From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 23 1999 - 06:44:54 EST
At 11:11 AM +0000 11/23/99, Maurice A. O'Sullivan wrote:
>At 01:32 23/11/99 -0500, GregStffrd@aol.com wrote:
>>GUNH hH SKLHRA hHMERA EGO EIMI.
>>
>>I take hH SKLHRA as an attributive of the third position, further qualifying
>>the indefinite substantive GUNH. If hHMERA were not involved, I would
>>translate, "I am a strict woman." But how might we understand hHMERA, here?
>
>
>Greg:
>Brenton's translation supplies the verb "I live", so that it reads:
>" I live in a hard day, and I have not drunk wine or strong drink ......"
>
>This absence of "I am"/ "I live" is common in Hebrew, as in Latin, etc., too.
>The MT of this phrase is a standard use of the noun+ noun-adjective used
>predicatively; it reads literally " woman | severe-spirit" --- no
>verb.. Hence the JPS translation " I am a very unhappy woman." -- as in
>the NAB, too.
>Perhaps the NRSV " I am a woman deeply troubled; " best catches the nuance
>involved in the word RUACH.
>
>What interests me in the LXX is the way a concept which in the original is
>very much an interior one becomes an external one in the translation.. Is
>this another example, I wonder, of the inherent difficulty in rendering
>RUACH into Greek?
>I would appreciate any comment on this from the "Big Greekers".
The only LXX text I have available at home reads GUNH hHi SKLHRA hHMERA EGW
EIMI; i.e. hHi is a relative pronoun, not an article; given this text, I
would understand the Greek with SKLHRA as the predicate adjective n. pl.
and hHMERA as the subject n. pl. with an implicit ESTI thus: "I am a woman
for whom soft things are hard." That is, I understand hHMERA here as a
neuter plural form of the adjective hHMEROS,-A,-ON. And the sense I derive
from this understanding of the Greek fits the context (I'm paying no
attention to the Hebrew from which it may have come, at least until I can
check it): "I am a woman unaccustomed to refinement."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:45 EDT