Hot answers tagged psalms
29
David Boswell is absolutely correct - animal names are consistently difficult to translate.
The word under inspection is reim (Hebrew: ראם). The word also comes up in Numbers 23:22:
God brought them out of Egypt; they have the strength of a wild ox. (NIV)
Here are some commentaries.
...It is difficult to say what kind of beast is intended by the
...
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I am by no means a Greek scholar and I am not really giving an answer here, but rather a, possible, helpful clue that may help in finding the answer.
I looked at the LXX (that includes English translation) for Psalms 22:21 and have noticed that, it too, uses the term "unicorn".
The Greek word that is used in the LXX (Ps 22:21) is monokeros (μονόκερως). ...
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This question was just asked over at the Judaism site, so I'll repost my answer from there here.
In general it is difficult to find pre-Christian rabbinic commentary, since the earliest rabbinic commentaries began coalescing around the end of the Second Temple period, in the first century CE. So while early midrashic collections like the Sifra and Mekhilta ...
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Raca means "empty headed," very similar to how we use "fool" today. Jesus also uses moros in that verse, which is the root of moron. While we normally need to take care not to commit the root fallacy, this one does mean the same thing.
The word used in Hebrew is nabal which has more to do with consistently making bad moral choices. Brown, Driver, Briggs ...
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This is an attempt to give a brief theological answer, an answer that examines the words in their contexts and in their broader theological context, rather than a lexical investigation.
The fool in Psalm 14/53 and in Proverbs is someone who is in moral antithesis to God. This is not an insult or a slur; it is an accurate description of the state of his ...
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I asked about this question at the Judaism.SE site and was told that it is difficult to find pre-Christian Rabbinic sources. It seems that the current understanding of Psalm 22 within Judaism deals with the plight of the Jewish Nation in Exile.1 However, Rashi's 11th-century commentary states that
Our Sages, however, interpreted it [(ayeleth hashachar, ...
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From my discussions with translators of ancient languages I have learned that Animal names and varieties of plants are the most difficult words to translate. For example - what does gopher wood refer to in the Genesis account of Noah's Ark. The lack of context and the small number of times they occur in literature make them the most complex. Hopefully a ...
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Per Strong's, the word itself means to lift up, exalt.
However, when we see it used in Psalms (per the question), it's accepted that this is a musical term used to accentuate the passage, pause or show interruption. (Again, this is per Strong's.)
Psalms 3:1-2 (NASB)
1 O LORD, how my adversaries have increased!
Many are rising up against me.
2 ...
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"yakar" is a word for which there isn't a good single-word English translation in this context. "yakar" is "dear" in the sense that "dear" is used in the UK to mean something costly or high priced. "Costly" in OT Hebrew as in English also has overtones of "regret" as in expressions such as "we paid a high price for that victory", or, "you paid too much for ...
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Both Psalm 14 and 53 use the word nabal <05036> which can be translated:
foolish, senseless, fool
It comes from nabel <05034>, which has a literal meaning of:
to wilt; generally, to fall away, fail, faint
The foolish meaning is figurative. Perhaps the idea is that such a person is corrupt or morally weak.
As a side note, there's very ...
6
See this overview from jewishencyclopedia.com. The overview breaks out the Psalms into classes:
Praise
Elegy
Didactic
A more detailed analysis could probably add more classifications such as historical, epic, etc.
Psalms, like Proverbs, is both an accretional work and an anthology. It is a collection by genre rather than by theme, and so, unlike a ...
6
The first and most important clue is found in the annotation of the Psalm:
For the Leader; upon Aijeleth ha-Shahar. A Psalm of David
"Of David" can mean that it was written by, about, or in the style of David. Since the Psalm is written in the first person, any way you look at it, the subject must have originally been David. Nothing in the Psalm ...
6
The context of the two books gives an insight:
In the Psalm, the Psalmist is saying that those who follow God (The Righteous) will flourish. The Righteous delight in the LORD (vs 4-5), they Praise the LORD (vs 1-3), etc.
Isaiah on the other hand is a book of Judgement on Israel. Isaiah 57 looks at the fact that although Israel is chosen as God's people, ...
6
Paul made a direct word-for-word quote not from Psalm 37:8, but from the Septuagint of Psalm 4:4 -
...ὀργίζεσθε καὶ μὴ ἁμαρτάνετε...
In the Hebrew of Psalm 4:4, the verb for "anger" is רָגַז which has the connotation of perturbing, or being perturbed. In the 41 instances that this verb occurs in the Hebrew Bible in various conjugations and tenses, the ...
6
Not a Hyperbolic Expression
The Text of Psalm 51:4:
לְךָ לְבַדְּךָ ׀ חָטָאתִי וְהָרַע בְּעֵינֶיךָ עָשִׂיתִי
לְמַעַן תִּצְדַּק בְּדָבְרֶךָ תִּזְכֶּה בְשָׁפְטֶֽךָ׃
Explanation
1) "Against you alone" (לְךָ לְבַדְּךָ): This is a prayer of David for repentance (a penitential psalm), and while he sinned against many others in the affair with Bathsheba, ...
