Continued from the last post above ↑
Continuation of excerpts from the CRITICAL NOTES section of The Apocalypse of John (Yale University Press, 1958) by Charles Cutler Torrey:
To be continued...
Continuation of excerpts from the CRITICAL NOTES section of The Apocalypse of John (Yale University Press, 1958) by Charles Cutler Torrey:
1:15. [οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὅμοιοι χαλκολιβάνῳ ὡς ἐν καμίνῳ πεπυρωμένης] Hoi podes autoû hómoioi khalkolibánōi hōs en kamínōi pepurōménēs (!) The meaning of the clause is unquestionably "His feet were like burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace." The Greek does not say this, but presents a very strange reading which up to the present time has not been explained. The astonishing form of the participle with its genitive case and feminine gender, both quite impossible, has seemed to be the result of some curious accident, and substitute readings have been freely proposed. The text is right, however, as it stands. Charles, I, 29, concludes that the reading "can only be a slip for pepurōménōi on the part of the Seer, which he would have corrected in a revision of his text."
The true explanation of the difficulty is readily suggested by the fact that in the Aramaic language the neuter gender is regularly expressed by the feminine. When the clause is written in its original form, everything is clear: [sorry, Torrey's transliteration of Aramaic is too recherché for me to copy]. "Gold refined by fire," khrusíon pepurōménon, is mentioned in 3:8, where the original was certainly [... ...], cf. Targ. Prov. 3:14. The word [...] (whatever compound may have been used here) is masculine. The translator, rendering word by word as usual, very naturally took the noun kūr, "furnace," to be in the construct state, wherefore it was necessary to render the following passive participle as feminine and in the genitive case: "as in a furnace of that which is refined." In fact, however, it was the masculine definite form: "like brass refined in a furnace." This is a characteristic and very instructive example of translation Greek. Any translator of the time would have been likely to render in just this way.
The true explanation of the difficulty is readily suggested by the fact that in the Aramaic language the neuter gender is regularly expressed by the feminine. When the clause is written in its original form, everything is clear: [sorry, Torrey's transliteration of Aramaic is too recherché for me to copy]. "Gold refined by fire," khrusíon pepurōménon, is mentioned in 3:8, where the original was certainly [... ...], cf. Targ. Prov. 3:14. The word [...] (whatever compound may have been used here) is masculine. The translator, rendering word by word as usual, very naturally took the noun kūr, "furnace," to be in the construct state, wherefore it was necessary to render the following passive participle as feminine and in the genitive case: "as in a furnace of that which is refined." In fact, however, it was the masculine definite form: "like brass refined in a furnace." This is a characteristic and very instructive example of translation Greek. Any translator of the time would have been likely to render in just this way.
To be continued...
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