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Hey, a small nitpicky request.
I'm assuming Ngao Mbeba is supposed to be "Shieldbearer" in Swahili, since info on Kikongo seems ridiculously hard to find, and google translates it directly into Shield Bearer as well.
The thing is Ngao Mbeba is grammatically incorrect. Swahili (and likely Kikongo) compounds words in reverse order to English. So "Fireman" for example would be "Manfire".
So Ngao Mbeba (Literally Shield + Bearer) should actually be reversed to Mbeba Ngao (Bearer + Shield). You can actually see it in this excerpt from the Swahili Bible (1 Samuel 17:41).
> Wakati ule ule, yule Mfilisti, akiwa na mbeba ngao wake mbele yake, akaendelea kujongea karibu na Daudi. > > Meanwhile, the Philistine, with his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David.
So if you could fix/look into that. It'd be much appreciated.
Samaritans number at most, 1,000-2,000 people. They are not strictly speaking "Jews" because they claim descent from Northern Kingdom Israelites--i.e not "Judeans." Samaritans and Jews are both Israelites though.
Samaritans are not considered Jews in modern day Israel. Most live in Palestine/the West Bank. There are very few Samaritans left so I think they are considered more of a "topic of interest" and relations are not strained or considered very seriously in Israel.
The biggest difference between Samaritans and Israelite belief is that Samaritans believe that the "place that God will choose" mentioned in Deuteronomy is Mount Gizrim in modern day Palestine/West Bank, while Jews believe it is Jerusalem. Because the "place that God will choose" is the only place Israelites can offer sacrifices but the Jewish "place of God will choose"--i.e the temple mount in Jerusalem--is inaccessible only Samaritans still offer sacrifices. That is the biggest "theological" difference--where is the "place that God will choose."
The Jewish and Samaritan Torahs are almost identical. Samaritans consider the Torah/Pentateuch (their version that is) holy. They also have post Torah writings, including a book of Joshua and other books explaining post Israelite conquest history. The Samaritan Torah is very similiar to the Jewish Torah, here are some notable differences: --In the Samaritan Torah, Terah is told to leave his home land but dies on the way --The "bridegroom of blood" from Exodus chapter 4 story is more metaphorical (Tziporah has to 'circumcise her heart') --The Samaritan ten commandments (in Exodus at least) have a tenth commandment of setting up an altar on Mount Gizrim.
Here is a Hebrew and English Samaritan Pentateuch online: Eng: https://www.stepbible.org/version.jsp?version=SPE
Heb: https://www.stepbible.org/version.jsp?version=SP
Happy comparing!:)
You're talking about textual traditions, not dialects. All the Greek NT variants are in Koiné Greek, but some have what appear to be later liturgical elements incorporated into the text. With this in mind, it doesn't make much of a difference which textual tradition you decide to study, if you're studying for religious purposes.
The main variant is the Alexandrian text type, which is the earliest attested tradition. It appears to be the earliest version of the NT texts, and draws from fragments of books as old as maybe 1800 years. It is the basis of most modern NT translations. The text is available here.
The next common variant is the Textus Receptus, from which the Authorised Version and other early translations is translated. It was an early attempt at reconstructing and ratifying the "original" New Testament text from what Greek manuscripts were available at the time, and was based on the Byzantine text. A parallel TR/AV is available here.
The Byzantine text type is the text that has been preserved by the Orthodox Church (or so they claim, at least) since the New Testament was first collected into a single volume. It contains additional text that appears liturgical, and is thus the reason why the TR contains those additional texts. The whole thing is available online here.
If you are simply interested in learning to read the NT in Greek, which of these you decide to pursue will make little difference - they are all Koiné Greek and if you can read one, you can read them all. Theologically and doctrinally, there's little to choose between them. Academically, the Alexandrian text type is the more readily-accepted as the "original" NT text.
Hope this helps.
My church fellowships in a network of regional churches to put on two events a year: an "Equipping Event" in the spring, and a Simeon Trust workshop in the fall. The Simeon Trust workshop is mid-October, and I got my assignments for it. We're going through the gospel of Mark, and I am doing my worksheet on expositing Mark 4:1-20 (the parable of the sower) and Mark 14:51-72 (Jesus in front of the council and Peter denying Jesus).
So I will be "in the word" for the next 3 weeks in these two passages whenever I find the time. I'm excited!
Lust is an English translation of a couple different words - let's look at one -
Matthew 5:28 is famously Jesus stating: "everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
The word used is ἐπιθυμέω, and means: to set one's heart upon a thing, lust after, long for, covet, desire.
