Aramaic Word Study – Weaker Vessel – Mana Machal

I Peter 3:7: “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.”

The wife is the weaker vessel. Try that one out at the next women’s march. You may discover that they are not all that weak. In the Greek, the words weaker vessels are asthenestero skevel. Asthenestero comes from the root word asthenes which means to be delicate weak, sickly, infirmed, without strength and/or unimpressive. Skevel is the word for a vessel that doesn’t help this politically incorrect situation at all because it means property, merchandise or goods that is carried in a vessel. Does that make sense if we are to give honor to the wife as a piece of weak, unimpressive merchandise? Perhaps we could say that we are to honor the wife as you would with a delicate piece of merchandise. Some women might like that but still many would take offense to that as it still suggests she is just property.

Women in the Roman Empire by the first century had advanced to a level where they could own land, appear in court and write their own wills but still could not hold public office or join the military. Yet, there was a growing women’s lib movement and many would take offense at Peter’s language here as a weaker vessel.

Did Peter really call a wife a weaker vessel? I am afraid that in the Greek we will have to suck it up unless we want to take that leap and use the word delicate rather than weak.  I do know, however, some women who would resent being called delicate and from their appearance, I would have to agree that they do not put on the persona of a delicate little flower.

A little reality check here. There are some women who are weak and delicate and then there are some who are quite formable. Just like men, there are strong men and weak men. I really can’t see Peter making such a generalization that all women who are wives are weak. Every culture pretty much defines how a woman and/or a man demonstrates weakness and strength. The Word of God should transcend cultural roles and express the God-given differences between men and women.

What are these God-given differences, I am not even going to go there. Most people, however, not all, will agree there are psychological and biological differences between men and women and as much as some would like to think it not so, they still laugh at the countless sitcoms and movies that work these differences off of each other.

Still, that does not help us in determining whether Peter is a chauvinistic pig. So let’s start at the very beginning. Did Peter the beloved disciple really write first and second Peter? Well, I Peter 1:1 seems to clear that up. “Peter an Apostle of Jesus Christ.” Yep, that’s our Peter, the rough hard-talking, uneducated fisherman. But if this is written in Greek, then this uneducated ruffian was in fact someone with advanced knowledge in the Greek language. Another problem is that the rhetoric and philosophy expressed in this letter suggest someone with a formal education, which Peter did not have. Peter spoke an Old Galilean form of Aramaic, which was a pretty colloquial and backwater type language. Most scholars reject a Petrine authorship for these reasons. However, I would like to point out that Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman when he wrote some of his greatest philosophical books like The True Believer without much formal education. Although he later became a professor at Berkeley he had little formal education when he wrote The True Believer. Many who have little formal education are offered a Doctor of Letters for their works which equals or exceeds that of an educated person. I see no reason why Peter could not have developed some strong philosophical thought in his years of ministry. What I find hard to accept is his advanced knowledge of Greek.

If the Bible says this work is attributed to Peter, then I believe Peter is the author of this work. So the only conclusion is that Peter had his personal scribe Silvanus not only write the letter but translate it for Peter into Greek to be sent to the Greek churches of Asia Minor. This creates the problem of whether Silvanus’s translation of Peter’s letter from the Aramaic is the inspired Word of God or was Peter’s Aramaic version the inspired Word of God?  I am not a theologian so again I will not go there but I am convinced the original language came from the mouth of Peter and Peter did not speak fluent Greek. Silvanus could very well have been Peter’s translator but there is no proof of this either.

Nonetheless, when I go to the Aramaic version of this letter I find something much more politically correct making more sense than calling wives weak vessels. The word for vessel in Aramaic is mana which is a word for garments or clothes. Its root comes from Phoenicians origin for the outriggers of a ship. The outrigger’s of a ship are what keeps the ship on course and moving. Without it the ship is dead in the water.

So this vessel idea is really speaking of a ship and the out-rigging of a ship. The ou-trigging includes the sails which power the ship and the rudders that guide and navigate the ship. It would be fitting for a former fisherman to use a seafaring illustration. Thus the word for weak in the Aramaic is the word machal which means weak but weak only in the sense of paying off a debt to a debtor so he has no power over you and is weakened. Machal is more of the idea of neutralizing a threat. So following a nautical motif when the word machal to neutralize a threat is used as an adjective to the word mana the out-rigging of a ship it would express the idea of a wife who is the out-rigging of the vessel of her husband. When the storms of life come the sailor uses the out-rigging, the anchor, the rudder and the sails to steer the ship in such a way as to weather out the storm. Without the out-rigging the vessel is dead in the water and subject to whatever currents, it has no direction. With the mana the out-rigging or a man’s wife the man has direction and the power to follow that direction. When the storms of life come the wife and husband work together to navigate the storm and ride out the storm.

So a man honors his wife as a sailor honors the out-rigging of his ship. He takes care of it, protects it so that when the storms come they can work together to reach their destination safely. Without the out-rigging, the husband is doom to be adrift in the sea and sunk when a storm comes. Without a vessel, the rudder, the anchor, and the sails are of little value. Put them together and you can do a lot of fishing. Sort of like in the church I attend, the pastor and his wife are both ministers. She preaches a little sermonette before her husband preaches. She shares her husband’s duties as a co-pastor and believe me it works really well.