Does anyone know why Seas in capitalized in Genesis verse 10?
Genesis which chapter verse 10?
And what translation?
Genesis chapter 1 verse 10 King James Version
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And why is Earth capitlized while it is lowercase in subsequent verses?
I assume the OP means Chapter 1 of the KJV. Note that there are several capitalized words in the chapter (Day, Night, Heaven, Earth, Seas) all referring to what God “called” something.
Other versions of that chapter use quotation marks instead of capitalization.
(This post was written before I saw the OP’s clarification.)
Because you are suppose to understand that HaShem literally spoke that word that particular time it is used in the text. Is it in quotes in other translations? If you read it in Hebrew, it’s pretty clear that HaShem is giving names to things in a parallel situation to the first human later naming all the animals.
The verb “called” implies “called out,” or said aloud. It’s the word you would use for “call roll.” It’s different from the word that you would use for “give a name,” if there’s no implication that the name is said out loud.
I hope you are aware that this is an artifact of the translation. There is no small letter/capital letter distinction in the original Hebrew.
Thank you all
Which bible do you consider to have the best translation (the closest to the original)?
Which bible do you consider to have the best translation (the closest to the original)?
The closest to the original is always going to be the original itself. If you want true fidelity, you’ll need to learn Hebrew.
Short of that, what matters more is not the translation itself, but the footnotes. In any case where you’re translating one language to another, you’ll always have some words with nuances of meaning that don’t carry over exactly, or puns, or other obstacles to a perfect translation. A good bible with a lot of footnotes will explain those words when they show up.
Everett Fox’s translation of the Torah captures the tenor of the original like no other, but so far he has translated just that. The Torah is paramount for Jews, so I don’t know whether Fox has plans to translate any further scripture or not.
IMNSHO, the two best translations of Scripture, into English, are the New Revised Standard Version, for both testaments and the Apocrypha, and, for the Tanakh, the Jewish Publication Society’s tranlation, from 5746/1985.
I worked with the RSV in college, and it was OK, but it fudged a bit around any passage that was considered a traditional Jesus prophecy, but contained a mistake or just a really bad word choice. It always chose to go with the “mistake” to preserve the prophecy.
You’ve not experienced the Bible until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
And not just learn vocabulary. You need to learn the whole language.
And even that’s not going to get you all the way, since you need to know how things were understood at the time it was written. So you need to study Jewish history and culture and lots of other things.
Hence why we tend to defer to experts. It’s easy to become an amateur and still get things quite wrong.
While I agree that footnotes are good, I also would say that you should read many translations, and read their forewords and such. And then read some expert translators who describe things.
This. While the original is always best, if you don’t, it’s good to have a variety of study tools. Some versions (e.g. Young’s Literal Translation) are good at consistent and pedantic attention to grammatical and lexical conciseness and consistency, but are not so good for actually understanding and following the story. These translations are good for studying the use of a specific word or phrase. Other translations provide a much better understanding of what is happening but do this by taking liberties with the translation like substituting culturally-analogous idioms or choosing one way to translate a phrase that is grammatically or semantically ambiguous in the source language (rather than trying to make an equivalently ambiguous English phrase).
A large part of the Bible (the New Testament) was originally written in Greek, which may be an easier language to learn than Hebrew for an English-speaker.