[Between six appearances in four cities and then having to buy a new car, I haven’t been in front of a computer in nearly two weeks. So I’m playing catch-up, starting with a much-delayed installment of “translation traps.”] Following up on some thoughts about myopic translations, here’s one way in particular that a translation can…
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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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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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From the about page comes a question about the Hebrew word toldot: I ran across Genesis 6:9 in the TNIV, which says “this is the account of Noah and his family.” Ive checked the KJV, NIV, NASB, ESV, Message, Luthers translation (1545), the Amplified Bible, the NLT, and the Leningrad Codex for good measure. Only…
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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…
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Perhaps because understanding parts of speech is so central to learning a foreign language, translators often try to preserve parts of speech when they translate. But I think this is a mistake. We know from modern languages that parts of speech often have to change in translation, and I think we see cases where more…
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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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