The Power of the Footnote
T. C. Robinson reminds us how important footnotes are.
Footnotes are generally used for three purposes:
1. To offer additional information, such as a source the text might be quoting, or a similar passage.
2. To let the reader know that the translator is not sure what the original means.
3. To let the reader know that even though the original meaning is clear, the translator is not sure how to express that meaning in English.
Footnotes like (1) seem helpful, but only in some contexts. Sometimes too much information can detract from the power of a passage, and I can understand why some readers might not want these extra-information footnotes.
I think that a careful translator will let the reader know how much faith to have in a particular rendering, so footnotes like (2) can be very important. If the Greek or Hebrew really is inscrutable, I think the translator has an obligation to let the reader know. Still, sometimes the footnotes offer alternative meanings without giving the reader any further guidance. (I have a particularly egregious example here.) I’m not sure how helpful these are, particularly as some lay readers may want to make do with the experts’ best guess.
But I think a translation without footnotes like (3) is deceptive. If the translator knows what the original means, and knows that there’s no way to express it fully in English, why wouldn’t the translator use a footnote to make the full meaning clear?
Robinson suggests in a response to a comment that, “Some translations are so committed to a particular rendering that they don’t even want to consider an alternative rendering.” That would reduce the need for category (2) footnotes, but not category (3). Surely every translator must encounter Hebrew and Greek that can’t be nicely coerced into English.
What do you think? Is there a situation when you’d prefer not to have any footnotes?
When the Bible Quotes Itself
John Hobbins writes in favor of “retaining the standard ‘x and y’ collocation ‘God and men’” in I Samuel 2:26 and Luke 2:52, because it is an example of “standard literary English.”
I think “peace on earth and good will toward men,” — another example that John mentions — is now a perfect example of what I call the Bible quoting itself.
Even though Luke 2:14 was original prose when it was written, precisely because it has become such a common phrase in English now, it’s hard to read “good will toward men” without seeing first a Bible quotation, and only second whatever it might actually mean. (Luke 2:14 has been highlighted recently by Jim West, by Clayboy, on BBB and in a slew of other places.)
This translation dilemma is not unique to the Bible. Shakespeare, too, has been facetiously criticized because he just “strung together a bunch of well known quotations.” A reader who reads Shakespeare for the first time may now read a “well known quotation” where Shakespeare penned original words.
Similarly, “dust and ashes” is now an English expression, whereas it was novel Hebrew once. Like “good will toward men,” it’s hard to read “dust and ashes” and actually see the words that make up the phrase.
I think this is a translation problem, because it’s usually a mistake to translate a novel thought with a well-known expression. More importantly, it’s surely a mistake to translate a phrase that was intended literally with a phrase that can only be understood figuratively. As an example of the latter, what we would do if a foreign text referred to “driving me up a wall” and really meant “driving up a wall”? The seemingly obvious text would be completely wrong if “driving up a wall” wasn’t an idiom in the original language.
Similarly, “dust and ashes” wasn’t an idiom in the OT, nor (as I understand it) was “good will toward men” in the NT.
But in many cases like these we seem to have little choice.
As it happens, though, we have a great alternative for Luke 2:14. And that’s getting rid of the word “men,” which I don’t think is what Luke meant. The original point was “people,” male and female alike.
The debate over gender and language has been fierce and on-going, but I think this example is particularly instructive.
In favor of keeping “men”: Even though “men” may not usually be the right word to express anthropoi, it would be a shame to destroy such a well-known quotation. (I have some thoughts about quoting the Bible when the translation keeps changing here.)
In favor of changing “men”: Not only is “men” the wrong word to express anthropoi, but even if it were accurate, we want to avoid a familiar phrase in translating an original one.
In other words, sometimes “that’s the traditional way of translating it” or “it’s a well known phrase” may mean precisely that it has to be changed.
Too Much Emphasis
It seems that the default explanation for an unknown grammatical feature is to assume, often wrongly, that it is “emphatic.” Here are four examples, three from Hebrew (skip to them: one, two, three) and one from Greek (skip to it here).
