13 August 2022 draft-bible
1. these are the generations. See the note on 2:4.
1. and of (WEB). In Hebrew, after the expression bᵉnei noaḥ, ‘the sons of Noah’, there follow the words šem ḥam wayafet, ‘Shem, Ham, and Japheth’. That is, as we already know from the previous story, Shem, Ham, and Japheth are the sons of Noah. The ASV gets this correct, inserting the now obsolete word ‘namely’ to signal that Shem, Ham, and Japheth are the sons of Noah. However, the WEB, for some reason, inserts an ‘and’ here, which could have the unfortunate effect of making it look like the three persons named were not the sons of Noah.
1. were. Biblical Hebrew typically omits the copula where English has it, so there is nothing odd or wrong about the WEB’s decision to supply were in the English. However, adding the were makes the colon after ‘Japheth’ that was in the ASV superfluous. The same issue applies to verses 3 and 4.
2. Madai. Or, in today’s English, Media, the land and country of the Medes.
3. Javan. Or, in today’s English, Greece.
5. islands of the nations. Hebrew iyyei ha-goyim, but iyyim doesn’t quite mean ‘islands’, as it can also embrace lands along seashores, even if connected to a continental mass.
5. each one. Hebrew ʾiš. The ASV gets the sense right in translate every one, but the downside of that rendering is that a reader might mistake every one for everyone, as the WEB in fact does.
5. with its own language. Hebrew lilᵉšono. The preposition ‘after’ is a bit archaic here, and ‘his’ should be replaced with ‘its’ in modern English when the referent is a ‘people’.
5. language. Literally ‘tongue’, but ‘language’ is the meaning.
5. peoples. Hebrew goyim. The potential downside of ‘nation’ is that the Hebrew goy does not carry the same connotations of statehood that the English nation sometimes does.
6. were. As in verse 1. So also in verse 7.
10. and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. W. F. Albright suggested that perhaps the Masoretes have mispointed the word read here as ‘Calneh’, and that in fact the word intended was kullanah, ‘all of them’. This the verse would read, ‘And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and all of them [were] in the land of Shinar.’ See Albright, “The End of ‘Calneh in Shinar’”, in the journal of Near Eastern Studies (1942).
11. went forth. Hebrew yaṣaʾ, ‘he went out’. To omit the ‘forth’ is to leave out something in the meaning of the Hebrew verb.
12. that is, the great city. Hebrew hi ha-ʿir ha-gᵉdolah. This clause is a statement, and in the Hebrew is not simply ‘wrapped up’ as a modifier to Calah, as in the WEB’s rendering “the great city Calah”. There is, besides, another issue here. As the Masoretic Text currently stands, it would appear that Calah is being called ‘great city’, but this is strange, given the nearness of Nineveh in the list. Nineveh is referred to a ‘great city’ no less than four times in the Hebrew Bible (Jonah 1:2, 3:2, 3:3, 4:11). Driver took ‘the great city’ to refer collectively to Resen, Nineveh, Calah, and the place known as Rehoboth-Ir, on the theory that they might appear from a distance as a single city (Genesis, Tenth Edition, 1916).
13. Mizraim. That is, Egypt.
14. from whom the Philistines went forth. So reads the Hebrew, literally. It is odd that it is the Casluhim from whom the Philistines came forth. Elsewhere, the Philistines are called “the remnant of the island [or coastal region] of Caphtor”, and Amos 9:7 relates that God brought “the Philistines from Caphtor”. So it would be tempting to guess that perhaps the expression from whom the Philistines came forth has gotten itself misplaced slightly. The NLT, Good News Translation, and NRSV all rework the verse to make Caphtor (or Crete) the original home of the Philistines.
16-18. the Jebusites, etc. In Hebrew, it is literally a procession of singulars: the Jebusite, the Amorite, etc. Of course, the meaning is that Canaan is the progenitor of all these various peoples. Still, though Genesis 10 is a bit inconsistent and lapses into plurals at times (as in verses 13 and 14), the general pattern is that the nations are each represented in the form of a singular "individual" in the Table of Nations. To the extent that we can preserve this formatting, we should.
20. after their families, after their tongues (ASV). Hebrew lᵉmišpᵉḥotam lilᵉšonotam, where the ‘after’ is a bit archaic. For some reason, the WEB translates the first lᵉ- as ‘after’, following the ASV, but then reads the second as ‘according to’. Compare verse 31, where the WEB translates lᵉmišpᵉḥotam as ‘by their families’.
20. in their lands, in their nations. This is the literal structure of the Hebrew. WEB adds an ‘and’.
21. the elder brother of Japheth. Some (e.g. KJV, NIV, NKJV) read Japheth as the elder brother. However, see the grammatical note in the NET translation at this point.
22. were. As in verse 1. So also in verse 23.
30. was from. So reads the Hebrew, literally.
31. by … by … by. The Hebrew le- appears three times, and all three times for consistency I read ‘by’. Between the second and third instances, the word ‘lands’ takes the preposition bᵉ- ‘in’. The ASV, though somewhat archaically, translates lᵉ- as ‘after’ and bᵉ- as ‘in’. The WEB, for reasons I’m not quite sure of, retains the first ‘after’ but then translates two instance of lᵉ- and one of bᵉ- under the strange choice ‘according to’.
31. peoples. Hebrew goyim, which is commonly used for ethnic groups but does not necessarily connote statehood as the English ‘nation’ sometimes does.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.