Koinonia

Seek Righteousness; Find Righteousness - Prov 21:21 (Monday with Mounce 107)

We read Prov 21:21 this morning in church. “Whoever pursues righteousness (צדק) and love finds life, prosperity (צדק) and honor (NIV).” Two things should jump out at you.

1. How do you hear the word “prosperity”? I only hear it in financial terms, and with the benefits of wealth such as independence and power. I understand that wealth can be a sign of God’s blessing, but I also understand that much of the Bible is clear about the extreme dangers of wealth. “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you” (James 5:1, ESV).

2. The second problem comes when you look at most other translations; the same Hebrew word lies behind the NIV’s “righteousness” and “prosperity.”

• ”Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness, and honor” (ESV).
• ”The one who pursues righteousness and faithful love will find life, righteousness, and honor” (HCSB).”
• ”Whoever pursues righteousness and unfailing love will find life, righteousness, and honor” (NLT).”

Only the NET has the same type of variation as the NIV. “The one who pursues righteousness and love finds life, bounty, and honor.” So what is going on?

What’s a “Strong” Tower? - Prov 18:10 (Monday with Mounce 92)

In church today we sang the song, “the name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and they are saved.” I checked the updated NIV text, and it has been changed from “strong tower” to “fortified tower.” (The change is in the TNIV as well). 

This brings up an interesting issue. It is one thing to change people’s “favorite verse,” but to change a song’s text, now that’s serious.

I am only half joking. “The name of the Lord is a fortified tower” doesn’t quite fit the cadence.

The LXX has εκ μεγαλωσυνης ονομα κυριου, which word of word is, “out of majesty the name of Lord is strength.” Tower” is from the Hebrew MGDL.

The real question is, “What’s a strong tower”? A tower that possess the quality of strength? What does that mean? A tower that is built with a strong door? Strong straps?

Get Half Off "A Reader's Hebrew & Greek Bible" + Last Week in Review

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Learn more about A Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible

Koinonia Highlights 7-12 to 7-16
• In response to popular demand, we excerpted the complete chapter on Hebrews from Carson and Moo's new Introducing the New Testament: A Short Guide to Its History and Message.

Extra-Curricular Activities
News and opinions that gave us something to think about...

• Suddenly Realizing You're More Conservative Than You Used to Be by Jon Acuff -Andrew

• The Problem with Pastor as Rock Star by Ed Stetzer  -Andrew

• Manute Bol's Radical Christianity As one Twitter feed put it, "Most NBA cats go broke on cars, jewelry and groupies. Manute Bol went broke building hospitals." -Jesse

• Slackers, take heart! Perfectionists more likely to die earlier: study (This story via First Thoughts) -Adam

• How the skills of authors and marketers are converging, by blogger Paul Steinbrueck  -Andrew

• Amazon review can = libel? An English historian who wrote anonymous critiques against his competitors is facing charges of libel. (This story is via Euangelion) -Adam

Miles Van Pelt - Why Do I Invest in the Biblical Languages?

Miles V. Van Pelt (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of Old Testament and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS. He is the coauthor of our best-selling Basics of Biblical Hebrew, as well as a number of other resources on biblical Hebrew.

Have you studied ancient Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic? Do you resonate with what Miles said?

Influential Books and Authors: Miles Van Pelt on John Piper, Bill Mounce and others

Each week in Influential Books and Authors we hear from a noted scholar on the author(s) and book(s) that have been most important to them for spiritual and intellectual growth. This week we feature Old Testament Hebrew scholar, Miles Van Pelt.

Miles V. Van Pelt (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of Old Testament and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS. He is the coauthor of Basics of Biblical Hebrew, as well as a number of other resources on biblical Hebrew.

Cheerleading by Miles Van Pelt

At Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi I have the distinct privilege of teaching all three biblical languages – Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. My students might tell you that I am a bit of a zealot when it comes to teachings these languages. True enough! In fact, one of my primary goals is to implant this same zeal in those I teach. It is not enough that my students simply learn the languages. I want them to share in my passion for knowing them.

Motivation, therefore, becomes an important factor in teaching. And let’s be honest, students entering a degree program requiring the languages often dread this prospect. Because of this I frequently admit to my colleagues that teaching the actual language represents less than half of my job in the classroom. My primary role is one of cheerleading.

Hebrew Corner 16: Jephthah’s Daughter

First, I just want to mention that this will be the last Hebrew Corner post (at least for awhile). After the holidays I will be starting a new series called "Bible Backgrounds" dealing with background issues from the ancient Near East that help us to interpret the Bible with fresh insights.

