuesdays and a notice in Greek says merely: "Closed on the third day," for the Greeks still number the days of the week like the Jews, as they did in the past.

So there are still a whole series of ideas in the stories about Rabbi J. that become more nonsensical the more exactly and literally they are rendered, because no one bothers to ask what they meant in their original cultural context.

Do you see now why this perspective just might be important to consider? Think about that this holiday season, and for the love of everything, pray for a ceasefire in the Holy Land if you believe that will help.

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* Several villages in modern Galilee are possible candidates, based on the discovery of pieces of stone jars from the time of Jesus of the type described in the story. I side with Shimon Gibson on the mere presence of stone vessels not being enough to prove a site is biblical.

** One scholar's distinctly minority viewpoint argues that the early texts were misinterpreted, and that the word translated as "wine" should actually be "beer." Much like the difference between types of virgin in Hebrew that I discussed when we talked about the prophecy from Isaiah where a young unmarried woman bears a son, there's a Koine Greek word for wine and a Koine Greek word for barley beer, the latter of which the author would surely have used if he meant Jesus turned water into "beer."