The lexicology of yi 已 and ji 既
He who sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of his fury will fail. (Prov 22:8)
In terms of my thinking and habits I am quite possibly the furthest thing you are likely to find in the United States from an adherent of the theology of Jehan Cauvin. Yet on account of family obligations, it used to be the case that I would attend a Congregationalist church on a semi-regular basis. My parents are Methodists, just as their fathers were both Methodists, yet in my mother’s rural small-town northern New England context, ecumenism at least among the mainline Protestant churches was simply a necessary fact of life. On account of budgetary limitations and the physical distance of parishioners from each other, it so happened that the First Congregational Church of Bakersfield combined with the Bakersfield United Methodist Church and the East Fairfield Congregational Church to form the United Church of Bakersfield and Fairfield in 2007. Yet even before I was born, the three churches had been pooling their resources and sharing each other’s church spaces.
I remember from my youth that one of the advertising campaigns of the United Congregationalist Church, emblazoned on a poster in the lobby of the First Congregational Church of Bakersfield, was entitled ‘God is still speaking’. Yet even then—liberal mainline Lutheran though I still was at the time—I remember that ad campaign never sat right with me. For one thing, if God is still speaking, then why are you talking over Him with your ad campaign? And why are you giving us, not God’s words, but (supposedly) those of a Hollywood actress and comedienne from the thirties? Gracie Allen died in 1969. It’s highly unlikely that she’s still speaking!
What the Psalmist said—past tense!—is quite a bit more interesting, and powerful, than that.
אחת דּבּר אלהים שׁתּים־זוּ שׁמעתּי
God has spoken once, and I have heard these two things. (Psalm 61:12)
That is to say: God has already finished speaking, but we are still obligated to hear again what He has said. This is because if power belongs to God, then so does mercy. That’s a very good thing for us, because human beings very rarely hear things right the first time. And God is possessed of patience: not infinite patience, but certainly patience beyond what human beings possess.
In Mandarin Chinese, the compound yijing 已经 is used for ‘already’, though the lexeme yi 已 is somewhat more flexible. It can be used, for example in zaoyi 早已 ‘a long time ago’, buyi 不已 ‘without end’, eryi 而已 ‘that’s all’ and yiwang 已往 ‘bygones’. This term originated as a pictograph (xiangxing 象形) that was repurposed in the style of a rebus, as a loangraph (jiajie 假借). In oracle-bone and bronze-inscription forms, it shows a snake (si 巳), possibly with a truncated tail. The two characters si 巳 and yi 已 converged in their seal-script forms, such that Xu Shen in the Shuowen jiezi mistook them for the same character. Yet in the early Zhou these two characters had already diverged in their ranges of semantic function.
The word yi 已 was used in the context of the Chinese Classics, though its functionality was largely to mark the ‘end’ of something, or a ‘cessation’ or a ‘pause’. 心之憂矣、曷維其已。 ‘The sorrow of my heart; how can it cease?’ (Book of Odes 《詩經》, Odes of Bei 邶風, ‘Green Robe’ 綠衣 1) Or: 父曰嗟、予子行役、夙夜無已。 ‘My father is saying, “Alas! my son, abroad on the public service, morning and night never rests.”’ (Odes, Odes of Wei 魏風, ‘Hill Ascent’ 陟岵 1) It can be used as an intensifier: 昊天已威、予慎無罪。 ‘The terrors of great Heaven are excessive, but indeed I have committed no crime.’ (Odes, Decade of Xiao Min 小閔之什, ‘Artful Words’ 巧言 1) Here the intensifier acts like this: Hao Tian 昊天 ‘Great Heaven’ yi 已 ‘is yet, is already’ wei 威 ‘dreadful, awful, terrifying’. It could also function as a verb in the sense of ‘to execute, to discharge, to complete’: 侯、甸群后咸在，百官總已以聽冢宰。 ‘All the princes from the domain of the nobles and the royal domain were present; all the officers (also), each continuing to discharge his particular duties, were there to receive the orders of the chief minister.’ (Book of Documents 《尚書》, Book of Shang 商書, ‘Instructions of Yi’ 伊訓 1)
The function of ‘already’ is implied in some places in the Classics, but the more common lexeme used for ‘already’ throughout the Zhou Dynasty was ji 既: 女曰觀乎。士曰既且。 ‘A lady says, “Have you been to see?” A gentleman replies, “I have been.”’ (Odes, Odes of Zheng 鄭風, ‘Zhen and Wei’ 溱洧 1) The functionality of ji 既 was quite specialised even from oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions: it shows a woman turning her face away from a steaming bowl of food, implying that she’s ‘full’ or ‘done’ eating! At the time the Classics were written, during the Warring States, yi 已 was already in the process of replacing ji 既 in vernacular use. By the Han Dynasty, yi 已 would be the more commonly-used for ‘already’, with ji 既 taking on a literary or antiquarian tone.
