A question arrived via e-mail about the different Hebrew verbs that mean “create” or “make” and how they relate to “peace.” There are three Biblical Hebrew verbs that all mean roughly the same thing: asah, yatzar, and bara. Later Jewish thought would differentiate them, giving asah the most basic meaning (like “do” or “make” in…
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Perhaps the biggest translation mistake I’ve seen is relying too closely on word-internal structure to figure out what words mean. We saw this last week with toldot and in a comment regarding etymology. I call this the trap “word-internal structure” (even though it applies to phrases, too). English As usual, we can look at modern…
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Thanks to Wayne at BBB for pointing out that the God’s Word translation (GW) has a new website. One page on the site compares representative passages as translated in GW and other versions. I noticed Joel 2:11, which GW translates as, “The day of the Lord is extremely terrifying. Who can endure it?” I was…
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From the about page comes a question about the Hebrew word toldot: I ran across Genesis 6:9 in the TNIV, which says “this is the account of Noah and his family.” Ive checked the KJV, NIV, NASB, ESV, Message, Luthers translation (1545), the Amplified Bible, the NLT, and the Leningrad Codex for good measure. Only…
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Last month, Bill Mounce, C. Michael Patton, and Clayboy all alluded to the issue of etymology, which is surely one of the biggest translation traps (and important enough that I devote considerable attention to it in my And God Said). Etymology is really fun. Tracing a word’s winding history, seeing how meanings mutated, and learning…
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