“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.
David Doesn’t Sit in a Chair
In Scriptura’s training materials, there is an image of David lamenting. Four participants in Mbandaka flagged it.
The Word They Dropped
When the Lingala group composed their song from Psalm 133, they ran into a problem. Their chosen wording felt formal, distancing — the opposite of the warmth the psalm was reaching for.
The Instrument Nobody Could Fully Explain
Psalm translation into local languages isn’t only a linguistic challenge. It’s a cultural one.
