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Tuesday 4 November 2014

Isaiah 53 justification for my reading of את

I doubt that translation will ever be easy. I adjusted grave to tomb to agree with my earlier translations. It is so easy to slip away from concordance - even though it is not as important as I sometimes think. I use grave as a gloss for Sheol so I stick to tomb for קבר. Also my rendering of Isaiah 53:9a is so out of tradition. But every translation (except one) I read takes liberty with the grammar and to my limited mind guesses as much as translates.

e.g. (see here at Bible gateway). CJB makes the verb a divine passive rather than an active voice. ֹNET and RSV pluralize the verb. All of them consider the object marker as if it were a preposition of place.

BUT

There's a lot of detail on the translation here by someone I do not know but who seems to know something. This translation does not use 'with' in its rendering: And he gave the wicked his tomb and the rich his high-burials. That's cool. Deaths (high-burials) is plural. Notes 42 and 43 give an explanation of what my complaint is. Note 41 showing the relationship between wicked and rich (עשר רשע) is also a fun wordplay. Notice how the letters of the roots are reversed. `shr rich, rsh` wicked.

The author concludes: Overall, the phrase is clear and readable, not significantly different from how an Israeli newspaper would have written today: he gave… his altars. Choosing the common reading, they will make his tomb, requires seven significant changes or nonstandard assumptions in two Hebrew words.

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