Translating znh

Claude Mariottini has a post on translating Judges 19 here. Claude has been doing a lot of posts on translating recently. In this one he has a few comments about Hebrew words that are homonyms. His initial appeal to Akkadian for an alternative gloss in English and following the Greek has some attractive possibilities. I for one would need to know more about Akkadian influence on the story to pick that solution. I scribbled a comment which is under moderation. I suspect I am immoderate lots of times. One has to be immoderate to be foolish enough to translate the whole of the Hebrew Bible.

  

It’s a horrible story. There appears to be some cultural pattern going on in the repetition. It is difficult to say exactly who is coercing whom about what. The violence in the story reflects Sodom. But I don’t see anywhere or any other example where I could justify a homonym for znh. I can’t say that anger is an adequate guess.

I would not use anger but some English synonym to avoid contaminating the Hebrew-English glossing rules I have enforced.

Whatever I do, I don't think this story is salvageable with a change of gloss. What needs decoding is the repetition and insistence that the Levite stay longer. The father may be delaying it because he loves his daughter and knows he will lose her. (See the next post.)

For what it's worth, I am not at all sure how much farther ahead I am for having translated the Scripture. I started with a bias - as everyone does. I believed, therefore I wrote. But my belief about the Hebrew Scriptures changed from wanting to prove Jesus is the Messiah - if indeed that would even be useful - to realizing that the Tanach stands on its own without the New Testament as a book full of grace and truth. This story among many is not prescriptive. We don't imitate this Levite. 

Whether I will write more on this, I do not know. I only know how poorly we humans deal with each other. Read Land by Simon Winchester - he is thorough, knowledgeable and as incisive and clear as any writer I have read.

Michael Pahl recently tweeted a note from Bruggemann that is worth reading. This is how to adjust our bias with our reading of all Scripture.