Again from the about page: What’s going on with the pronominal suffixes in Psalm 103 3-8? I can’t find -ki as a pronominal suffix in any of my grammar books — neither singular nor plural! Good question. The suffix -ki (also spelled -chi) is a variant form of -k, and it means “your (sng, f).”…
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Bill Mounce has a post about gramma in Romans 2:27 and 2:29. He’s responding to a question about the ESV’s translation of the word as “letter” in 2:29, but “written code” in 2:27. (Dr. Mounce defends the decision.) Let’s look at how gramma is used. The word gramma refers most basically to letters (of the…
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Cameron asks via the About page whether “until everything is accomplished” (eos an panta genetai) in Matthew 5:18 could be punctuated as part of Matthew 5:19, the original being unversified and unpunctuated. That is, could the text read: I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least…
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Are there miracles in the Bible? The KJV uses the word “miracle” (or “miracles”) less than 30 times. The ESV, only about a dozen. And the NAB half of that, even with the apocrypha. Yet the word appears over 150 times in the NLT. So miracles pervade the Bible only in some translations. Why? What’s…
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Dannii asks on the About page: In Galatians 3:16 Paul makes an essentially linguistic argument about Genesis 22:18. Does the Hebrew word for ‘seed’ have a similar range of meanings as the English word? Paul’s argument feels strange in English because when ‘seed’ is used to mean descendants it is a non-count noun. Is the…
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Frequently a Hebrew or Greek word will, in the eyes of English speakers, “mean more than one thing.” There are two ways for this to happen. The first is when there are really two foreign words, similar to the situation with “bank” in English (both a financial institution and the side of a river); that’s…
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Karyn Traphagen notes that Dr. Ellen Frankel has some thoughts about making the Bible PG for children. (Dr. Frankel authored the JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible.) Seeing this reminded of something I saw some time ago in a “children’s prayerbook” along the lines of “Like wine, the sabbath is sweet.” The problem is that children think…
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Polycarp has posted the God’s Word translation of Psalm 137, along with the NASV and NLT for comparison. I’m glad he did, because it’s always a treat to revisit Psalm 137. (I won’t copy his translation chart here, so you might want to open his page for comparison while you read this.) I posted a…
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