Though perhaps not as significant as yesterday’s exegetical insight, I put myself to the task of translating Jacob’s tapestry from last night’s lost (that pause button is wonderful, isn’t it!).
So here goes. First I transcribed it into miniscules:
θεοι τοσα δοιεν οσα φρεσι σησι μενοινας
So it’s two clauses:
θεοι τοσα δοιεν
οσα φρεσι σησι μενοινας
The latter clause is a relative clause, with μενοινας as the main verb. It’s a standard progressive active indicative, 3nd singular from μενοινάω, “to desire eagerly, be bent on a thing” according to Middle Liddell. The adjective σησι is just a possessive, with φρεσι as its head noun. So the phrase is something like “whatever/as much as you desire for your heart.”
Now to the main clause. δοιεν took me awhile because it’s an optative (not used to those in the NT). But the root δο is your clue, and it’s listed in Great Scott: Aor. act opt. 3rd plural from διδωμι. I think τοσα is nueter plural, the antecedent of οσα.
So here is my translation
May the gods give [to you] as many things as you desire for you heart.
Or more idiomatically (removing the repetitive relative pronoun and treating the dative of advantage as idiomatic):
May the gods give to you all your heart’s desire.
Or you could just search on the transliteration in the Perseus Project (I assumed it was a quote from something). It’s from Homer, Od. 6.180. Here.
Update: The bottom line, by the way, is the following
θεοι δε τοι ολβια δοιεν
This one is much easier. ὄλβιος, α, ον, used substantively here, means “blessing,” or “riches”. This line is actually listed in Middle Liddell as an example, and is also from the Odyssey. So the translation:
In the course of preparing for their Greek finals I have received a number of wonderful questions from students about this or that passage of Scripture. And since Nick Batzig has been hounding me for over a year to include some kind of Greek exegetical comment on my blog, I thought it might be appropriate to share one with you, though it is a significant departure from my usual posts (I really try to steer clear of theological stuff here).
The question revolves around translating 1 Cor 15:26:
ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος
Don’t let the brevity fool you. I found it very difficult to bring out the force of this in sensible English. The Greek syntax actually made me teer up a little. Here are some considerations.
The position of ὁ θάνατος makes it difficult to bring out the “surprise” of the passage. It is appositional with ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς: “the last enemy… namely, death.” Translating as appositional in English seems overly formal to me, though. Paul makes his point with a bit of rhetorical flair, a flair that is removed in the “literal” English.
The verb καταργεῖται is both passive and progressive. The combination makes translation difficult, but the big problem is the force of the progressive. Most English versions regard it as futuristic, which would indicate the surety of the outcome described. I think it better to regard it as having a durative or tendential force.
Futuristic idea: either “the last enemy to be destroyed” (most translations) or “the last enemy that will surely be destroyed is death” (focuses on the surety of a future outcome). This is possible, but it is not the best explanation. Remember we are driving to a main point in all this discussion of resurrection: the (present!) stinglessness of death (1 Cor 15:55-6).
Tendential idea: “the last enemy is being destroyed” (that is, Christ is currently in the business now of destroying this enemy). This is my preference. See Thiselton’s 1 Cor commentary, p1234. The difficulty here is the passive. It’s really difficult to get (1) the tendential idea, (2) the passive idea, and (3) the pithiness all in one go.
Durative idea: “the last enemy has begun to be destroyed” (that is, Christ began destroying this enemy in the past and continues to do so. This is possible, but durative progressives are usually associated with a temporal adverbial clause, which we don’t have here.
Paul is all over the temporal and aspectual map in this section (1 Cor 15:23-28); progressives are bracketed by Aorists, which in turn are bracketed by progressives again. The whole constitutes a redemptive-historical description of the resurrection. We start with the broadest eschatological orientation: ἀπαρχὴ Χριστός, ἔπειτα οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ (15:23). One resurrection harvest in two parts (see Gaffin). So Christ’s resurrection starts the process, and the whole thing will be completed when his many sons (Genitive of relationship) will be raised ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ (temporal prepositional phrase (“when”) with a subject Genitive (“when he comes”). Within these two bookends we have a whole slew of activity, described with whole slew of progressives and Aorists and related temporal conjunctions, all of which is then described under the umbrella of Jesus’ βασιλείν. Sorting when each activity occurs can be difficult, and goes beyond the abilities of what started out as a simple post.
