13 August 2022 draft-bible
1. beasts. Hebrew ḥayyah, and here as in 7:21 I think the argument holds that the term is used specially in reference to wild animals as opposed to animals in general.
1. made a wind pass. There is no need for the slightly wordier “made a wind to pass”.
1. subsided. The word assuaged might not be recognizeable to some readers.
3. And the waters continually returned from upon the earth. Hebrew, ‘And the waters returned from upon the earth, going and returning’. A literal translation isn’t quite possible here, but the picture is clearly one of the situation gradually returning to normal from its flooded state. The WEB replaced ‘returned’ with ‘receded’ as the first verb of 8:3 (for the Hebrew wayyašubu), but this is unfortunate, given that the WEB also translates wayyiḥsᵉru, later in this same verse, as ‘receded’.
The flood story, with its confusing chronology and parts welded together from multiple sources, produces difficulties for a reader who wants to understand the exact ‘final picture’ produced by the story. In a situation like this, the differences between different Hebrew verbs can be a critical piece of the puzzle. It is precisely in a situation like this one that we do not want to be translating multiple different Hebrew verbs with the same English word.
3. decreased. Hebrew ḥsr, a general verb for decreasing. ‘Receded’ might be a bit over-specific.
5. decreased. As in verse 3.
5. seen. In Hebrew, this is a passive form of the common verb rʾh, not some kind of abstract adjective like ‘visible’.
7. it went back and forth. Hebrew and it went out, going out and going back.
7. from. Hebrew meʿal.
8. that was with him. Literally, from with him. The ASV’s “from him” is not a bad rendering, but doesn’t register right in today’s English. The WEB bungles the meaning of ‘from with him’ by translating it “himself”.
8. from. As in 7.
9. place to rest. Treating the whole Hebrew word manoaḥ as meaning ‘place to rest’.
9. the sole of her foot. So goes the Hebrew, while the WEB abbreviates to just ‘foot’.
10. seven more days. Hebrew ʿod šibʿat yamim.
10. waited. The ASV’s ‘stayed’ is not necessarily bad either, but ‘waited’ is very clear.
11. came in. Contra the WEB, no Hebrew equivalent of ‘back’ occurs here.
11. evening (WEB). This is preferable to the ASV’s obsolete eventide.
11. behold (WEB). Though they are generally interchangeable in the English Bible tradition, an advantage of ‘behold’ over ‘lo’ is that ‘behold’ will be recognized by somewhat more readers.
11. there in her mouth. Or, more literally, ‘behold, in her mouth’.
11. freshly plucked. Hebrew taraf. See BDB, Gesenius-LT, entries for טרף.
11. from. Hebrew meʿal.
12. waited. As in 10.
12. seven more days. As in 10.
12. _she did not return to him any more._ More literally, ‘she did not repeat returning to him again’, from which we get the redundancy of how the ASV translates it here.
13. from upon. Hebrew meʿal.
13. there before him. Hebrew hinneh, traditionally ‘behold’.
17. among. Hebrew b-.
19. beast. Hebrew ḥayyah, which could be translated ‘animal’. But perhaps ‘beast’ will have the same whiff of potentially implying a wild animal that the Hebrew ḥayyah has.
20. animal. Hebrew ḥayyah. In this case ‘clean animal’ refers to all those animals which are (in the biblical scheme) fit for human consumption. So these animals would most certainly include the domestic animals which made up the mainstay of the biblical sacrificial system.
21. _smelled the soothing scent. Whatever the defects of the ASV’s wording here, it does a nice job of showcasing the consonance of the Hebrew expression: _wayyaraḥ YHWH ʾet reaḥ ha-niḥoaḥ. We can improve a bit on the ASV wording here without ruining the effect. The smell is niḥoaḥ, meaning not so much ‘sweet’ as ‘soothing’, and we can replace the now-obscure word ‘savor’ with ‘scent’. This phrase ‘soothing scent’ does not appear only here, but in fact dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. The word ‘soothing’ reflects an important feature of the Hebrew Bible’s philosophy of sacrifice – the belief that the act of sacrifice is ‘soothing’ in that it turns away the wrath of the deity. It is upon being soothed by the scent that Yahweh promises never again to wreck the world.
The word ‘scent’ is also worth noting in Israel’s cultural context. Though the exact details might vary, a repeated idea in Israel’s region was that a sacrifice was in some sense the sharing of food with a deity. In the highly anthropomorphic flood story preserved in the Gilgamesh Epic, the gods are famished during the flood due to a lack of sacrifice, and ‘gather like flies’ around the survivor of the flood when he makes his post-Flood offering. However, as is common with other features of Genesis, the deity here is made a bit less anthropomorphic. The God of Genesis is not starving or dependent on human food, although he still does appreciate the smell of the sacrifices.
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