Sometime in the weeks between the ascension and Pentecost, according to the Acts of the Apostles, Peter stood up among about a hundred and twenty believers in Jerusalem and explained what had to be done about Judas. He did it with a quotation stitched together from two psalms, the second of which reads, in the Greek that Luke gives him, “Let another take his episkopē.”[1] English Bibles render the word “position of overseer,” or “office,” or in the King James Version “bishoprick,” and the believers then cast lots and filled the vacancy with a man named Matthias. On a quick reading, the scene is the first piece of church administration in Christian history, a post declared vacant and a successor chosen.

The Hebrew word behind Luke’s Greek does not read quickly. It is pequddah, and it carries two meanings that English keeps in separate rooms: an office, and the reckoning that falls on whoever holds one. The argument of The Gospel as Mirror leans on that word at the point where the whole book turns, the night in Gethsemane, and readers who meet it there for the first time deserve a slower account of what it meant before anyone asked it to do work in a garden. This essay is that account.

A Root That English Breaks Apart

The Hebrew root p-q-d is one of the commonest in the Bible and one of the hardest to translate, because it names an act that English divides among half a dozen verbs. When the Lord “visits” Sarah and she conceives, the verb is pāqad.[2] When Potiphar puts Joseph in charge of his household, the causative form of the same verb makes him overseer, and the same form describes the captain of the guard assigning Joseph to the imprisoned officials of Pharaoh.[3] The men counted in the census that gave the book of Numbers its English name are the pequdîm, the mustered ones.[4] In the Ten Commandments God “visits” the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and there the verb means to call someone to account for what was done.[5] A related noun, piqqādôn, is a deposit, something left in another person’s keeping to hold on the owner’s behalf.[6]

The lexicographers who have tried to name the common thread usually settle on something like attention with consequences.[7] To pāqad someone is to turn toward him in a way that alters his standing. He is appointed, or counted among those liable for service, or called to answer, or rescued, and in each case the one who does the turning has authority over the one turned toward. I have found it useful to think of the verb the way a surveyor thinks of a benchmark. The mark on the stone changes nothing about the stone, and yet once it is cut every measurement in the district is taken from it.

Office and Reckoning

The noun pequddah takes two of the root’s senses and holds them in one word. In one group of passages it means an office or charge. Eleazar, Aaron’s son, has the pequddah of the tabernacle, its oil and incense and furnishings; the priestly families in Chronicles serve according to their pequddah, their appointed turns; and in Isaiah’s picture of the restored city God promises to make peace her pequddah, her overseer.[8] In another group the same noun means visitation in the sense of judgment. Isaiah asks the rulers of Judah what they will do on the day of pequddah, when disaster comes from far off, and Hosea announces that the days of pequddah have come, the days of recompense.[9]

A modern translator has to choose between “office” and “punishment” every time the word appears, and the choice hides what a Hebrew reader heard, which was one word. The overlap has its own sense. An office is the place where a reckoning lands. The steward who holds the keys is the one who answers when the master comes home and finds the storeroom empty, and the Hebrew noun names both the keys and the day of the master’s return.

I made an error about this word in the first edition of The Gospel as Mirror, and it belongs here, since the correction teaches something. I listed Jeremiah 52:11 among the passages in which pequddah means an appointment, as though the king of Babylon had placed the blinded Zedekiah under some kind of charge. The phrase there is bêt-happequddōt, the house of custody, which is to say the prison where Zedekiah stayed until he died.[10] I had read the office side of the word into a passage that belongs entirely to the reckoning side. On reflection the passage still earns a place in the evidence, for a different reason than the one I first gave: the last king to hold David’s throne before the exile ended his days in a building named by the punishing sense of the word, and a reader who notices that has one more example of how short the distance was, in Hebrew, from a royal charge to a sentence.

The Curse in the Hundred and Ninth Psalm

The psalm Peter quoted is a curse, and it is one of the harshest in the Psalter. It opens as a lament and then, at its sixth verse, turns into a long malediction against an enemy, and the malediction begins in a courtroom. “Appoint a wicked man against him,” the psalm says, using the causative of pāqad, “and let an accuser stand on his right; when he is tried, let him be found guilty.”[11] The accuser is the śāṭān, the adversary at law who stood at the defendant’s right hand, and the scene is a trial that ends in condemnation. Only after the verdict comes the line Acts quotes: “May his days be few; may another take his pequddah.”[12] The curse then moves on to the condemned man’s children, his widow and his memory.

