Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Joel Stucki wrote:

> Yes I never found the absence of of the object marker to be an
> insurmountable problem,It just would have been nice to make the object
> less ambiguous my bigger concern was the vav prefixing what was
> intended to be the direct object according to KJV and most
> translations. The way they dealt with this was to translate it as
> "both" which seems unjustified.


HH: I see no problem with translating a vav as "both." See BDB, s.v. W, 
at 1h., where they sat that vav repeated equals "both . . . and." And 
Dan 8:13 is listed for this usage.

> As to the criticisms of the NAB I
> won't disagree. I tend to like very exact renderings as well but not
> every translation has that as a goal. I just liked that they rethought
> the object of TT.
> My main argument against the KJV and other trans that follow it is the
> interpretation of a compound direct object with both prefixed with vav
> and rendered in English as "Both objecta and objectb" I can't recall
> ever seeing this construction before. Is there any other example of a
> compound direct object with both objects carrying the vav?


HH: How would I know offhand? It seems grammatically possible though. 
Jeremiah 13:14 is not quite it, but close. Psalm 76:7 shows such a 
construction functioning as subjects, not objects.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard