Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

First of all we would have to be happy that Alter respected Hebrew
syntax unlike virtually all other commonly used translation, that in
fact all misunderstand Genesis' ouverture.
Second, I don't think the absence of a main verb in English has got
anything to do with bad style. English has a nice way of shortly
stating verbless circumstantial clauses such as "the cat having left
the house, dozens of mice entered and had the time of their lives" or
whatever. I'm no English speaker, and not even sure if this type of
clause is possible, but I never thought it was grammatically wrong.
"and God's breath hovering over the waters" is not a main clause in
the Hebrew equivalent, and it's not a main clause in English in this
translation, which to me is a great improvement.
Herman


2005/11/22, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>:

> "The earth then was welter"? What on earth does that mean? It may sound
> nice and poetic with its alliteration with "waste", but as far as I am
> concerned it is nonsense, a bit like Jabberwocky. Then we have "and
> God's breath hovering over the waters" with no main verb, a clear
> grammatical error which would be marked wrong in first grade. (Well, I
> suppose the point could be that "the earth then was... God's breath...",
> but this is both bad punctuation and a translation error.) This is no
> more and no less than bad English, and would be marked as such by any
> teacher. I suppose there is a fashion in certain literary circles for
> writers to ignore the basic rules of English and still be considered
> "literary", but I don't judge English by those people's standards.