We read the Scriptures but we do not understand what they say. We do not even realize our lack of understanding because our present blindness to its meaning came about very slowly over a period of several centuries. In the Middle Ages, no one among Christians, except members of the clergy, did read the Bible. Then, when the Reformation took place in the XVIth century, its success was largely based on the idea that everyone should be able to read the Bible for himself. As a result, many translations of the Scriptures were made in vernacular languages. Since then, the idea that every believer should make a habit of reading the sacred texts has spread beyond the Protestant denominations. Every Christian now takes it more or less for granted that he should read the Bible regularly. As a result, the number of translations has multiplied. Biblegateway.org, the most comprehensive Bible study Web site, lists 21 translations of the Bible into English alone, all available on line and free of charge. Many of these translations are recent or have been recently updated. The same trend is apparent in Isalm and Judaism, in which every believer has always been expected to read the Scriptures on a regular basis. A large number of translations of the Quran and the Jewish Scriptures into English have also been published in the past few decades.

Despite the differences in faith and outlook, nearly all available translations take it for granted that there is a fixed set of English words and phrases that refer properly to the central elements of religion. These include "God," "Lord," "blessing," "worship," "prayer," "godly," "holy," "covenant," "psalm," "sin," "salvation," etc. Most of these words belonged to the vocabulary of everyday English at the time of the Reformation, when the first translations of the Bible were made. Because of this, they had plain and unambiguous meanings. Over time, however, those original meanings have withered away. Today, the words still seem to have meanings but when we try to pinpoint them we realize that we are chasing a ghost. The only reward we gain for our efforts is a hazy cloud of ambiguous and vague impressions. Let us take the word "lord" as an example. In XVIth century english, lord was an everyday term used to refer to a person who was in charge in some capacity. It was somewhat equivalent to our modern words "executive" or "boss." A relic of this meaning remains apparent in the title borne until the 1950s by the British equivalent of the Secretary of the Navy, the "Lord of the Admiralty." Today, the word lord conjures up in our minds the image of a mild-mannered, but largely irrelevant, old English aristocrat. The meaning has shifted from a fearsome title infused with power to a mildly obsolete irrelevancy that survives only because of tradition. At the same time, it continues to refer to the most powerful being there is, on whose decisions our fate depends ---but also to various abusive power relationships as evidenced through the expression "to lord it over someone." In such a context, can we still maintain in good faith that the word "lord" means anything at all?

Once we realize that the traditional English religious words lead us astray, what we need is a starting point and a method to try and rebuild a genuine understanding of the Scriptures. As a starting point, the First Commandment is an obvious choice, because it is certainly not without reason that it has been placed at the top of the list, but also because the rejection of idolatry is quite apparently a dominant theme throughout the OId Testament. Furthermore, the First Commandment belongs to the heritage of all three monotheistic faiths.

In Exodus 20, the First Commandment is stated thus:

(v. 3) You shall have no other gods before Me. (v. 4) You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. (v. 5) You shall not worship them or serve them [...] (NASB)

Verse 3 states the basic principle of monotheism, namely that one should not have multiple gods. Verses 4 and 5 make this prohibition more precise by making it clear in what sense the expression "having a god" is intended here. Specifically, it means worshiping and serving. Unfortunately, the word "worship" belongs to the category of unclear traditional English religious words mentioned above. Therefore, we must dig deeper in order to recover its meaning. In the verses above, the Hebrew word translated as "worship" is "shachah." Its literal sense is "to bow down" and can be used in non-religious contexts such as bowing down in front of a human ruler. However, the meaning of shachah in biblical Hebrew is wider and includes the general idea of "doing something to honor someone" without necessarily physically bowing down.

In traditional religious English, this idea of "doing something to honor someone" is usually rendered with the words "praise" or "glorify". These two words suffer from the same type of meaning blur as all other modern religious English terms and some more effort will therefore be required before we can safely assert that we have fully grasped the meaning of the biblical passages in which their Hebrew equivalents occur. However, we can temporarily use them in order to summarize how we understand the First Commandment. The First commandment says that "having a god" means "behaving towards a certain entity in a way that can be described as praising and serving it". Furthermore, the First Commandment says that there is only one entity towards which we should adopt such a behavior: God.