It would be difficult to find in the Bible a more tragic story than that of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11:29-40. The question arises from time to time whether he really sacrificed his daughter—perhaps he dedicated her to lifelong service in the sanctuary where she would have remained a virgin. Some of the arguments used are that the text emphasizes her mourning her virginity (seemingly not the biggest issue if she were being sacrificed), that Jephthah as a judge on whom the spirit had come would not do such a despicable thing, and that no priest would have officiated at such a sacrifice. These can be answered by noting how having children was important in their understanding of afterlife, and how depraved behavior was in the Judges period—even by judges and priests. We would note also that Jephthah hardly had grown up in an environment where he would have been instructed in the law.

All of this having been said, the real issue deals with some of the details of the Hebrew text, which is why this passage is included in our Hebrew corner today. There are two Hebrew elements to explore, both in 11:31. 

Hebrew Corner 15: Nineveh's Response

Jonah 3:5 describes the Ninevite response to the prophet’s oracle of judgment. NASB indicates that the Ninevites "believed in God," yet in many translations the rendering is "believed God" (NIV). Which is correct? What does this phrase convey about the spiritual state of the Ninevites?

It is not going to work to ask simply, "Is the Hebrew word for ‘in’ there or not?" The reason for this is that in English the collocation "believe in X" has become an idiomatic expression indicating a significant faith commitment. The same combination would not necessarily convey the same idiomatic force in another language. This is one of the things that makes translation so tricky.

If we want to understand this verse we have to apply two of the principles we have considered in previous entries.

An interview with A. Philip Brown II, part 2 Author of A Reader's Hebrew Bible with Bryan W. Smith

Why is it that students and pastors seem to retain their Greek knowledge more than Hebrew?

I think the answer is simple. (1) Students and pastors read and preach more from the New Testament than they do from the Old Testament. Therefore they have more opportunity to use their Greek. (2) Most Hebrew teachers and textbooks major on Hebrew morphological minutia and verbal parsing skills rather than on exposing students to reading the text and acquiring meaningful exegetical skills. The result is most students leave graduate school with one year of Hebrew under their belt and virtually no knowledge of how to use what they've learned about Hebrew in meaningful exegesis.

In my opinion, if NT Greek teachers were to spend the same amount of time on Greek morphology that Hebrew teachers spend of Hebrew morphology, knowledge of NT Greek would suffer severely. It is time for Hebrew pedagogy to get beyond a Sherlock Holmesian passion for morphological minutia and focus on equipping students to read and exegete the Hebrew text.

How do you envision this book being used by pastors?

I envision this book being used by pastors, as well as students at multiple levels:

An Interview with A. Philip Brown II, part 1 Author of "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" with Bryan W. Smith

When did you first develop a passion for reading Hebrew? What about your passion for Greek?

I don't view myself as a Greek scholar first and foremost. However, I have had more opportunity to teach NT Greek than to teach Hebrew. I paid my way through graduate school by teaching first and second year Greek at Bob Jones University.

I have wanted to read Hebrew for as long as I can remember. My father has an Old Testament Ph.D. and taught biblical Hebrew at Bob Jones University and then at Hobe Sound Bible College where I completed my undergraduate degree. In the seventh and ninth grades I studied modern Hebrew under, now, Dr. Lavonne Stiffler, along with my father.

My passion for reading Hebrew increased during my graduate studies. I remember observing that many of my classmates in the first year of Hebrew, quickly abandoned their Hebrew and made no effort to retain a working knowledge of the language. The primary reason appeared to be because it was so difficult. I thought surely there's some way to help people retain their Hebrew and not lose the skills in which they have invested so much time and labor.

I took eight semesters of graduate Hebrew as part of my OT PhD. However, Hebrew was not the focus of my degree. OT Interpretation was.

Can you describe the process of glossing and editing that you and Dr. Smith went through with the Hebrew text?

Michael Bushell of BibleWorks helped me tremendously by providing a text file with all the lemmas in the Hebrew OT identified by book, chapter, verse, word position, and lemma position. I developed a flat-file database with his text file. From an Access database I would generate an Excel spreadsheet that listed every word occurring under a hundred times in a given book.

I would work through that spreadsheet in BibleWorks verse by verse looking up each word in BDB and HALOT. I wrote a number of macros that allowed me to write the same gloss to the database anytime HALOT offered only one gloss for every occurrence of a lemma. I would then copy and paste the glosses from Excel back into the database and spellcheck the glosses to avoid as many typos as possible. During the summers I was working on this project, I made it my goal to gloss between 500 to 1000 words a week.

Once a book was glossed, I would typeset it in MS Word, print it off, and start reading the text checking each word that was glossed as I encountered it. This gave the glosses a reality check – do BDB/HALOT’s glosses make sense in the context? Frankly, I was surprised at the infelicity of HALOT’s glosses on multiple occassions, which is why I noted in the Introduction that long-time users of Holladay and BDB should expect to be surprised by HALOT’s glosses at times.