Hidden Biblical Humour
There are even jokes- of sorts- hidden in the Bible. In the Science of Mind magazine, I love to read the colunms by Dr. Rocco Errico. He is a scholar of ancient Aramaic, the original language of most of the Bible. Our King James version is NOT translated from the original Aramaic, but from later Greek translations, for the most part.
Errico translates the story of Jonah and the whale. In most translations, it is given as a FISH, not a whale. Jonah was ordered by God in a dream to go and warn the people of a foreign country that they should change their ways or be destroyed. Of course, on the way he spent three days in the 'fish' before being cast up on their shore.
The Aramaic slang expression for being in a real pickle or dilemma is to be "in a fish" Jonah's dilemma was that he was unknown and had no credibility at all in the country where he was expected to preach and make them change their ways. Maybe he couldn't even speak the language! So, for the entire voyage, he was "in a fish".
The writers of ancient Aramaic told an excellent joke, and it only took us a few thousand years to get the punch line! Are we slow, or what?
Imagine if we wrote a story today about someone in a dilemma, and we wrote that he was in a real pickle. Four thousand years from now, people would be wondering what sorts of cucumbers we were able to grow, and how did we get them pickled! We might even have archaeologists rummaging for giant pickle vats - and of course they would find them - or at least something very large, which would immediately be designated a pickle vat!
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