The Examples
The Infix Nun
From time to time, a nun will appear between a verb and its pronominal objective ending. For example, in Psalm 72:15, we find y’varachenhu. Breaking down the verb form, we find the prefix y’- representing third-person singular future; the verb varach, “bless”; and the suffix -hu for “him.” So far, the verb means “he will bless him.” But there’s also an added -en- in the middle. That’s the infixed nun, commonly called the “nun emphatic.”
Because nuns are frequently replaced by a dagesh in Biblical Hebrew, it is more common to find the “nun emphatic” represented by nothing more than a dagesh. Probably the best known example is in the Priestly Benediction from Numbers 6:24-26. The last verb of Numbers 6:25 is vichuneka, with a dagesh in the final kaf representing the “nun empahtic” that dropped out.
But there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that this nun has emphatic force.
The Infinitive Absolute
A much more common Hebrew construction is the “infinitive absolute” in conjunction with a conjugated verb form. For example, in Genesis 2:17 we find mot tamut, which the KJV notes in a footnote is literally “dying thou shalt die.” Based on the (wrong) assumption that this doubling of verb forms is emphatic, the KJV translates “thou shalt surely die” here. (As it happens, this Hebraism is preserved in the LXX thanatu apothaneisthe, “by death die.”)
But not only is there no evidence that this construction is emphatic, there is evidence that it is not. In Genesis 3:4 the snake tries to convince the women to eat from the forbidden tree; he (it?) reassures her that lo mot t’mutun. Obviously this doesn’t mean “you will not surely die.” It just means “you will not die.”
The Lengthened Imperative
Frequently a verb form will have two imperatives: a shorter one, essentially the future without the prefix, and a longer one with an additional heh at the end. For example, from titen (“you will give”) we have both ten in Genesis 14:21 and t’nah in Genesis 30:26. Some grammars, such a Gesenius (wrongly, in my opinion), suggest that the latter is “give!” Again, there’s no evidence for an emphatic reading in these verb forms. (The forms are also not limited to the imperative, as we see in the continuation of Genesis 30:26, with elecha for elech.)
The Greek Emphatic Pronouns
The forth example comes from Greek, which has two sets of 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns. For example, “my” is either mou or emou. The latter form is called “emphatic” because it is widely assumed to convey particular emphasis. Once again, though, there is nothing to suggest that the longer forms are necessarily more emphatic than the shorter ones. (Bill Mounce has a post — also available here — where he similarly notes that sometimes the “emphatic forms [...] are significant, but when they are objects of prepositions, evidently not.” In other words, he notes a case where the “emphatic” forms are not emphatic.)
Summary
What all four of these cases have in common is that the supposedly emphatic forms are longer than the ordinary ones. I think there has been a general if misguided assumption that longer words are more emphatic that shorter ones. At one level, it seems reasonable. And there are even times when it’s true (I give some examples here). But it’s not a general principal.
I think we have to rethink all of these “emphatic” forms with an eye toward figuring out what they really represent.
Translate But Don’t Editorialize
We just saw a case of an attempt to translate the pragmatics of a text instead of the text itself.
In general, a text will have a variety of implications, morals, allusions, etc. I think that a good translation of the text will match the original with a translation that has similar implications, morals, allusions, and so forth. Sometimes, however, translators are tempted to focus on one aspect of the text; then they translate that aspect instead of the text. The chart at the right depicts the two approaches.
For example, the “golden rule” is explained in Matthew 7:12 as outos gar estin o nomos kai oi profitai, “for this is the law and the prophets.” Ignoring for the moment what exactly “the law and the prophets” is (probably the Jewish Canon at the time), we still find translation variations for outos gar estin. For example (with my emphasis):
- this is…. (ESV, NAB)
- this sums up…. (NIV)
- this is a summary of…. (NLT)
- this is the meaning of…. (NCV)
- this is what [the Law and the Prophets] are all about…. (CEV)
- add up [God's Law and Prophets] and this is what you get. (The Message)
I think that the NIV, NLT, NCV, CEV, and The Message get it wrong. Each of those versions translated something related to the text instead of the text itself.
