Polycarp has posted the God’s Word translation of Psalm 137, along with the NASV and NLT for comparison. I’m glad he did, because it’s always a treat to revisit Psalm 137. (I won’t copy his translation chart here, so you might want to open his page for comparison while you read this.) I posted a…
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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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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.
I think back to a radio spot for lechayim, an “auto donation program” (that is, a program for donating your car, not for donating yourself). The announcer in the ad tells listeners that if they donate their car to lechayim they will get a tax deduction, and furthermore, “it doesn’t matter the condition of the…
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Doug Chaplin has a post about to alpha kai to o[mega], “the alpha and the omega.” This poetic device is technically called a merism — though Doug, being wiser than I, avoids putting “merism” in the title of his post, presumably not wanting to scare readers away before they start reading. (“Young and old” is…
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