Translators make choices, and people who think like Western legalists then read the Scriptures, in English, as though they were statutes written by God. Perhaps they are, but if they are going to be treated that way, each word in Hebrew has to be translated into English with a variety of meanings, and the understanding that the Hebrew embraces all of those meanings. And imperfect verbs must be rendered with a future sense.
To understand what Genesis says, you have to accept that the verbs are open and incomplete - the imperfect tense. Everything you have ever read has the verbs in the perfect tense, the actions completed. And everything you have ever read is wrong. The verbs are imperfect in Hebrew, and the Hebrew is the only real Scripture.
The key takeaway is that Ancient Hebrew verbs are not based on the time principle, but on the completeness or incompletion of action. It's a difficult way to think, and when you do start to think that way, it isn't pleasant, because it starts to change some "settled" Biblical understandings rather radically. But if you want to understand what God actually SAID, you MUST do that. Otherwise you're reading a story in which things happened in a certain fixed way, but the Scriptures say differently.
- by @Vicomte13, February 2016
Read the full article here: https://static.adonai-reigns.life/hotlinks/hebrew-english-lost-in-translation.pdf
To understand what Genesis says, you have to accept that the verbs are open and incomplete - the imperfect tense. Everything you have ever read has the verbs in the perfect tense, the actions completed. And everything you have ever read is wrong. The verbs are imperfect in Hebrew, and the Hebrew is the only real Scripture.
The key takeaway is that Ancient Hebrew verbs are not based on the time principle, but on the completeness or incompletion of action. It's a difficult way to think, and when you do start to think that way, it isn't pleasant, because it starts to change some "settled" Biblical understandings rather radically. But if you want to understand what God actually SAID, you MUST do that. Otherwise you're reading a story in which things happened in a certain fixed way, but the Scriptures say differently.
- by @Vicomte13, February 2016
Read the full article here: https://static.adonai-reigns.life/hotlinks/hebrew-english-lost-in-translation.pdf
