A rose by any other name and other topicsh

Back in the Dark Ages, back when Hector was a pup, by which I mean a few decades ago, my job as a Technical Writer in a Major Corporation included the act of proofreading user manuals, and I was paid very handsomely to do it. I said that to say this: I pay attention to detail. I am a stickler for accuracy. Sometimes this job skill/hobby of mine leads me into unusual places.

For example, errors were introduced unintentionally into the Bible by Hebrew scribes whose job was making copies of scrolls by hand in ancient times. One of these errors involves a certain king of Assyria who lived about 2,800 years ago.

In the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) the name Tiglathpileser is mentioned three times in the book of 2 Kings (twice in the 15th chapter and once in the 16th chapter) and the name Tilgathpilneser is mentioned twice in the 5th chapter of 1 Chronicles and once in the 28th chapter of 2 Chronicles. Notice the differences: "Tiglath" versus "Tilgath" and "pileser" versus "pilneser". These appear in the King James Version (KJV) of the English-language Bible first published in 1611 as transliterations of rhe Hebrew originals. In the English Standard Version (ESV) published in 2001, however, the single spelling Tiglath-pileser (including the hyphen) appears in all six places.

Big deal, you may be saying, who cares if the guy's name was Tiglathpileser or Tilgathpilneser?

I do, that's who.

So which is more authentic, the KJV that accurately reproduces the earlier documents or the ESV that correctly indicates that only one person was being referred to and not possibly two different persons?

What is interesting to me is that both the KJV and the ESV are correct in different ways. The ESV makes all six instances of the king's name the same, since there was clearly a single king of Assyria at that time, not two kings with slghtly different names, thus elminating what were undoubtedly errors made by ancient scribes in producing the Hebrew text that the translators of the KJV used. But here's the thing. The KJV translatore faithfully transliterated into English the Hebrew names they encountered and the ESV translators didn't.

I learned to read Hebrew about a year ago, and

תִּגְלַ֣ת פִּלְאֶסֶר֮ in First and Second Kings definitely is Tiglathpileser and

תִּלְּגַ֥ת פִּלְנְאֶ֖סֶר in First and Second Chronicles definitely is Tilgathpilneser.

The discrepancy is actually in the Hebrew, which is being converted accurately into English. Perhaps they are not "errors" but merely variants of the same name, like Brian and Bryan.

Proper names are one thing; ordinary words are another matter entirely. Take the basically twin verses of 1 Kings 10:22 and 2 Chronicles 9:21 where we find not only the by-now-familiar variant spellings of proper names (Tharshish/Tarshish, Huram/Hiram) but also the very real dispariy at the end of the verses where some translations say the ships brought "gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks" and other translations say they brought "gold and silver, ivory, apes, and baboons."

Which is it? Clearly, both can't be right unless the same word means both peacocks and baboons, which I doubt.

In the book of Proverbs, two verses in close proximity -- actually, they are adjacent -- give contradictory information. Proverbs 26:4 says "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him." The very next verse, Proverbs 26:5, says "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." It is rather like reading "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" followed immediately by "Out of sight, out of mind."

The thing to remember is that this particular book is called Proverbs because it contains a large collection of proverbs, not a list of instructions to be followed religiously (pun intended), which in the case of being able both to answer and not to answer simultaneously is impossible. Like the absence/out-of-sight pair, however, both might be applicable at different times depending on the situation in which one finds oneself.

People who believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures should remember to say "in the original writings" to be intellectually honest. Unfortunately, the oldest copies known to exist today are centuries removed from when the originals were produced. Until originals are found, all bets are off, or at least hedged.

In this post we have touched upon, but only slightly, two schools of thought concerning translations of any kind, not just Biblical translation, whether to follow Formal Equivalence principles (word-for-word translation) or Dynamic Equivalence principles (sense-for-sense translation). If, for example, you were translating the Lord's Prayer into the language of people living on a remote Island in the Pacific who had never heard of or seen bread and whose chief sustenance was derived from fishing, would you insist on saying "Give us this day our daily bread" or might you decide to say "Give us this day our daily fish" instead?

I apologize that this post somehow turned into a rather long and rambling treatise, but like Topsy, it just grew (Topsy is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).