The JW use of this word gets my knickers in a right twist! When someone is impaled, it means he is run through with something. The thing he is run through with is the thing he is impaled on or by. Take a butterfly collection -- the butterflies are not impaled on the board; they are impaled on the pin. If Jesus had been impaled on a stake, he would have had the stake THROUGH him. The other thing that really gets me about this is that I don't see how a whole group of wordsmiths could have made a mistake like this. It had to be intentional.
Misuse of "impaled"
by RebelWife 17 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Forscher
Of course it was
The problem Freddy Franz faced was that the only word in English which was reasonably near in meaning to the Greek verb stauro has the meaning of "being fixed to a cross, something Franz wanted to avoid at all cost. So he misused another word in order to avoid using an ackward phrase to convey the meaning he desired. Since he knew the Bub rank and file would simply accept his redefinition of the word "impale" with out question, and they were all who really counted, he felt he could safely do it.
Forscher
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John Doe
I've got to disagree. Take the statement "He was impaled." Notice there is no requirement that the impaling instrument is named. Now, take the statement "He was impaled on a cross." This can be read two ways--what he was impaled with, or merely where he was impaled. While the statement is ambiguous, it is not incorrect.
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Leolaia
Yes, that is a rather poor choice of word. The NWT translators wanted to avoid the word "crucifixion" in its various forms, so "impalement" was chosen even though it does not mean "bound or nail to a stake" in English. The phrase "impaled on a cross" normally would imply that the person was thrown on top of a stake which passed through his/her body. Ironically, the original word crux could refer to crucifixion by impalement, i.e. by forcing a sharpened stake through a person's body, since the term simply denoted a kind of execution involving the use of timber(s). In no sense does anyone, even the Society, suspect that Jesus died in this fashion. As for the term "torture stake", this seems more like a literalistic rendering of the Latin crux than the Greek word. However, the dominant form of the crux at the time included a patibulum which the condemned would carry beforehand, and the references to patibulum bearing in the gospels would imply that crucifixion in the NT presumed a kind of crux that incorporated a patibulum.
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Leolaia
John....I wonder tho if that understanding of the word is mainly confined to JWs who have been conditioned through frequent use of the word to accept it as also referring to death by nailing to a timber. If you look at how the term is otherwise defined, most people would understand it as death by piercing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impale
http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid=Mozilla-search&va=Impalement+
Note the etymology of in- "in" + -palus "stake", to "impale" would be to "in-stake" someone, just as "insert" would be to join (Latin serere) something in and "infix" would be to fix something in. Impale is "putting a stake in".
It is possible that the term has a dialectal sense where the meaning has become more generalized, but not in most English. Perhaps the "dialect" is only the lingo of the JWs.
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John Doe
Very well could be. My main point was simply that the wording is ambiguous and we can't dictate it to be read a certain way. However, just about all wording used in religious literature is ambiguous. This allows the greatest number of people to apply it in a way they see fit.
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Leolaia
I don't think it's really ambiguous. I think most people would picture something passing through a person's body when they hear "He was impaled". It may only be ambiguous for JWs, especially those born in it, who learned the meaning of the word mainly through its use among JWs. I would not doubt that an average born-in would hear the word used most often in a JW context, simply because JWs use it so frequently compared to most other people.
Here is a comment in an early review of the NWT:
"In accordance with human nature, the reader will first notice faults. The first to catch his eye will be the unwise typographical trick of distinguishing the second person plural from the singular by printing the word in small capitals when the meaning is plural. Possibly he may notice next that instead of "cross" we have everywhere "torture stake," in favor of which translation something can be said, and instead of "crucify" always "impale," in favor of which nothing can be said, for "impale" has in English the settled meaning of thrusting the stake through the vitals, not of fastening the body to a stake outside the body (Stephen Byington, "N.W.T.," Christian Century, 1 November 1950).
