Still Broken: the Shepherd Psalm

A note

How you render this one word determines the meaning of the whole paragraph. A translator has to decide, and the decision is already an interpretation. Readers deserve to know that a decision was made.（ゼカリヤ書 3:3）

This is where I stopped. I could not go forward, so I stayed with the same few lines for a long time. I have come to think the staying was the point.

（エズラ記（ギリシア語） 第2章）

Closing

Some people are consoled by this verse and others are wounded by it, often in the same room. The writer almost certainly did not anticipate that. It is left for readers to carry.

7彼らが慕って姦淫をおこなったみだらな神に、再び犠牲をささげてはならない。これは彼らが代々ながく守るべき定めである』。

レビ記 17:7（口語訳（日本語））

In its own century

There are obvious objections, and I don't hold this reading with much confidence. What I would defend is narrower: that the text leaves room for it.（ヨナ書 2:7）

8山に登り、木を持ってきて主の家を建てよ。そうすればわたしはこれを喜び、かつ栄光のうちに現れると主は言われる。

ハガイ書 1:8（口語訳（日本語））

Another way to read it

I went through several scholarly treatments and found nothing decisive. On reflection, the absence of anything decisive may be the most appropriate result this passage could produce.

1You did well, silencing the unmentionable doctrines of the Carpocratians. For these are the prophesied stars straying from the narrow path of the commandments into a bottomless abyss of fleshly and bodily transgressions. For being inflated as to “knowledge,” as they say, “of the deep things of Satan,” they overlook that they cast themselves into the deepest gloom of falsehood, and bragging they are free, they have become slaves of servile lusts. These, therefore, must be opposed in each and every way. For, even if they say something true, nevertheless, one who loves truth must not agree with them. For not everything actual is the truth, nor is what appears to be true according to human opinion to be preferred over the real truth according to the faith.

秘密のマルコの福音書 2:1（Zinner 訳（英語））

Closing

A short detour. There is a passage elsewhere with the same shape though no direct connection, and setting them next to each other makes the writers' different concerns visible.（ローマ人への手紙 15:4）

（秘密のマルコの福音書 第4章）