Translation | Nerdlets

Exegetical Insight, Lost Edition

May 142009

lost

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:

And may the gods give you riches/blessing.

Exegetical Insight: 1 Corinthians 15:26

Biblical Greek, Christianity 5 Responses »

May 132009

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:

ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐν τῷ Ἀδὰμ πάντες ἀποθνῄσκουσιν, οὕτως καὶ ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ πάντες ζῳοποιηθήσονται. Ἕκαστος δὲ ἐν τῷ ἰδίῳ τάγματι· ἀπαρχὴ Χριστός, ἔπειτα οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ, εἶτα τὸ τέλος, ὅταν παραδιδῷ τὴν βασιλείαν τῷ θεῷ καὶ πατρί, ὅταν καταργήσῃ πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν. δεῖ γὰρ αὐτὸν βασιλεύειν ἄχρι οὗ θῇ πάντας τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ. ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος· πάντα γὰρ ὑπέταξεν ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ.

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.

The Open Scriptures Project

Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Computing, Research Tools, Webapps and Websites 2 Responses »

Mar 022009

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.

: Image via Wikipedia

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.

The Open Scripture project is open-source, licensed under the excellent GPL 3.0. The source code is available on Google Code.

The people behind Open Scriptures will be presenting at the BibleTech 2009 conference.

HT: Biblical Studies and Tech Tools

Göttingen Septuagint in Logos Pre-Pub

Biblical Greek, Books, Software No Responses »

Feb 272009

From the Logos blog:

The Göttingen Septuagint (a.k.a. Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum. Auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Editum) is the most important edition of the Greek translation of the Old Testament ever published. At present it spans 24 print volumes and nearly 7,000 pages, setting the bar high for text-critical studies.

For optimal use in Logos Bible Software, these 24 print volumes will be split into 65 digital resources. This means you’ll be able to view the Greek text right alongside of the apparatus, and in several cases multiple Greek translations with multiple apparatuses. By linking them all together, they will stay in sync as you scroll or jump from passage to passage.

Logos is making this resource available for $299.95 for a limited time. Get it here.

You can find a short but concise introduction to this edition of the LXX here. If you would like to learn more about the relevance of the Septuagint for Old and New Testament studies, Karen Jobes’s Invitation to the Septuagint is an excellent resource.

New Features at Bible.Logos.com

Bible and Hermeneutics, Webapps and Websites 4 Responses »

Jan 282009

New features at an already great site

I’ve mention Bible.Logos.com before. It’s a pretty handy and fluid online Bible. Today it gets an upgrade:

As you navigate through the Bible, we dynamically pull relevant content—both sermons and illustrations—from our Sermons site and display the top three hits with a link to all of the other contributions that deal with the passage of Scripture you’re in.

The coolest part is that no matter where you are in the Bible, the list is automatically updated so there are always related sermons and illustrations just a click away.

This is definitely worth checking out. Logos has put together one of the better web-based Bibles out there. In addition to a variety of English translations they have recently added a number of additional Greek texts, including novum testamentum graece (in Unicode). The site is intuitive and the searching features are robust enough to find what you need. Give it a try.

If you need better Greek searching and features, try Zhubert.

Preach your Greek

Biblical Greek No Responses »

Jan 262009

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.…”

Read the whole thing.

Lost (and Gained) in Translation

Bible and Hermeneutics, Biblical Greek, Christianity No Responses »

Nov 242008

At a dog-friendly beach in Holland

Some ideas are easily represented in any language, but more often than not translation requires sensitivity to a wide variety of often competing influences.

I just listened to a nice little story on NPR about the “Art of Translation.”

Bea Basso, who came from Italy to the United States in 2000 to study and work in theater, has done a lot of translating from Italian to English. She says that the choice of a single word can determine the arc of an entire work.

“There is no such thing as a literal translation, by nature of choosing one word or another, you influence the next step,” she says.

Listen to the whole story.

Because no two languages are alike, and since the cultural differences surrounding a language are often more than meets the eye, translation is more an art than a science. Translation always involves something lost and also something gained–some of the original is gone, but there is also often additional meaning in the translation that was not there in the text being translated. For proof, type in some text here. The results can be comic.

This is true of all translation, but with Greek (or Hebrew, or any other “dead” language) the matter is complicated by the fact that the original culture is no longer there for us to study. Translation suddenly intersects with historical research, sociology, theology, and a wealth of other disciplines, which is one reason it is so important for pastors to learn Greek.

BibleArc Lets You Create Thought-Flow Diagrams

Bible and Hermeneutics, Books, Webapps and Websites 4 Responses »

Oct 162008

There are a variety of method of diagramming available to the student of the Bible, but very few tools to actually assist in creating such diagrams. Well BibleArc does just thought, providing scholars and preachers alike with an easy way to begin constructing their own diagrams. You can view my hastily created diagram to the left to get a taste.

The website includes instructions, a brief description of what all the symbols mean, and a plethora of videos and tutorials. You can diagram in a variety of English translations, or in Greek (complete with parsings). Improvements to the user interface (which is still a little cumbersome), as well as a repository of user-created diagrams, are apparently on the way. You can save diagrams to their site (with a user name and password), or export them as PDF documents.

Discourse Analysis Software from Logos

Biblical Greek, Books, Software No Responses »

Sep 292008

Good translations require a good understanding of how languages work. This requires more than just knowing a list of words and grammatical structures; it requires an understanding of why an author chooses this structure instead of that one. It requires an understanding of linguistic context, of the rules of discourse, of conventions of speech and genre. The tools and techniques by which exegetes can study these factors is called Discourse Analysis.

For a great introduction to Discourse Analysis, as well as other topics in linguistics and their impact on biblical studies, check out Cotterell’s Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation. Young’s Intermediate New Testament Greek also includes a wonderful introduction to Discourse Analysis, and includes several different methods for diagramming.

But the purpose of this post is to point out some software by Logos. First, there is a semantic/discourse diagramming feature bundled into Scholar’s Library (which looks very nice; Bibleworks includes grammatical diagramming, but not discourse diagrams). Check that out here. Additionally, they are now offering a complete discourse analysis of the New Testament. Check out the announcement, complete with screenshots and a video, here.

How to Type in Greek Part III: The Best Greek Fonts

Biblical Greek 21 Responses »

Jul 122008

This is the third past in a series of posts about typing in Greek. The first post was about the the joys (and necessity) of Unicode character encoding. The second detailed how to set up a Greek keyboard. Now you need a good font. While up to this point we have been dealing with encodings and characters, the way in which an operating system matches the push of a key to a letter in a given language; now we are going to focus our attention on glyphs, the way in which different characters are represented by a particular font.

What do you want in a Greek Font?

Eye Candy: The most immediate qualification for a good font is eye candy. Seriously: this is important. The better looking your font, the easier it is to read, both for you and your audience.

Check out the image to the left. Which do you like better? The top glyph is what we call “sans serif” because it does not have the fancy shaping and decorative formatting that the bottom glyph has. Sans serif fonts are particularly common on the internet because they are the easiest to read, even if not the prettiest over all. Times New Roman, by contrast, is a serif font. If you write your papers using a serif font, your Greek should be a serif font as well (and vice-versa). This is usually just a matter of personal preference, but generally readers prefer serif over sans serif for extended amounts of text, and the opposite for presentations (PowerPoint) and Web pages.

A more specifically Greek decision involves accents, the most important of which is the circumflex. This again is a matter of preference, but I prefer the full semicircle over the tilde. Having said that, the font I am eventually going to recommend uses the tilde. Oh well…

Free: The second (and most important) qualification of a Greek font is that it should be free. There are two types of free: free beer and free speech. The former is probably the most immediate concern, but the latter is really the most important. A “free beer” font will be free to use and will not encumber you with licensing fees should you decide to publish your work using that font. The Microsoft fonts seem like they are free-beer fonts—at least you probably do not remembering paying for them—but in reality they are encumbered by a pretty strict license. They will be fine for basic personal use, but if you are planning to start a Greek-Verse-Greeting-Card business, or am online journal for NT studies, you might want to pick something else. At the very least, you want to use a font that is free for both non-commercial and commercial use.

You may also be interested in a “free speech” font. In addition to being free as in free beer, free speech fonts allow you to redistribute, modify, and have absolute control over all underlying mechanics. You can use them, change them, and distribute them, all without asking permission.

In short, you want a font that is licensed under an a so called “copy left” license. These are “open source” licenses. Applied to fonts, these licenses define the parameters by which you can use and modify the glyphs in question; they will be royalty-free (“free beer”) and also free-to-modify (“free speech”) under certain conditions. .