The word isn't inherently a bad desire, in fact it is used a number of places including 1 Timothy 3:1: "The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task."
As you can see, the context of the word matters a lot. As with many words in English. The sin isn't "lust", after all, unbridled sexual passion in the appropriate context is acceptable, the sin is strongly desiring that which isn't good/Godly/right. Desiring my neighbor's husband, bad, desiring my husband, good. Desiring to be a leader in the Church, good, Desiring that a leader would die so you can be a leader, bad.
There are other places to justify that desiring power for power's sake is bad, desiring money for money's sake is bad, desiring to murder people is bad... the verses generally rendered with the word "lust" apply in context to inappropriate sexual desire.
I personally find the interface a little clunky to navigate, but STEP Bible has a download option HERE. I don't know how exportable the text is, but it is pretty powerful for a free tool.
If I recall correctly, there's also a later Rabbinic interpretation of Kushit to refer to Tzipporah, but it's not clear how modern it is, and whether they borrowed it from the Samaritans.
The Samaritan Bible is fascinating, and it is likely as authentic as the Masoretic text, the Septuagint or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Look at Exodus 20:17 for a really stark difference - https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=SPE|reference=Exo.20.
https://www.stepbible.org/ this is an incredible resource that my university encourages the Biblical studies students to use as part of our research when studying Scripture and writing Exegesis papers!
1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread 4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
> When it is plural, it takes the feminine-ות “-ot” ending.
I do not know why your teacher would tell you that, as that there are masculine plural nouns that end in -ot and feminine nouns that end in -im is a beginner grammar concept. Other examples of irregular plurals being fathers אבות, cities ערים, and women נשים.
> Do you know of a place where it is subject of a masculine conjugated noun?
Just a quick skim, here are several instances of לילה being grammatically masculine:
Genesis 32:31; Numbers 14:14; Joshua 8:9; Judges 6:25: בַּלַּֽיְלָה־הַהוּא
Exodus 12:8: בַּלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה
Jonah 1:17: שְׁלֹשָׁה יָמִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה לֵילֽוֹת
Job 2:13: שִׁבְעַת יָמִים וְשִׁבְעַת לֵילוֹת
Job 3:7: הִנֵּה הַלַּיְלָה הַהוּא יְהִי גַלְמוּד
> I know that some lexicons label it masculine
Are you aware of any that identify it as feminine?
The word na'ar (נער), can be used to refer to essentially anyone from infant to young adult. Moses in the basket is referred to as such, and in other contexts it obviously refers to an adult. What makes this instance stand out is that it is qualified by describing them as 'small'.
Yeled (ילד) on the other hand is almost exclusively 'child'.
There is no reason, other than an apologetic reason to not want God to seem capricious, to interpret these verses as referring to anyone other than 'children'.
If you want to make precise comparison word by word you can use that incredible tool.
You can compare many type on transcriptions with old greek and hebrew texts with a lot of details.
I dont think they have JW nwt but you can find it on their website jw.org.
To save the next person the four seconds to look it up, here is a link to the Gesenius entry, the middle chunk on the right-hand side, which defines it as "a large and magnificent building; a palace". And here is a link to where that word appears in the text.
I wonder if spelling it as 'achti' in the poem is meant to represent the lack of vav in the original Genesis text. There are only a few times elsewhere in the Tanakh where it is spelled fully, it is more often just אחתי.
https://www.stepbible.org/?q=reference=Mark.10|version=ESV&options=NVHUG
STEP Bible suggests that the Greek word ἀγαθός is a noun meaning "do-gooder" or "one who does good." Even if Jesus is taking it as an absolute (like, one who only does "good"), it would still apply to Himself as well.
Since it's coming from the rich young ruler, maybe Jesus is subtly challenging the man's worldview on what he considers "good" (obviously the rich man viewed wealth accumulation as a virtue before this encounter, so maybe Jesus was making him think about what a "do-gooder" truly is?).
Look, whether you interpret the apocalypse of Daniel as mere literature or a true prophecy, you have to accept that it uses symbolic language because every hebrew writing in this genre uses symbolic language and never uses literal language whether in or outside the bible. I could go back to the language of the text itself, but I don't need to since the text itself is clearly not meant to be understood literally. What matters most of all is authorial intent, and every clue we have for what that is points to the idea that a literal 69 weeks is completely wrong.
