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…
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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…
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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…
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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 Jesus 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…
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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…
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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…
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If we’re not careful, our Bible translations will wrongly alienate 51% of the English-speaking population, and perhaps offend even more. The issue (which has been addressed frequently — recently by me here and here, by Clayboy, Bill Mounce, and many others) is whether (orwhen) the English word “men” includes both men and women. In my…
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Also from the About page: Here is a question — I have explored the usage of ish and ishah in Ruth (here) and I was surprised to see in 3.14: vatakom b’terem yakir ish et-rei’eihu vayomer al-yivada ki-va’a ha-isha ha-goren and she rose before a man could recognize his friend and he said — let…
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From the About page: I have a question about Exodus 2:2. What does it mean that she saw that baby Moses was tov? Could it be a statement of affection, the way we refer to children and pets as “good?” Or does “seeing that…good” simply echo Genesis 1? Interesting question. I don’t think it’s an…
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In my last post I asked whether we should use modern terms like “womb” and “stomach” to translate the ancient beten, which was used for both. Similarly, what about “chair” and “throne”? It seems that, at least in the OT, one word was used for both different modern concepts. The Hebrew for both is kisei.…
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