From the About page comes this response to something I wrote in And God Said: On p. 155 of And God Said you claim that “there is no divorce in the Bible.” Yes. Two great questions follow. I’ll take them in reverse order: The Case of Two Husbands Also, you speculate that perhaps the Bible…
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The Greek aetos is usually translated “vulture” in Matthew 24:28 and Luke 17:37, but “eagle” in Revelation 4:7, 8:13, and 12:14. Why? The answer has to do with how words — for animals, in this case — are used metaphorically. In English a “vulture” is different than an “eagle” — and we also have hawks,…
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All in All Dannii at BBB has a post about “all in all” as a translation for panta en pasin in 1 Corinthians 15:28. The full verse is (NRSV): When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him,…
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Dr. Joel M. Hoffman on Bible Translation: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcH31y1VgFI] With some reluctance — and with renewed appreciation for people who spend their professional lives in front of a camera — I’m posting this short video excerpt in which I discuss what can go wrong in Bible translation.
Thanks to Naomi of Storahtelling for pointing out this ancient (mid-first-millennium AD) thought about translation, from the Babylonian Talmud (Kiddushin 49a): Rabbi Judah said: One who translates a verse according to its form is a liar; and one who adds anything commits blasphemy and sacrilege. (my translation from the Aramaic) Plus ça change…
The KJV translation of the OT mentions unicorns nine times and dragons over 30 times — translations that go back to the LXX, which features the monokeros (“one-horn”) and the drakon. The Hebrew words behind these animals — r’em and tanin, respectively — are more obscure. But the real question, in seems to me, is…
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Sometimes it seems that translators look too closely at individual words, only asking “how do I say this ancient word in English?” rather than asking “how do I translate this text into English?” I think this flawed approach comes in part from ignorance, but also from the religious tradition that each word has meaning. So…
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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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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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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
