The Word That Isn’t “Law”
Open almost any English Bible to the first line of Psalm 119 and you will read that the blameless “walk in the law of the LORD.” “Law” is the natural word, the expected word—and a growing number of translators think it is the wrong one.
Two Words Nobody Can Pin Down
Line up modern Bibles at Psalm 51:6 (Heb v. 8) and you will be pointed in different directions. The trouble is two Hebrew words: tukhot (טֻחוֹת) and satum (סָתֻם), which present translators with a double problem.
The Sign He Changed
As a deaf student was signing Psalm 23, he reached verse 4 and shaped it the way most people have heard it all their lives. After discussing it with Mari, who worked on the psalm for Scriptura, he changed it.
“We Don’t Have Poetry”
In 2004, translators in Chad were about to translate the Psalms, but they had an objection: “We don’t have poetry.” Not that it would be hard to translate, but that it didn’t exist in their language.
The Freed Man Among the Dead
The King James Version says something startling in Psalm 88:5. Describing himself as good as dead, the psalmist writes that he is “free among the dead.”
The Trouble with “Holy One”
In Psalm 16:10 God promises that he will not let his “loyal one” see corruption, the verse Peter later preaches in Acts 2. Yet nearly every English Bible translates this as “your holy one.” Would Scriptura translate it that way? Would they recommend it to translators?
The Question Nobody Had Asked Them
On the margins of the Africa Sings meeting, Bio was asked if he could help students learn Biblical Hebrew. Bio agreed to talk. But first he asked a question: did the institute have any curriculum on biblical poetry?
The Third Idea
Before writing a single line of a song, Jon Hutchins works through a psalm in detail — its structure, imagery, the progression of its thought. When he came to Psalm 19, he saw two main ideas. Then he opened Scriptura’s resources, which showed him a third idea he had missed.
Beauty Is Not the Reward. It’s the Work.
On the first morning of the workshop, our facilitator made an argument that stops people in their tracks: “If not beautiful, a poem translation is not accurate.”
A Musician Must First Be an Exegete
The musicians who came to the Yaoundé workshop had composed before. Yet what they hadn’t done was go through the process of internalizing a psalm. Working through Scriptura’s materials changed that.