So the question is: can we bring all this content out with the same economy and forcefulness of Paul’s original? Here are my attempts at a translation.
Respecting the passive, though adding an adverb to bring out the tendential/durative force:
“Death, the last enemy, is already being destroyed.”
Or, avoiding the passive for the sake of clarity (our little girl has made me appreciate the NLT more than I had in the past):
“Christ is already destroying death, the very last enemy.”
Or, alternatively:
“Christ has already begun to destroy the last enemy, death.”
All of these are significant syntactic departures from the original, though.
In any case, here is my (loose, preliminary) translation of the entire passage, 1 Cor 15:22-27a:
For just as all die in Adam, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in its own proper order. Christ as firstfruits, then those who are sons and daughters of Christ when he comes, then the end, when he will hand over the kingdom to His God and Father, after he has destroyed ever authority and power. For it is necessary for him to continue to rule until every enemy has been placed under his feet. The Last Enemy, Death, is already being destroyed, for all things have been placed under his feet.
What do y’all think?
Oh, and I have found Thiselton’s commentary on 1 Corinthians to be a very helpful handling of the Greek text. He consistently appeals to Paul’s overarching theology in its eschatological/redemptive-historical emphasis.
It’s been a long time coming, but SBL has finally released their promised Greek Font. The download page is here, or you can download it directly here. There is also a Hebrew font.
The fonts work in all Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Mac). They are not open-source (so a couple of other fonts are still my top recommendations), but they are free to use:
SBL fonts are made available without cost to individual scholars for non-profit use. Commercial use by publishers is reserved for members of the SBL Font Foundation.
If you haven’t already set up your keyboard to support Unicode Greek, follow my guide (for Macs go here, or for Linux here).
SBL’s Biblical Font FAQ is also worth a read. If you’re not already familiar with the advantages of Unicode (as described, for example, in my guide), you may find their explanation of interest:
Why should I bother with a Unicode font? Isn’t it easier to keep using the fonts I have used for years?
With older, non-Unicode fonts, character glyphs were simply mapped over Roman characters. So, with SPEzra for example, pushing “b” displays a bet, and “[” displays an ayin. However, the computer understands these characters as “b” and “[.” Thus, when the document is transferred to a computer that does not have that specific font installed, the computer displays those characters.
Unicode seeks to allow for transfer of encoded documents between platforms and independent of fonts. So, if a document is typed using one Unicode font, it will also be viewable using another Unicode font. Likewise if the font is not installed, the computer simply defaults to its normal Unicode font. If one wants to use a different font for aesthetic (or other) reasons, one can change the font just like one would do with English. Additionally, the computer understands the characters to be the ones that the screen displays. So, an ayin both displays as an ayin and is encoded that way. This makes cross-platform text transfers and searches possible, because texts can be encoded with the characters in which they are written. Even though learning to switch to and use keyboard layouts for other languages takes a little bit of time to learn, the benefits of Unicode more than make up for this small initial investment of time and effort.
If you ever type in Greek, Hebrew, or any other language that requires special characters, then you need to make sure you are using a Unicode font. I have written up a pretty thorough guide to using Unicode fonts in Windows and/or Linux, but my Mac knowledge is flaky. If you’re a Mac user and are interested in typing in Greek or Hebrew then follow this guide.
Regardless of your operating system you might also be interested in my introduction to Unicode.
We have had many occasions to mention the variety of online resources available for reading and browsing biblical texts here on Nerdlets.org. There is a lot of data online, and the continuing digitilazation of texts means the wealth of data is growing every day.
Here’s the problem: every website or resource database or web-app has a different way of representing that data and the information that describes it, and not all of them provide ways for external sites and apps to interact with that data. The bottom line here is that it is currently impossible, or at least very difficult, to seamlessly “mashup” information from various sources.
For example, say you want to compare the text of John 8 in a couple of ancient Greek manuscripts, all of which are available online, but from different institutions. Currently you would have to go to each site independently, use the disparate methods to extract the data you need, and then mash-them-up yourself using a Word Processor or other tool. Cumbersome, no?
The Open Scripture project has the ambitious goal of solving this dilemma. From their web site:
Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online—manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources’ interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.