Several reasons have been suggested for this process of replacement. One possible reason is phonetic similarity, though some scholarship counter-indicates this. In Old Chinese the two lexemes已 /*ɢ(r)əʔ/ and既 /*kɯds/ were much more distinct than they are today, though this distinction may have been less pronounced in certain regional dialects. Another possibility is semantic extension: yi 已, already functioning as ‘end, cessation, pause’, could have taken on the role of ‘already’—similarly to how the Middle English word alredy connoted ‘completely’… or to how Singlish ‘already’ is used, not so much as an adverb ‘previously’, but as a perfective-tense marker in loan-translation from le 了 or Malay sudah ‘finished’. The third possibility is the one I suggest above: that yi 已 was grammaticalised as an adverb ‘already’, through its prior use in the Classics as an intensifier—similarly to how the French déjà ‘already’ evolved from the Middle French (des)ia, used emphatically as in Rabelais’s Gargantua: Le pauvre Monsieur du Pape meurt desia de peur. ‘The poor Pope is already dying from fear.’
In the Semitic languages, there is a parallel between yi 已 and ji 既, on the one hand, and the Semitic root on the other which is reflected in the Hebrew k-l-h כ-ל-ה ‘pause, cessation, end’ and the verbal form of the Arabic k-l-l ك ل ل ‘delay, hindrance, weary, to become tired’. The Aramaic and Classical Syriac word kale’ ܟܠܐ ‘to stop, to hinder, to prevent’ functions more as an agentive transitive verb, but it derives etymologically from the same triliteral consonant cluster. As found here in Isaiah:
ואני אמרתּי לריק יגעתּי לתהוּ והבל כּחי כלּיתי אכן משׁפּטי את־יהוה וּפעלּתי את־אלהי׃
But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God.’ (Isa 49:4)
Note the proximity and semantic pairing with yāga‘ יגע ‘to toil, to labour, to grow weary’ here, as it is found also in Isaiah 40:28. This semantically parallels the connotation of yi 已 as ‘to discharge (a task)’; though the emphasis in Hebrew is more on the effort spent, and in Chinese on the result being complete. The teaching in Isaiah is that God’s capacities are never exhausted. God can never be tired out. He wants for nothing. Therefore He can continue to act without ceasing, and He can outlast any perversity or opposition that is brought against Him.
Yet we do see the function kālâ כלה applied to God. In Genesis 2:2, waykal ’Elōhîm bayyôm haššǝbî‘î mǝla’ktô, ’āšer ‘āsâ ויכל אלהים בּיּום השּׁביעי מלאכתּו אשׁר עשׂה ‘and on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done’, and He rested from His labours. This was not because His capacities were exhausted, but so that He could teach His creatures to give each other a rest, and not exploit each other to exhaustion. Note that the Book of Odes says something very similar to this! 或燕燕居息、或盡瘁事國。或息偃在床、或不已于行。 ‘Some enjoy their ease and rest, and some are worn out in the service of the State; some rest and loll upon their couches, and some never cease marching about.’ (Odes, Decade of Bei Shan 北山之什, ‘Bei Shan’ 北山 4) The conceit of this Ode is that Heaven is merciful to its creatures, like the swallows (yan 燕), and lets them rest in the trees—but that merciless human kings force their servants to labour and work and expend themselves while they never lift a finger.
But now we get to the heart of the matter. The Gracie Allen-quoting liberal Calvinists get it quite badly wrong when they say that ‘God is still speaking’. The irony is that they get it wrong for exactly the same reasons that the Christian-nationalist Reformed conservatives do. No—God is finished speaking with you, precisely because even His human prophets get sick of your human magistrate-worshipping nonsense!
God finishes (kālâ כלה) speaking to Abraham in Genesis 18:33, partly because He’s sick of Abraham’s bargaining on behalf of a pair of truly worthless and inhospitable cities, whose sin is cruelty to the poor and to the foreigner. He very nearly does the same thing to the Israelites in the desert; He’s fed up dealing with this ungrateful, callous, backstabbing rabble of former slaves and threatens to finish them (wa’akallēm ואכלּם, Exo 32:9-10), but Moses begs Him to relent, and He does (Exo 32:11-14). Joshua has to warn the Israelites again that God will be finished with them (wǝkillâ וכלּה) if they keep boasting of their own strength, lording their mastery over their neighbours, and running after other gods (Josh 24:19-20).
The Lord finishes (kǝkallôt כּכלּות) speaking through Jeremiah, and as soon as He does, it is the Israelites who surround him and threaten to kill him (Jer 26:8), because God’s words are not what they want to hear. The same happens in Jeremiah 43. And the same thing happens in Jeremiah 51, when he prophesies to the Babylonians that they will be cut off and sink like a stone in the Euphrates. Dare you tell me that ‘God is still speaking’ while you’ve been committing a genocide in Gaza in His name, and against His will, for the past twenty months? If He is still speaking, why aren’t you hearing Him? If He is still speaking, why aren’t you doing what He commands?
זורע עולה יקצר־און ושׁבט עברתו יכלה׃
He who sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of his fury will fail. (Prov 22:8)
Do you get the drift now? All your civil leaders, all your elected officials, all your political messiahs, all your NATO ‘daddies’ who are not God, will be cut off. God is done speaking. The message was clear. The problem, O human, is between your ears.
May He Whose strength never fails, give us ears to hear what He has already spoken.
