Hot answers tagged translation
10
I wrote a paper on James 2:14-26 a few years back.
Here's a link.
TRANSLATION
14: What (is) the benefit, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? That faith is not able to save them (is it)?
15: Suppose a brother or a sister is naked and lacking of daily bread,
16: and someone from you (pl.) says to them, “Go ...
9
It's odd to me that this isn't literal. The early portion of Genesis (1-11) is usually very literal. In my studies, Numbers is more literal than Gen 1-11 (so literal that I called it "Greek vocabulary on top of Hebrew syntax").
Uses in the Greek
The Greek word appears in the NT three times, all in Hebrews. (All scripture references are from the ...
9
In Hebrew the name Joshua is:
יְהוֹשׁוּעַ Yehoshua or יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yehoshua “the LORD is salvation.”
In Greek it is the transliteration of the Hebrew:
Ιησους (Iēsous, sounds like ee-ay-soos).
Therefore in the Greek New Testament Jesus and Joshua are both Iēsous.
Up until now the names are the same and even in the Latin Vulgate they remained the same. In ...
9
This is just to add to Mike's answer, not to replace it.
Joshua does not transliterate into Greek exactly. There are letters in Hebrew that are simply not there in Greek. The Greek of Luke 3:29, Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8 all have Ἰησοῦ/s for Joshua. Translators render it as Joshua instead of Jesus because that is the name readers will be familiar with. ...
8
This answer is supplementary to Frank Luke's, and supports it.
When someone makes a claim about an ancient language's grammar, it always helps me to believe it and internalize it when I can see parallel usages that illustrate the truth of the claim. Thus, I am glad that Frank Luke offered several examples.
I have another which is perhaps even more to the ...
8
As Frank Luke points out, the Hebrew word "kinah" (קנאה) as in "El kanna" in Exodus 20:5 (אל קנא) in both in OT Hebrew and in modern, is both jealous and zealous at the same time, and can have either positive or negative moral value depending on the subtext.
The name "Cain" in the story of Creation apparently comes from the same root, meaning someone who ...
7
"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 ...
7
The NET Bible notes:
tn Heb “rose fifteen cubits.” Since a cubit is considered by most authorities to be about eighteen inches, this would make the depth 22.5 feet. This figure might give the modern reader a false impression of exactness, however, so in the translation the phrase “fifteen cubits” has been rendered “more than twenty feet.”
tn Heb ...
7
The numbers are accurate as they have been translated. There were ~600,000 Israelites in the Wilderness (and in Egypt).
Proof
These are those who were numbered of the sons of Israel, 601,730. -Numbers 26:51
Earlier in the chapter we are given the counts of each individual tribe. They add up as follows:
1) 43,730 from the tribe of Reuben
2) 22,200 ...
7
The Hebrew for the first "mark well" is שִׂים לִבְּךָ , which is literally "give your heart". (The Hebrew for the second uses a different formation from the same roots -- וְשַׂמְתָּ לִבְּךָ .) This is probably an idiom, like "give ear" in Deut 32:1. The Ezekiel passage follows "give your heart" with appeals to vision and hearing -- וּרְאֵה בְעֵינֶיךָ (see ...
7
The English phrase "I will greatly mutliply" (A.V.) is translated from the Hebrew phrase הַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה (harbah arbeh). This Hebrew phrase consists of two verbs, both in binyan Hif'il, the former being an infinitive absolute, while the latter is in the imperfect tense. This is a frequent Semiticism in the Hebrew Tanakh, and it should not be translated ...
6
The argument I have read is that the word often translated thousands means "fighting units" and the number after is the number of soldiers in those units. Thus, it would be "64 units, 400 soldiers from the tribe of Dan." While the Lexicons and word books such as Gesenius and Strong point out that eleph can mean "a company of troops fighting under one ...
6
According to Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon1, the spelling difference is inconsequential. The spelling difference does not change the meaning and has more to do with transliteration (from Greek) than translation. The only way of distinguishing grammatical number is through diacritics, which were not added to the language until a couple centuries after the writing ...
5
Technically, ηὐχόμην is deponent which is a middle conjugation that is translated as active. The imperfect tense is an incomplete action. It's up to the translator to interpret whether it is iterative (periodic), inceptive (the beginning of the action), durative (a constant, ongoing action), etc. Translation of the imperfect is usually accompanied by the ...