Let us now try to grasp the idea of "praise" as it is intended in Scripture. In modern non-religious English, the word praise suffers from two major drawbacks. First, it has become overused in schools and in the workplace in a supposedly "supportive" way, which is in fact often condescending and patronizing. Secondly, largely as a result of this development, the cynical practice of "sarcastic praise" has become increasingly frequent. We now routinely hear and read such expressions as "smooth move!," "good job!" or "nice one Einstein!" meant as insult. From this heap of garbage and ruin how could one expect to salvage anything worthy of being applied to God?

Another word used instead of praise sometimes is "glorify", as we have stated above. But while this word has indeed kept most of its original dignity, it suffers from another crippling drawback: obsolescence. No one in our contemporary world ever "glorifies" anyone. Therefore, using the word inevitably makes the act of praising of God appear to be a relic of the past which is certainly not what it should be considered.

Recovering true equivalents from within our contemporary vocabulary for the Hebrew words usually translated as praise or glorify is no simple matter. In order to do so adequately we must make a sincere effort to travel back in time and try to imagine, without preconceptions, what it actually meant to praise God at the time of Moses or of David.

In doing so, let us first consider the case of Moses in the Sinai. The people of Israel were nomads who were living in tents. When the cult of YHWH was established, its most immediately perceptible manifestation was the erection of the tent of meeting (also called the Tabernacle) in the middle of the camp and the daily activities that were performed there by Aaron and his family. For any dweller of the camp, this essentially translated into a periodic "audio-visual" (actually an audio-olfactory-visual) experience when he was in or near the camp. The instruments used to create this experience are described in loving detail in six chapters at the end of the book of Exodus:

• Golden bowls, lamp stands and altar; a visual experience with shiny materials in an otherwise dull environment.
• Brass and silver pole holder bases; another visual experience with shiny materials.
• Curtains embroidered with blue, purple, and scarlet yarn: a visual experience that included pleasant colors (in a predominantly brown and gray environment) and designs (images of cherubim).
• Heavily decorated priestly garments: another visual experience which included pleasant colors and shiny materials.
• Incense: olfactory experience; "pleasing aroma".
• Trumpet calls at the time of sacrifices: an auditory experience; thrill and excitement at a sound usually used in war or to signal the alarm.
  

In other words, the religious activity instituted by Moses used all means of communication that a nomadic tribe could afford ---the "media" at his disposal--- to attract the attention of everyone in the camp and turn it towards the tent where the presence of God dwelled. It is in that very strong sense that he praised God and not merely by uttering a few well intentioned words as we often do today.

It is exactly this kind of procedure, scaled up to the resources available to a sedentary, city-dwelling, community, which is described in the parts of the Bible devoted to the Temple of Solomon and the activities of the Levite priests within. The temple itself is placed centrally within the city and sits at its highest point. It is also large enough to be the first building one sees when approaching the city from a distance. From most houses within the city, the temple is visible, at least when one is standing on the roof, a part of the house on which inhabitants of the Middle-East spend significant amounts of their time. The decoration of the temple matches that of the tent of meeting, but on an even grander scale: golden objects, brass basins and doors, etc. Furthermore, an audio component was added to the striking visual impression created by the architecture and the decoration of the temple; namely, the daily singing of hymns, accompanied by music, that a specialized group of Levite priests performed within its precint. These musical performances must have been of an exceptional quality since they contributed to give the Hebrews a reputation as accomplished musicians and singers well beyond their borders. At the time of the deportation to Babylon, this reputation was sufficietly established to cause many Hebrews to be hired (more or less willingly) by their Babylonian overlords as court entertainers. Again, we see here that the "media" that had the highest possible impact within the means of the community were being used to praise God in the most effective manner. They were not the only function of the temple, which also housed the service of God in the form of sacrifices, but we cannot deny that they were present and that they absorbed a large part of the total outlay of resources (building costs + craftsmen fees for decoration + cost of precious materials + building maintenance costs + living allowances for the musicians and singers) that the community had to provide for the construction and operation of the temple.

