14 August 2022 draft-bible
1. was sitting. Hebrew yošeb, a participle.
2. now … now. Hebrew naʾ … naʾ.
2. turn aside. Hebrew sur, a verb which describes turning away from something toward something else. In this case, the angels are invited to turn away from their journey and enter Lot’s house.
3. turned aside. As in verse 2.
2. stay the night. Hebrew lun, a verb for staying a night somewhere. No Hebrew word equivalent to ‘all’ appears here.
3. pressed them hard. The word choice may seem a bit odd, but the same wording recurs in verse 9, and it seemed worthwhile to me to translate it the same way both times.
4. from lad to elder. A somewhat more literal rendering of the Hebrew text.
5. know. This is a common biblical euphemism for sexual relations. While the WEB’s rendering has the virtue of clarity, I would assume that the biblical text here uses a euphemism purposefully. Their threat – like many threats – is clear enough to the listener but couched in words that are not literally threatening.
6. The Hebrew word here read as doorway is petaḥ, literally ‘opening’, while the door that Lot shuts is delet.
7. [so]. No Hebrew equivalent for the word ‘so’ appears in this verse, but leaving it out would leave the awkward impression, at least in English, that raping Lot’s daughters would not be a wicked act. I do not know for certain whether the ASV-WEB use of ‘so’ is an unjustified smoothing over of uncomfortable wording, so I am not confident that it would simply be appropriate to remove the word altogether. However, it seems fair in this case to use brackets to alert the reader that ‘so’ is found in the interpretation, not in the text itself. The NASB (1977 and 1995) does away with ‘so’ completely, reading “do not act wickedly”.
8. daughters who have not known a man. This is exactly what is said in the Hebrew. The WEB reads ‘virgin daughters’. But had the Hebrew writer intended to explicitly say ‘virgin daughters’, he easily could have. Virgin daughters are by no means unknown in the Hebrew Bible, and the word used for ‘virgin’ is betulah, which appears about fifty times in the Hebrew Bible. Instead, however, Lot uses a circumlocution, perhaps out of a father’s reticence to refer to his own daughters’ sexual status, perhaps out of revulsion at the offer he was about to make, perhaps out of a desire to speak to the crowd in the terms they themselves had already used.
9. now … Now. Hebrew naʾ … naʾ.
9. fellow. No word equivalent to ‘fellow’ appears in the Hebrew.
9. sojourn. The word refers to living in a place where one does not have the rights of a native, and is therefore an outsider in that sense to the community. In modern terminology, perhaps the closest equivalent to a biblical ‘sojourner’ is a ‘resident alien’. In any case, the point being made by the Sodomites is that Lot, being a foreigner to their town, has no right to tell them what they can and cannot do.
9. pressed hard. The words pṣr and mʾd, just as in verse 3. Just as Lot, knowing the dangers of being out in the open in Sodom at night, pressed hard on the strangers to enter his home, now the whole town is pressing hard to attack the guests.
14. who were to marry. In Hebrew, the ‘sons-in-law’ (ḥatanim) are described as loqḥei bᵉnotav, which might woodenly be translated ‘takers of his daughters’, based on the idiom that for a man to marry is to ‘take’ a wife. A participle in Hebrew, however, does not explicitly carry tense, raising the question of whether the young men had taken Lot’s daughters or were going to take them. The fact that the English word ‘son-in-law’ properly refers to a daughter’s husband and not a fiance is not necessarily relevant to what the Hebrew terms might refer to. Driver claims that the Hebrew wording ‘admits of either interpretation’, but says that ‘On the whole’, it is ‘more probable’ that the young men are betrothed to be married than that they are married (Genesis, 10th ed., 1916). The translators of the NRSV, NIV, ESV, NAB, and NET all translate in ways that indicate the marriages had not yet been completed.
14, 15. Get up! … Get up! The WEB is more consistent than the ASV here, translating both imperative appearances of qum as “Get up!”
17, 19. hills. The Hebrew term is har, which though grammatically singular can refer to a mountain, a mountainous region, or simply an area of higher than usual elevation. There is a certain broadness to the term. Perhaps this is why, in verse 17, WEB alters the ASV’s “mountain” to “mountains”. However, in verse 19, WEB leaves the singular “mountain” as is, despite the Hebrew term being identical in both verses.
18. Please, no. Hebrew ʾal-naʾ.
19. my lord. The Masoretic Text tends to point the nun of ʾDNY with a kamatz on the nun when it intends that its referent should be understood as God, and with a patah (plural) or hiriq (singular) if the referent is human. And here, in the Masoretic Text, we do have ʾadonay with a kamatz.
My usual way of showing this in English translation is to capitalize “Lord” in those cases where a kamatz indicates a divine referent. However, an additional complication emerges here because the word is pausal, which also can transform a patah into a kamatz, so it is unclear whether the word as pointed by the Masoretes should be read "my lords" or "my Lord". Cf. BDB, entry for ʾDWN, which considers this case uncertain, and the brief discussion of a rabbinic responsum on this very issue in Betzer (2000), "Accents and Masora in Rabbinic Responsa", The Jewish Quarterly, p. 12. See also Speiser (Genesis, ad loc.), who suggests we emend the Masoretic reading to ʾadoni.
I follow Speiser here on two primary grounds: (1) that a divine referent does not seem to make sense in this passage, as the two visitors are angels while Yahweh is no longer with them. And (2), the singular pronouns in verse 19 seem to suggest that Lot is speaking to one listener.
19. shown great kindness. Literally, ‘enlarged your kindness’ (ḥesed).
19. catastrophe. Hebrew raʿ. The term refers to bad things in general, and does not have the heavy connotations of specifically moral malevolence that ‘evil’ does.
20. Please. Hebrew naʾ.
20. my life will be preserved. Hebrew u-tᵉḥi nafši.
22. Zoar. In Hebrew, the name of the town, ṣwʿr, looks related to mṣʿr, the word translated ‘little’ in verse.
29. where. Hebrew, bahen. Despite the ASV and WEB’s ‘in which’, there is nothing about the Hebrew expression that demands that Lot lived inside each individual city.
30. hills. Hebrew har, which can refer to mountains specifically or an area of elevated land more generally.
35. the younger arose. The verb here is qum; I am not sure why the WEB would translate it as ‘went’.
37. Moab. Hebrew moʾab, which the text is punning against meʾab, which would mean ‘from father’.
38. Ben Ammi: literally, ‘son of my kin’. The text is playing the name ben ʿammi against the expression ‘children of Ammon’ (bᵉnei ʿammon), which is the usual biblical way of referring to the Ammonites.
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