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Now, let me ask you this, if your ancient language had no word for decade, how would you describe a large collection of years? Think about that for a second, cause the word decade comes from greek, and the author of Daniel probably didn't have an equivalent word. Wouldn't it make sense to use the word "week" or something along those lines to describe the similar idea of a collection of seven years if you didn't have a word for it?
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Finally, if you look up STEP Bible, if you go to the verse in question (Daniel 9:27), the more literal translation of the Hebrew word translated as weeks is "seven". Looking at the scriptures outside of Daniel, all the usages of this word do clearly refer to weeks of days, yes, so you might try and argue that they only use the definition that it can be "weeks of years" to make sure that their interpretation of Daniel's prophecy works. Here's the problem with that argument: firstly, you'd assume that their intentionally making up this translation to support an interpretation of the book you do not even know if they have; and secondly you would still be ignoring the fact that in the cliches of the apocalyptic genre this part of Daniel is being written in, the words of the prophecies in the apocalypse are never meant to be taken literally.
> Does it literally mean "to be able to physically stand up"?
As in the other reply, it is simply 'to stand'. It is sometimes translated with a sense remaining in place as in Leviticus 13:23: "But if the bright spot stay in its place, and be not spread." That is the sense that seems to me (just a student) is called for in this verse - "He remains". I take the verse to mean simply that he did not die.
This link will allow you to see all the times that word (and derivatives) is used in the Bible, giving you an idea of the ways it translated elsewhere. I do not see anywhere that it was rendered with a sense of healing or recovery.
Awesome post! I can agree with most of this. I think the one thing that I would (slightly) disagree with is:
>You have not considered the fact that your Bible is a translation
While I agree that you should keep this in mind when reading the Bible, I think that most of the english translations are really good translations. Most of them aren't decided by a single person, but by a group of people that are all peer-reviewing each other's work. So in the case of the core doctrines, I think it's ok to rely on the english translations. Mostly because these core doctrines are determined over multiple passages and aren't subject to the syntax or specific meaning of a single word.
The part that I do agree with you is that you should probably have some sort of resource to handle the other languages when dealing with smaller doctrines that are more dependent on syntax and the meaning of a single word. This is where you're going to want to either learn the original languages or use a tool that has strongs or something similar. (I have used this and it works pretty well.) Another good tool is the works of James White. He does a lot of deep dives into the original greek and hebrew of the Bible.
TL;DR: Most English translations (ESV, KJV, NASB) are "good enough" to get you through most of the doctrines layed out in the Bible. You only really need external tools if you're going to do a "deep dive" into the smaller doctrines (, which I would recommend you do eventually).
That is a noble goal! May I ask, have you studied any other languages before?
I was lucky to study a year of Hebrew and Greek during my theological training - but to truly grasp another language is tough work (believe me, I do not share a mother tongue with other of my parents or my spouse). I still consider myself a huge newbie, but there is great value is understanding there is truly a different language/culture/context in the scripture, and diving into the Hebrew/Greek helps enormously with that.
Let me toss in this link, because I think they have the best web interface with nice mouseover :)
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Cross-posted to r/Koine except for the last part.
BDAG and Wallace are good. Spicq is good, though I have not used it as much. Liddell, Scott, and Jones (better known as LSJ) is an awesome lexicon and there is a free online version of LSJ and it's pretty exhaustive on most pages.
If you are using Koine Greek to read the Bible (New Testament or Septuigent or maybe Apocrypha), Logos Bible software is the gold standard for computerized interlinear. However, Logos is expensive. There are other free interlinears online. Of free interlinears, I prefer Tyndale Step Bible. Tyndale Step uses the aforementioned LSJ for its Greek lexicon. (Go figure, right?)
EDIT: I would add The New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek NT by Cleon Rogers for NT Greek exegesis.
You could presume there was more there in Genesis regarding the Nephilim that we’re not seeing but you couldn’t really demonstrate that reliably without finding an ancient version with more there. Besides, because the Masoretic (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.biblegateway.com/passage/%3fsearch=Genesis%2b6&version=NRSV&interface=amp), Septuagint (https://biblehub.com/sep/genesis/6.htm; this version does translate with the word “giants” from Greek γίγαντες which is more explicit), and the Samaritan version (https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=SPE|reference=Gen.6&options=VNHUG; also uses the word “giants” in translation and I’m unaware if the Hebrew word there is the same because I can’t find an online Samaritan Hebrew version that I can read but I assume it’s also נפילים) all have simply a short section there, there’s not really something to identify as having been removed among our biblical texts.
