13 August 2022 draft-bible
1. you and all your household__. As in the Hebrew.
1. household. Hebrew bayit, which can mean both ‘house’ and ‘household’. The extra clarity doesn’t hurt here.
1. for you I have seen righteous__. As in the Hebrew.
2. clean animal. In terms of biblical thought, animals were divided into the ‘clean’ animals suitable for eating, and ‘unclean’ animals not regarded as fit for human consumption. To use the word ‘beast’ here would unnecessarily complicate things.
2. seven pairs. Literally, seven seven.
2. a male. Anarthrous in the Hebrew.
2. take two (WEB). But the Hebrew does not have a second instance of ‘take’ in this verse.
3. seven pairs. Hebrew ‘seven seven’.
4. For in seven more days. Hebrew, ki lᵉyamim ʿod šibʿah.
4. bring rain. Hebrew mamtir. It seems almost overkill to translate this word by the abstract mouthful ‘cause it to rain’.
4. from off. Hebrew, meʿal, also a sort of ‘compound’ preposition.
6. waters upon the earth. As in 6:17, the exact phrase _mayim ʿal ha-areṣ interrupts the sentence after the occurrence of the world mabbul. But the ASV, WEB, and other translations tend to obscure the strangeness here. It might be right to read ‘the flood of waters was upon the earth’ if the Hebrew read mabbul ha-mayim hayah ʿal ha-areṣ. But that is not what we find: instead, it is ha-mabbul hayah mayim ʿal ha-areṣ. One could be a fluke, but twice cannot be accidental: someone is glossing the term mabbul with a simpler explanation. While many translators try to cover over the this awkward phenomenon, a special honorable mention must go to Robert Alter, who translates this straightforwardly. Yet even Alter leaves something to be desired. While mayim ʿal ha-areṣ appears identically in Hebrew both times, in 6:17 Alter translates it “water upon the earth”, while in 7:6 “water over the earth”. The variation removes the possibility that the English reader will notice the exact repetition of this curious phrase. (See Alter’s Genesis [1996]).
8. clean animals. As in 7:2.
10. came. Hebrew hayah, which by a strict dictionary reading one might be tempted to translate were, but as Hebrew is somewhat more sparing in its use of hayah than English is in its use of ‘to be’, I think something that more clearly emphasizes the arrival of the waters is appropriate.
11. burst open. This seems to me a vivid and quite adequate translation of the Hebrew nibqᵉʿu.
12. the rain was upon the earth. So literally the Hebrew.
13. that very. Hebrew bᵉʿeṣem ha-yom.
14. every kind of animal. As in 1:11.
15. two by two. Hebrew ‘two two’, but two by two grasps the idea.
17. lifted up the ark. A more up to date equivalent for ‘bare’.
17. and it rose up. Hebrew wattaram. There is no need to take the wordy route of translating this with a passive verb. In addition, once wayyisᵉʾu is tranlsated ‘lifted up’, it becomes unnecessarily repetitive for the WEB to also translate wattaram using the same English term.
18. surged. The Hebrew verb is gbr. Used specifically of water, it can refer to upward motion. It is a synonym for ‘rose’, as in 7:20 – “fifteen cubits upward the water gbr-ed”. But more generally speaking, it means ‘to prevail’, or ‘to be powerful’. The related noun gibbor refers to a powerful man or warrior. So it would be good if the translation could reflect this general tone, and in the context of water the word ‘surge’ denotes both rising and powerful movement.
18. moved across. The Hebrew verb is hlk, a very common word for movement, and nothing as specialized as ‘floated’.
19. utterly overwhelmed. Literally, greatly greatly prevailed upon. The Hebrew repetitive meʾod meʾod (“greatly greatly”) is not out of place in formal Hebrew literature the way its equivalent would be in English.
20. higher. Hebrew milᵉmaʿᵉla. While the word ‘upward’ is not necessarily an awful choice here, in context it is clear that what is being said is not that the waters rose to a total of 15 cubits (about 22 feet) high, but that they rose 15 cubits higher after covering the mountaintops.
21. among. Hebrew b-.
21. livestock. Hebrew bᵉhemah.
21. beasts. Hebrew ḥayyah, which according to BDB in this case refers to wild animals, although the word itself is capable of speaking of animals more generally. I think the BDB must be right in this case given the structure of the list of creatures. There is an opening phrase that describes all terrestrial life broadly ‘all flesh which moves upon the earth’ – followed by a number of subcategories each introduced by the particle b-. One of those subcategories is ḥayyah, and so it would seem to me that in this case we must opt for understanding it in the more restricted sense ‘wild animals’ rather than in the broader ‘animal’ or even broader ‘living things’. Given this conclusion, I think the ASV’s ‘beasts’ is a better rendering than the WEB’s ‘animals’.
21. swarming thing that swarms. Hebrew šereṣ ha-šoreṣ, not the usual words that ASV and WEB render elsewhere with ‘creeping’ (of the stem rms).
23. from … to … to. This is one of those fortunate places where the literal form of the Hebrew idiom works equally well in English.
24. prevailed. Hebrew gbr, a verb having to do with being strong or powerful. The WEB’s translation of the word as ‘flooded’ would seem to me to imply that the flood itself lasted 150 days, which would be at the least a complicated claim in terms of the flood’s difficult chronology. As will be seen in chapter 8, there is an extended period of time in which the earth might fairly still be described as ‘flooded’, but during which the waters were slowly dissipating in such a way that ‘prevailing’ might not be a good description of the water’s behavior.
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