Psalm 140:10

A few weeks ago, a footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of The Canterbury Tales led me to Psalm 140 (although since the citations were keyed to the Vulgate, the reference was actually to Psalm 141).  In any case, I realized a minor point about Psalm 140:10:  "Let burning coals fall upon them!  Let them be cast into fire, into miry pits, no more to rise!"

This verse contains something of a merism.  In the first sentence, the burning coals fall from above, and while the second sentence describes "them be[ing] cast into fire," if the "them" is understood as stationary, it would be as if that fire is coming up to meet them.  Basically, the burning is coming from both above (as coals) and beneath (as fire), and the opposite directions in these descriptions provide a sense of totality.

Psalm 119:105

Since the church year started over, I've been following along with the readings in the Latin Vulgate, moving on from my French New Testament, which I'd followed along in for the last three years.

The title of this blog is adapted from Psalm 119:105, which is my confirmation verse and which I put in the blog description.  Earlier this month, I finally got around to replacing the French translation with the Latin, and when I did this, I noticed something about the structure of the verse.  The Latin closely follows the Hebrew:

נֵר־לְרַגְלִי דְבָרֶךָ וְאוֹר לִנְתִיבָתִֽי׃

Lucerna pedi meo verbum tuum et lux semitae meae

In English, this is "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path," but the word order in the Hebrew and Latin is such that "Your word" (דְבָרֶךָ and "verbum tuum") is in the middle of the verse.  A literal translation would be something like "A lamp to my feet [is] Your word and a light to my path."  In English, this is rearranged so that the two parts of the compound predicate nominative are on the same side of the copulative verb (which is merely implied in Hebrew and Latin).

Because "Your word" is placed in the middle in the Hebrew and Latin versions, though, there's a sense of its centrality and importance.

Matthew 2:10

The Gospel reading on Worship Anew a couple weeks ago was Matthew 2:1-12.  After I watched the program, I was thinking about verse 10:  "When they [the wise men] saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy."  (ἰδόντες δὲ τὸν ἀστέρα ἐχάρησαν χαρὰν μεγάλην σφόδρα)

It doesn't come across in English this way, but "they rejoiced with joy" is a cognate accusative in Greek (ἐχάρησαν χαρὰν), literally something like "they rejoiced a joy."  This pleonastic construction and the redundancy of both "exceedingly" and "great" (in the opposite order in the Greek:  μεγάλην σφόδρα) illustrate the high degree of the wise men's emotion.  Even just one of these pairs would indicate this, but using both compounds the effect.

Psalm 85:10-11

For almost three months now, I've been reading a Psalm a day, in the NIV translation for a change.  Last week, I read Psalm 85, and I noticed all of the directions in verses 10-11:  "10 Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other.  11 Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven."

"Meet[ing] together" and "kiss[ing] each other" seem to imply horizontal movement, and "spring[ing] forth from the earth" and "look[ing] down from heaven" describe vertical directions, so within these two verses, there are left and right and up and down.  Referring to all of these various directions provides a sense of the abundance of these qualities, which the next verse also seems to describe:  "The LORD will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest."

John 6:60

Last week, I watched the Daily Dose of Latin video on John 6:60 and noticed a grammatical ambiguity that I'd missed when I watched the corresponding Daily Dose of Greek video about two years ago.

Multi ergo audientes ex discipulis eius dixerunt durus est hic sermo quis potest eum audire

πολλοὶ οὖν ἀκούσαντες ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ εἶπον· σκληρός ἐστιν ὁ λόγος οὗτος· τίς δύναται αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν;

Of the English translations I have, I like the NIV the best:  "On hearing it, many of his disciples said, 'This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?'"

Almost all of the translations I lookt at understand this in the same way and take "sermo" (λόγος in the Greek) as the antecedent of "eum" (αὐτοῦ), but the antecedent could also be Jesus since, grammatically, Jesus is also a masculine singular.  Consequently, "eum" (αὐτοῦ) could be translated as "Him" instead of "it," resulting in:  "Who can hear Him?" or "Who can accept Him?"

In the immediate context, "sermo" (or λόγος) does seem to be a more likely antecedent, but taking Jesus as the antecedent results in a reading that's similar to verse 41, where the Jews grumble about Jesus because of what He said.  Verse 60 could express something similar and show the crowd dismissing Jesus because it is unable to accept this particular point of His teaching.

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In my French translation, the antecedent is ambiguous:  "Plusieurs de ses disciples, après l'avoir entendu, dirent:  Cette parole est dure; qui peut l'écouter?"  The pronoun is elided into "écouter," and it could be either the feminine la, referring to "cette parole" or the masculine le, referring to Jesus.