An ambiguity does not resolve itself. Somebody resolves it, and the common law worked out centuries ago that the cost of an ambiguity belongs to whoever supplied the words. Every ambiguous word in Eve's account was resolved against her by the party holding the pen, and the rule that would have run the other way was never reached for.
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Six words in the account given of Eve are genuinely ambiguous in their source languages. Teshuqah, itsavon, kephalē, authentein, hupotassō, ezer kenegdo. Each has at least two defensible readings and scholars still argue about every one.
Each was resolved the same way, and no single resolution is the thing that needs explaining. A word with a range can be read either way, and a range read in one direction across six words, four languages and sixteen centuries is not a range being used. It is an outcome with a set of citations attached.
[See EVE · THE LEXICAL TRESPASS · TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS]
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RESOLVE MEANS TO LOOSEN APART
Two words in the standard account of what translators do carry their operation on their face, and both are ordinary derivations that any dictionary will confirm.
Resolve is resolvere, re- and solvere, to loosen or untie, back. To resolve an ambiguity is not to discover which of the two readings was the real one. It is to untie the double reading so that only one strand is left holding, and the strand that is cut did not turn out to be wrong. It was let go of.
Render is reddere, red- and dare, to give back. A translator is said to render a text, which is a claim that what is handed on is what was handed over. A rendering that keeps one of two readings hands back less than it was given, and the word for the act still says it gave back everything.
That is two words and not a family, and the limit is deliberate. The wider sweep of re- words would be folk etymology, which this body of work refuses wherever it is tempting. One contrast is worth drawing though, because the vocabulary here is not all running one way: re-turn is re- and torner, to turn again, and it changes a facing rather than untying anything. It is the only one of the three that leaves both strands intact.
[See RE-TURNING · THE FORGED WARRANT OF THE WORD]
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THE LAW HAS A RULE FOR THIS
The tradition that produced the translations also produced, slowly and in its own commercial self-interest, the principle that answers the question the translations never asked.
Contra proferentem: an ambiguity is construed against the party who put the words forward. The Restatement (Second) of Contracts states it at § 206 under the heading Interpretation against the Draftsman, preferring, among reasonable meanings, the one that operates against the party who supplied the language or from whom the writing otherwise proceeds. And the section does not sit among the mechanics of construction. It sits in the chapter topic the drafters titled considerations of fairness and the public interest, which records that they understood the allocation of ambiguity to be a question about justice and not about grammar.
The criminal side says it without the commerce. The rule of lenity resolves an ambiguous penal statute in favor of the defendant, on the ground that where the state has written a law unclearly, the person facing the penalty is not the one who should absorb the lack of clarity.
So the principle, stated at its most general and in the law's own voice: whoever holds the pen does not also get the benefit of the doubt.
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AND THE DOCTRINE'S OWN DOMAIN IS HER EXACT POSITION
The rule is not applied uniformly, and the conditions under which it bites hardest are worth setting out, because they describe her situation and not some analogy to it.
It applies with most force to standardized terms, to writings produced by one side and presented to the other, and where the parties are of unequal bargaining power. It is weakened, and courts have said so, where the party receiving the terms is sophisticated and able to negotiate them.
Now name her position against those conditions. She did not draft the Hebrew, choose the Greek, commission the Latin, sit at Trent, translate for King James, or sit on any committee that produced any version since. The text was standardized, canonized and presented. The one party in the entire history of the document who had no hand in any draft of it is the party every ambiguity in it was resolved against, which is the precise inversion of the rule, applied in the precise circumstances the rule was built for.
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AND THE METHOD USED INSTEAD IS A REAL CANON, RUN WITHOUT ITS COUNTERWEIGHT
What was used in place of it is not a trick, and treating it as one gives away the finding.
Noscitur a sociis: a word is known by its companions. An unclear term is read in the light of the terms around it, and this is ordinary, daily, legitimate interpretive practice. It is also exactly Jerome's method at Genesis 3:16, which survives in his own reasoning: he does not claim to know what the word means, and he settles it from the second half of the verse, because the latter part speaks of the man's rule.