In response, the Society wrote that their use of the word was correct:
"When the Jews called out for him to he suspended, they properly cried "Impale him!" as they were not privileged to dictate to the Roman governor what form Jesus' impalation should take. The textual and historical bases for rendering stauroo "impale" and stauros "torture stake" are supplied in the appendix" ("How Bible Translators Work," Christian Century, 9 May 1951, pp. 587-589).
And Byington responded in turn:
" 'Impale' Erroneous: All we know about the form of Jesus' cross is the presumption that it was such a cross as the Romans most commonly used. The question whether to say 'impale' for 'crucify' is a question not of Greek nor of archaeology, but of English. The committee will hardly deny that in Jesus' case the stake was outside his body; and I should like to see their evidence that 'impale' can refer to a stake that does not go into or through the body" (Ibid).
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Hellrider
When I hear the word "impaled", I picture a person being lifted up, and, while still in an upright position (...) he is dropped down, being impaled from the "bottom" up, in an .."embarassing", horrid manner with horrible sexual abuse/ torture as an undertone. It`s strange that a group considering themselves to be (the only) true christians would use that word the way they do, about Jesus. I don`t think you`re the only one that cringe when hearing that word.
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Narkissos
The French NWT avoided the cognate verb "empaler" which is totally unambiguous (implying piercing) and resorted to a periphrase, "attacher sur un poteau" (to tie onto a stake). I long believed the English verb to impale was ambiguous and its WT use was part of its semantic range. Actually it seems to be rather another case of etymology abuse. Perhaps (I'm just asking the question, I don't know) to impale is such a rare word in English that the misuse is practically tolerable? A similar use of empaler would be impossible in French because the average reader knows what the word means.
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Leolaia
I've been looking for pre-1950 references of "impalement" mentioned in the same context as Jesus. So far they seem to mostly concern "impalement" in its usual piercing sense.
"Crucified with inverted head, or impaled on iron stakes, or breast-deep in flames, it mattered not, since Paradise smiled, and Jesus beckoned, almost visibly beside them" (George GIlfillan, Bards of the Bible, 1853, p. 271)
"...fervent preaching of the early day degenerated to the slovenly reading of essays, in which man was dissected, Jesus impaled on the point of a cambric-needle criticism" (A. D. Mayo, "Call to the Unitarian Ministry," Monthly Journal of the American Unitarian Association, October 1865, p. 435).
"It was not invariable in crucifixion that the feet were impaled [by nails], but sometimes the hands only" (Mary Hunter Austin, The Man Jesus, 1915, p. 176)
"It was a dilemma with two fatal horns, the one of which these Jews could not escape without getting themselves securely impaled on the other" (William Wilkinson, Concerning Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, 1918, p. 217)
"At another time, when these same Pharisees muttered among themselves that it was demonic power by which Jesus was driving out evil spirits, Jesus impaled them upon two horns of a dilemma" (John Heston Willey, Between Two Worlds, 1919, p. 79).
"Ctesias ... cannot, as is sometimes done, be cited as a parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus. The author describes a rebel who was 'impaled on three stakes', not crucified with companions on a cross" (Floyd Spencer, Beyond Damascus: A Biography of Paul the Tarsian, 1935, p. 424)
But I found one example that certainly resembles Franz' use of the term:
"In the Acts and rarely in the epistles, it [zulon] signifies the wood or timber on which Jesus was impaled alive. Zulon and stauros are alike the single stick, the pale, or stake, neither more nor less, on which Jesus was impaled, or crucified" (Henry Dana Ward, History of the Cross: The Pagan Origin and Idolatrous Adoption and Worship, 1871, p. 14).
Interestingly, this was one of the main books in the late 1800s that claimed that Jesus did not die on a cross and which likely influenced the JWs, so possibly Franz picked up his usage from this book (or others that followed it). I suspect that the usage arose out of the desire to have a replacement verb for "crucify" that does not imply the use of a "cross", hence "impale".