David in 1 Samuel 17 is Philistine and not in the service of Saul but rather the armies of the Philistine state of Gath, which makes geographical sense for a battle in the Elah Valley anyway because that’s a primary route between Judah and Gath and we can see a lot of effort put into fortifying it through archaeological sites like Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Azekah. There’s nothing in the text to suggest that Goliath is ravaging towns. He’s just a really noted warrior in the military.
Some think that Isaiah 8:2 is related.
> And I cause faithful witnesses to testify to me, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah son of Jeberechiah.
This is a link made by Lightfoot. He tries to deduce that "son of Berechiah" was another term for the Zechariah in 2 Chronicles. Most others simply say that double names were common and it's likely that Zechariah had multiple names.
A more modern scholarly take on it is in Moss, C. M. (2009), p. 122-150 [PDF!]. Others such as Origen and Jerome suggested that Zechariah referred to the priestly father of the Baptist in Luke 1. When it comes to variant readings, the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews has "Ἰωδαε", or Jehoiada, and the original version of the 3rd century Codex Siniaticus ends at "Zechariah" and leaves it unqualified. This reading was later corrected.
You can see here that there are some (largely irrelevant) variant readings. There is no manuscript evidence that the 7 verses were an interpolation.
Have you ever done an exegetical analysis of your conclusion? To which you compared native language definitions and meanings in context. I think after you do, you will come to a different understanding.
Here is a great resource to help.
Here’s an online version:
https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=NETfull|reference=2Sa.22
I happen to have gotten the whole thing in PDF format a number of years ago which have been indiapensable.
This CESLetter.org page links to a page that has all of that 1769 King James Bible. (CES Letter page here, KJV bible page here)
Step Bible is a free online resource from Tyndale which includes Greek and Hebrew text. It's a little difficult to navigate, but it's very effective. You can set up passages in parallel or do a word search in English, Greek, or Hebrew.
Accordance does it all, but is not cheap. I built mine up over the years and was invaluable for my training. There is now a free resource from Tyndale House which looks excellent: https://www.stepbible.org
I'm not sure if these are the correct codices (quite new to Hebrew study) but this is a really useful tool for comparing multiple texts https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=OHB|reference=Ps.25|version=WLC&options=VUNGH
> KJB
Just to be clear, you're referring to the KJV here, right? I'm not being pedantic. I just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
> And bows down the mean man and humbles the great man them not do therefore forgive to.
But that's not what the Book of Mormon says. I don't claim to be a Hebrew expert, nor can I validate your personal translation; however, you seem to be ignoring the key fact. Your translation does not match the Book of Mormon text or the KJV text; however, the Book of Mormon text did copy the KJV text word for word in the case of these errors. Therefore, the Book of Mormon still copied a bad source, which was definitely not buried a thousand years earlier.
> Now, the MISTAKE you are making is you are claiming that since the KJV isn't a MEANING for MEANING translation
No. I'm saying that since Joseph copied these exact words into his book, words first sourced here and not translated correct as per my understanding of the experts in the field, then he did not get those from a perfect source or plates buried in 500 AD.
> But as I already pointed out, the KJV is not a MEANING for MEANING translation, it is WORD for WORD and that is what the Hebrew literally says.
Okay. Then why is this site wrong? Where is the word-for-word translation incorrect?
> He doesn't specify shooting, it's almost like it was written in the Bronze Age, eh?
If I recall, the majority of the Torah was written during the Babylonian exile 597-539 BCE (dates from wikipedia). The Bronze Age (again according to wikipedia) ended in the Near East around 1200 BCE. So whilst the stories in the OT might be Bronze Age, the written OT seems to be firmly an Iron Age document (unless wikipedia is being wildly inaccurate). Indeed, there are numerous references to worked iron in the OT.
A perhaps unnecessary nitpick, but it's a pet peeve of mine when the Bible is referred to as Bronze Age.
> You’re claiming that when this was originally written in Hebrew, that it meant that after the light affliction, Zebulun and Naphtali were made heavy with honor.
Exactly. See here to see the original text, but it's likely a moot point as major players on both ends of the bias spectrum agree on the definition.
You can carry out a number of operations, you can compare translations for instance (although I think a a free bible software does it better: see e-Sword, etc.) but the option I'm most interested in with STEP is, as someone who is about take up learning biblical Greek as a hobby, is to view English and Greek/Hebrew translations in an interlinear fashion.