To deal with all the issues raised by the translation would take a book many times longer than the original. All rights reserved. 1 Declare me innocent, O God! It is context that adds the required precision of meaning, not double translation, which only serves to distance the reader from the original. Yes, living before his face is my saving grace! I will praise him again—    my Savior and my God! 43 For the Pure and Shining One, by the prophetic singers of Korah’s clan A contemplative poem for instruction 1 God, clear my name. Even the historical psalms in TPT, such as Psalm 106, tend to make historical people and places less prominent, though the majority of them are retained. They are always colored by associations, and evaluated in terms of the emotive reactions of people’ (Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice, 98). Instead he abuses ancient witnesses, pressing them into the service of his own novel ideas about what the text ought to say. Why is my heart so sad?I will put my hope in God! for I fully expect my Savior-God to break through for me. Apart from the Dead Sea scrolls, which Simmons does not cite even when their evidence is important (e.g., Pss 22:16; 107:29; 144:2; 145:13), these manuscripts are translations of the Hebrew, and so must be used with double care. Simmons’s caricature of God as ‘the King who likes and enjoys you’ (‘Introduction’, p. 5) eliminates all but one facet of God’s feelings about us, and then gets that one wrong. ‘Here’s my story: I came so close to missing the way’ (73:2). Additions aimed at stirring up ecstasy are unsurprisingly prominent in TPT’s praise psalms. Defend me against these ungodly people. / You are the only God to be worshipped’. In Nida’s words, this is not a linguistic translation; it is a cultural translation, and hence it is not a legitimate Bible. And while they can be idiosyncratic and flawed, such as Mitchell Dahood’s Psalms, or J. Burning Scripture with Passion: A Review of The Psalms (The Passion Translation) By Andrew G. Shead . Although there is no inscription for this psalm, it was originally part of. He rounds off Psalm 150 by inserting ‘crescendo of ecstatic praise’. In the early 4th century the great Church Father Athanasius wrote a letter commending passionate, Christ-focused, Spirit-filled interpretation of the psalms. The whole point of meaning-based translation is that a sentence is more translatable than a word. The Greek Septuagint is by far the oldest and most important non-Hebrew witness to the original. Not that there is anything wrong with feeling them – it’s part of living in a fallen world. The cords of death entangled me;the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. Pour into me the brightness of your daybreak!

“Don’t be discouraged; don’t be disturbed. I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise, For when the spirit of death wrapped chains around me. Then I’ll have plenty of reasons to praise him all over again.”. ‘Inherit the land’ (Ps 37:9, 11) becomes ‘live safe and sound with blessings overflowing’ in v. 9 and ‘inherit every promise’ in v. 11. (2) ‘Corporeal’ images of touch, ardour and physical intimacy designed to intensify feelings of love: Passionately (v. 1), embrace (v. 1), around me (v. 2), in you (v. 3), wrapped (v. 4), sobs (v. 6), heart (v. 6), reached down into my darkness (v. 16), I was helpless (v. 17), held onto me (v. 18), his love broke open the way (v. 19), heart (v. 24), surrendering to him (v. 24), taste (v. 25), you love (v. 25), wrap-around God (v. 30),5 wrapped (v. 32), your wrap-around presence … stooping down (v. 35), your loving servant (v. 50). [6] ‘The Letter of St. Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms,’ in St. Athanasius on the Incarnation: The Treatise de incarnatione verbi Dei, ed.

Don't have an account? Light and TruthFor the Pure and Shining One, by the prophetic singers of Korah’s clanA contemplative poem for instructionGod, clear my name.Plead my case against the unjust chargesof these ungod Simmons’s response is to mistranslate the ‘Aramaic’ (Syriac) in a footnote, and use it as an apparent licence to provide a double translation that bears no resemblance to the Syriac or any other ancient version!4. It’s equivalent to translating ‘He bowed before the Queen’ as ‘He bent forward before the Queen like the front of a ship,’ because two unrelated words just happen to be spelled ‘bow’. A poetic flavour is added back into this prose by means of abundant alliteration, a technique used in at least every second verse, and by multiplying colourful, emotive, and exclamatory language wherever possible. 43 For the Pure and Shining One, by the prophetic singers of Korah’s clan[a]A contemplative poem for instruction1 God, clear my name.Plead my case against the unjust chargesof these ungodly workers of wickedness.Deliver me from these lying degenerates.2 For you are where my strength comes from[b] and my protector,so why would you leave me now?Must I be covered with gloomwhile the enemy comes after me, gloating with glee?3 Pour into me the brightness of your daybreak!Pour into me your rays of revelation-truth!Let them comfort and gently lead me onto the shining path,showing the way into your burning presence,into your many sanctuaries of holiness.4 Then I will come closer to your very altaruntil I come before you, the God of my ecstatic joy!I will praise you with the harp that plays in my heart,to you, my God, my magnificent God!5 Then I will say to my soul,“Don’t be discouraged; don’t be disturbed,for I fully expect my Savior-God to break through for me.Then I’ll have plenty of reasons to praise him all over again.”Yes, living before his face is my saving grace! To give one more example, in Ps 74:3a the Syriac has ‘servants’ (’bd’) instead of the Hebrew ‘steps’ (פעם), possibly because the Syriac translator read the word פעל in his Hebrew source-text (p‘l means ‘to labour’ in Syriac). Rescue me from these unjust liars.2 For you are God, my only safe haven.

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So how can a translation avoid the dangers of subjectivism, of reading meanings into the text that were not there to start with? (F)3 Send me your light(G) and your faithful care,(H)    let them lead me;(I)let them bring me to your holy mountain,(J)    to the place where you dwell. Omission is rare, and mostly consists of the repeated words and phrases that characterise Hebrew parallelism. (London: Mowbray, 1953), 116. Let them comfort and gently lead me onto the shining path.

Why so disturbed within me?Put your hope in God,    for I will yet praise him,    my Savior and my God.(Q). 1–2 God, we’ve heard about all the glorious miracles you’ve done for our ancestors in days gone by. Here is TPT vv. First, we must decide if a phrase was translated literally enough to be able to tell what the underlying Hebrew was; then, we must decide whether that underlying Hebrew text is any more accurate than our text. In Ps 148:2–3 Simmons plays DJ to the psalmist, expanding the repeated imperative to ‘praise him’ (NIV) with ‘go ahead’, ‘keep it up’, don’t stop now’, ‘take it up even higher’. Meanings change, of course, and today ‘passion’ just means a strong emotion. It can produce clear, faithful and accurate translations, but the method needs to be carried out with care to prevent meaning from being lost in the transfer process. Finally, while most alterations have theological implications, sometimes theology seems to be the driving factor, serving either to advance the author’s favourite themes or to bring potentially problematic statements into his theological comfort zone. The Greek reads, ‘The fear of the Lord is pure.’ One gets the impression that Simmons felt more comfortable with a response of cheer than fear in this verse, and simply made up an excuse to distort the text. Exegesis is wrong, entirely apart from any stylistic considerations, if it (1) misinterprets the point of the original, or (2) adds information from some nontextual source, and especially from some other cultural milieu. Simmons has produced a text so far removed from the original that it no longer counts as the Bible.14.

Clearly Simmons’s preferred style is not that of the Hebrew poets, who build argument through the juxtaposition of parallel ideas: ‘The cords of the grave coiled around me’ (v. 5) is omitted following a very similar line in v. 4; ‘I cried out’ (v. 6b) is omitted following ‘I called’ (v. 6a).