Psalm 119:125

A few weeks ago, I read the Ayin section (verses 121-128) of Psalm 119.  I was thinking about the underlying Hebrew as I read, and I correctly deduced that part of verse 125 was inverted in translation and that in the original Hebrew, the word for servant (עֶ֫בֶד) comes first.  (Each verse in this section starts with an ayin.)

In the NKJV, the verse is

I am Your servant, give me understanding, that I may know Your testimonies.

In Hebrew, it's

עַבְדְּךָ־אָנִי הֲבִינֵנִי וְאֵדְעָה עֵדֹתֶֽיךָ׃

In the original word order, the first clause is something like "Your servant [am] I."

Then I realized that, perhaps coincidentally, the word order of the Hebrew matches the outlook of a good servant:  the word servant (עַבְדְּךָ, with the possessive suffix "your") comes before the pronoun I (אָנִי) in the same way that the duties of the position take precedence over personal interests.

I referenced the Latin Vulgate and found that it follows the Hebrew word order and thus also has this feature:

servus tuus ego instrue me et cognoscam testimonia tua

1 Chronicles 16:26, Psalm 96:5

About a month ago, I read some of 1 Chronicles 16 and noticed a couple contrasting features in verse 26:  "For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens."  In the first clause, there's only a stative verb, which is actually merely implied in the Hebrew (it's just "For all the gods of the peoples - idols":  כִּי כָּל־אֱלֹהֵי הָעַמִּים אֱלִילִים), but in the second clause, there's an active verb ("made" עָשָֽׂה).  The different qualities of these verbs (absent or present and stative or active) distinguish between the "idols" and "the Lord" and highlight the inactivity of the idols.

This verse seemed familiar to me, and after some searching, I discovered that it appears verbatim as Psalm 96:5.

The same features are present in the Vulgate, although there's a slight difference in that "idols" is translated as "idola" in 1 Chronicles but as "sculptilia" ("sculpted things") in the Psalm:

omnes enim dii populorum idola Dominus autem caelos fecit 

omnes enim dii populorum sculptilia Dominus autem caelos fecit

Matthew 7:3

A couple weeks ago, I watched the Daily Dose of Greek video on Matthew 7:3:

"'Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?'" [ESV]

Even before Dr. Plummer mentioned it in the video, I noticed that the verse has a chiastic structure:

τί δὲ βλέπεις

τὸ κάρφος

τὸ ἐν τῷ ὀφθαλμῷ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ σου,

τὴν δὲ ἐν τῷ σῷ ὀφθαλμῷ

δοκὸν

οὐ κατανοεῖς;

Something like:

Why do you see

the speck

that is in your brother's eye,

but that is in your own eye

the log

you do not notice?

Since the words in the two clauses appear in an inverted order, this structure highlights the contrast between βλέπεις ("you do see") and οὐ κατανοεῖς ("you do not notice") and perhaps also between the sizes of τὸ κάρφος ("the speck") and τὴν δοκὸν ("the log").

Joshua 5:1

Last month, I read Joshua 5 in the NIV, and I noticed a feature in verse 1 that's related to what I noticed in the ESV translation of Jeremiah 4:9 last year.

The entire verse is "Now when all the Amorite kings west of the Jordan and all the Canaanite kings along the coast heard how the LORD had dried up the Jordan before the Israelites until we had crossed over, their hearts melted and they no longer had the courage to face the Israelites."

The Hebrew clause וְלֹא־הָיָה בָם עוֹד רוּחַ is translated as "and they no longer had the courage," although it's literally something like "and there was no longer any spirit in them," which is how the ESV translates it.  Because the word courage is related to cor, the Latin word for heart, the NIV translation actually exhibits a sort of parallelism between "their hearts melted" and "they no longer had the courage."