Letting Go of the City in Revelation

yamaguchi_megumi2026/7/9

Moving back and forth between an ordinary week and an ancient text.

One word that snags

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.（哀歌 3:13）

9building an house unto the Lord, great and new, of hewn and costly stones, and the timber already laid upon the walls.
10And those works are done with great speed, and the work goeth on prosperously in their hands, and with all glory and diligence is it made.
11Then asked we these elders, saying, By whose commandment build ye this house, and lay the foundations of these works?
12Therefore to the intent that we might give knowledge unto thee by writing, we demanded of them who were the chief doers, and we required of them the names in writing of their principal men.
13So they gave us this answer, We are the servants of the Lord which made heaven and earth.
14And as for this house, it was builded many years ago by a king of Israel great and strong, and was finished.
エズラ記（ギリシア語） 6:9-14（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

Anticipating the objection

A word about ordinary life. I think about this passage in the kitchen and on the train, almost never in a pew. I have come to suspect that is not accidental.（ローマ人への手紙 4:15-16）

13見よ、もろもろの民は火のために労し、もろもろの国びとはむなしい事のために疲れる。これは万軍の主から出る言葉ではないか。
ハバクク書 2:13（口語訳（日本語））

In an ordinary week

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.（申命記 19:14）

Put the translations side by side and the same verse arrives differently each time. One is soft, another is severe, and the original is a third thing that is neither. That difference is itself a way in.（エペソ人への手紙 1:7）

15そして彼女がまた穂を拾おうと立ちあがったとき、ボアズは若者たちに命じて言った、「彼女には束の間でも穂を拾わせなさい。とがめてはならない。
ルツ記 2:15（口語訳（日本語））

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.