Professor Ellen van Wolde’s recent article about Genesis has brought the debate about the word breishit to the fore again. Some people don’t like the traditional understanding — “In the beginning” — because the Hebrew word is, literally, “in a beginning” or “in the beginning of.” (Simon Holloway recently provided a little more detail.) Accordingly,…
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In a comment on A. Admin’s post about Bill Mounce, Mark Baker-Wright takes Dr. Mounce to task for writing (originally here): Have you noticed the new advertisement for the Prius: “Harmony Between Man, Nature And Machine.” I’ll bet Toyota would be glad to sell to women. Dr. Mounce is using the point to support his…
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Another question from the About page: The Twelve Prophets . I find it strange that the abbreviation for these books is given as תרי עשר Why are the 12 called 10? Please could you say more about the grammar of this phrase. Thanks The word תרי (trei) is actually Aramaic for “two,” so תרי עשר…
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Psalm 2:2 exhibits particularly clever structure, with meanings that form chiasmus and word combinations that pattern in straight parallelism. The Hebrew reads: yityats’vu malchei erets//v’roznim nosdu yachdav. Yityatsvu means the about same thing as nosdu yachdav, and malchei eretz is like roznim. That’s the chiasmus. But equally, each line has three words, and both times…
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Even though “part” means roughly the same thing as “portion,” and “parcel” means “division,” “part and parcel” cannot equally be phrased, “portion and division.” Yet when I read many Bible translations, I feel like exactly that sort of error has taken place. The phrase “Tohu and vohu” in Genesis receives lots of attention, because the…
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The question of the value of consulting multiple translations comes up from time to time (recently here, for example). But beyond flagging passages where a reader might want to investigate a bit more, I’m not entirely sure what the value is. As the chart to the right depicts (click on it to enlarge it), multiple…
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Polycarp has begun a more detailed look at the God’s Word translation, starting with Romans 5:1-11. Take a look.
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