Ecclesiastes 9:5

[Belacqua]

They work differently because they’re simpler - past, simple present, and future. That’s it.

‘Sayeth’ (amr) is present tense. Instead of ‘God said’ the actual Hebrew is ‘God says’. 

Boru

So, if Hebrew has the past tense, why does it say "God says" rather than "God said"?

In English there's such a thing as the "historical present." 

So if you're writing a history book, you might tell the events of the past in present tense. Something like, "At this point Caesar is unaware of the plot against him, so he attends the Senate meeting as usual. While Caesar remains undefended, Publius Servilius Casca strikes the first blow." If it's clear from context what time you're writing about, narration is often done this way. 

There's also a way to put timeless advice, like "Confucius says: honor your parents." Or "Polonius says: to thine own self be true." The speaker said it in the past, but we still quote it in present tense. 

I'm not saying that Genesis uses either of these, but they are examples of when verb tenses work unexpectedly. 

Brian Sodding's interpretation is Platonic, and unlikely to be what the original Jews had in mind. 

Translation is always interpretation. We rely on the objectivity and accuracy of the translator to some extent. But Mr. Ball's advice, in the post above this one, is good. Reading the sentence is never enough. We have to know the historical context and literary tropes that the original writers used. Christian translations of the Old Testament in particular have been tricky, since the Christians want to read Christian ideas in where they didn't originally exist. 

I think we have to be comfortable with not knowing for sure, and read different scholars when we can. Anyone who thinks he knows for certain should not be trusted.

To go off topic a little bit:

The extreme case is probably The Tale of Genji. This is an endless source of interest for people interested in translation. 

The author of Genji expresses nearly everything important through allusion and literary reference. She would never ever write something so simple as "He fell in love with her." In the novel, after the guy meets the girl he will send her a certain kind of plant with a line from an ancient Chinese poem written on a certain kind of paper. Both the lady in question and the original readers of the novel will understand the significance of all of these things -- for example, by remembering the context of the Chinese poem and the fate of its author, the single quoted line takes on all kinds of meaning. But if you don't know these things it's just a list of random stuff. 

This poses a problem for the translator. If you just convert the sentences into English, or even modern Japanese, the reader has no idea what's going on. Some translators deal with the issue by adding lots of explanation within the text, which the original author would find inelegant. Others explain in footnotes, which means that the bottom half of every page is fine print. 

Despite many translator's polemical ambitions, I think the Bible should be treated the same way. We just have to assume that large parts of it are obscure to simple modern readings.