Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 18/03/2006 18:07, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> ...
>
> Howerver, the philosophy of the modern idiomatic translations, on the basis
> of which you criticize a uniform rendering of NP$, works in the opposite
> direction. ...

This is not the basis of my current criticism of the rendering of NP$ as 
"soul". I have said this in the past, but that was a different issue 
which I wish to keep separate from this one.

> ...
>
> I heartily disagree with you that sentences in an English Bible with the
> word "soul" are "extremely misleading". ... In "The Concise Oxford
> Thesaurus" five different entries are found under "soul". Number  3 is:
> ""not a soul in sight", person. human being, being, individual, creature."
> Thus, the most normal Hebrew reference of NP$ has its counterpart i the
> modern English "soul". ...

Yes, it does have its counterpart in one of the English senses of 
"soul", one which is obsolescent in modern English except in a few fixed 
phrases like the one you cite. I don't have the thesaurus which you 
mention, so I will refer you to http://www.answers.com/soul&r=67. In the 
definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, the first three senses 
as well as the seventh relate to the immaterial and immortal part of the 
human, whereas the sense "A human" is number four. Similarly in the 
Houghton Mifflin thesaurus, where the sense "A member of the human race" 
comes third. In the Columbia University Press Encyclopedia the only 
sense of "soul" given is "the vital, immaterial, life principle, 
generally conceived as existing within humans". Our sources are 
therefore united in saying that this is the primary sense of the English 
word "soul", and that the sense "a human being" is secondary. This is 
very different from the semantic range of Hebrew NP$, for which "the 
immaterial and immortal part of the human" is not a sense at all. This 
mismatch is the essence of my criticism of this rendering.

> ... The philosophical view that Bible readers can
> misunderstand the English word "soul," and therefore its use is "extremely 
> misleading" is
> in my view wrong. ...

This is not a "philosophical view" but a practical observational fact, 
which can be confirmed by field testing - and from the prevalent but (in 
biblical terms) wrong view of the soul held by most English speakers 
today, whether Christian, Jewish or unbelieving.

> ... When reading the Bible, people should use their mental
> faculties and find the references and meanings of the words by help of the
> context. People are prevented from this when more than thirty English words
> are used for the single Hebrew word NP$. Below I will illustrate this by a
> comparison of three passages in the literal NWT and the idiomatic NIV.
>   

I will not attempt here to defend the NIV readings, not least because 
this is a distraction from my main point here. If you do want to choose 
a single consistent word to render NP$ in English, that word should not 
be "soul". Perhaps "being" would be better.

> ... Instead of viewing the NWT
> renderings as "extremely misleading" I think they are very informative. By 
> the help of such a uniform rendering the readers can see that any hint of a 
> disembodied soul is nonexistent in the Tanakh. ...

The problem is that by using the English word "soul" you have 
immediately introduced into your Tanakh translation a strong hint of 
this concept, which you rightly say is not in the original. Surely it is 
better to use the right word in the first place than to use a wrong word 
and attempt to redefine it within the text.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/