Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Calamity, burden, destruction and glossary

You would think I would be smarter. When I did the psalms, I kept the data at the phrase level - too short in some ways, too long in others. I still have not developed a glossary for the psalms to see how concordant I have been as well as how slavish.

The Psalter kata Bob (available here - see the links on the right) was my first learning experience in Hebrew. Job now requires a glossary and eventually a justification for every gloss. But I have kept the Hebrew at the verse level making it very hard to automate a glossary, and no easy way to check English usage on a phrase by phrase basis. Hence the title of this post.

Today I went round the block with mercy, loving kindness and spare. There is a word whose consonants are darkness but it 'means' spare. I had carelessly used mercy instead of loving kindness for חסד, a word that is rare in Job (only 3 times). I say carelessly because חסד is a loaded covenant word and should be noted in this book which is in some sense as outside covenant as the psalms are in.

So I relieved
חסד of mercy as its gloss and substituted 'loving kindness',
spared mercy for spare, and freed spare for another gloss.
Now I have to sort out c
alamity, burden, and destruction.
All this means that I have been re-glossing posts behind your backs!

I had rendered some words like איד with unnecessary variation. Now I have corrected the translations as follows:
משא which occurs once only (chapter 7) - is now a 'heavy load' - it is the load which Hashem bears for us and though Job cannot yet see this, his striving to express it creates its frame. To lift it requires נשא, a lifting up.
איד as burden - fits well in all its contexts (chapters 18, 21, 30, 31 - both theme and frame)
בלהה chapters 18, 24, 27, and 30 destruction
הוה chapters 6 and 30 calamity

Enough for now - every chapter I come across my impossible task.

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