Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 826 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Spellchecking the Bible - Wisdom Wednesday


Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. Today is Day 826 of our trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday. The past several weeks on Wednesday, we have been focusing on interpreting current events through a Biblical worldview.

To establish a Biblical worldview, it is important that you also have a proper understanding of God’s word. Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors. In order to help us all have a better understanding of God’s word, I would like to invest the next several weeks reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser, which he has compiled into a book titled I Dare You Not to Bore Me with the Bible.

We are broadcasting from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. I write a lot for both work and the scripts for this podcast. At some point, I would like to write a novel series that is a Christian space-based theme. While my spelling has improved considerably over the years with all of this writing, I would be lost without a good grammar and spell checker.

The grammar checker does have various options depending on the type of writing and the context. This also plays a factor in a book we usually don’t consider needing a grammar or spell check, which is the Bible. With the numerous translations available today, it may be prudent to consider. So the topic of our essay today is…
Spellchecking the Bible


The words of the original Biblical text cannot always be read with certainty. Genesis 49:10 is a famous example. These three translations show the differences.




NASB

ESV
NLT


"The scepter shall not depart from Judah, Nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples."
"The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples."
"The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from his descendants,
until the coming of the one to whom it belongs, the one whom all nations will honor."



Three translators arrived at different conclusions because the Hebrew text itself is ambiguous. The problem is one word made up of four Hebrew letters which is translated (shiyloh).

The NASB takes these four letters as spelling “Shiloh,” the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept during the days of the Judges, Samuel, and David. As it is written, this is how the word should be pronounced, but “Shiloh” is not spelled this way anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The odd spelling has led many translators to suspect that “Shiloh” is not the correct translation.

Another problem with translating this word as “Shiloh” is that the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced a few centuries before Christ, which is often quoted by the New Testament writers—has a different rendering. The Septuagint literally reads, “until that which is stored away for him comes.” The Hebrew text used by the Septuagint translator did not read (shiyloh).



The Septuagint translator saw one of two things. The four consonants in our problem word could have been divided into two words: (shay loh). That option would result in “until tribute comes—is brought to him.” The ESV reflects this option.

One text of the Septuagint translator may have had three consonants instead of four.