Thursday, December 01, 2005

Hebrews is difficult, okay?

Just so you know, translating the Greek text of Hebrews is a pain.
Vocab, sentence structure, idioms, ellipses - take your pick, they're
all hard. And once you finally get a workable translation, you still
don't really know what it's trying to say. We're in chapter 12. Take the
exegesis of verse 24, for example. "The blood of sprinkling that speaks
better than Abel." What in the world does that mean? Or the theology
that lies behind verses 16 and 17, talking about Esau giving up his
birthright and not being able to get a blessing no matter how he wept
for it.

Okay, I'll quit whining now. Despite all the difficulty and the many
hours of work and the paper cuts from flipping pages in BDAG, I love it. It's a wonderful feeling when the translation finally hits you.
Wonderful. I just wish it would hit me sooner.

3 comments:

JM O'Clair said...

Ah, c'mon, Danny. It's a piece of cake.

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Now hurry up and translate. :)

JM O'Clair said...

Oops. Scratch that previous comment. A total non sequitur. Arrgh..

Danny said...

And the earth was תהו ובהו