STORIES
STORIES
Count the commands in Psalm 100 and you'll get seven. In a psalm this short—only five verses—that is a remarkable density of imperatives, and the number is almost certainly deliberate.
The workshop’s ethnoarts specialists had been interpreting for everyone else, so they had never gone through the song translation process themselves. So one of the teachers added a session for them on the spot.
Some song forms are built to be short. But then you hand it Psalm 1, which, while compact, is packed with content. One translation team hit that wall and did not flinch.
Most Bibles translate the superscription of Psalm 100 as “a psalm for giving thanks”—as if the psalm were simply in a grateful mood. But the term todah (תוֹדָה) has a deeper significance in Israel's worship.
If you read Psalm 16 from the perspective of an ancient diviner, the vocabulary starts to look familiar. A cup, lots, kidneys and liver. All four appear in the psalm. But how are they used?
The musician had the melody, and he had the words in his own language. When the room was ready, he stood up to sing Psalm 1 for the first time in public. He almost could not get through it.
Psalm 1 describes the happy person as having "not walked in the counsel of wicked people." But to "walk in the counsel" is not a phrase that every language can render. How do translators handle this?
At Pentecost, Peter quoted Psalm 16: “You will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption.” But is the Greek word for "corruption" an accurate translation of the Hebrew?
The Hebrew word naim (נָעִים), “delightful,” is rare, only appearing 22 times in the Bible. Psalm 16 uses it twice, each time at the very end of one of its two halves.
The workshop had gathered two groups who do not usually work in the same room. One rule was adopted: the agreed translation would not go up on the board until everyone in the room accepted it.
Psalm 16:4 opens with a line that modern translators have called difficult, uncertain, even obscure. The ESV refers to those who "run after" another god. Yet this is not what the term typically means.
Every verse in Psalm 16 has two or three lines, except the first, which has only one: “Protect me, God, because I have taken refuge in you.” The two halves of that line reflect the structure of the rest of the psalm.
The musicians and translators were a long way from home. Traditionally, having their communities check their drafts would be a months-long process that required going home. Instead, the drafts went out over WhatsApp.
A group of translators we confronted with the question: "What defines poetry in our own languages?" Nobody could answer it in full. Not because there wasn't an answer, but because no one had yet to write it down.
Psalm 16 declares, "Property lines have fallen for me in the most delightful places." What does this mean, and what is its significance to our understanding of the poem?
Psalm 8 ends exactly where it began. The final line repeats the opening line word for word. It's the simplest kind of poetic device, a bookend, and it frames the meaning of the psalm.
A translation consultant is the last gate of Bible translation. Nothing gets published until they sign off. Fifty of them, responsible for oral Bible translation across francophone Africa, gathered in Cotonou in August.
Few verses in the Psalter pack as much textual difficulty into so few words as Psalm 8:3. And yet our preferred reading yields one of the most arresting images in the psalm.
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