In sequence the verses tell a small story. A man is brought to trial with an accuser beside him, is condemned, dies before his time, and sees his charge pass to someone else. The Greek translators of the psalm rendered pequddah as episkopē, a word that in their Greek could mean oversight or visitation and so could carry both halves of the Hebrew, and it was the Greek psalm that the first Christians read.[13] When Luke put the verse in Peter’s mouth he used half of it, the half about the office. The trial that opens the curse stayed in the psalm, and so did the early death that comes before the transfer, though Acts had already given Judas an early death of its own a few verses earlier.

A question within the psalm bears on how its early readers used it, and I cannot settle it. Several modern commentators read verses six to nineteen as a quotation, the words the psalmist’s enemies speak against him, reported so that God may see their malice, and a number of recent translations add “They say” at the head of the curse to mark it that way.[14] On that reading the man cursed with a trial, an early death and the loss of his charge is the righteous speaker of the psalm himself. The Hebrew gives no sign of quotation, and the older reading has able defenders. If the quotation reading is right, the verse the Jerusalem church used to replace Judas was a verse first spoken against an innocent man by his persecutors, which is an irony I note and leave where it lies.

One Word, Two Meanings, One Author

Luke knew both senses of the Greek word, and he used both, which is the strongest evidence we have that the double meaning of the Hebrew survived the crossing into Greek. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel, he weeps over the city and predicts the siege that will level it “because you did not recognize the time of your visitation,” and the word for visitation is episkopē.[15] Three chapters into Luke’s second volume, the same word names the charge that passes from Judas to Matthias. One writer, in two books meant to be read together, used one word for the hour of divine reckoning on a city and for the office of an apostle, and I doubt he felt any strain between them. The Hebrew behind his Greek had never separated the two.

The word went on to a career that Luke could not have foreseen, and it ended in the vocabulary of every Christian church. The first letter to Timothy says that whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task, and the office is episkopē.[16] The title of the person who holds it, episkopos, became the Church’s name for its governing office everywhere Greek and Latin were spoken, and from the Latin episcopus came the English “bishop.” The first Christian text to use the word for a post in the community uses it for the post that Judas lost, in a quotation from a curse. Whether anyone in the early Church found that uncomfortable I have not been able to discover. Nobody seems to have remarked on it, and the silence may say more about how completely the word’s harder sense had been forgotten than about anyone’s comfort.

Garments, Hands and Witnesses

The Hebrew Bible never uses pequddah for the scene that The Gospel as Mirror places at the center of the Passion, and that has to be said before anything else in this section. What the Bible does contain, in separate places, is each piece of such a scene.

Office passes from one living holder to another. It passes by visible acts, before witnesses. At Mount Hor, Moses strips Aaron of his priestly vestments and puts them on his son Eleazar, and Aaron dies on the summit without them; the two men who come down the mountain have made a high priest in an afternoon.[17] Isaiah describes the same act in the royal household. The steward Shebna will be thrown away like a ball into a wide land, and of his successor the Lord says, “I will clothe him with your robe and bind your sash on him. I will commit your authority to his hand,” and the key of the house of David goes onto the new man’s shoulder.[18] When Elijah is taken up, his mantle falls, Elisha picks it up and strikes the Jordan with it, and the prophets watching from across the river say that the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.[19] In none of these stories does the garment work like magic. It makes the transfer public, so that the people who see it treat the man wearing it as the holder of the charge.

Guilt passes too. On the Day of Atonement the high priest lays his hands on the head of a living goat, confesses over it the iniquities of the people, and sends it into the wilderness bearing them, and the fourth Servant Song in Isaiah gives the pattern a human face, a servant who bears the sins of many, is counted among transgressors, and is handed over to death though he had done no violence.[20] And the rabbis, in a principle the Mishnah records, held that a man’s agent is like the man himself, so that the acts of one commissioned to act for another count as the other’s acts.[21] That principle governs messengers and legal proxies, and I do not treat it as a license for impersonation; it shows only that the Judaism of the period had a working idea of one person standing in another’s place.

