Ecclesiastes 9:5

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I prefer Young’s Literal Translation, as it seems to do the best job of preserving the tenses of the original Hebrew and Koine Greek. It’s a little jarring at first, as we’re all used to past tense in verses like, ‘And God said “Let there be light” and there was light’, which Young renders, ‘And God sayeth ‘Let light be”, and light is’, which, according to my Hebrew-fluent wife, is a much more accurate translation.

Boru

Well, I've heard that tenses in Hebrew work very differently from tenses in English, like that Hebrew has no future tenses but uses present tenses for future things, and you are supposed to guess by context whether the speaker is referring to something in present or something in the future. But which tense is "sayeth"?

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

[FlatAssembler]

Well, I've heard that tenses in Hebrew work very differently from tenses in English, like that Hebrew has no future tenses but uses present tenses for future things, and you are supposed to guess by context whether the speaker is referring to something in present or something in the future. But which tense is "sayeth"?

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"?

[Bucky Ball]

It means the memory OF THEM (eorum) has been given/delivered/transitioned to oblivion.

The Jews did not believe in an afterlife / "going to heaven".
All dead souls went to Sheol.
Later that changed, but even then, the sect that believed in "resurrection of the dead" thought that happened at the end of time.
Meanwhile, the dead were dead.

[Bucky Ball]

It means the memory OF THEM (eorum) has been given/delivered/transitioned to oblivion.

The Jews did not believe in an afterlife / "going to heaven".  
All dead souls went to Sheol.
Later that changed, but even then, the sect that believed in "resurrection of the dead" thought that happened at the end of time.
Meanwhile, the dead were dead.

Psalm 39 :
"Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart, and am no more"

Psalm 115 :
The dead do not praise the Lord,
nor do any that go down into silence".

Psalm 6 : 
"For in death there is no remembrance of you, in Sheol, who can give you praise ?"

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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"?

It’s an attempt to make God ‘present’, in the sense that God actively maintains the material world - God didn’t just make light, God makes light.

You can find where the original present tense slips through the translation in Isaiah 45:7. 

Boru

[Bucky Ball]

The Hebrew priests and other writers who edited /authored / redacted the Hebrew texts used all sorts of metaphors and all the other literary devices commonly used in ancient Near Eastern literature.
The only way to understand the texts is to understand the cultures, Archaic Hebrew, whether the ideas actually came across in the Greek translations, and part of that is understanding that in no way are the texts to be taken "literally", necessarily. Historic prose is only a small part of the texts.

The idea that one could understand the texts by literally translating Latin to English, and "prove" something by that, is nonsense, and a fools errand. It's committing the very same historical errors Fundamentalists commit all the time. They used idioms, metaphors, allegory, simile, figures of speech, and many other literary devices which the readers / hearers would recognize, and we would not, and they were commonplace. They used prose, poetry, parallelisms, amplifications, HYPERBOLE, idioms, personifications, and parables. For example all through the Book of Isaiah the 3 authors call "Israel" THE "suffering servant", as Israel had come through the Exile experience. It's a metaphor.

[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.

[FlatAssembler]

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.

Do you agree with the motto of the New International Version that to modern readers the Bible appears like a cryptic reference book, but that it's not how it appeared to the original readers, and that, in ancient times, anybody who heard the God's word would also understand it?
I am not sure that's the case. I think that the Book of Revelation was linguistically clear to the early Christians (unlike if you were reading it in the King James Version), but that its actual meaning was about as obscure to the original audience as it is to modern readers (Was it prophecizing the end of the world? Or merely the fall of the Roman Empire?). And I think that some verses in the Vulgate would confuse a native speaker of Latin. In Judith 8:34 in Vulgate, which is quite a literal translation of the Greek original, it says "Et revertentes abierunt.". Try to, without looking at modern translations, come up with a meaning which is both grammatically possible and logically possible. Can you? When I was reading the Bible in Latin, I was not able to. And, when I looked at modern translations, they seemed rather fanciful. I am no expert in Latin and Greek, but I think that passage would sound like an ungrammatical gibberish to native speakers of Latin and Greek.