Presumably, the translators for some of these versions decided that it’s just not true that the Law “is” the Golden Rule, but if so, what they missed is that it’s equally (un)true in Greek as it is in translation.
Perhaps the point of the passage is that the golden rule sums up the Law and the Prophets, but again, even if that’s true, “sums up” doesn’t seem like the right translation, because I don’t think it’s the job of the translation to jump from the text to its point for us.
By focusing on the point, or the moral, or the message, of the text, translators disguise their interpretation as translation. (This is, by the way, what I think Dr. Leland Ryken dislikes so much about the translations he criticizes, and I think in this regard he is correct to protest.)
It seems to me that when the lines between commentary and translation are blurred, it does a disservice to both.
On Translating Pragmatics
A well-known example in linguistics describes a group of people sitting a living room that has become chilly because a window has been left open. “It’s cold in here,” one person says, by which he means, “please close the window.” The second meaning is the pragmatic meaning in this case.
The issue is important for translation because many people — wrongly, in my opinion — try to translate the pragmatic meaning. We just saw an example from Bill Mounce (criticized by me here, by Steve Runge, Mike Aubrey and others). He took the text of the beatitudes and tried to turn their point into a translation.
Both English and ancient Greek allow a pragmatic generalization toward exclusivity. In English, “First Class customers on Delta airlines get dinner” can reasonably be interpreted to mean “only First Class customers…,” just as the Greek “the merciful … shall obtain mercy” can reasonably be interpreted to mean “only the merciful….” But precisely because the pragmatics work the same way in English and Greek, they shouldn’t be translated, any more than “it’s cold in here” should be translated into, say, Spanish, as “please close the window.”
When God answered Job in Job 38 with the words, “where were you when I established the earth?” I think the point was, “what makes you think you can understand suffering?” But that doesn’t mean that the point is the translation.
There are times when a translation has to reflect pragmatics. But I think that what’s conveyed by inference or allusion in one language ought to be similarly conveyed by inference or allusion in translation. Anything less diminishes the beauty and power of the original.
Please take those quotation marks off your interpretation
Rick Warren tweeted:
To see consumerism on steroids, come here to Tokyo. “Life is not measured by how much one owns.” Luke 12:15
But neither Luke nor Jesus said that. Rick Warren did. (To be fair, so did the New Century Version translation.) The original Greek reads, “life is not estin…,” and estin just means “is.” So the phrase means, “life isn’t how much one owns.” (The meaning of the verb is not generally a disputed point.)
The translators of the NCV, though, decided to interpret Luke by adding the word “measured.” Maybe they’re right, maybe not, but either way, it seems to me that the quotation marks have to go.
I suppose there’s a theoretical sense in which quotation marks never belong around a translation (unless it’s the translation that’s being quoted). What was said in Greek can’t literally be directly quoted in English. But as a matter of practicality, most people know the difference between what someone said and what someone implied. And only the former gets quotation marks.
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” It’s a quotation. The subtext is, “why aren’t you someone I can marry? Why are you Romeo?” But to put quotations around my interpretation is simply to misquote and mislead. Even if I’m right, I’m wrong if I claim: Shakespeare wrote, “Why can’t I marry you?”
Similarly, even if Jesus meant that “life isn’t measured…” to put quotation marks around what he meant is to misquote and mislead.
I think we see the same sort of thing in Bill Mounce’s claim today that “the nuance of autos is [...] they alone” in the beatitudes in Matthew. (His post appears here, too.) Dr. Mounce’s point is that, for example, in saying “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs [autin] is the kingdom of heaven”:
Jesus is not saying that the poor in spirit, among others, are blessed. He is saying that they and they alone will inherit the kingdom.
