...I take your point. I wondered whether to suggest something like "I was apprenticed to the ground" which would imply someone acquiring him as an apprentice. I certainly wasn't ruling out real slavery or serfdom, although of course most agricultural slaves would have been born as such rather than actually bought. Remember that this is in the post-exilic period, when many Israelites would have been more or less agricultural slaves in their places of exile.
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
Karl, you have an excellent point, although your apparent emendation of
)DM "man" to )DMH "soil" is unnecessary. There is an obvious word play
between )DMH, the soil to which the speaker is now a slave [ (BD -
pointed in MT as (OBED rather than (EBED but still suggesting work as a
slave], and )DM, the person who caused that "slavery" perhaps by
bringing up the young person on a farm. So the meaning is something like
"I am a worker of the land, that is what people have made me", but of
course that misses the word play.
Peter,
thanks very much for all your posts. In your translation, you have been
careful to keep the causitive sense, but I think it loses the meaning of
QNH. There is no possessing or aquiring. It is similar to the KJV.
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