It’s still in its infancy, but they have released their first application, the Manuscript Comparator:
This tool allows two or more Biblical (currently New Testament) manuscripts or manuscript editions to be easily compared in side-by-side and unified views (no original unedited MSS are yet incorporated). It demonstrates a fundamental concept in the Open Scriptures framework: semantic linking. All of the contributing manuscripts are merged together to produce a single unified manuscript containing every attested variant; additionally, while merging, a manuscript’s words are linked to their corresponding words in the unified manuscript.
A full review of this tool is coming to Nerdlets.org soon.
Mounce fields a question I get a lot: how do you use your Greek in the pulpit? His answer is well worth a read. My favorite part:
It starts with your homework. The most important place to use biblical languages is behind the scenes in doing your research, whether it be sermon preparation or getting ready for a Bible study. The languages give you access to tools that are far beyond the reach of English.
In class I have sometimes used a cooking analogy to get this across. Imagine someone in cooking school. One day one they are taught how to make pancakes. The good chef does not respond, “Why should I have to learn how to make pancakes? Why not just use Aunt Jemima?” The master chef does not pull out Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima may be easy—the ingredients are already mixed up together, just add water!—but the master chef always starts from scratch. Why? Because he knows his ingredients and wants to use them effectively. In the same way the pastor should be a master exegete. He should not rely on the pre-packaged just-add-water translations available to him. Those translations have already made all the tough decisions! Rather, the pastor should struggle with the original, even if only in a limited way.
And here is another good rule, this time more on presentation:
But I imagine that you have noticed I have not yet used the word “Greek” or “Hebrew” publicly. This is my general rule. When I want to talk about the meaning of the Greek word, I say something like, “The word translated such-and-such has a range of meanings that includes.…”
If you frequently search the Westminster Library then you may be interested in this post. I have created a command for Firefox‘sUbiquity that allows you to search the Westminster Library Catalog without ever leaving your web page. You can even highlight text on any web page and automatically search the library catalog using that text.
The ubiquity notification bar appears on pages with Ubiquity commands
If you know all about Ubiquity, and already have it installed, then simply add the wtslibrary command by clicking “Subscribe” in the drop down notice on this page. Once you’ve subscribed to the command, activate Ubiquity and type in “wtslibrary”, then your search. To highlight and search, just select text on any web page (try it now on the word bavinck), activate ubiquity, and then type “wtslibrary” and return. So easy (and you may also be interested in this post)!
New to Ubiquity? I have a full introduction available, complete with instructions for installing my Westminster Bookstore Ubiquity command.
If you’re not ready to jump into the wonderful world of Ubiquity, try my simpler Firefox Search Plugin.
How does the wtslibrary command work?
You can subscribe to the “wtsbooks” command by browsing to this page with Ubiquity installed and clicking “Subscribe” when the notification window drops down.
To use the command, activate Ubiquity (your shortcut key) and start typing “wtslibrary”. Then type in your search and press “enter”. You can also select text on a web page (why not try it be selecting the following: bavinck), activate Ubiquity, type “wtslibrary,” and the text you selected will be automatically entered as your search.
Future prospects
For future updates to this command, bookmark this page or subscribe to my site. I hope to add more functionality in the future, like search previews (type “amazon” into Ubiquity to see what I mean) and other goodies. If you have suggestions or questions, please post them in the comments!
If you love the Westminster Bookstore, then you’re going to want to read this post. I have created a command for Firefox‘sUbiquity that allows you to search the Westminster Bookstore without ever leaving your web page. You can even highlight text on any web page and automatically search WTS Books using that text.
The ubiquity notification bar appears on pages with Ubiquity commands
If you know all about Ubiquity, and already have it installed, then simply add the wtsbooks command by clicking “Subscribe” in the drop down notice on this page. Once you’ve subscribed to the command, activate Ubiquity and type in “wtsbooks”, then your search. To highlight and search, just select text on any web page (try it now on the word bavinck), activate ubiquity, and then type “wtsbooks” and return. So easy (and you may also be interested in this post)!
New to Ubiquity? Keep reading!
What is Ubiquity?
Ubiquity is a plugin for Firefox (an excellent web browser) that allows you to interact with the web in a whole new way. It is a way of talking to the internet, telling it what kind of information you want and what you want to do with it. Bottom line: it’s the future of interacting with the web because it lets you do things more naturally and with less effort.
All this may sound like a lot of fluff. Why not see Ubiquity in action? The video below is an amazing demonstration of Ubiquity’s power and promise.
