I recently observed master teacher and musician Kenny Green telling children about the Jewish month of Adar. “Once Adar begins, we increase our happiness,” he explained, using the usual terminology. Then he added with a self-mocking grin, “yes, I talk that way at home, too.” There’s a Hebrew verb hirbah that means generally “to do/have/make…
Read more
Exodus 15:22-26 deals with drinking water. The People of Israel come to Marah (the name of a place, but the word also means “bitter”) and when they find that the water there is undrinkable, Moses throws a log into the water and it becomes drinkable. It’s a fairly simple concept (thought a complex trick), yet…
Read more
I’m thrilled to announce that my latest book, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, goes on sale today. I want to keep “God Didn’t Say That” as commercial-free as possible, so I’ve set up a separate blog for the book here, though the book is about Bible translation, so I’m…
Read more
Because this is a blog about translation, I’m curious when people read it in translation. Recently the logs showed me that someone used Google to translate the blog from English into Turkish. I took a look at what the site looked like in Turkish, and then used Google to translate the Turkish back into English.…
Read more
Mark 15:9 demonstrates how translation can make people forget their own grammar. A curiosity of English generally prevents anything from appearing between a verb an its object. This is why “I saw yesterday Bill” is such an awkward sentence in English. (It’s fine in French, Modern and Biblical Hebrew, Greek, and many other languages.) Yet…
Read more
Dr. Jim West’s comment that Jeremiah 25 is a good litmus test for translation — and his claim that the NLT doesn’t do badly — directed my attention to the NLT’s translation of Jeremiah 25. In light of some resent claims about the disaster in Haiti, Jeremiah 25:7 in the NLT jumped off the page…
Read more
From the About page comes this question: Mark 1:2 and Isaiah 40:3 — is the idea that crooked paths need to be straightened, or that obstacles need to be removed? Neither, actually. Isaiah 40:3 is a variation on classic Hebrew parallel poetry. We have two parallel phrases, each with four words. For example, from the…
Read more
The KJV popularized the tradition of using italics to mark the English words of a translation that are not actually in the original Hebrew or Greek (or Aramaic) of the Bible. But I think this typographic custom creates the false impression that translation words come in two varieties, with the first kind supposedly representing words…
Read more
Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
