In catching up on reading the entire chapter of some Biblical references in the introduction to my copy of
The Bhagavad Gita last month, I found yet an-other small feature to write about. I read Psalm 102 in the ESV, in which verse 11 is: "My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass." (The NIV is basically the same: "My days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass.") There's a sort of redundancy in the phrase "an evening shadow" ("evening" and "shadow" both imply a degree of darkness), and this results in an imbalance between the two halves of the clause: there's a single element as the subject ("days") but an adjective and noun pair with overlapping meanings as the predicate nominative ("evening shadow"). This unevenness with more weight placed on "an evening shadow" emphasizes the darkness of the Psalmist's plight.
This doesn't apply to the Hebrew, though, where the verse is:
יָמַי כְּצֵל נָטוּי וַאֲנִי כָּעֵשֶׂב אִיבָֽשׁ׃
The ESV and NIV translate נָטוּי as "evening" in this context, but the word actually means something like "stretched out" or "extended." This is how the NKJV translates it: "My days are like a shadow that lengthens, and I wither away like grass."