Probably. But when Dr. Mounce adds:
[T]he fact of the matter is that this is what the Greek text says. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs, and theirs alone, is the kingdom of God.”
he is confusing what the text means and what the speaker (may have) implied. The Greek is no more or less ambiguous than the English, “…theirs is the kingdom of God” (though I might quibble about the English grammar.) And by putting quotation marks around his (probably correct) interpretation, it seems to me that Dr. Mounce is misquoting and misleading.
There’s an important place for interpretation. But I think part of its value lies in being distinguished from translation.
So, please — Pastor Warren, Dr. Mounce, and so many others — take those quotation marks off of your interpretations.
Who is the King of Kings?
If for no other reason, the phrase “king of kings and lord of lords” is famous because it’s in Handel’s Messiah.
We first find “king of kings” in the OT, where the appellation is used for Pagan rulers: Artaxerxes in Ezra (where “king of kings” is the Aramaic melech malchaya) and Nebuchadnezzar in Ezekiel and Daniel (in Hebrew and Aramaic, respectively). The Babylonian rulers were “kings of kings,” reflecting their desire to rise above other, lower kings. (Based on this, Jewish custom would later call God melech malchei ha-m’lachim, “king of the kings of kings,” the final salvo of one-upmanship emphasizing God’s power over the “kings of kings.”)
In the NT, the phrases “king of kings” and “lord of lords” each have two Greek equivalents, a fact that is hidden by all of the English translations that I know of.
In Revelation we find phrases that are structurally similar to “king of kings” and “lord of lords,” basileus basileon and kurios kurion, respectively. The first is the same Greek phrase that we find in the LXX in Ezra, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
But in I Timothy 6:15 we find the less-expected basileus ton basileuonton — similar to “ruler of the rulings” — and kurios ton kurieuonton (“lord of the lordings,” as it were).
The difference is particularly surprising in light of the otherwise similar phrasing in I Timothy 6:15-16 and Daniel 2:37, including the fact that timi — variously “honor” or “glory” — is ascribed to the “kings of kings” in both places.
Is the different Greek wording for “king of kings” in I Timothy an irrelevant detail, best hidden (as it currently is) by translations? Or should translations let the English reader see that the wording in I Timothy is different than what we find elsewhere?
Q&A: Is God’s Son The Son of God?
Another great question from the About page:
I have a question about Matthew 27:54. The centurion and the rest of the detachment set to guard JesusÂ’ body cried out and said “truly he was the Son of God!” — or is that really what they said?
Since it lacks the articles in Greek, and Latin doesn’t have articles, is it possible that they really said “truly he was the son of a god!”?
It’s a simple question with a complex answer.
There are two parts to understanding the issue.
The first is how Greek conveys possessives like “God’s.” In Greek, a possessor is marked by the genitive case, similar to the apostrophe “s” in English. So “God” in Greek is theos and “God’s” is theou. This same genitive also plays the role that “of God” does in English. Similarly “Paul” is paulos and “of Paul” and “Paul’s” is paulou.
At first glance, this seems to be Greek 101, but there a very important nuances that hide in the details. To get a sense of them, we can look just at English, and note that there are three expression that look like they should mean the same thing but do not: “Paul’s,” “of Paul,” and “of Paul’s.” Moving to less religiously charged words helps, so we can better compare:
- I am a friend of Bill. / I am a vice-president of the company.
- I am the friend of Bill. / I am the vice-president of the company.
- I am a friend of Bill’s. / I am a vice-president of the company’s.
- I am the friend of Bill’s. / I am the vice-president of the company’s.
- I am Bill’s friend. / I am the company’s vice-president.
Some of these sentences are ungrammatical in English (“I am a VP of the company’s”) and some are odd (“I am the friend of Bill”). Proper names work differently that common nouns, which is why “friend of Bill’s” is so much better than “vice-president of the company’s.” Importantly, some of these phrases imply “the”: “I’m the company’s VP” most naturally means that the company has only one VP. In short, we see a lot of complexity, and subtle nuance related to (1) nouns vs. proper names; and (2) definite vs. indefinite readings.
The second part to understanding Matthew 27:54 is even more complex. “God” in Greek is either theos (“god”) or o theos (“the god”). In John 1:1, for example, the word was with o theos but the word was theos.
