No Robots

It's great. Thanks for posting this. It is interesting what it says about the Hebrew words rashit and alhim. It makes it clear that this is not a creation story, but a description of eternal substance.

Lugubert

A "faithful translation" of Gn 1:1-3 might run like

Clivedurdle

If I remember, the New English Bible - now out of print - did something similar but got a huge amount of flak about it - looks like they may have been on the right track!

PapaverDeum

But, there is already something like this that has already been done. It is called Youngs lLiteral Translation. And many agree that Young took it as far as it ought to go. Youngs Gen 11-3 goes like this ;


I agree with the author on some level. The KJV is written with a certain cadence of prose. REading it, I'm always struck by just how "englishy" it is.

There was also at one time something called Rabinah French. It is interesting how close Young's literal and the Rabinnah french becomes.


If you are going to do something like this,I've always thought of this.

Whenever you translate something, you use words from the target language that have certain pre-existing meaning, and those meanings get carried into the story.

For example, using the NT, what was the effect of using words for the underworld like greek "Hades" and "Tartarus". These were words with pre-existing greek meaning. How did that affect how it was interpreted ?

Enter latin. In Latin these same ideas were translated as "Infernum". To the ITalians of the time, this word had some pre-existing meanings.

English used "hell". But, you got it, this word already had meaning.

If we take this argument and extrapolate the consequence, what we discover is that the meaning of the story changes somewhat with each translation and becomes couched in thoses already existing ideas in the destination language. This is unavoidable.

But my problem with what this guy is doing is simply, whow and where did he find these meanings. That must be explained.

spin

Shouldn't you know better than that? I mean, if elohim is plural, shouldn't the verb agree? But the verb is singular. If you look at Gen 1:3, "god said..." )LHYM Y)MR, but Gen 11:3, "they said..." Y)MRW. Gen 1:4 "god saw..." )LHYM YR), but Gen 37:18, "they saw..." YR)W. Etc. You'd expect, if "elohim" were plural, that the verb would agree, but it doesn't, it's singular, indicating that "elohim" must be considered singular, despite the plural appearance.


spin

Lugubert

Yes. :redface: A good thing my Bible Hebrew teacher isn't into freethought sites. But I like the last sentence, idea stolen from Laurence Clarke: A Compleat History of the Holy Bible ..., ca. 1740, where "a most vehement Wind" is suggested.

Roger Pearse

True; but possibly the reverse; that English was shaped by the KJV being read every Sunday for 4 centuries to every English speaker who wasn't drunk or dead.