Mark Goodacre has an excellent podcast on this question. What I’d want to get across in a brief answer to this question is: 1) Greek parthenos is not necessarily a bad translation of Hebrew almah. The semantic ranges do overlap substantially, though (as Mark points out) parthenos tends more toward “virginity.” 2) For reasons that…
September 14, 2003 17th Sunday after Pentecost The following are the suggested passages: Proverbs 1:20-33 and Psalm 19 or Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-8:1 Or Isaiah 50:4-9a and Psalm 116:1-9 James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38 Proverbs 1:20-33 This hymn to Wisdom personified is both beautiful and very important to the balance of the church. …
Easter Evening, Year A March 27, 2005 I didn’t manage to restart these notes before Lent as I had planned and stated on the web page, but they are restarted now. I am no longer including my working translation so I can focus more on the interpretive process. Where I have worked such translations over…
I made a mental connection this morning while reading the lectionary passages for Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday. I’m not certain just how valid this is, but I thought I’d write about it. There are multiple views of the servant passages in 2nd Isaiah. Some see each passage separately, with some being prophecies of the Messiah, and…
So why do I want to talk about an insignificant variant? The answer is simple. In many cases the reliability of Biblical texts is stated simply in terms of the number of variants that exist in the manuscripts. This number is quite high, but most of these variants are not significant. They may involve identical…
One basis I use for comparing Bible translations is the way in which idioms are handled. It’s difficult to measure this precisely, because you have to consider several things: Is the idiom as used comprehensible to modern readers? Does it mean the same thing to modern as to ancient readers? Is there a reasonable English…
The JPS Tanakh of Isaiah 49:7 reads, in part: Thus said the LORD, The Redeemer of Israel, his Holy One, b-To the despised one, To the abhorred nations,-b . . . Note b reads: Meaning of Heb. uncertain. Emendation yields “Whose being is despised / Whose body is detested”; cf. 51.23. I noticed this first…
I’m probably going to talk about common themes later, but I noticed something interesting that might not be the first thing one would notice in these passages, and that’s a combined sense of inadequacy without God’s Spirit, and the adequacy given by the presence of God’s Spirit. In Isaiah 49, the servant is taken as…
In my ratings for the Bible Version Selection Tool, one of the areas on which I compare translations is capitalization of pronouns referring to God or to Jesus. The interesting thing about this is that the Hebrew text has no analog to capitalization of any kind, while edited Greek texts and some late manuscripts can…
Since I’ve been attending a lectionary discussion group during Wednesday lunch, and therefore spending more time on the lectionary texts, I’ve been interested in the way the texts are selected. For this coming Sunday, Epiphany, one of the texts is Isaiah 60:1-6. “Now what could possibly be interesting about that?” you might ask. I’m glad…
