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Numers 14:11 LXX

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 12:41 am
by Bert
καὶ εἶπεν κύ?ιος π?ὸς Μωυσῆν ?ως τίνος πα?οξύνει με ? λαὸς οὗτος καἰ ἔως τίνος ο? πιστεύουσίν μοι ?ν πᾶσιν τοῖς σημείοις, οἷς ?ποίησα ?ν α?τοῖς;I am having a little difficulty with the prepositional phrase ?ν πᾶσιν τοῖς σημείοις. Looking at translations is of some help but but not as useful as I'd like because even the Greek text is a translation.
Most translations have something like; "in spite of all the signs which I did among them." I found one Enlish translation that renders it; "in the face of all the signs..." and one Dutch translation that has something like; "by all the signs..."
"In the face of" has the same basic meaning as "in spite of" but it has to add the words; "the face of" to make an English prepositional phrase work.
"By all the signs" seems to correspond fairly close to the Greek text.
Is "in spite of all the signs" a valid rendering of ?ν πᾶσιν τοῖς σημείοις or is this English text (along with the Greek) a more or less accurate translation of the Hebrew, but the Greek and English don't correspond that closely?

Re: Numers 14:11 LXX

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 3:19 am
by Kopio


Re: Numers 14:11 LXX

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:47 am
by Bert


Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:51 pm
by IreneY
Hmmm my Hebrew is not rusty, it is non existent but where does that "μοι" come from then? (mind you I rather mistrust the Greek translation than Kopio's). If it wasn't there (I think) things would be simpler and in accordance with i.e. πιστεύετε ?ν τῷ ε?αγγελίῳ (Marc I,15) . Do you think it might be because someone confused the meaning of "πιστε?ω" as in "believe in God" and "πιστε?ω" as in "I believe = trust"?

By the way, the Byzantine tradition (translation if you wish) came up with ο? πιστεύουσί μοι ?πὶ πᾶσι τοῖς σημείοις which is a pretty good compromise between that "μοι" there and the original "believe in all signs" .To tell you the truth the first time I looked at it I got a "believe in me in all the points" and I bet those Byzantine "scholars" didn't read it twice :lol:

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:00 am
by Bert
IreneY wrote: To tell you the truth the first time I looked at it I got a "believe in me in all the points"
That does make sense.

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 12:37 am
by IreneY
That I won't deny Bert (I bet those scholars thought the same) but there's no "in me" in the original so why put it there? (plus, this "translation" doesn't "go well" with "that I made in their midst"

The "believe in me in all the points" does make sense but is different than "trust in all the signs which I have made [....]"

Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 5:46 am
by Kopio
I'm gonna have to ask my Hebrew Prof about this verse, more specifically about the word translated about "to believe"....it is in the Hiphil, and I think that might have a reflexive quality to it, Hebrew also does some funny stuff with it's verb endings that is very different from Greek. Like I said, my Hebrew skills are rusty at best. I've finally started to do a little work on Hebrew databases, which is encouraging, simply looking at it for 6 hours at a time helps it to stick a bit. I know it was interesting when I took 4th year Greek, I had spent about 200 hours working on the LXX, and I was amazed at how much vocabulary I had aquired. My classmates were fairly blown away too....mind you, my syntax and grammatical understanding hadn't excelled, but I'll take what I can get!