is authorship relevant to translation?

over in the basic reading of genesis 1:1 thread, ICANT has made the following assertion numerous times: now, these are mostly nonsense, of course. he doesn't seem to understand that other languages have grammatical rules also, and that many of the functions described in english grammar are also seen in other languages, and whether or not an author understood grammar isn't particularly relevant when all you're looking at is how they used grammar. the proof is on the page, so to speak.further, i have replied to him numerous times to this effect, and stated repeatedly that the authorship of the torah is not the topic, and really should have no bearing on what the torah actually says. i think that's fairly common sense. this one is particularly and painfully ironic, as he is essentially assuming mosaic authorship, and using his traditions to "read moses mind" about what moses did or did not know: of course, i pointed out the hilarity to him. but this one raises a potentially legitimate question: now, i made the obvious lexical reply: nearly every time the word is used in the bible, other than in reference to the heavens, it describes either literal metalwork, the action of pounding metal, or dispersal. and the other obvious reply: though "moses" never referred to the heavens as a tent, isaiah did. and isaiah didn't live in a tent.but the question is this: can assumptions or traditions be validly used as input in a translation? if so, how? and when? can we find some examples of acceptable and unacceptable uses?i'd also like to state that, just like the other thread, this thread is not about whether moses wrote the torah. there are multiple threads on that topic, and will be many more. the thread is asking whether traditions regarding authorship, or lets say even known facts, should have an influence on how a translation is done, for any document.

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אָרַח

Thread copied here from the is authorship relevant to translation? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Question for clarification:Are you asking whether we should translate a word as, for example, 'canvas' over 'firmament' based on whether tradition holds the author to be a certain person who lived in a tent and thus must have meant 'canvas', as opposed to simply translating the word for what it means?Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

yes, but only kind of. ICANT's example is sort an extreme one, because it argues something that is not compatible with the strict lexical translation. but perhaps there are alternatives where the two are compatible, and we might look to the author's identity/history/whatever for a decision between two possible translations.i'm trying to be as charitable as i can here -- the kind of proposol made by ICANT would probably only generate "lol, no" kinds of responses. but are there any circumstances under which this principle or something similar can be used?

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אָרַח

To those with an apologists mindset, having already decided that they are right (and extremely reluctant to be persuaded by mere evidence) any excuse that can be deployed to deny that an opposing position is correct is "relevant" no matter how irrational. Have we not seen this here enough times ?

sure.but what i want to know is if there might be any rational reason to apply similar logic.

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אָרַח

More often we would be using the work to identify the author !But I suppose that there is an example from a current thread here - Shapiro who Shadow71 is promoting. His idiosyncratic and misleading (perhaps intentionally misleading) use of words to hype the ideas he favours is one of the rare cases where it would be relevant. However, it is only because we know that he does that, that his identity is relevant.

Another case I can think of involves Abe Lincoln. In his letters he often refers to "mother", but from other context it is possible to determine that when he uses the word he is most often talking about his wife, not his mother.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Hi arach, You competely missed the thought game on that one I was suggesting to kbertsche.Moses could have written anything he desired to write 3500 years ago but that does not mean it has not been changed two or three times since then.We have people today making translations from translations.So what I was implying was that maybe Moses wrote one thing and then later on a copyist who viewed it as something hammered out passed along that meaning for the word written down.English changes all the time.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

okay. so, my question remains essentially the same -- does the author's identity have any relevance to translation. i think the question of scribal continuity is within the acceptable realm of this topic, so...here is your example. the verse reads:

quote:

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ויאמר אלהים יהי רקיע בתוך המים

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-- genesis 1:6

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and you suspect it should read:

quote:

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ויאמר אלהים יהי אהל בתוך המים

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-- genesis 1:6, hypothetical

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or something similar? well, the problem with this that the two words aren't especially easy to mistake for one another. though, perhaps, "curtain" might be more applicable:

quote:

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ויאמר אלהים יהי דק בתוך המים

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-- genesis 1:6, hypothetical

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this would be a much easier mistake to make. so the question is, is this method valid? i'll provide a similar example. here is god's command to noach,

quote:

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עשה לך תבת עצי-גפר

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-- genesis 6:14

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nobody knows what "gopher wood" is. however, later in the very same verse, we are presented with the word kopher, which means "pitch". parallelism reinforces this, and it's a sensible way to build a boat. so the verse should read:

quote:

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עשה לך תבת עצי-כפר

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-- genesis 6:14, hypothetical

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it's easy to see how a koph could degrade into a gimel through scribal error. but this whole thing makes no assumptions about authorship. the question here is not whether scribal errors happen, or whether (or even how) they can be detected... but whether authorship should play any role whatsoever in those conjectures.

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אָרַח

You just might be a couple of orders of magnitude off!What I want are the bootleg tapes of the parts of the bible left out. I want full disclosure. How is it that we only get a small fraction of the thoughts of these dudes and dudettes? Where are the bootlegs? Where's the part that shows us that Jesus was gay? Dudettes?? I mean we can suspect it, but where is the evidence? 12 dudes following him around....turn the other cheek (WHAT?)....Mary Magdalena's frustrations......where's the evidence?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

you might want to look into the available extra-biblical texts. there are the apocrypha and pseudopigraphica for the OT, and a few lost gospels for the NT. most of those are composed too late to be truly relevant. by that, i mean, "later than the bible texts" and largely based on them.however, we do have the DSS, which give us a few extra pieces of the puzzle, and some hints here and there from the LXX of where a word or two might have changed. but by and large, both sets of documents support the idea that the transmission of the scriptures over the centuries has been fairly consistent.

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אָרַח

Hi arach, Why would the word have to change?It could have been intentionally changed rather than an error.It could have happened by the meaning of the word changing over time..Or it could be just as the author originally wrote it.I was just raising a question.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

oh, okay. i misunderstood. you mean that the author of genesis meant one thing by the word, whereas we read it as something else? the problem is that, while the word רקיע isn't actually used anywhere else in the torah (just the extended tanakh), the related verb רקע has a clear contextual meaning:

quote:

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וַיְרַקְּעוּ אֶת-פַּחֵי הַזָּהָב

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-- Exodus 39:3

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they aren't tenting the gold into thing plates. like i said above, nearly every time this verb is used, it applies to literal metalwork, or the actions of beating literal metalwork. there are interesting exceptions, of course, like in job 37:18, where the author is comparing "stretching out" the heavens... to metalwork. sense a theme here?now, to argue that these must also mean something else, you'd have to completely change the meaning of all of those verses, too. and then all the words they use in other verse. you are basically turning the language into nonsense. no, assuming scribal error is far more logical choice than linguistic conspiracy theory. but i apologize for being too charitable. sure. and i'm interested in exploring it. i don't think that your points, as you have been making them, are necessarily valid (indeed, some are just ill-conceived nonsense) but perhaps there is some valid middle ground here, and situations where something similar would be proper.

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אָרַח