Nazaroo

Short answer: Yes. That's the worst rendering of Zech. 9:9 of all time.

Jewish my ass. Who made this mess?

The vav often means 'even' or 'also', particularly in poetic passages.
The standard Hebrew Scripture method of building in redundancy
to make sure meaning is clear and to preserve synonymic expression,
is to repeat the idea in different words.

There are oh about 20,000 such examples in the Tanakh.

"riding on a donkey, even the foal of a donkey." (the same animal).

People who have no clue about poetic expression or languages should not be allowed within a thousand yards of a translation project.

But this is to be expected in modern translations:

Idiocracy: the prophecy <-- Click Here.

Cege

It looks to be Judaica Press Complete Tanach http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=16213

Nazaroo

Yes. Let me rephrase that:

Just because a bunch of yutzes who happen to be 'Jews-by-birth' but are really atheists and don't know, love and live the torah and tanakh make a 'translation' in order to make some quick bucks hoodwinking other Jews who should know better, doesn't mean their translation is going to be worth a rat's ass.

Put that translation alongside the others in case we run out of toilet paper.

The last Jew who really knew biblical Hebrew was Franz Delitzsch. He singlehandedly revived Hebrew from near extinction.

Franz Delitzsch <-- Click here.

Steven Avery

Let's go slow. We understand that 'donkey' and 'foal' (italicized) are the same animal. How about the donkey, the mom, the she-ass. Don't we have two animals referenced - the young donkey and his mom ? You might assert that the mom is incidentally mentioned however she is clearly in the verse. Agreed ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Nazaroo

Seriously Steven, there is only one donkey there. It is described as the child of she-asses, which is another flowery though redundant adjectival modifying cluster. The 'mom' is not mentioned, anymore than my mom could be clamed to be 'mentioned' in the following phrase:

"Nazaroo, offspring of haughty Jewish princesses, wrote a post."

Does this sentence in any way imply my mother was present in writing this post?

Steven Avery

Nazaroo, the analogy works against your view. That actually does draw attention to your mom. She is part of the exposition, being described as a JHAP. If you wrote that way the immediate question is - why bring your mom into the discourse ? To show that she was unduly influenced by Spock, perhaps.

Same with Zechariah, yet even more so. Zechariah is showing that the donkey is very young, even motherly-dependent. Otherwise it might be an older colt (rather than a foal), independent, out on his own. And this fits very neatly with the action in Matthew, where the mom would be right by her foal.

And the idea that Jesus is doing some unusual riding action is largely based on the grammatical difference in the alexandrian text. That is just one of so many such difficulties in the corrupt text, geographical, historical, logical, consistency, acrobatic. True tangible Bible apologetics will be based on the historic Reformation Bible, the Received Text, most especially the English King James Bible.

Here is a bit of Delitzsch, properly referencing the Rashi commentary .. which is given at Judaica Press, the link above.

http://www.johnankerberg.org/Article...TRJ1103-15.pdf
Delitzsch and Gloag observe, This prophecy cannot possibly refer to Zerubbabel, or to any Jewish monarch or ruler after the time of Zechariah; but can only have a reference to the Anointed King, or the Messiah. This the Jews themselves are constrained to admit. “It is impossible,” observes rabbi Jarchi, “to expound this text of any other than the Messiah.” It is a fact that Jesus entered Jerusalem triumphantly, riding on the colt of a donkey (Mt. 21:6-11).

Returning to the foal and his mom, I always get a little over how hard folks try not to see the foal's mom in Zechariah 9:9. Rabbinical exegesis even gives her quite a flourish, going back to Abraham.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Cege

The cloaks were placed on the donkey and the colt, then Jesus sat on the cloaks atop the donkey and the colt? Both animals at the same time? How did that work?

Steven Avery

Cage, you are quoting a modern version that has the grammatical difference (error) of the minority text. In the large majority of manuscripts the text would be translated as does the King James Bible ..

Matthew 21:7
And brought the ass, and the colt,
and put on them their clothes,
and they set him thereon.

A small difference can be very significant.

I have made it clear again and again that I do not consider the minority-text alexandrian modern versions as defendable. However with the pure Bible the verse above is simple and fine.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Nazaroo

It seems you want to save Matthew's exegis by having the mother tag along behind the foal.

That's fine by me, as long as you agree about the 'vav' meaning 'even',
and also that Jesus only rode one of the animals. Otherwise, you are saving Matthew at the expense of the other gospel writers...

Steven Avery

Nazaroo, there is nothing to be 'saved'. I walked into all this 'circus' stuff out of left field and then looked closely at the accounts. So I learned that again you had another alexandrian textual problem. Good 'ol Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus. The variant led to the translation that looks like Jesus is sitting on two donkeys. If one had to deal with the mistaken "sat on them" the priority, the straight reading, would clearly be the animate objects, sat on the donkeys, plural, rather than on the cloaks. With "sat thereon" Jesus is simply sitting on cloaks, there is no acrobatics, no problem, all is fine. The English difference represents the grammatical difference between the TR/Majority reading and the Alex text.

And I got a big smile out of how Zechariah was read in so many commentaries and also in the back-and-forth dialog and papers. It was like the mom of the foal was invisible (while it was conjectured so much about how Matthew got two animals .. it was like they never even read Zechariah !). So this is one salient point that Matthew adds over and above the other accounts. The rabbis even have this mom going back to the Akedah, if I remember, in a somewhat transcendental interpretation.

Anyway, it was a bit of an 'aha' moment when I saw what was going on. And I really wondered about the quality of the apologetics that missed the two animals in Zechariah. (Similar to the apologetics that misreads Luke on the Nativity and goes on all sorts of rabbit trails.) Now I probably picked up the basic sense from one commentator, out of many, offhand I can't say which one, I would like to give proper credit. Really it is so simple and clear. "Tagging along" .. or right next to. One of the posters on Messianic_Apologetic who is familiar with donkeys gave a description of how closely she would stick by if there was tumult and excitement, to calm her foal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nazaroo That's fine by me, as long as you agree about the 'vav' meaning 'even', and also that Jesus only rode one of the animals. Otherwise, you are saving Matthew at the expense of the other gospel writers...

Agree on both counts. I was not trying to make the animal separation in the wrong place. It is possible that some folks have done that.

Shalom,
Steven Avery