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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And one more from the about page: Is Genesis 4:7, the first words, halo im-teitiv s’eit, an example of the idiom of a condition with antecedent but no stated consequence? Would the last of the words apply to Cain (as KJV implies) or to Cain’s offering (JPS)? Genesis 4:7 is clearly poetry, so we shouldn’t…
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Also from the about page: Is it true that in Greek they didn’t have multiple words that meant the same thing or one word that meant multiple things? More clearly — that every word had only one meaning and each thing/idea had only one word for it. Thanks! Thanks for the question, which I think…
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From the about page: Ooh, let me be number eleven! I’d like to formally ask about the possible meanings of Iscariot. Although I highly doubt it’s actually related to the Latin sicarius (assassin), I’ve heard that as an unlikely though interesting theory. What explanation(s) of that surname/eponym do you find plausible? As usual, I’ll start…
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The Greek word hosanna appears six times in the NT: three times in Matthew, twice in Mark, and twice in John. The context is each case includes the quotation, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” from Psalm 118:26. Because Psalm 118:25 contains the Hebrew words hoshi’a na, the Greek…
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A curious footnote in the ESV: Numbers 24:3 “The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eye is opened,…”(1) (1) “Or closed” It seems to me that when the translator can’t narrow it down beyond “open or closed,” the footnote should be “we don’t know what it means.”
Adjectives without nouns are quirky and idiosyncratic, and understanding them is important for translation. As an example, in English we have “the Americans” (American people) but not (*)”the Swisses,” or (*)”the Frenches.” We have “the Swiss” (Swiss people) and “the French” (French people), but “the American” can only mean one person. Other languages work differently.…
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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops started their semi-annual meeting today, and among the topics up for vote is the new English text of the Missal. (Bishop Trautman has been vocal about the shortcomings of the new translation, as summarized here and critiqued here.) So I took a look at some of the proposed…
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From the about page comes this question: Here is something I ignored when I translated Job and I don’t think I should have. In chapter 1 we get the b’nei ha-elohim. In chapter 38 we get the b’nei elohim without the definite article. I am thinking that the first should be the children (or sons)…
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