OK, so this thread has stopped. I wanted to wait until now to post how I would translate it.
Jason Hare wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 9:31 am
Here's the fourth drill from this exercise. It's quite long!
The king sought to take the woman to him(self) for a while and she said unto him, ‘My lord, I am the wife of a man’. And the king asked the name of her husband and she told (to) him. And he took a book and he wrote in it and he called (to) the husband of the woman and he said unto him, ‘Take now this book and give it to the judge whom thou with find before the palace’. And the man took the book and he gave (it) to the judge. And the judge read the command of the king which (was) written in the book, saying, ‘Send this man away to the wilderness and he shall die there’. And the judge hearkened to the voice of the king—according to (‘as’) all that he commanded him, so he did. And it was told to the king that the husband of the woman was dead and he took the woman to himself for a wife. And it came to pass in that time that the prophet called unto the king and he was very angry and he said, ‘Thou whom the Lord hath chosen (“who, the Lord hath chosen thee”) for a righteous judge over His people, thou hast sinned before Him and He hath judged thee the judgement of death’.
Have fun!
Notes:
“to seek” in English, or if you wish to use בקש in Hebrew, has the main idea of searching for, or in this case looking for a way to marry the woman. What is really meant is that he desired to marry her, so I used a word meaning to desire.
To desire a particular person or thing is חמד while a generalized desire is אוה. Because the king desired a specific woman, I used the term חמד.
To say that a woman is married, literally is “mastered” בעולה and her husband can be either “her man” אישה or “her master” בעלה.
“To tell” comes from the root נגד so that’s the verb I used for when the woman told the king the name of her husband.
“Palace” is a word that is not found in Biblical Hebrew. There is a word whose basic meaning is used for any large building such as a mansion, and very often for the temple. I assume that here Weingreen meant the king’s palace, which is often rendered in Hebrew as “the king’s house” which is what I used.
“writing in a document” presupposes that the document be taken, therefore I see no need to say “he took a book”, I simply omitted it. However, the document is addressed to a certain judge, so I added to whom the document is addressed. In this I followed the example of how this was described in the story of David with Bathsheba.
In the message, “to send” is really too gentle. One who is merely sent can make his way back. In that the kings wants the man to die, the idea is more “to drive him out” which is גרש.
בעת ההוא חמד המלך אשה לקחתה לו לאשה ותאמר אדני בעולה אנכי: וישאלה את שם בעלה ותגד לו: ויכתב המלך ספר אל השפט אשר מול בית המלך וישלח ביד בעל האשה: ויכתב בספר לאמר גרש את האיש הזה המדברה להמיתו שם: ויעש השפט ככל אשר צוהו המלך: ויגד למלך כי מת בעל האשה ויקחה לו לאשה:
אחר הדברים האלה בא הנביא אל המלך בחרי אף עד מאד ויאמר אותך בחר יהוה להיות שפט צדיק על עמו ואתה חטאת לו ובן מות אתה
Notes on the second paragraph:
The prophet didn’t call out the king’s error while he was doing it, rather it came later. How much later? In the case of David with Bathsheba, a few months. It could have been as short as a day.
Prophets didn’t usually call out publicly the king’s errors, rather went to the king personally to give his message.
The pronouncement of the death sentence in 1 Samuel 20:31 and 2 Samuel 12:5 was to call the person בן מות.
Knowing that this translation was based on the history of David with Bathsheba, as recounted in 2 Samuel 11–12, I then consulted with those two chapters to see how it was written up in Tanakh, then copied those ways of writing in my translation. That required a massive rewriting of the text that Weingreen wrote.
One of the things I noticed about the writers of Tanakh is that they often wrote things in ways expecting readers to fill in the missing details. So, for example, where Weingreen wrote “And he took a book and he wrote in it and he called (to) the husband of the woman and he said unto him, ‘Take now this book and give it to the judge whom thou with find before the palace’. And the man took the book and he gave (it) to the judge.” in 2 Samuel 11:14 was written merely as ויכתב דוד ספר אל יואב וישלח ביד אוריה. Take “the king” for דוד, “judge before the king’s house” for יואב and “the woman’s husband” for אוריה then you have something that sounds like Biblical Hebrew. The idea is not to translate word for word, rather to get the same ideas across in a way that sounds like Biblical Hebrew.
Biblical Hebrew uses pronominal suffixes rather extensively, a practice I tried to follow.
By the way, I found a way to defeat the hidden text feature. I read Jason’s translation.
Karl W. Randolph.