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Footnotes
See “Where Is Biblical Debir?” BAR 01:01.
There are some insignificant differences in the two passages. We will be using the text of Judges in this article.
Endnotes
In medieval liturgical Hebrew
Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, transl. S.P. Tregelles (London: Samuel Bagster, 1894).
Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: University Press, 1951 [1906]), p. 856. This edition was overseen by Godfrey Driver, Samuel R. Driver’s son.
Georg Fohrer, Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary of the Old Testament, transl. W. Johnson (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973).
Godfrey R. Driver, “Problems of Interpretation in the Heptateuch,” Mélanges Bibliques: Rédigés en l’Honneur de André Robert, Travaux de l’Institute Catholique de Paris 4, (Paris: L’Institute Catholique de Paris, 1957), pp. 73–75. I am grateful to Suzanne Siegel of the Hunter College library for help in tracking down Driver’s far-flung publications.
Arthur Gibson, “
Roger A. Bullard, “The New English Bible,” in The word of God: A Guide to English Versions of the Bible, ed. Lloyd R. Bailey (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), pp. 55–56. And he says of “oozed” at 4:21: “the translators have apparently given it a different meaning. (I don’t know this; they may well be letting the hypothetical root-meaning of the Arabic root color this rendering as well.) In the first place, it is not clear how they have determined the subject of this verb, since it is not expressed. … What the panel has done with this word is a mystery to me.”
F.F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations from the Earliest English Versions to the New English Bible (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 248.
I wish to thank Donald Kraus for his graciousness in searching Oxford’s files and library in order to answer my questions.
John Beekman and John Callow, Translating the Word of God (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1986), p. 105.
Peter Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” in Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism, ed. D.J. Enright, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 164–165. In later editions, the Jerusalem Bible replaced “happy” with “blessed.”
Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” p. 160. So, too, p. 164: “There is a great deal of this polite drawing-room chat in most new translations of the Bible, as if sin were not bad but only bad form.”
Brown et al. (A Hebrew and English Lexicon, p. 116) give the etymology as a compound of beli “without” and ya‘al “worth, use, profit.” See also Mandelkern, Concordance, p. 202; Theodor H. Gaster, “Belial,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, columns 428–429.
G. Driver, “Colloquialisms in the Old Testament,” in Mélanges Marcel Cohen: Études de Linguistique, Ethnographie et Sciences Connexes, ed. David Cohen (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), p. 232.
Richard Elliott Friedman, “Sacred History/Sacred Literature,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature: Composition and Redaction of the Biblical Text, ed. Friedman, Near Eastern Studies 22 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 1.
Following the NJPS translation. See Genesis Rabbah 36:8: “R. Yudan said, … ‘and they read in the book of the Law of God’ refers to miqra’ [the Hebrew text];
See Megillah, ed. Simon, pp. 151–154, in The Babylonian Talmud, ed. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1938).
See “
Katharine Barnwell, “Towards Acceptable Translations,” Notes on Translation 95 (1983), pp. 19–26.
John Banker, “How Can We Improve Translations Stylistically?” Notes on Translation 94 (1983), pp. 16–21.