David, Yahweh's Anointed Sorcerer?

Dear praying friends and family,

It's good to be home after my trip to Orlando -- and to see Alan. We want to thank you for your prayers over the last month; God answered wonderfully, as you can read after the following story written by a friend of ours.

A challenge in translation - David, Yahweh’s Anointed Sorcerer?
“Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.”

In my preparation for checking this verse I did a lot of study on the word “anoint” with ideas how to help the translators come up with a good translation of this key term. I assumed that there was no word for it Gbaya. Boy, was I wrong. They did have a perfectly fine word that means ‘to anoint/put oil on someone’: “honga.”

To put oil on someone [is] a transfer of power ritual from one village chief to another. After the new chief is anointed, local powerful evil spirits enter into the chief at this time to give special discernment to the chief to lead wisely when the anointing is done.

See the similarities in how anoint (honga) is used in modern Gbaya culture and in the Biblical text? Both involve transfer of power rituals: village chief in Gbaya and David as the King of Israel. Both involve spirit possession/control/influence to empower the leader’s new position.

Now….STOP! What should we do? Should we leave the word or change it somehow? This is a good word in one sense, but will people be confused that David is possessed by the same local spirit(s)? Will ‘the spirit of the LORD’ be confused with the local evil spirits from this?

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You can read the whole post to find out more.

Answered prayer
During the week before Alan’s British colleague arrived, Alan was able to get some focused time (sometimes well into the evening) to finish what was needed for their work together. David did well developing the new system for creating their fonts with technical input from Alan. Alan also learned a lot about one of the new software tools (Smith) they’re using. Since I was gone for their second week together, Alan was able to spend some extra hours in the office. The day David left, they were able to successfully run the system on three test fonts!

The teacher orientation in Orlando went well. I was able to get the notebook finished in time and to take advantage of discounted pricing and free shipping. Only one graphic didn’t end up where it was supposed to, and it wasn’t an important graphic. Also, while I was trying very hard not to panic in finding volunteers for one of the cross cultural simulations, God put me in contact with someone I didn’t know. She took it upon herself to forward my plea for help to others in the office and even talked to some people individually. By the time that simulation occurred, I had all the people I needed! I told this young woman that she was a direct answer to your prayers! After returning home, I had a week to recover and am now back at work.

How to pray now?
Alan is still working to understand Smith. It’s a program that another colleague wrote. He’s trying to understand the programming code so he can enhance it or fix bugs. Please pray he can understand the more critical parts of it.

I’ll be doing some catch up over the next week or two, and then my manager and I will need to figure out what to concentrate on after that. Please pray for direction for what our priorities need to be. As a praise, three of our participants left this weekend for Papua New Guinea!

Thank you so much for your prayers. We couldn’t do this without you. How can we pray for you?

Serving Him together,

Lynee (& Alan)