[Belacqua]

Do you agree with the motto of the New International Version that to modern readers the Bible appears like a cryptic reference book, but that it's not how it appeared to the original readers, and that, in ancient times, anybody who heard the God's word would also understand it?

I guess it depends on how far we go with "understand it." 

They'd probably understand the words. Hebrew or Greek speakers would follow what the sentences say, and then the Vulgate was probably quite readable for educated people. It's not intended to be tricky, like Finnegans Wake or something. 

As always we have to think of the Bible as a group of texts written by different people at different times for different purposes. Some will be straightforward narration, and other parts will intentionally be challenging. So for example I think the Book of Job's language will not be at all obscure, but its message might well be. I think it's wrong to read it like an Aesop's fable, where we can draw a clear moral at the end. It's more of a puzzle and a challenge -- a debate topic. 

Even if we assume it's the word of God, there are parables in the NT explaining why some people won't get it. The talk about how some seed falls on fertile ground and some on stony ground seems to indicate that people who hear the same words will accept them differently, so that some won't understand it deeply at all. “Let him who has ears hear" indicates to me that some won't get it. 

William Blake called the Bible "The Great Code of Art," for a couple of reasons. First, because it should be read as art and not as science, history, etc. Unlike those types of writing, it expresses its meanings through beauty, through suggestion, symbols, puzzlements. He also felt that because God's knowledge is infinitely beyond that of people, a Bible which was easily deciphered by people would be unholy. We work on it but, like God himself, it is infinitely beyond our capacity to understand.
 
So, no, I don't think the early readers grasped every word, or were meant to.

And I think that some verses in the Vulgate would confuse a native speaker of Latin. In Judith 8:34 in Vulgate, which is quite a literal translation of the Greek original, it says "Et revertentes abierunt.". Try to, without looking at modern translations, come up with a meaning which is both grammatically possible and logically possible. Can you? When I was reading the Bible in Latin, I was not able to. And, when I looked at modern translations, they seemed rather fanciful. I am no expert in Latin and Greek, but I think that passage would sound like an ungrammatical gibberish to native speakers of Latin and Greek.

I don't know Latin nearly well enough to judge whether "Et revertentes abierunt" sounds funny or not. The translators seem confident that it means something like "So they returned from the tent and went to their posts." Which I agree sounds a little rough, but the meaning is clear. In modern English maybe "So they left the tent and went..." would be more conversational. Each translation, though slightly different, seems to give it the same general meaning. It's true they seem to have added "tent" and "posts," probably to make it clearer in the translation. 

So it may be an idiosyncrasy of Latin grammar, or a textual degradation, or just sloppy writing in the original. I'm not educated enough to know. 

I do know that "come" and "go" sometimes work differently in other languages. For example in Japanese if you are making a quick trip to the store, you'll tell your wife "itte-kuru yo." Which literally means "go-come!" That's all: go-come! Which would be nonsense in a literal translation, but is completely natural in use.

[FlatAssembler]

They'd probably understand the words.

Well, they probably won't understand the Lord's Prayer (Pater Noster) completely, as it contains the hapax legomenon "ἐπιούσιον".

Even if we assume it's the word of God, there are parables in the NT explaining why some people won't get it.

If it was a word of God, God wouldn't allow his word to get corrupt. Prophets didn't actually prophecize that the Messiah would be born by a virgin, they merely prophecized he will be born by a young woman. Yet, the New Testament states that the virgin birth was prophecized. That's the kind of thing you really wouldn't expect if the Bible was the word of an omnipotent and benevolent God: it getting corrupt by a mistranslation.
If God really had something to say to humanity, why wouldn't it magically appear in everybody's native language? They are people living in small tribes speaking only some small language who haven't even heard the God's word, much less believe it. At the very least, God could somehow make mistranslations not be a problem.