The dancing girl and the road to hell
How "becoming like a child" and "keeping one's mind in hell" are analogous...
One of the indispensable texts I’ve had with me ever since my seminary days (forty years past) is Zerwick and Grosvenor’s A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament. [1] Unexciting as the title is, it’s no exaggeration to say I’ve spent more hours poring over that volume than many of the other books I own, regardless of genre. It has provided my New Testament studies with insights and interpretive nuances – and even a few rabbit holes – that I wouldn’t have picked up on otherwise, at times significantly altering the way I read a particular text. Here’s a case in point: It has been standard for centuries to depict the infamous dance of the daughter of Herodias (Salome III) – the young woman who was persuaded by her notorious mother to ask for the head of John the Baptist as the reward for pleasing Herod at his birthday feast – as an erotically charged performance, intended to arouse the king’s baser feelings and, hence, cooperation in the execution. Certainly, the superb film Jesus of Nazareth (1977) presented the scene in just this way, with a weak and louche Herod – portrayed with psychological finesse by Christopher Plummer – visibly stirred to lust by Salome’s lascivious dance. Oscar Wilde’s rather febrile single act play, Salome, goes even further, ending with Herod becoming so horrified by Salome’s lewdness and viciousness – her dance is a vehicle for her revenge on John because he resisted her unwelcome advances – that he commands his soldiers to kill her by crushing her with their shields. But we probably should put such a… well… wild revision entirely aside, as well as less racy renderings of the story. While still a seminarian, it was the book mentioned above, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament, that overturned for me any idea that the birthday dance was sensually stimulating in character, or that Herod was whipped up by a nubile temptress into a randily compliant condition, or that Salome was a very nasty sexy beast. What mitigated any impression of the sort for me was a single word in the Greek that is applied to the daughter of Herodias, once in Matthew and three times in Mark: κοράσιον (korasion; Matt. 14:11; Mk. 6:22, 28). The word, notably, is a diminutive, which mustn’t be overlooked, but usually is. Needless to say, I was pleased to see that my brother translated the word quite rightly in his translation of the New Testament as “little girl”; as he explained in a footnote:
