Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Numberup AT worldnet.att.net]

"Subordination" has several meanings, and how does this affect a precise 
translation?  I think preferable is Koehler and Baumgartner's explanation (_A 
Bilingual Dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament_, Brill, 1998): 
"_)asher_ marks the connexion of two independent clauses of which the
second explains more distinctly a part of the first."

Solomon Landers

Daniel Wagner wrote:

> In defining a word, we need to not merely find a bunch of possible glosses 
> that work in a target language, and then plug in whichever one seems 
> appropriate when translating a particular given passage, but rather we seek 
> to determine a word's function in the original language.
>
> Thus, what's wrong with taking _)asher_ generally as the "sign of 
> subordination"? That works in *all* contexts. It's not a relative pronoun, 
> and it has no *intrinsic* translatable meaning such as "what" "where" or 
> anything like that. All it does as a "function word" is to indicate 
> subordination.
> *********************