A digression, which is the reason I wrote this essay at all. In Mark’s account of the arrest, after every disciple has run, a young man who has been following wearing only a linen cloth is seized, leaves the cloth in the soldiers’ hands, and escapes naked.[22] Mark names no one and explains nothing. The Gospel as Mirror reads the young man as the Galilean teacher, whose title the arresting party had come for, and reads the abandoned linen as the garment of his charge left behind with the men who now held someone else under his name. The next evening Mark uses the same word, sindōn, for the linen in which Joseph of Arimathea wraps the dead man’s body. Mark says Joseph bought that cloth, so the two pieces of linen are different pieces of linen, and the thread joining them is the word and not the object. A reader fresh from Mount Hor and Shebna’s robe will still notice that in Mark’s garden a garment changes hands, and that its name returns at the burial of the man who took the office.

What the Word Can and Cannot Carry

The limits of this argument belong on the table, since a reader can fairly suspect a writer who borrows an ancient word for a modern thesis. The Hebrew Bible does not use pequddah for one man assuming another’s identity in order to die in his place. No text says that a charge was handed over at Gethsemane. The Gospel as Mirror takes a word that joined office and reckoning, places it beside scenes in which office passed by garment and guilt passed by touch, and proposes that the arrest in the garden combined them: a title the soldiers had come for, a man who answered to it, a condition that the others go free, and a trial and execution that followed. The use of the word for that transaction is an extension, and the book calls it one. A legal historian does something similar when he describes as “adoption” an arrangement that the parties to it would have called by some other name, and the description earns its place only if the arrangement makes more sense with the word than without it.

What can be said with confidence is narrower, and it still matters. The Jews of the Second Temple period had a single term in which holding a charge and answering for it were one thing. The Jerusalem church reached for that term, in its Greek form, when it needed to explain what had happened to Judas. Luke kept both of its meanings alive across his two volumes. And the Church named its own highest office with a word that it first applied to a charge lost under a curse. Those are facts about language, available to anyone with a concordance and a Greek Psalter, and they do not depend on the thesis of my book.

Whether they support the thesis is the question the book itself has to answer, in the chapter on the garden. The question this essay can answer is smaller. When Peter stood up in Jerusalem and said, “Let another take his episkopē,” he was not only declaring a vacancy. He was quoting a psalm in which the man whose office passed to another had first been put on trial and condemned, and the word he used meant, to anyone who knew its Hebrew, both the post and the day of reckoning that came with it.

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[1]Acts 1:15–20, quoting Ps 69:25 and Ps 109:8. Biblical quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

[2]Gen 21:1.

[3]Gen 39:4–5; 40:4.

[4]Num 1:1–3, 19–46.

[5]Exod 20:5.

[6]Lev 5:23 (6:4 in English versions); Gen 41:36.

[7]Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), s.v. pāqad; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), s.v. pqd.

[8]Num 4:16; 1 Chr 24:3, 19; Isa 60:17.

[9]Isa 10:3; Hos 9:7.

[10]Jer 52:11; the NRSV has “put him in prison.”

[11]Ps 109:6–7, my translation. The verb in 109:6 is the Hiphil imperative of pāqad.

[12]Ps 109:8, my translation of pequddātô; the NRSV has “may another seize his position.”

[13]Ps 108:8 in the Septuagint, ed. Alfred Rahlfs (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1935).

[14]See Leslie C. Allen, Psalms 101–150, Word Biblical Commentary 21 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), on Ps 109; Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60–150, trans. Hilton C. Oswald (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989), on Ps 109.

[15]Luke 19:41–44.

[16]1 Tim 3:1.

[17]Num 20:22–29.

[18]Isa 22:15–25; the quotation is from 22:21.

[19]2 Kgs 2:9–15.

[20]Lev 16:20–22; Isa 53:9, 12.

[21]m. Berakhot 5:5, in The Mishnah, trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).

[22]Mark 14:51–52; 15:46.