So the toolkit holds both a neighbor rule and a drafter rule, and they pull against each other on purpose, which is what makes a set of canons a set rather than a lever. The neighbor rule was run on every one of her words and the drafter rule on none of them, and a canon applied in one direction only has stopped being a canon.
[See JEROME · ITSAVON · TESHUQAH]
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AND AMBIGUITY IS AN ASSET TO WHOEVER MAY DECLINE TO RESOLVE IT
Ambiguity is not a cost to everybody. It is priced by position, and the same property is valued oppositely at the two ends of a relation.
His unclarity is deniability, and deniability is worth having: I never said that. That is not what I meant. You have taken it the wrong way. You are reading things in. Hers is a defect in her: mixed signals, she was not clear, she never actually said no, nobody could have known what she wanted. Identical imprecision, and whether it functions as a shield or as an admission is settled by which end of the channel it was spoken from.
Which is the disclosure finding in the register of meaning. The party required to be legible pays for every ambiguity, including his, and the party permitted to remain unclear is paid for his own.
[See MAKING KNOWN · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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AND SHE WAS BEGUILED BY AN AMBIGUITY SOMEBODY MANUFACTURED
The first ambiguity in the account was not found in the text. It was introduced, by a party who is named.
The serpent's opening move is a question, and a question put to a clear instruction does not add information to it. It adds doubt, and the doubt is the working material. Her own testimony identifies the author of it in four words: the serpent beguiled me. So the ambiguity has a proferens, he is named in the record by the only witness who named anybody, and the cost of it was assigned to her.
And working by question rather than by assertion is what made the assignment possible. A question states nothing, so there is no claim to be checked and no contradiction left behind for anybody to find. What it does instead is open a fork and hand her the choosing, and the choosing is hers in a way the fork never was. Afterwards the record shows a woman who decided.
And the assignment was then ratified, which is the part that outlasted everyone present. The account that blamed her became the record, and every resolution of every ambiguous word in it for the next three thousand years was performed by parties who had adopted that record first.
[See BEGUILING · DID GOD REALLY SAY · ADAM]
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AND THE BISTABLE FIGURE IS WHY POINTING HARDER DOES NOTHING
There is a reason the argument cannot be won by showing the other reading, and it is not that her reading is weaker.
In a genuinely ambiguous figure both percepts are in the figure and neither is an error. What decides which one a person reports is not the figure. It is the long training in which resolutions count as seeing clearly and which count as not paying attention, and that training is maintained at cost and pays out on every correct answer.
So she is not arguing against a mistake, she is arguing against a reinforced percept, and the demonstration she would need is one the other party performs on himself. Pointing at the second reading supplies him with nothing he does not have. He has the figure. What he does not have is any reason to flip, and several to keep seeing what he is seeing.
[See THE GESTALT · THE SELF-RATIFYING STRUCTURE]
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WHAT THIS ESTABLISHES AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
The objection is jurisdictional and it is correct as far as it goes.
Contra proferentem is a rule of contract construction. It does not govern the translation of scripture, it is a canon of last resort reached only when actual intent cannot be determined, its application to interpretation as distinct from construction has been limited, and courts have divided on its reach. No tribunal has jurisdiction over the Vulgate.
All granted, and the canons are not offered here as binding law over a translation. They are offered as evidence that the tradition which held the pen knew the principle, worked it out across centuries, wrote it into its own law of obligations under the heading of fairness, and applied it to protect parties bound by words they had no part in choosing. The same tradition's clerics held the pen on her six words and took the benefit of the doubt on every one. The rule of lenity shows the principle was never merely commercial: it is about who stands to lose.
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An ambiguity is a fork and a fork requires a hand.
Nothing in any of the six words chose a direction, and nothing in any of them had to. What decided was who was holding the pen, which way he was already facing, and whether anybody had the standing to send the question back to him. The law knows what to do with this and has known for a long time. It has simply never once been asked to do it here.
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