Jeremiah 4:4 "circumcise your hearts" (some kind of surgery?)
Jeremiah 6:10 "their ear is uncircumcised" (more surgery not carried out?)
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Personally, I would say six such figures represents in Genesis a significantly thematic repetition to try to preserve it in translation. I think it is a shame and a disservice to any audience to obliterate such a figure by substituting an *explanation* such as "he thought" for a translation of Hebrew leb, "heart." ...
It may be consistent to translate "heart", but it is wrong. As I pointed out before, Hebrew LEB nowhere refers to the heart as an organ. The words have only a limited domain of semantic overlap, which certainly does not cover this expression. If you want to preserve the thematic repetition (although a rather weak one if it occurs only one per 8 chapters on average), a better way to do so would be to translate "he said to himself".
On the other hand, almost every language has compound verbal idioms, and it is simply not possible to preserve those idioms in translation. For example, in Genesis 29:1 literally Jacob "lifted up his feet", but every one of the translations which Wayne Leman surveyed recognises that this is an idiom for "went on his journey". Would you say that such a verbal idiom must be translated literally? Or that this would be necessary if it was used repeatedly?
The phrase literally translated "long of nose" or "long of nostrils" is used repeatedly and thematically a number of times as an attribute of YHWH. The meaning, as followed by all translations I know, is "slow to anger". Are you saying that because this phrase is thematically significant it should be translated literally?
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Peter Kirk
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