Anger and the Shepherd Psalm

In an ordinary week

The first time I read this passage I understood nothing at all. I carried that incomprehension around for years, and then one afternoon it turned slightly, the way a key turns, and something opened. What follows is an attempt to describe the turn.

Before we start

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.

Following the context

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.

A note

Pull a single verse out of its paragraph and you can make it say almost anything. This particular verse has been made to say a great deal. Which is precisely why it deserves to be read with what stands on either side of it.

• Written out of a failed attempt to explain this passage to a child.
• One verse, read slowly, with one word held up to the light.
• A by-product of sermon preparation, reworked into something readable.
• What came into view when I set three translations side by side.

Following the context

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.（スザンナ 1:38）

In an ordinary week

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.

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.

What I read

Finally, back to the text. No amount of commentary competes with the texture of the sentences themselves. Read it out loud once before you read anything else about it.

1And when they had supped, they brought Tobias in unto her.

トビト記 8:1（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

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.

29イスラエルの人々のうちの、国に生れた者でも、そのうちに寄留している他国人でも、あやまって罪を犯す者には、あなたがたは同一の律法を用いなければならない。

30しかし、国に生れた者でも、他国の人でも、故意に罪を犯す者は主を汚すもので、その人は民のうちから断たれなければならない。

民数記 15:29-30（口語訳（日本語））