And to you as well.



Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are indeed respected religious leaders. In my English Bible the word that is most commonly used to describe them is "patriarch". In many ways they are thought of as the "founding fathers" or "forefathers" of Judaism and the nation of Israel in both a religious and a political sense.

You're asking me to draw a conclusion regarding someone I have never meant or spoken to. That probably is not very fair to them or to you. For, I really have no information with regard to anyone's motive. But if pressed, I would say, probably that is NOT the reason. I suspect that it is because in trying to stress the important place of Abraham and Isaac in the life and history of the community that they adopted a word from the language of the culture that they were translating into that they understood to most closely fit their understanding of the role of Abraham and Isaac to the subsequent nations of Judah and Israel and to the Jews of Jesus' day who became the Church.

Sometimes they have to pick words that are not always the right translation of the term in order to get at the idea behind the word, and that may have been what happened here. Let me give you another (true) illustration from the country of Guatemala.

There is a group of Indians in Guatemala for whom some translators were trying to translate the Bible. And they came to a verse in Luke (2:19) where Mary is remembering all of the miraculous events surrounding Jesus' birth, and the verse says: "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." And they wanted to translate it into the language spoken by these Guatemalan Indians, but they were having trouble with the last word of the verse. It is καρδια (kardia) from which we get English words like cardia or cardiac. And so in English it is translated "heart". And likewise in Spanish the word is "corazon", meaning heart, because in both English and Spanish speaking cultures the heart is often understood to be the place where one's greatest emotions are stored. If you've ever been "in love" you may have even felt that tightness that can grip you in the chest or stomach and if you lost someone dear to you felt like your "heart was breaking".

Well, in Guatemala, these Indians had the same emotional and physiologocial reactions to love as well. It is a universal human condition. But as they grasped their chest or abdomen, they did not sense that the pain or joy they were feeling was located in the organ we call the heart, they who would often hunt birds for food found a organ in the bird that was very close to where they felt this in their own bodies. And this organ was filled with small pea-sized gravel. It was the bird's gizzard. And whenever they felt those pains in their own chest, it made them think of the rocks in the bird's chest cavities. So, they attributed the pain not to the heart, which was just another organ like the stomach or instestines, in their common language when they loved a person they loved them with all of their gizzard. If they missed someone, they were not heart-broken, but gizzard-broken. And they stored their most precious memories of people not in their hearts but in their gizzards.

I know that might sound strange to people who have grown up speaking of feeling things with one's heart, but these Guatemalan Indians didn't feel things with their hearts, they felt love and other personal emotions with their gizzards. So, when the Bible translators translated that verse into the dialect of this small group of Guatemalan Indians they had to decide do they say that Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her "heart" -- as this was the best translation of the word that Luke had written? Or do they say that Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her "gizzard" - which was not the word Luke had used, but communicated the idea to these Guatemalan Indians in the way they were most familiar with thinking? Eventually, the translators chose "gizzard" as they decided that Luke chose the word "heart" as a figure of speach for where we feel things most deeply, not because it was the organ that pumps blood through our bodies. And for these Guatemalan Indians, the figure of speech that they used to express the idea that Luke was trying to express was not "heart" but "gizzard", so gizzard was actually the better translation of what Luke was trying to say, even if it wasn't the word he had actually used.

I don't know, but I suspect that some similar process was used in selecting "hazrat" in the Bible passages you are referring to. It wasn't done to attract Muslims as much as the translators were trying to communicate the idea of a person who was a leader of great respect among the people of the religion who were telling his story.