5
Being awed and inspired by the world's beauty is not the same thing as a teleological argument. In Psalm 19, the psalmist captures the experience of wonder, a core component of the religious experience and offers an awareness of God's manifestation in the physical world (all translations are by Robert Alter):
The heaven's tell God's glory, and his ...
5
As evocative as the phrase is, the context excludes an astronomical interpretation. The poetry of the Psalms comes largely from use of repetition and parallelism. A psalmist often repeats the same idea in two or more phrasings in order to solidify what they are speaking of. In this psalm, we see:
"God reigns over the nations"
"The princes of the ...
5
Psalm 4 is the polemic prayer of a hasid, a pious devotee of the Lord, against a majority or elite class who might be nominal believers, but lack the trust that differentiates true belief in God. The psalm is written in the first person but is likely a collective first person representing the community of the pious. I suspect that this psalm is ...
5
Likely polyptoton based on the ancient Hebrew prayer Nishmat that ends "shir ushvaha, hallel v'zimra" translated into Koine, in which case it would not necessarily be appropriate to look for a distinct meaning for each term. Attributed variously to the Apostle Peter and to Shimon ben Shatah, I guess depending on which side of the fence you are on, and ...
5
First I checked that the same phrase appears in both Col 3:16 and Eph 5:19. It does.
psalmois, humnois, kai odais pneumatikais
I then checked those words out in the lexicons and compared the words they translated in the LXX.
psalmois - often for neginah, which means song, or mizmor, also meaning song. Used 92 times in the LXX but mostly in the title ...
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hekal(הֵיכָל) means 'palace' or 'temple'. It is used to refer to the Solomon's Temple but also (for example) the house at Shiloh in David's time, here in 1 Samuel 1:9
After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. ESV
Among other usages, it can also refer ...
5
Some Jewish translations do translate it that way, actually. Mechon Mamre (based on the Masoretic text with JPS 1917) has "let be", and this version has "desist".
I think part of the problem is that the English word "still" is not unambiguous. "Still" can mean both "stationary, motionless" and "calm" -- when you say "be still my heart" you surely don't ...
5
It seems that these divisions may have been due to the various peoples and times over which the Psalms were originally collected and used as hymnbooks in the temple services:
The psalms were arranged into five subdivisions or books (1–41; 42–72; 73–89; 90–106; 107–150). This order follows the fivefold division of the Pentateuch and may reflect the ...
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In Romans 3:4 Paul does the same kind of verb change. That is, he modifies the meaning of a verb from the Old Testament while quoting every other word verbatim from the Old Testament verses in question.
So to use the example of Romans 3:4 we see that Paul is quoting from Psalm 51:4 saying, "...and prevail when you are judged." But the same verse in the ...
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OK, moving this from a comment to an answer.
Note about "tenses" in Biblical Hebrew. Technically speaking the idea of "zman 'avar"/'past tense' is Modern Hebrew. In Biblical Hebrew, you have aspects rather than tenses: perfect/imperfect. So [lo] halakh is in what's called the simple perfect[ive] aspect. The verbal system in Biblical Hebrew is somewhat ...
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מזמור = "psalm"
לדוד = "of David"
The order doesn't matter. If you wanted to translate the slight difference, you could translate one as "a psalm of David" and the other as "one of David's psalms." For what it's worth, "David" comes first in Psalms 24, 40, 68, 101, 109, 110, 139. The word "psalm" comes first in the other 28 usages. Thus the order found in ...
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"Born" is usually a conjugation of the verb ילד. However, in Hebrew, different words can have an overlap in meaning, and this appears to be the case with יחם. While יחם simply means "to be hot" (cp. Eze. 24:11), it may also be used idiomatically in the realm of sexuality, meaning "to be aroused." This phenomenon is not unlike that which occurs in many other ...
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Background: Ps 119 is an alphabetical acrostic in stanzas of eight verses per stanza. All of the verses in a stanza start with the same letter. Verses 1-8 start with Aleph, 9-16 start with Bet... Each verse is a couplet, where the second part is a thematic reply to the first. The meter is not completely regular. The psalm is traditionally used in memorial ...
4
Addressing the question in the title:
The Hebrew phrase b'nei Yisrael refers to Jews (the sons of Jacob and all their descendants -- plus converts even though they technically aren't sons of Jacob). You usually see it in this form -- Israel, not Jacob. The only Tanakh uses of b'nei Yaakov (Jacob) I can think of are either referring to his sons ...
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Both Psalm 69 and Psalm 109 are psalms of David. Both are, as well, psalms of vindication. In Psalm 69, David's enemies seek to destroy him without cause (v4), so David prays out against them that God would vindicate him against them. Similarly in Psalm 109, David has been betrayed by his friend(s). Therefore, David prays that God would destroy his enemies.
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