Psalm 22:13

A section of Psalm 32 was one of the readings on Worship Anew a couple weeks ago.  I was following along in the Psalms portion of my French hymnal, and half of verse 7 ("de chants de délivrance, tu m'as entouré") made me realize that a specific feature of French almost mirrors the meaning.  It doesn't quite work in Psalm 32:7 (because there's an ablative of means), but I found a better example in Psalm 22:13.  In French, it's "Des fauvres nombreux me cernent, des taureaux de Basan m'encerclent" ("Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me").  Because French has a subject-object-verb word order*, "me" (in bold) is literally "surround[ed]" by the noun and verb (in italics):  "Des fauvres nombreux me cernent, des taureaux de Basan m'encerclent."

I lookt in my German Psalter and found a similar feature there.  In the German translation, the verbs are perfects ("they have surrounded me"), but because of German word order, the "me"s here are literally surrounded too:  "Gewaltige Stiere haben mich umgeben, mächtige Büffel haben mich umringt."

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*In this instance, at least.  If I remember aright, French uses subject-object-verb word order only if the object is a pronoun.

Colossians 1:23

Last week, I was looking at some verses in Colossians 1, and I noticed a small feature in verse 23:  "if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister."  "Stable" and "steadfast" alliterate, and this repetition of sound gives a sense of the words' meanings.  There's a sense of constancy.

Of the translations I have (English and otherwise), this feature is specific to the ESV.  In the NIV, this phrase is translated as "established and firm," and in the NKJV it's "grounded and steadfast."

Psalm 147:9

I recently remembered something I'd noticed about Psalm 147:9 years ago, and I figured I might as well write about it here.  The verse is:  "He gives to the beasts their food, and to the young ravens that cry."  Because "their food" is implied in the second clause, because "that" can function as a relative pronoun or a demonstrative adjective, and because the form of "cry" here can be read as a noun or a verb, the English translation of this verse can also mean something along the lines of:  "God gives food to the beasts, and He gives a specific noise to the ravens."  While this is true from a certain point of view, it's clear from looking at the Hebrew that this isn't the intended reading.

In German, this verse is "Der dem Vieh sein Futter gibt, den jungen Raben, die zu ihm rufen."  This is phrased differently so that there's no ambiguity:  "to the young ravens that cry to Him."

In doing a bit of research to write about this, I discovered that Jesus references this verse in Luke 12:24:  "'Consider the ravens:  they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.  Of how much more value are you than the birds!'"  Job 38:41 is also relevant:  "Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God for help, and wander about for lack of food?"