Corn - Glenn Conjurske
Corn
The word “corn” in our day has a narrower meaning than it had in the past—-at least in America. Where it now means a certain kind of grain or vegetable, formerly known as maize, “corn” used to stand for grain in general, or for “a grain” of anything, such as “a corn of sand,” or “a peppercorn.” This being the case, the modern versions in general have altered “corn” to “grain.” More than thirty years ago, when I was a student at Bible school, I was assigned to teach Sunday School at an American Baptist church. The pastor was an Evangelical of a sort—-a graduate of Moody Bible Institute—-but so thoroughly enamored with the American Baptist Convention that he could scarcely pass an hour without praising it. He employed the modernistic Sunday School literature of the Convention, and I was obliged to spend much of my class time—-teaching high school students—-refuting the printed material. The pastor also endeavored to thrust in the modernistic Revised Standard Version, but some of the people objected to this. I recall hearing one of the men vent his disapproval quite forcefully after one of the meetings, saying, “Corn is corn”—-and forsooth not grain.
But he was as mistaken on this as he was ignorant in general. The fact is, corn is grain. It does not necessarily follow, however, that we ought to so render it in the Bible—-at least not in all cases. We suppose that spiritual minds would be extremely reluctant to relinquish such familiar expressions as “the old corn of the land” or “the ox that treadeth out the corn”—-much less “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” It may be that in less familiar passages we might profitably alter the word to “grain,” but meanwhile we think it proper to teach the people concerning the actual meaning of the word “corn.” A few examples of its historical usage may suffice for this.
The familiar “grain of mustard seed” in our Bibles is “a corne of syneuey” in the Wycliffe Bible—-variously spelled, of course—-and in the Anglo-Saxon “an senepes corn.”
The “bare grain” of I Cor. 15:37 is “bare corn” in all the early English Bibles (”nakid corne” in Wycliffe), till the Roman Catholic Rheims version altered it to “bare graine.” And this text well illustrates the old sense of the term. The Bishops’ Bible, for example, reads here, “And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shalbe, but bare corne, as of wheate, or of some other.” Corn, then, is wheat, or some other grain.
“The harvest of the earth” in Revelation 14:15 is “the corne of the erth” in Tyndale.
George Joye renders the latter part of Isaiah 28:25 thus: “and aftyr warde sowe it orderly now with whete and then with barley and so forth withe other corne acordinge to the strength of ye soyle.”
Bishop Hall, who was contemporary with the production of the King James Version, writes in his Occasional Meditations, under the title “Vpon the fanning of Corne,” “See how in the fanning of this Wheat, the fullest and greatest graines lye ever the lowest,” etc. Corn, then, is grain.
The same usage prevailed till a much later date. In the Guardian for 1870, under the regular heading of “CORN EXCHANGE,” we read, “Last week’s foreign arrivals were heavy in oats, good in wheat and barley, and moderate in other grains.” The same usage appeared until the turn of the century, and I would guess much later, though I have no papers at hand to check it. I do, however, have a dictionary, the Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, dated 1967 (the latest which I possess), which defines “corn” (in part) as “a small hard particle: GRAIN; a small hard seed; the seeds of a cereal grass and esp. of the important cereal crop of a particular region (as in Britain wheat, in Scotland and Ireland oats, and in the New World and Australia Indian corn).”
Returning to our English Bible, the “corn of wheat” which must fall into the ground and die has been long familiar to the saints, and the expression must be much endeared to those who have any depth of spiritual experience. On that account, then, it ought by all means to be retained. Neither is there any sufficient reason to alter it, as all the modern versions have done, for whatever the ignorant may think when they read of “corn in Egypt”—-however forcibly they may proclaim that “corn is corn”—-there is not the slightest danger here of anyone taking corn to mean maize. A corn of wheat must of necessity be a grain of wheat. This verse, then, actually provides a key to the understanding of the word—-provides it at any rate for any who will pay attention and think. And frankly, we do not suppose that the Bible, no matter how simplified, can possibly be of much use to anyone else. The book in its nature requires us to be attentive, observant, and thoughtful, and to attempt to so simplify it as to suit those who are not so is really labor lost. We may rewrite Milton in the language of first-graders, but they will not understand him for all that. Much less will the careless and thoughtless understand the word of God, simplify it as we may. Why should we labor to procure so much loss for the spiritual, for the sake of the unspiritual, when the latter are not even likely to profit from our pains?
Glenn Conjurske