Aramaic Word Study – Weaker Vessel – Mana Machal – Mem Nun Aleph   Mem Cheth Lamed

(This Word Study is excerpted from Chaim Bentorah’s book: Aramaic Word Study: Exploring The Language Of The New Testament)

I Peter 3:7:  “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.”

A little reality check here.  There are some women who are weak and delicate and then there are some who are quite formable.  Just like men, there are strong men and weak men.  I really can’t see Peter making such a generalization that all women who are wives are weak.  Every culture pretty much defines how a woman and/or a man demonstrates weakness and strength.   The Word of God should transcend cultural roles and express the God-given differences between men and women. 

What are these God-given differences, I am not even going to go there. Most people, however, not all, will agree there are psychological and biological differences between men and women and as much as some would like to think it is not so, they still laugh at the countless sitcoms and movies that work these differences off of each other.

Still, that does not help us in determining whether Peter is a chauvinistic pig.  So let’s start at the very beginning.  Did Peter the beloved disciple really write first and second Peter?  Well, I Peter 1:1 seems to clear that up. “Peter an Apostle of Jesus Christ.”  Yep, that’s our Peter, the rough hard-talking, uneducated fisherman. But if this is written in Greek, this uneducated ruffian was in fact only someone with advanced knowledge in the Greek language.   Another problem is that the rhetoric and philosophy expressed in this letter suggest someone with a formal education, which Peter did not have.  Peter spoke an Old Galilean form of Aramaic, which was a pretty colloquial and backwater-type language.   Most scholars reject Petrine authorship for these reasons.  However, I would like to point out that Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman when he wrote some of his greatest philosophical books like The True Believer without much formal education. Although he later became a professor at Berkeley he had little formal education when he wrote The True Believer.  Many who have little formal education are offered a Doctor of Letters for their works that equal or exceed that of an educated person.  I see no reason why Peter could not have developed some strong philosophical thought in his years of ministry.  What I find hard to accept is his advanced knowledge of Greek. 

If the Bible says this work is attributed to Peter, then I believe Peter is the author of this work. So the only conclusion is that Peter had his personal scribe, Silvanus, not only write the letter but translate it for Peter into Greek to be sent to the Greek churches of Asia Minor.  This creates the problem of whether Silvanus’s translation of Peter’s letter from the Aramaic is the inspired Word of God or was Peter’s Aramaic version the inspired Word of God.  I am not a theologian so again I will not go there but I am convinced the original language came from the mouth of Peter and Peter did not speak fluent Greek. Silvanus could very well have been Peter’s translator but there is no proof of this either. 

Nonetheless, when I go to the Aramaic version of this letter I find something much more politically correct making more sense than calling wives weak vessels.  The word for vessel in Aramaic is mana which is a word for garments or clothes.  Its root comes from a Phoenician’s origin for the outriggers of a ship.  The outriggers of a ship is what keep the ship on course and moving.  Without it, the ship is dead in the water. 

So this vessel idea is really speaking of a ship and the outrigging of a ship. The outrigging includes the sails which power the ship and the rudders that guide and navigates the ship.  It would be fitting for a former fisherman to use a seafaring illustration.  Thus the word for weak in the Aramaic is the word machal which means weak but weak only in the sense of paying off a debt to a debtor so he has no power over you and is weakened.  Machal is more of the idea of neutralizing a threat.  So following a nautical motif when the word machal to neutralize a threat is used as an adjective for the word mana the outrigging of a ship it would express the idea of a wife who is the outrigging of the vessel her husband.  When the storms of life come the sailor uses the outrigging, the anchor, the rudder, and the sails to steer the ship in such a way as to weather out the storm.  Without the outrigging the vessel is dead in the water and subject to whatever currents, it has no direction.  With the mana the outrigging or a man’s wife, the man has direction and the power to follow that direction. When the storms of life come the wife and husband work together to navigate the storm and ride out the storm. 

So a man honors his wife as a sailor honors the outrigging of his ship. He takes care of it, and protects it so that when the storms come they can work together to reach their destination safely. Without the outrigging the husband is doomed to be adrift in the sea and sunk when a storm comes.  Without a vessel, the rudder, the anchor, and the sails are of little value.  Put them together and you can do a lot of fishing. Sort of like in the church I attend, the pastor and his wife are both ministers. She preaches a little sermonette before her husband preaches. She shares her husband’s duties as a co-pastor and believes me it works really well.

(This Word Study is excerpted from Chaim Bentorah’s book: Aramaic Word Study: Exploring The Language Of The New Testament)

Thanks & Blessings, it means a lot to me!