Biblical Hebrew

The Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, is incredibly poetic. I'm surprised at how much I prefer the Hebrew to the English translations I see.

For example, take 2 Samuel 7: 8.

New International Version: "Now then, tell my servant David, 'This is what the LORD Almighty says: I took you from the pasture and from following the flock to be ruler over my people Israel."

King James Version: Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel.

Word for word Hebrew translation: And now, thus you will say to my servant, to David, Thus says The Lord of Armies[1], I took you from the meadow, from behind the sheep, to be the prince[2] over all my people, over Israel.

[1] Or possibly "God of War."
[2] Literally "the one in front."

As you can see from the above, only the KJV comes close to retaining some of the poetic structure, the parallelism and repetition, of the original. However, it also seems to place its own poetry above that of the original. This isn't bad, necessarily, but in other places of the Bible, such emphasis strains translation quite a bit. Also, without context, I doubt many people today would have any idea what a sheepcote was. (And I think that sheepcote implies a pen, anyway, something much smaller than a meadow or a pasture.)

Edit: I removed the term "original Hebrew" because I realized how silly it is. The Masoretic text that my copy is made from (the Lenigrad Codex) comes from the early 11th century. Some of the scrolls it was based on seem to pre-date the texts used to make the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Torah that is quoted in the New Testament), and others seem to be versions from after the Septuagint's formation. Unfortunately, all of the scrolls have a pesky habit of being slightly different. The other big extant source, the Aleppo Codex, also has a few differences. The Aleppo Codex is a few decades older (from the 900's), but the Lenigrad Codex's superiority comes from the fact that we have an entire copy of it. Still, however, "original" isn't quite a valid term.

That reminds me of something. I enjoy the way that notations are used in the Hebrew. I can't understand most of them yet, but many have to do with mistranslations or misspellings. A good analogy would be if you were tasked with copying the Gospel of John, and the only scroll you had that held a surviving John 3:16 said:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting lies."

When a situation like this happened with the ancient scrolls being copied into the Masoretic texts, the scribes copied everything exactly as it was written. The words are holy, and so are the letters, and there will be no risk of sin by changing what has been written! However, they did add notations that say things like, "This should say life instead of lies."

The situation I've noticed more often than others involves the Hebrew word "lo". There are two silent letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and "Lo" can be spelled with either of them. "Lo" spelled one way means "no." "Lo" spelled the other way means "to him" or "his." Needless to say, this can cause some fairly bizarre translations unless one notices the notation. This has caused problems in my class, so it's funny to see that it caused problems over a thousand years ago, among trained scribes, as well.

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