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Our readers will likely already know where today’s entry for our Word of the Week comes from. My family and I heard it yesterday in the gospel, which was John’s account of the incident with Thomas. The other apostles had seen the risen Lord, but Thomas wasn’t with them at the time. He was stubborn. He did not give them credence. He had to see the marks in Jesus’ hands and feet, to touch them, even to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. That’s what he said. Maybe we can say that Thomas is the patron saint of brave and stalwart pessimists, like C. S. Lewis’s Puddleglum of happy memory. For the same Thomas, when Jesus told the apostles that he was going to Jerusalem, said, “Let us go too, so we may die with him.” But when Thomas does see the risen Lord and does touch his wounds, his affirmation knows no bounds. There is nothing timid about what he says then, no dithering, no pondering, no doubt. “My Lord and my God!” he cries.
Thomas, you’ll also remember, was so called because he was a twin: the word is taom in Hebrew, and John, to help out his Greek readers, says that it’s equivalent to the name Didymos, which also means twin. I don’t know whether Taom ever served as a proper name in Hebrew, rather than a nickname, but it does appear that you might well meet a Didymos in the Greek world. Many words for twin that I know of have to do with there being two: along with the Greek didymos, there’s English twin, and German Zwilling (think of their number zwei: a Zwilling is a Two-ling, just as a triplet is a Drilling, a Three-ling). But Hebrew taom doesn’t have to do with the number two. It’s related instead to a root suggesting completion: as boards that are coupled together to make up something whole.
Now then, does the number two have anything to do with doubting? Yes, quite a lot, as it turns out. We say we are “of two minds” about something, when we are wavering between yes and no. We can find that sense in Greek. When Jesus appeared before the apostles and the crowds at Bethany that final time, we are told that “some doubted,” Greek edistasan, from the verb distazein, suggesting that you are standing between two alternatives, wavering, hesitating. That doesn’t mean that they persisted in their hesitation. It’s one of the normal human reactions when we’re confronted with something utterly new to us, foreign, wondrous, impossible to file away in our usual categories. We find the same sense in German Zweifel, doubt — you are teetering this way and that way. So also in Latin dubitare, a verb built from the noun dubium, doubt, and if you give it the “frequentative” sense suggested by the suffix -ito, teetering or wavering is the way to look at it.
So the English word dubious in its old sense did not suggest something that probably was not true. It suggested that teetering, as you get when nearly equal weights are placed in each scale of the balance. When Milton’s Satan boasts that he opposed the power of God “in dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,” he is telling a flat-out lie. There was nothing dubious about it. The bad angels have their clocks cleaned by the good angels on each of the first two days, and on the third day the Son of God alone, unassisted, overwhelms them utterly at the first charge: it is as infinity against nothing.
Our word doubt, like the similar but unrelated word debt, came into English with William and his Norman conquerors. Doubt replaced the Old English word tweogan, meaning, as you may guess, being puzzled by two contrary choices, as if you were your own twin. By the time the words doubt and debt entered our language, the b in the Latin word had been lost in French before the t, so that in Chaucer you will see the words written as doute and dette. In fact, the b was never pronounced in English doubt and debt, and wasn’t even written in those words until around 1450 or so, when English scribes inserted it to bring the words closer in appearance to their Latin ancestors. Alas for schoolchildren everywhere! But the b does help to show the kinship between doubt and indubitable, and between debt and debit.
But let there be no doubt about it, since Thomas certainly didn’t hang on to any. As we say at Easter, “Christ is risen, He is risen indeed.”
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