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Mark 12:36 — On "Lord"
vs. "Lord"
Why does the
ISV render Mark 12:36's quotation of Psalm 110:1 "The Lord said to my
Lord..." instead of reading "The Lord
said to my Lord..."? The Hebrew uses the divine name in Psalm 110:1 in the
first instance of "Lord," so why doesn't the ISV reflect this in the Old
Testament quotation?
The
Greek NT uses the same word
κύριος
as the second and sixth words in the sentence you've
quoted from Mark 12:36 in the ISV. But the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text
(dated about 900-1000 AD) uses the Hebrew word
יהוה
(the name of God) in the first instance and the
Hebrew word
אדֹנִי
(which means "Lord") for
the second occurrence.
To sum up,
the Greek makes no distinction that the MT of the Hebrew OT makes. The
citation from Psalm 110:1 by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is, strictly
speaking, a free-verse translation from the Hebrew into Greek by Jesus
called a targum. Targumim (the plural word) were made on the
fly by cantors in synagogues of the first century. When the Tanakh was
read in the synagogue in Hebrew, often times a separate translator would
render the text freely into the native language of the speakers, someone
analogous to the pattern of a U.N. translator today. These renderings are
called targumim. Since the Gk. of all NT quotes of the OT
never distinguish between YHWH and ADONAI, we don't make such a
distinction in the ISV, in keeping with our principle of translation that
dictates we translate Gk. and/or Heb. ambiguities by a similar ambiguity
in English. We'll let the commentators speak on these kinds of nuances.
This ISV reader then replied
as follows:
Thank you so
much for your explanation. One of the things that impress me about the ISV
is that it translates the original language honestly. Makes me scratch my
head when I read that translators insert their personal bias into a
translation and translate the passage as “The LORD said to my Lord” such
as what the KJV and NKJV done here. On a personal note, is there any word
in the Greek that would refer to the name of God which many pronounce as
Yahweh which could have been used here?
If my memory
serves me correctly, when I was studying in my undergraduate degree, a
visiting professor of religion from the U.K. pointed me to an article on
that very subject in which the author claimed that a Greek language Hebrew
grammar (!) had been found which gave a pronunciation guide in the Greek
alphabet for the sacred name YHWH. In Greek letters, the word spelled out
IOUBE (yow-bay), which is very close to the word Yahweh that we know
today. That's the best I know, at any rate, and that Gk. pronunciation
guide doesn't appear anywhere in the NT or early apostolic literature.
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