A classic bit of self-contradictory writing advice goes back to William Safire in the 1970s: “Always pick on the correct idiom.” In English, “pick on” means to annoy, and the right phrasing here is “pick” (which means “choose”). What makes his example work is that the meaning of “pick on” doesn’t come from the meanings…
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From the About page comes a question about baptism, the essence of which is the observation that the words we now translate “baptize,” “baptism,” “[John the] Baptist,” etc. were actually ordinary words in Greek, like our “wash” in English. They were not technical religious terms like the English “baptize,” and the Greek words did not…
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Give Ear At BBB, Wayne notes the oddity of the English phrase “give ear” for the Hebrew he’ezin. I think it can be useful to look at what went wrong here. The Root of the Problem Hebrew has at least two words for “hear/listen.” The first is shama. We find it, for example, in the…
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I’ve just returned from my summer break, so I’ll be posting regularly again and also catching up on the questions from the About page. I’ll start with Rabbi Morton Kaplan, who asks simply, “What is the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton?” I’ve already explained a bit of the background. I have more information in my…
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While most translations agree that the translation of Genesis 1:1 should read, “In the beginning…” the (Jewish) JPS translation offers instead, “When God began to create…” And the NLT and some others offer a footnote with that possibility. What’s going on? The answer dates back 1,000 years to Rashi. He notes that the usual word…
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Nowadays, translators usually try to figure out what a word originally meant before they translate it. But translation hasn’t always worked that way. For example, a passage in the (mid-first-millennium) Talmud explains the Hebrew word sechvi. The story, in the part of the Talmud known as Rosh Hashanah 26a, explains that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish…
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Still following up on my question about accuracy and choosing Bible translations, and by way of answering my question about whether it’s okay if people choose what the Bible is, it occurs to me that music might be a useful comparison. Many, many parts of the Bible have been set to music, and the options…
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I recently asked how people choose a Bible translation. (And I have more here.) One interesting (though entirely predictable) result was that some people prefer more than one translation: the NLT for “readability,” for example, but the NET for “accuracy,” or the NASB for use in formal settings. Even people who only have one preferred…
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“I like my Bible translation because it…” How would you complete that sentence? I hear this sort of thing all the time — in comments on this blog, in discussions on similar blogs, via e-mail, in books, and from people who attend my lectures — and there are lots of reasons people like a particular…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