So what fonts should I use?
The following is a list of the best fonts available. Only Unicode fonts are included:

Gentium would be my first-choice recommendation. It is a serif font. The standard versions uses the tilde for the circumflex, though an alternative version (GentiumAlt) is now included in the download that uses the half-moon. It includes a full Latin set of characters, which means that in addition to being your Greek font, you could use it as a whole-sale replacement for Times New Roman, or whatever default font you use in your documents—a one-stop shop for all your Latin-based language needs. Additionally, it is fully open (both “free beer” and “free speech”), and is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which is excellent. It includes installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as source code. The recent addition of GentiumAlt to the font family eliminates all my previous hesitations about recommending this font. It really is excellent, and its Latin characters are so nice that I have begun using it as my default serif font for all my documents. Gentium is maintained by SIL, which has developed quite a reputation among linguists, and promises robust future development while maintaining an open licensing schema. (By the way, if you are using Ubuntu/Debian Linux, you can install from the command line: “sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium”.)
Galatia SIL is a serif font that uses a half-moon circumflex. It is “free beer” but not “free speech.” This is a slight problem because the font no longer appears to be actively developed, which is unfortunate because it is probably the best-looking Greek font available. A font that is no longer supported by those that made it can be problematic because errors will not get fixed, and errors might crop up as the rest of the computer world marches on.
Freefont. I have not had much experience with this font. It’s biggest claim to fame is its audacity: the goal of the project is to support every unicode character, which is pretty ambitious. It looks nice and is licensed under the GNU (pronounced GooNoo) public license, the best and original “copy-left” license. You can check out more information on the project here.
Linux Libertine and other OpenType fonts are available for Linux and other operating systems, including Windows, despite the name. A good choice. Fully open. But they are not the prettiest fonts available, and I’ve had issues with software compatibility (such as exporting a document to PDF).
Other SIL fonts. The Summer Institute of Linguistics specializes in languages, translations, and technological tools. There are many fonts available on their site, most of which provide Unicode support, many of which are licensed under their OFL. If you are in search of a different Greek font, or a font for a non-Latin character set (coptic, Hebrew, etc.), this is the place to start.
The Free Font Foundation has several Unicode fonts that are worth checking out.
Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are not yet ready to deploy, as they do not yet support Greek characters. Nevertheless, they are the next “upgrade” to the wonderful Gentium font family, listed above. Gentium only builds regular and italic glyph-sets into its definition: no additional weights are included. This is not a problem for basic users; almost all Word Processors are able to automatically “add” bold weighting to any font, regardless of its internal definition (at least that is my understanding—I am able to get great-looking bold characters with the regular Gentium fonts listed above). Publishing companies, by contrast, will not want to rely on a particular Word Processor’s interpretation of a font, and will therefore require additional “built in” weights. So, to make up for this deficiency, SIL has split Gentium development. Both Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are based on the Gentium glyph-set, but will include bold-weight characters, as well as some other features not included in the original Gentium (again, this is my understanding of their explanation, and I invite correction from anyone with more accurate knowledge). They do not yet support Polytonic Greek, however, though eventually they will support every character that Gentium supports. Keep an eye on these; when they are finished they could supply the biblical scholar and publisher with all their Latin-based-character needs.
Still looking? While the above fonts are, in my judgment, the best available, there are others. The above link provides some additional online resources. This site might also come in handy, though some of the fonts listed are either terrible or not free in any sense.
SBL has an collection of legacy fonts available at their site, none of which are included in the above lists due to their non-open license, and also because only a few of them include Unicode support.

What about Hebrew?

I have given short-shrift to Hebrew, and I apologize. There are reasons, however. There really is only one decent open-standard font that I know about for Biblical Hebrew: Ezra SIL. It’s fully open under SIL’s OFL, it supports every character used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and it’s easy on the eyes. You will need to download a special keyboard to get it working, though. Instructions for doing so are available on the download page, where you can also find a keyboard map of the layout. Also: you may run into small problems with Macs and in Linux, though nothing catastrophic. If anyone has other Hebrew fonts they would like to recommend, please do so in the comments.

Ros Clarke notes in one of the comments that SBL has a good Hebrew font available here. It is a very well designed font that includes Linux support. The only disadvantage is that it is not licensed under an open standard, though SBL does provide it free of charge for non-commericial use. Thanks Ros.

Conclusion

Don’t forget to check out my previous posts on Unicode and on setting up a Greek keyboard. All this might sound a bit intimidating, but it really will make your life easier in the long run.

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Nerdlets

Exegetical Insight, Lost Edition

Exegetical Insight: 1 Corinthians 15:26

The Open Scriptures Project

Göttingen Septuagint in Logos Pre-Pub

New Features at Bible.Logos.com

Preach your Greek

Lost (and Gained) in Translation

BibleArc Lets You Create Thought-Flow Diagrams

Discourse Analysis Software from Logos

How to Type in Greek Part III: The Best Greek Fonts

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