Another way to picture what the word "praise" meant in earlier times is to note that long before the Old Testament was written, and for a long time afterward, it was customary for court poets and other public officials to "praise" the monarch. For example, elaborate (and largely fictional) laudatory biographies of rulers are common among the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets recovered by archaeologists in Mesopotamia over the past two centuries. The earliest examples date back to the middle of the third millennium BC. In Roman times, the panegyric genre was cultivated abundantly by all known orators, and many of these works were addressed to emperors and other ruling figures. As late as the XVIIIth century, it was still quite common for well regarded poets to write "panegyrics" that glorified contemporary kings (Voltaire himself wrote one for Louis XV). On the face of it, it may seem that this practice is now obsolete and has completely disappeared. But while this is true in its traditional form, if we examine the issue without the bias associated to our current modes of social behavior, we may notice that the practice continues to flourish. It does so in the guise of advertisement and news "reports" and is, in fact, pervasive in the output of the media and entertainment industries. In ancient times, a panegyric glorified the name of a ruler who was the direct superior of its author. Similarly, an advertisement today glorifies the brand of a corporation which is ---through a chain of contracts--- the employer of its designer. Many historians have observed that classical panegyrics, far from being isolated pieces of flattery, were generally integrated into deliberate propaganda strategies as is most obvious, for example, in the case of Julius Caesar and Augustus. Similarly, today's advertisements are coordinated generally into global "communication strategies" aimed at magnifying the "mage" of the brand. This is true, obviously, of consumer goods and other brands of industrial products and services but also of political candidates in democratic elections, for which advertisement budgets never cease to increase. The generic word in contemporary English for this sort of activity is "promotion", not "praise". We say that a marketing department uses the resources at its disposal to promote brands and product and, similarly, that a campaign team uses the same sort of techniques to promote the image of its candidate.

The sections of the Old Testament dealing with the Tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple describe a very similar range of activities. They described how all available "media" were used to promote the name of YHWH as much as was feasible given the means of the communities involved in both cases. One possible objection to this comparison is to say that we view the activities of the media industry in a negative light while the Tabernacle and the Temple were obviously the most highly regagrded elements in the lives of the Hebrew people. But this is an error of perspective. At the time of Moses or Solomon, the audio-visual techniques they used to praise YHWH were not new. They had been used for millennia to praise the innumerable idols which were such an abomination to the Hebrews. This proves that, from a biblical point of view, the stigma is not in the techniques themselves but in the choice of the entity they are directed to, for the purpose of praising it. It is only when an idol, a "foreign power", is being praised that an abomination is being committed. In contrast, if it is YHWH which is to be praised, no amount of flashiness or cost is to be avoided. The bigger the show, the better the praise.

From our point of view, this may seem naive and even tasteless when in reality, it is only realistic and pragmatic. It is we who are being naive by thinking otherwise. The Hebrews were heirs to a culture that was at least 3000 years old when they established Jerusalem, and they were all but naive. They knew from experience that all enduring forms of worship had always been based on show, and that the success associated with such endeavors was always proportional to the amount of lavishness poured into them. Indeed, we also know this, even though we may pretend not to. We know that advertisement works and that the success of anything, from corporate image building to public awareness campaigns to the careers of popular "artists" is related directly to the scale of media investments marshalled by their respective sponsors. The difference between the Hebrews and us is that the Hebrews realized that they had to compete with the idolatry of their time by using the same means while we we have forgotten it (or pretend to). For the most part, this is due to our snobbishness and arrogance. We see that our modern forms of idolatry are repulsive ---just as they were at the time of Moses--- yet we think we can avoid getting our hands dirty in opposing them. We believe that good words and haughty condemnations will suffice to make them disappear. Clearly, they do not. Instead our idolatry grows daily to ever more monstrous proportions.

Instead of listening to our own snobbish complacency, we would be better off heeding God's word and actually reading the Scripures. Not pretending to read them by relying on translations based on words we no longer understand but actually exerting ourselves to actually understand the text as it was meant. The books of Exodus and Kings tell us that the foremost prophets of God used the audio-visual media of their times to their full capacity in order to praise God, and this is also what the Book of Psalms is telling us. So what are we waiting for? Let us obey God's command and start promoting Him with all of the deafening roar the modern media places, according to His will, at our disposal.