God
said, "I will cause all My GOODNESS to pass before you, and I will
proclaim the name the LORD before you. I will be gracious to whom I will
be gracious, and I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion."
Here's how Exodus 33:19
reads in the current release of the ISV OT:
God said, "I'll cause
all my goodness to pass before you, and I'll proclaim the name 'the Lord'
before you. I'll be gracious to whom I'll be gracious, and I'll show
compassion on whom I'll show compassion.
Setting aside our use of
contractions in this edition of the unpublished release of this verse as
opposed to our not using contractions in your early draft of this verse,
three observations should be noted:
1. The personal pronouns
referring to God are not capitalized in the current draft of the text in
conformity to our principles of translation by which pronouns referring to
deity are not capitalized unless they occur as the first word in a
sentence or quotation. If your early draft of Exodus 33:19 capitalizes the
pronoun "my" in "cause my goodness," please be informed that this
capitalization error is corrected in the current edition, which has not
yet been released publicly.
2. The word "goodness"
is not placed in all capital letters in the current unpublished draft
edition of Exodus 33:19. How it has come to be placed in all caps in your
quotation is a matter of mystery to us. At any rate, the word is rendered
in lower case letters and appears as such in our current edition.
3. Note that the exact
text of the verse reads "proclaim the name 'the Lord'
before you". The citation sample you provided to us neglected to include
the single quotes around the phrase "the
Lord".
In the Hebrew the phrase is a genitive of apposition. The LXX rendering
also supports this conclusion, by the way. Think of the phrase "city of
Los Angeles". That phrase is a genitive of apposition -- it literally
means "the city which is Los Angeles". The noun preceded by the
preposition "of" -- i.e., "Los Angeles" -- is defining the word "city". In
the same way, in Exodus 33:19 the Hebrew phrase "the name of the
Lord"
means "the name which is 'the
Lord.'"
Accordingly, our rendering of "the name 'the
Lord'"
is quite accurate. To sum up, our using single quotes surrounding the
words "the" and "Lord"
takes the place of the preposition "of". Had our placement of the single
quotes NOT have been there, your observations that you think we've made a
mistake would have been accurate. We apologize if your draft edition of
Exodus 33:19 omitted the single quotes around "the LORD"
-- to have made this omission was a mistake, if no single quotes
appear in your early draft.
