Hebrew – NU 10:36 …Return, Adonai of the many, many thousands of Israel

NIV – NU 10:36 Whenever it came to rest, he said, “Return, O LORD, to the countless thousands of Israel.”

The question that sparked the discussion was whether the Lord had LEFT the countless thousands of Israel so that He had to RETURN to the countless thousands of Israel. The scripture is surrounded by the telling of what looked like a cloud by day and a fire by night…the presence of the Lord…and the lifting of the ‘cloud’ which directed the people of Israel to break camp and follow. It seemed to me that the Lord never left them during those times. He simple gave them something to follow, thus the wording confused me in the NIV.

When they, being my favorite lay-scholars, translated directly from their Hebrew texts it revealed the true structure of the sentence to be shifted. All of the sudden, the text is giving the Lord the TITLE of ‘Adonai of the many, many thousands of Israel’.

What are your thoughts?

So, with that little bit of couching, here’s my take. The term that is “many, multitude” in Num 10:36 shows up in 1 Sam 18: 7 “Saul has killed his thousands and David his tens of thousands.” It’s on the basis of it’s context in 1 Sam 18:7 that you can get (as the NRSV does) “ten thousand thousands” in Num 10:36.

Given the poetic nature of the text, some translations play it a little looser (e.g. the NIV’s “countless thousands”). The NIV invokes the “bigness” of the poetic line and generally conforms to the dynamic equivalence translation model that the NIV uses (“thought for thought” rather than “word for word”). I’m not sure I would call it something completely different than the Hebrew, but it is obviously less wooden.

I’m wondering, have you ever looked at the NETBible? It’s a translation that gives mostly translation notes rather than study notes. Very nice if you find often find yourself wondering why translations render the text differently. (The notes on Song of Songs are huge!) As a lay reference it is quite useful. I might not always agree with the choices that the NET translators make, but they are quite good at explaining their decisions in the notes. (Oddly enough, they don’t really mention anything on Num 10:36.)

Hope this helps.

It is also entertaining to me that we ran across another instance of questionable wording in the text. Num 10:36 – Literally…Return, Adonai of the many, many thousands of Israel (NIV incorrect). Would you mind terribly using this as an example of what you are attempting to clarify for me? It seems the placement of even a comma can change the entire meaning of the sentence.

This is very unnerving for me to find so many small pieces of scripture that are represented as something totally different than what the Hebrew reveals.

Good catch on the typo. This post has been sitting here for two years, you are the first to note it. I’d like to say it’s a simple mistake, but I’m betting there was probably a parapraxis (Freudian slip) involved.

Regardless, I wouldn’t equate “Bible scholar” with a post-graduate degree from a reputable institution. There are some amazing translators and scholars who don’t have their “papers” as it were. The fine folks at Wycliff come to mind.

I do think that if you are going to claim (as the author did on her website and press release) that your version of the Bible is the only real version, you had better at least have some knowledge of the source languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek). A. Frances Werner has none.

Her system of translation is to create one-to-one relationships between Hebrew and English. This violates one of the cardinal rules of translation: CIE (context is everything). Words aren’t individual bits of data that exist independently. They are intimately dependent on other words around them to help trigger what they mean.

Additionally, their is the question of the development of the language. The Hebrew Bible was written over a period of roughly a thousand years (if you date Exod 15 early and Daniel late, as most scholars do). Trying to have the same meaning for words over such a vast time is difficult. Granted, there is more consistency in Hebrew than in English. The “Song of the Sea” would probably have sounded more like Chaucer than Beowulf to the writer of Daniel. However, theses sorts of changes are inherent in language.

Along the same lines, the Hebrew Bible exhibits regional dialects and authorial idiosyncrasies. For example, parts of Samuel and Kings (and Hosea) might exhibit a Norther Kingdom dialect. Similarly, the author of Ecclesiastes uses the word “hebel” in idiosyncratic ways; hence the range of possible translations and variation from the use of the word in other biblical books where it usually translated as “wind” or “breath.” Such differences are often important for understanding what an author is saying. Imposing a definition of a word based on how it was used hundreds of years and hundreds of miles removed from a text can cause the author’s meaning to be obscured.

I should also note that variants in translation and meaning in various versions of the Bible running around today are less an issue of “inaccuracies” and more of the suppleness of human speech. ALL translation is interpretation. This in some ways is why most translations are done by committees. Generally they are either ecumenical groups trying to find a common translation as free from bias as they can (NRSV is one example) or they are a group from a particular heritage trying to translate the text in accordance with their theological perspective (the NIV would probably be closer to this). Such groups will not produce the same translation, but each will be more free of individual bias than a translation done by a committee of one.

Then again, all of this assumes the basic premise that the Bible was written by people living over a vast amount of time in a vast number of circumstances and cultures, and that these different contexts have left a mark on how they wrote. If your personal theological convictions are something to the contrary (e.g. a dictation theory of inspiration or the like), then a more exotic translation method such as that posed by the ARTB might be right up your alley. Indeed, in the more than two years since I wrote this post, I’ve come to suspect that it was probable such a theological assumption (rather than a scientific disposition) that lead to A. Frances Werner’s project. This is not demean her, but rather to state that we are asking the Bible to do very different things.

My only concern, so far, about what I’ve read is the assumption made at the very beginning…just after the misspelled word “buy” (instead of the proper word “by”). It seems that the author is devalued on the grounds that the she is not a ‘Bible scholar or group of scholars working together’, by that I believe you mean as having a post graduate degree from a reputable institution.

This formal academic arrogance could very possibly be WHY we have the inaccuracies that we do today. It only causes me to assume that the author of this unique book may be rattling some cages that have long needed rattled. My lay-scholars consistently prove to me on a regular basis that passion and logical analysis of the data often trump academic pursuit of such a wonderful text.

I urge you to justify your perception of another’s work on data, as you have in the discussion with the author, and this will or will not convince those who are genuinely searching for truth. Thank you for taking the time to consider my simple thoughts.

What caused me to ask the question was the analysis that I did on the vocabulary of 20 translations. When I started, I would have expected approximately 90-95% correspondence between English and Hebrew–certainly giving translators “wiggle room” to provide better meaning in appropriate cases (like throne, as you mention above). But I was very surprised that the major versions were only between 50-75% consistent in their application of English to Hebrew. Paraphrase versions generally were 25-50%.

That also may not have surprised me if the Hebrew vocabulary was very small in comparison to the English vocabulary. (Which is what I thought originally.) But quite the opposite is true–most English versions are missing significant amounts of Hebrew vocabulary. Most people don’t care that their version misses 6 words for “lion”, but important desert-culture words like “oasis” are missing.

Rather than argue the point theoretically (the data are presented in my book “Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Surprising Bias in the Old Testament”), I decided to demonstrate the gap by creating “Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB)”. It is specifically named TRANSLINEAR, because it is not a TRANSLATION per se.

Enough on my end. Are you surprised at the poor correlation between the English and Hebrew? Or is it what you expected?
Thanks for your time.

So when you ask if there is a better word for ישב than “dwell” the answer you’re going to get is “better where?” Obviously when the context is a king ישב-ing on a throne, I’d say “sitting” would be better than “dwelling” in English, since we sit on chairs in English, we don’t dwell on/in/upon them.

Hope that explains things a bit.