http://esv.org/wp-content/uploads/misc/esv_2011_changes.swf

Plato used these two words interchangeably, it seems, or at least collocatively for playful emphasis:

[τὰ] μέλη [τε] καὶ [ἅμα] μέρη

(Philebus 14e, Timaeus 77a, Laws 795e, Phaedrus 238a, Ion 14a)

“parts and pieces also”?

“the members and likewise the parts” is how commentator Robert Gregg Bury and then translator Benjamin Jowett render the phrase in the Philebus.

I really like how Seth Benardete puts the whole clause in the Philebus:

“…whenever someone divides up in speech the limbs and different parts of each thing… “

In (the particularly gruesome) Judges 19:29, the word is used very generally for “part.” The concubine is cut up into 12 mele, surely just “parts.” In Leviticus, animals are cut into mele.

But even if the word came to mean specifically “body parts,” I think that as a matter of translation we still need “parts” in English. I don’t see how “body parts” will work.

(There’s also a word meros, whose meaning intersects significantly with melos. I wonder if they are variants of the same thing, or (as happens sometimes) if melos came to mean what it did partly because it sounded like meros.)

Either way, I think Romans 12:4-5 locks us into “parts” for a translation. I can’t think of any other word that will make it possible to translate the imagery well: For just as in one body [soma] we have many [polus] parts [melos] and not all parts [melos] do the same thing, so we, though many [polus], are one body [soma] through Christ, and each part [melos] of the other.

I think the Greek order:

soma … polus … melos … melos … polus … soma … melos

is part of the poetry. It’s classic antimetabole (ABC//CBA) with the middle word repeated at the end for poetic force. And with “parts” we can capture this in English (“body … many … parts … parts … many … body … parts”).

Do you think that Paul means “limbs”? Ann Nyland likes “body parts” for the word in Romans. I think her English works for Callirhoe as well (as in “Then, stretching her body parts, she began to stir”). What best English would you propose?

I don’t think anyone is doubting what the Greek means. The question is how best to render it in English. “Member” doesn’t seem to do the trick.

compare:

μηδὲ παριστάνετε τὰ μέλη ὑμῶν ὅπλα ἀδικίας τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ· … καὶ τὰ μέλη ὑμῶν ὅπλα δικαιοσύνης τῷ θεῷ. (Romans 6:13 )

ἔπειτα κινεῖν ἤρξατο κατὰ μέλη τὸ σῶμα (Callirhoe 1.8:1.4)

G.P. Goold translates the latter, “Then she began to stir, limb by limb.” And of course, “she” is Callirhoe who has no male-only member.

Romans 6:13 ESV
13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

This is a great example. At best, “member” for melos belongs to a dialect that no one I know speaks. At worst, it sounds like the pornographic spam I keep getting.

-Joel