Don Cram

…but in translation it can come out absent any fragrance and looking like a wilted dandelion. In reading the New Testament in Greek today (Gospel of John), it struck me again how much more illuminating the original language is when compared to any English translation.

The problem is the very process of trying to pick the best single English word or phrase to express the meaning of the Greek word. It is, at best, a lost cause. When you read your English Bible you will be completely unaware of this. The English reads smoothly and you discern meaning from it. But, because it is a translation, you are missing a lot.

I’ve read Shakespeare in other languages, and it falls flat when compared to what he created in English. The translation might be in iambic pentameter and might even coin some words to reflect Shakespeare’s coinages. But a translation can never catch all the word play and the multifaceted nuances of Shakespeare’s phrasing.

I’m not saying that God does not use the Bible in translation; I’m living testimony that He most certainly does. I grow spiritually through it, I came to Jesus Christ through reading its words, it cuts me more sharply than any double-edged sword with conviction, and it guides my prayer and worship. I am just saying that one should remember that there are helps out there that illumine the text of the English Bible with gems from the Greek.

Here’s my expanded translation from the Greek.

In my reading recently in both Isaiah and the Psalms, the word “totter” has been catching my eye. It’s a vivid verb, often used in the sarcastic suggestion that, if you worship some little wooden idol, you you should nail it to the table top so it doesn’t totter. After several days of having this word jump out at me in my reading, I decided to look into it.

I found it in my Hebrew Bible, looked it up in the lexicons, and found that it has a broad range of meaning: “totter, shake, move, overthrow, slip, waver, reel, stagger, flinch, wobble, weaken, remove, retire, deviate from, repel, push, thrust, dwindle, and diminish.”

Fascinating. So, I decided to do a word study on it to discover how it is used in the Hebrew Old Testament. If you’ve bothered to read the last page of my bible reading schedule, you’ll have seen my rationale for not doing much exegesis from the original Hebrew or Aramaic of the Old Testament. So, when I pulled the Hebrew Concordance (a book that lists every time a given Hebrew or Aramaic word is used in the entire Old Testament), I had to blow some dust off the top.

When I looked up the Hebrew word, the translation given was “wanken.” There is a similar English word I have never found a need to use, but its definition didn’t seem to match anything I had seen in the lexica. I closed the book and stared at the cover, not really seeing what I was looking at. Then my eyes focused on Konkordanz zum Hebräischen Alten Testament.

Oh (I slapped my head), it’s in German. I can read (and to some extent speak) German, so I looked up “wanken” in my Deutsch/English dictionary and found “totter.” The concordance had an elaborate apparatus under each word entry, so I turned to the Introduction to remind myself how to use the book.

“Als der Unterzeichnete den Plan zu dem vorliegenden Werk entwickelte, war er an zwei von der Privileg. Württ. Bibelanstalt gestellte Bedingungen gebunden.”

No offense if German is your native tongue, but I don’t know which strikes me as more funny, the fact that you have to wait until the final word in most clauses to discover what the verb is (and therefore what you are reading about) or that nouns of every stripe are capitalized to inform you ACHTUNG: ZIS IST A NOUN!

Anyway, I can read it, so I slogged through the Introduction. Later I noticed, a little farther on, that the entire Introduction had been translated into Latin. Not helpful. But, just beyond the Latin translation was an English version. Too late.

The Hebrew word is used forty times in the Old Testament, most often in the Psalms, which I would have suspected. I’ll dig in. If I find anything of interest, I’ll post it on my www.wordwalk.org site soon.