[Peace-discuss] "To cover sin with smooth names" on Neptune

[C. G. Estabrook]

On News from Neptune tonight (the "White Bull" edition, 7pm on ch. 6 & 99 and <http://urbanapublictelevision.org/livestream>; repeated thru the week) the question arose of the biblical source of the phrase "to cover sin with smooth names." 

It's Psalm 140 (141), verse 4, in the 4th century Latin version of the Hebrew bible, the Vulgate. (The Vulgate numbering of the Psalms is slightly different from that of the KJV.) There the phrase is "ad excusandas excusationes in peccatis," a gerundive somewhat difficult to render into English (perhaps "for excuses to be excused about sins," literally).

"To cover sin with smooth names" was the elegant translation by Ronald Knox (1888-1957), who translated the entire bible "from the Latin Vulgate in the light of the Hebrew and Greek originals" (in addition to writing crime novels) in the 1950s.  Knox' bible translations were used in the English text of the Catholic high mass - the old Latin, 'Tridentine' mass (from the 16th century) that was swept away by the Vatican Council, which began fifty years ago this week. I still have the missal (mass book) and Knox' bible in which I read them long ago (and which I found, not without difficulty, while trying to answer this question). 

That mass quoted  Ps. 140(141):2-4a as follows:

Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea sicut incensum in conspectu tuo: elevatio manuum mearum sacrificium vespertinum. Pone, Domine, custodiam ori meo, et ostium circumstantiae labiis meis: ut non declinet cor meum in verba malitiae, ad excusandas excusationes in peccatis... 

Knox: "Welcome as incense-smoke let my prayer rise up before thee, Lord; when I lift up my hands, be it as acceptable as the evening sacrifice. Lord, set a guard on my mouth, a barrier to fence in my lips, lest my heart turn to thoughts of evil, to cover sin with smooth names..."

That seems to me to describe rather well the work of the propagandist. --CGE
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