One of the great problems I find in teaching biblical languages, or in explaining Bible translation to lay audiences, is that people don’t understand meaning very well. They assume that words have fixed, narrow ranges of meaning, and that if you search carefully, you can find a word or phrase to precisely represent that word…
Mike Sangrey has a post on translating 1 Thessalonians 5:17 at Better Bibles Blog where he suggests “Don’t stop praying!” would be more accurate than “Pray without ceasing,” which is what most of us are used to hearing. He arrives at this conclusion by looking at various uses of the Greek word in question (adialeiptws)….
14[The kingdom of heaven] is like a man going on a journey. He calls his slaves and hands his property over to them. 15To one he gives five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each one according to his strength. Then he goes on his journey. As soon 16as he goes, the…
This passage in 2 Peter is one of the most commonly cited in discussions of Biblical inspiration, along with 2 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 4:12 and Psalm 12:6. One of the interesting things that I notice about them all is that they are often used as though they obviously say something that, on closer examination, they…
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…
Note: I will be using the English verse numbering throughout. Hebrew verse numbers are one greater in this chapter, thus this is Psalm 40:7 in Hebrew. In reading Psalm 40 several times, since it’s the lectionary passage for this week, I noticed a few things that I would have missed in just one pass. One…
This is a brief note expanding my query about ambiguous passages. I have discussed passage that are ambiguous in Greek, but where translating them ambiguously in English results in a different range of options from those a Greek reader would likely perceive. This passage seems to me to be a case in which one must…
I have blogged previously just a little bit about the A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, and also made some negative comments about the use of interlinears, especially for Greek or Hebrew students. I recommend this lexicon for use in reading rapidly in order to encounter a large body of text in Biblical…
This relates to my previous post on translating ambiguous passages. The last clause of this verse reads, formally translated, “so that we might become [the] righteousness of God in him.” I’m interested in the range of meanings that might be heard by a modern English reader for the final phrase, “in him.” A number of…