It turns out it’s hard to write poetry, at least good poetry. But even so, many efforts seem to focus more on the words than on the poem. Job 38:36 is an interesting example, because no one knows for sure what the words there mean, particularly tuchot and sechvi. Still, the poetic nature of the…
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John Hobbins has an interesting analysis of near-parallel passages in Mark 1:16-18 and Matthew 4:18-20. I’m struck by the fact that I can’t find a translation that makes it possible to follow along in English. (I have a table below.) The KJV, for reasons I can’t fathom, adds the word “Jesus” to Matthew, and it…
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Recents discussions (on Dr. Jim West’s blog, ScriptureZealot, etc.) have focused on what to do with Greek pronouns in English. But the discussion seem to gloss over the fact that subject pronouns are generally missing in Greek. So instead of “he said,” Greek offers us just eipen “said.” It can be “he said,” “she said,”…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender It seems to me that a lot of the confusion about gender and translation stems from a misunderstanding of the two ways that gender works, as I’ll describe here. Two Kinds of Gender On one hand, men are different than women, and we can use the words “gender,” “masculine,” and “feminine”…
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