Easy. If you are using Firefox just go here and click the “Download Latest Version Ubiquity” link (or alternatively, just click here). Restart Firefox. You should see a page that tells you how to use Ubiquity and offers you a few options.
Note the keyboard shortcut listed in the top left corner of the page. It’s set to <CTRL>+Space by default (for Windows). You will use this shortcut to invoke Ubiquity and type your commands. Try it out now. Press the shortcut key, then type in “weather”. Wait for it…. Pretty cool, huh?
You may want to customize your shortcut key (especially if it doesn’t work, which is probably because that key combination is mapped to some other command on your system). I have mine set to WINDOWS+U.
How do I install more Ubiquity commands?
Ubiquity just provides the interface—the language by which your browser can communicate with you. For Ubiquity to be useful, you need to install commands. Ubiquity comes with a whole set of default commands, and installing new ones couldn’t be easier.
The ubiquity notification bar appears on pages with Ubiquity commands
If you go to a web page (like this one!) that contains a Ubiquity command, a little drop-down notice will appear asking if you want to subscribe. If you do, click “Subscribe” and follow the instructions on the next page. That page will look unnecessarily scary. It’s asking you if you trust the source. If you do, scroll down to the bottom and click “I know what I’m doing”. You might also want to check the “auto-update the feed” box, which means that anytime the author of the command makes a change, you will automatically have the latest version.
You can subscribe to the “wtsbooks” command by browsing to this page with Ubiquity installed and clicking “Subscribe” when the notification window drops down.
To use the command, activate Ubiquity (your shortcut key) and start typing “wtsbooks”. Then type in your search and press “enter”. You can also select text on a web page, activate Ubiquity, type “wtsbooks,” and the text you selected will be automatically entered as your search.
Future prospects
For future updates to this command, bookmark this page or subscribe to my site. I hope to add more functionality in the future, like search previews (type “amazon” into Ubiquity to see what I mean) and other goodies. If you have suggestions or questions, please post them in the comments!
I’m not an über-PC kinda guy, but in papers I try to use non-biased terms like “c.e.” and “Hebrew Scriptures” and gender neutral language where possible. But what about the word “Biblical”? Should it be capitalized? This question has always given me a bit of trouble, since you see it both ways in journals. Well, here is the answer.
It is now even easier to search, read, and even listen to the Bible online.
A much improved upgrade to Ubiquity has been released, making this ground-breaking Firefox plugin prettier, more robust, and exceedingly versatile. More to the point, the ESV command for this plugin has also been updated, and the update allows you to listen to the Bible as you browse. You can watch the video at the end of this post for a full demonstration and how-to instructions.
Ubiquity is a plugin for the Firefox browser. You can read the full introduction, complete with an excellent video demonstration, here. In a nutshell: it gives your browser a basic understanding of language. You can use Ubiquity to type in simple commands in order to make Firefox do things that it would normally require several clicks and minutes to do.
Check the weather with Ubiquity
Take checking the weather as an example. The old way: (1) open up a new tab, (2) type in the URL of the weather site, (3) type in your zip code, (4) scroll past adds and other useless information. The Ubiquity way: (1) Type in “Weather”, (2) Wait while ubiquity does everything for you (it uses your IP address to automatically determine your location, check the weather site, and output todays weather in the same window).
Ubiquity Commands
Ubiquity includes a number of built in commands, such as “wikipedia” to search the site with that title, “calculate” to crunch numbers, “add-to-calendar” to add an event to your Google calendar, or “twitter” to change your twitter status. You can see all available ubiquity commands by using the command “command-list.”
The true awesomeness of Ubiquity, however, lies in the fact that any web page or service can generate a set of commands that allow you to interact with its services. You can add these commands to Ubiquity by “subscribing” to the page in question. You can find a large list of commands here, but be warned that these should all be considered beta-at-best.
How to Set Up Ubiquity and the ESV Plugin
The good folks in charge of the ESV Bible have provided a ubiquity command that allows readers to search, read, and even listen to the ESV Bible. I have written a small screen cast that shows you how to set this up and also demonstrates some of Ubiquity’s best features.
You will need to go to the following sites in order to set things up.
Below is a brief screencast demonstrating how to get Ubiquity set up, how to install the ESV plugin, and how to use both to do a number of interesting things while you browse the Internet.
Update:
Don’t miss the official video from ubiquity! It’s truly amazing:
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