Amelia Bedelia is a fictional character from my childhood. She was a young person who was trying to navigate the world when language is so full of double meanings. And so Amelia Bedelia got into all sorts of trouble not because she misunderstood but because she understood. She just understood the other meaning. For instance, when asked to “draw the drapes when the sun comes in” Amelia Bedelia might get pencil and paper to illustrate the drapes. But she did not close the drapes. She understood the “other” meaning of the word draw.
There are a set of words called contronym which are common and yet rare. There are not that many contronyms in total but we use them all the time that we remain unaware of how rare they are. A contronym is a single word that have two contradictory meanings.
Here is a list of the most common contronyms I found:
Apology – a statement of contrition for an action or a defense of one
Bolt – to secure or to flee
Bound – heading to a destination or restrained from movement
Cleave – to adhere or to separate
Discipline – a form of training to obey rules or a form of punishment for an offense (or a field of study)
Dust – to add fine particles or to remove them
Fast – quick or stuck and made stable
Left – remained or departed
Peer – a person of the nobility or an equal
Sanction – to approve or to boycott
Weather – to withstand or to wear away
These common and simple words above are words English speakers say we understand and that their meaning is clear. But these simple words show us that words can have not only different meanings but directly opposite meanings. The existence of contranyms should humble us when we consider reading the Bible - a collection of books written in different languages over different time periods. Could it be that there are passages in the Bible that have Hebrew or Greek contranyms?
Yes. Yes there are.
The most cited one is in Job chapter 9 when Job’s wife tells Job to “barech God and die.” Your Bible might show that the word barech means to curse and to bless. So which is it? Is Job being instructed to bless or curse God and then die?
We are limited and the Bible is not always as clear as we would like it to be. As Paul says, we see through a mirror only dimly. Which when you think about it, this is a masterful sentence. Not only does it state a truth (we do not fully understand) but the sentence itself is an example of that very truth:
Do we see just fine but the mirror is dim and it makes what we see dim? Or is the mirror so dim that we can only see small specks of light? Is the dimness in our eyes or the mirror?
What a conundrum.