Sunday, July 25, 2021

Mark 13:6

Last week, I watched the Daily Dose of Greek video on Mark 13:6:


I'd always understood this verse and specifically the "'I am he!'" more prosaically, but looking at the original Greek made me realize that this "ἐγώ εἰμι" is a reference to Exodus 3:14 where God says to Moses, "'I AM WHO I AM.'"  Jesus takes up this title multiple times in John's Gospel ("I am the bread of life," "I am the Good Shepherd," "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," "I am the vine," et cetera), but the "many" described here claim it falsely.

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Psalm 119:29-30

The Daily Dose of Hebrew has been going through Psalm 119 lately.  While following along in the Latin Vulgate, I noticed a feature in verses 29 and 30 that's obscured in the English translation and that I didn't catch either in watching the videos or while copying out the verses (because I turned pages in my notebook, these verses weren't next to each other).


In the ESV, these verses are translated as:  "29 Put false ways far from me and graciously teach me your law!  30 I have chosen the way of faithfulness; I set your rules before me."

In the Vulgate, however, these verses appear as:
29 viam iniquitatis amove a me et lege tua miserere mei
30 viam veritatis elegi iudicia tua non sum oblitus
The formatting and word order here help to emphasize the contrast between the "false ways" (as in the Hebrew, it's singular in the Latin:  viam iniquitatis) in verse 29 and "the way of faithfulness" (viam veritatis) in verse 30.

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Mark 12:30

When I watched the Daily Dose of Greek video for Mark 12:30 last week, I noticed a couple rhetorical features.


"'And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'"

The repetition of "and" is polysyndeton.  I'm not sure if the repeated "all" is technically anaphora (it is near the beginning of each prepositional phrase, but I'm not sure if that's enough to fulfill the definition).  In any case, these repetitions give a sense of the totality of the self that one should devote to God.