Word games
I have the oddest feeling I’ve already blogged on this, but can’t find it, so here goes anyways.
There is an oft repeated quote in the bible – “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”.
Most everyone has heard some version of this before, whether they be religious or not – and it is fairly self-explanatory. Obviously, you’re going to have a hard time ramming your average dromedary through the eye of a needle, ergo it must be challenging to say the least to get a rich man into heaven. That all boils down to “you can’t take it with you” plus some wisdom about not concentrating all your effort on the cash.. This is the accepted phrasing generally.
The quote by the way is from the gospel of Luke, chapter 18 verse 25 (New King James).
The interesting thing to note however is that the hebrew source word for camel is the exact same word used for rope. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to assume that the Jesus was using the term “rope” – IE a thread waaaaaaay too thick to go through the needle? For some reason, it has been popularly decided on that the good Lord went a bit Monty Python on us and decided “it would be easier to stuff, oh, say…. a camel! through the eye of a needle yada yada”. Odd that. Ultimately it makes little difference to the resulting message, but it is a nice pointer to the kinds of problems that translation and transliteration can bring up.
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Exactly – not to mention that for the old testament at least, there were no vowels, nor the vowel use indicators that modern hebrew has, so they were translating a language that is heavily based on oral tradition and implication rather than explicit references. The names of God alone are a huge one – throughout the original hebrew text many different names are used for God, all of which have a different meaning, but the translators changed them all to just God. I’m looking at getting an interlinear hebrew/greek/english bible so I can read the original god names.[Reply]
It is called faith. To believe is something you cannot literaly see. Surely if God could create life he could inspire a person to write the truth. He gave them language so he would also inspire its translation. Don’t concentrate on the words instead be inspired by the spirit behind them. Not blind faith just good faith.[Reply]
That’s exactly my point though – if you examine the original texts the hebrew tells a different story to what is currently accepted. It is the message that’s important, but the message has been distorted.[Reply]
Oh the other thing I was going to say was that yes, I believe God could inspire someone to write the truth, but what I’m pointing out is that it is patently obvious that what he has not done is prevent anyone from distorting that truth or writing their own versions.[Reply]