My guess is that the two ways of saying “God” convey different nuances, but I’ve yet to see a convincing analysis of the pattern, even though there are lots of partial explanations. Until we understand the pattern, though, I think it will be almost impossible to know how the two phrases for God interact with the genitive.
It’s perfectly reasonable to think that “[a] son of god” means “one son (among many) of one god (among many),” but that’s just based on our English grammar. The syntactically parallel “[a] son of Moses” is only likely — again based on English grammar — to mean “one son (among many) of (the one and only) Moses.” Yet the English “Moses’ son” might mean “(the one any only) son of (the one and only Moses),” even though the Greek would be the same in the last two cases.
We also have the word order to deal with. In Matthew 27:54 (along with 14:33), we find theou uios, instead of the more common reverse order.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think we can conclude that the Greek means what “a son of a god” would in English. So your interpretation is certainly possible, but I don’t think it’s more (or less) likely than the more common “Son of God.” (I also think that theou uios would have sounded very different in Greek than o uios tou theou [e.g., Matthew 26:63], with two determiners and a different word order — and as a guess, the word order adds more than it seems.)
I do think that we’re missing something important here, and Matthew 27:54 is a valuable clue.
How Many Women is One Woman in 1 Timothy 2:12?
Peter Kirk drew my attention to a post by Bill Heroman about I Timothy 2:
If anyone wants us to be perfectly literal about 1 Tim 2:12, we should note, at least as a beginning, that Paul is primarily speaking against one-on-one mentoring, female to male. “I do not allow a woman to teach or to direct a man.” Everything in this statement is entirely singular. [Emphasis in original.]
Bill then asks whether “[t]he male/female intimacy of a one-on-one discipling relationship may be all Paul is really afraid of.”
In other words, Bill suggests that Paul may not be talking about women in general, but rather about one woman teaching one man, in private (and perhaps even the specific instance of that).
It’s a lovely suggestion — and I laud the effort — but I don’t think the grammar supports it.
It’s common to use singular nouns generically, both in English (which is why I might equally write that “it’s common for a singular noun to be used generically”) and in Greek. Furthermore, the tendancy in Greek is to use eis (“one”) to refer specifically to one of something.
For example, in John 11:50 we find, “it is better for eis anthropos to die…,” that is “one person.” Without eis the text would more naturally mean that it is better for people to die. I think that John 11:50 is particualy instructive because the context could make it clear that anthropos means just one person, because “it is better for people to die than for the whole nation to perish” doesn’t make any sense. But the grammar still has to support the context.
So it seems that the way to say, “I do not allow one woman to teach one man” would be to use the word eis twice.
Even so, I have to agree with Peter, who “love[s] the way that blogger Bill Heroman is prepared to think outside the box.”
There’s No Distraction in the Bible
Karyn Traphagen points out that there are no distractions in the Old Testament:
In doing some searches in Accordance, I happened to notice that there are no distractions in the Hebrew bible.
No Hebrew word is translated by ESV, NIV, NRSV, NET (or many others) as “distract,” “distracted,” or “distractions.” The KJV does translate afuna found in Psalm 88:15 as “distracted,” but this word is found only here in the HB and does not have consensus for translation. In the NT there is only one verse that is translated with the word “distracted” (Luke 10:40).
I would add that the NLT and NJB use “distracting” in Exodus 5:4, but in a sense that is one step removed from “distracted.” Pharaoh chastises Moses and Aaron for, “destracting [hifri'a] the people from their work.” And many translations use “[without] distractions” in I Corinthians 7:35, where the Greek is aperispastos, the opposite of the word we see in Luke 10:40.
Significantly, the NRSV uses the word “distracted” twice in a row, first in Luke 10:40 (for periespato) and then again in 10:41 (for the unrelated thorubazi). The NRSV thus emphasizes distraction beyond the force of the original. The error seems all the more important in light of Karyn’s observation that the now-common topic of distraction is so rare in the Bible.
