If we’re not careful, our Bible translations will wrongly alienate 51% of the English-speaking population, and perhaps offend even more. The issue (which has been addressed frequently — recently by me here and here, by Clayboy, Bill Mounce, and many others) is whether (orwhen) the English word “men” includes both men and women. In my…
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Also from the About page: Here is a question — I have explored the usage of ish and ishah in Ruth (here) and I was surprised to see in 3.14: vatakom b’terem yakir ish et-rei’eihu vayomer al-yivada ki-va’a ha-isha ha-goren and she rose before a man could recognize his friend and he said — let…
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From the About page: I have a question about Exodus 2:2. What does it mean that she saw that baby Moses was tov? Could it be a statement of affection, the way we refer to children and pets as “good?” Or does “seeing that…good” simply echo Genesis 1? Interesting question. I don’t think it’s an…
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In my last post I asked whether we should use modern terms like “womb” and “stomach” to translate the ancient beten, which was used for both. Similarly, what about “chair” and “throne”? It seems that, at least in the OT, one word was used for both different modern concepts. The Hebrew for both is kisei.…
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At Hebrew and Greek Reader, the question is asked whether the NLT’s rendering of Ecclesiastes 11:5 is politically motivated. The issue is the image of …ka’atzamim b’veten ha-m’lei’ah, that is, “like etzems in the beten.” The NLT’s rending is: …a tiny baby [etzem] growing in its mother’s womb [beten]… (I’m ignoring maleh here, because it’s…
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Daniel 12:7 refers to a man who “swore by chei ha-olam,” commonly translated as something like “the one who lives forever.” Some years ago, I had a to translate a similar phrase in the Jewish liturgy, chei ha-olamim, which many prayer books wrongly render, “life of the universe.” It was the last line in the…
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It turns out that “um” means something in English, and we can learn about translation by looking at that short word. The following hypothetical conversation between a shopper and a sales associate at a book store demonstrates: Shopper: “Where can I find a complete bilingual text of Aristotle?” Clerk: “Aristotle who?” Shopper: “Um, the Greek…
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Some people believe that every word of scripture is God-given. Reasonable people can disagree about this (see Clayboy’s thoughtful rejection of the idea, for example) but I’m not sure the inspiredness of the words has anything to do with translation. Even if every Hebrew and Greek word in the current version of the Bible is…
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Polycarp asks on the about page about a comment to a thread he started. The issue is Mark 15:34: eloi eloi lema sabachthani. The Greek — which appears almost identically in Matthew 27:46 — is actually transliterated Hebrew/Aramaic. In Mark we find eloi, which is probably Aramaic; in Matthew eli, probably Hebrew. The only line…
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I frequently read comments like “Every Bible translation is a paraphrase” (Abraham Piper) and cringe. The philosophy seems to be “nothing is perfect, so everything is the same.” I agree that no translations are perfect, but that quite obviously doesn’t mean that they are all the same. A related complaint is that we can’t know…
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