5
See the Encyclopedia Judaica on taḥash for the earliest ancient translations—"blue", "purple", "violet" (Volume 19, page 435), and the reference links at Wikipedia's tachash article (e.g. Living Torah on Exodus 25:5 footnotes "blue-processed" citing ancient sources; and Natan Slifkin's Sacred Monsters on "The Tachash" also citing the ancients "leather ...
5
Fifteen cubits above: Above the peaks of all the mountains, after the
waters were equal to [at the same level as] the mountain peaks. —
[from Gen. Rabbah 32:11] - Rashi
Gen Rabbah is said to be from the third century, long before anyone would have objected to or attempted to cover up a supposed flat earth cosmology.
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
Here's the problem concerning the singular/plural distinction: I found an online Peshitta forum post by Paul Younan (who prepared a scholarly Peshitta text) that mentions that there was no way to distinguish between the singular and plural in Aramaic until at least the 6th century. He states:
Notice the only difference between the two is the Syame ...
5
I know that the other answers explain this in more depth, but the simple answer is really that the early Christians read the Greek Septuagint (LXX), and this translation of the Hebrew Tanakh and apocryphal works rendered יֵשׁוּעַ / יְהוֹשֻׁעַ as Ἰησοῦς. From there it was transliterated into Latin (Iesus) and became the name associated with the Christian ...
5
Dr. Sebastian P. Brock, who retired from teaching at Oxford University, has demonstrated that the Peshitta New Testament was translated from the Greek into Syriac. The name of Jesus in the Syriac Peshitta text is ܝܫܘܥ (Jesu). This is how it is rendered in Matthew 1:21. However, the name 'Joshua' is not consistently rendered in this way in Syriac, presumably ...
5
In Hebrew the words share two of the three letters of the root:
Sabbath (Shabbat), שַׁבָּת, is Strong's H7676. It is spelled shin-bet-taf.
Seven, שֶׁבַע, is Strong's H7651. It is spelled shin-bet-'ayin.
While Shabbat does fall on the seventh day of the week, Strong's doesn't note a linguistic connection between the two words nor have I ever learned one ...
5
Punctuation is more or less an educated guess1, but most modern critical texts (including Byzantine critical texts which are sympathetic to the TR) render this as a question (Ἄρτι πιστεύετε;). As a question, Jesus' words cast doubt on his disciples' faith, which the 1984 NIV translation committee may have wished to avoid. Translating this as a statement, ...
5
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 ...
5
I think you may be trying to read far too much into this verse that the grammar won't support. The first translation of each verse in its simplest form is really the best translation and says pretty much everything the grammar allows. The rest is reading more into the text than the grammar would support. I also think you are misunderstanding some of the ...
4
In addition to the points already provided, may I offer a more obvious point based on simple logic?
So, the question is, should the latter θεός in John 1:1 be translated into English as "God" or "a god"?
In John 1:3, it is written that «πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν», that is, "All things were made by him, and not one ...
4
As an imperfect it has a sense of continuation "I wished and continued to wish". Middle is usually translated as active, so Paul is doing the wishing. Indicative indicates it is an actual fact.
"I, Paul, really did wish and continued to wish..."
So is a conditional simple "I could wish" an equivalent? I could wish for a better one. It kind of loses the ...
4
The NET Bible notes:
The meaning of קֹהֶלֶת (qohelet) is somewhat puzzling. The verb קָהַל (qahal) means “to assemble, summon” (HALOT 1078-79 s.v. קהל), and is derived from the noun קָהָל (qahal, “assembly”; HALOT 1079-80 s.v. קָהָל). Thus קֹהֶלֶת might mean: (1) convener of the assembly, (2) leader, speaker, teacher, or preacher of the assembly, or (3) ...
4
The Hebrew word is qanna. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament has a fairly long entry on it. The word can be used positively or negatively. They suggest "zeal" to be a better translation of the word as it has the same negative or positive aspects. If one is zealous for another's property, this is envy and a sin. However, if one is zealous of ...
4
It is certainly an idiom, so a literal translation won't convey the actual meaning of the phrase. Now, a literal translation of the Hebrew שִׂים לִבְּךָ (sim libbeka) would be "Set/ put/ place into your heart!" Again, the heart was considered as the locus of thought --- a function we now give to the brain. Thus, to place something into your heart was to ...
3
Yours is the only view that states that the waters must have been to within 15 cubits of the top of the sky from a "flat earth cosmology".
No other English translation gives anything of the kind:
New International Version (©1984)
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
New Living Translation (©2007)
...
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