Biblical Hebrew Forum

[spedrson AT juno.com (Trevor M Peterson)]

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998 05:16:55 EST a.c.smith AT juno.com (Andrew C Smith)
writes:
>The NIV translation of I Chronicles 13:6 moves from the past to the 
>present mid-way through the sentence. To what extent is this justified 
>or justifiable?

I see what you mean.  I don't have the NIV handy, but I'm guessing it's
similar to the NASB in this regard.  Of course, there is no actual verb
present to say that Kiriath-jearim "belongs" to Judah, so I don't know
that you can go with past or present based on anything but your
assumption about whether it's still true at the time of writing or not. 
I suppose you might say something like, "a city of Judah," which would
remove the problem at least in this case.  The participle YOW$"B doesn't
seem much better.  I suppose you could say something like "Yahweh, the
cherubim-rider," but now we're just getting a bit silly.  Again, it would
tend to fall upon context and how you're going to take the perspective of
the author.  It may be that the translators have followed the later
Hebrew use of the participle for present time, but I don't see why they
would have done that, especially since NIQRFH is perfect and under the
same convention should indicate past time.  And this last one is probably
the most difficult to reconcile with their decision, unless they really
and truly were assuming that it was written from the perspective of the
ark still being Yahweh's dwelling place.  The only other thing I can
think is that they may be hesitant to speak of Yahweh as having existed a
certain way in the past, as if He no longer does.  I don't see why they
would have this problem, but we all come with different presuppositions.

The (N)KJV, ASV, (R)WEB, and DBY at least put Kiriath-jearim belonging to
Judah in the past, as opposed to NASB and (N)RSV, but every version I
checked preserves the present tense with regard to Yahweh's position. 
The LXX is interesting, in that it does put Kiriath-jearim (which it
calls "a city of David") and "called" (EPIKALEW) in the past, but
probably following the translators' most literal understanding of the
Hebrew participle, uses a present participle for "sits" (KAQHMENOU).  But
I'd say there's good reason to put them all in the past and go no further
than the narrative itself does.

Trevor Peterson
Bible/Theology Department
Washington Bible College
Lanham, MD

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