>> Well, good afternoon, Joe. We have finished both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the whole Bible is in. And in the process, not only did we translate, but people had some questions for us and different kinds of people, not just people who are reading the current translation that's out, but also reviewers who have reviewed our notes on translation and such, and several questions have crossed my desk, and I thought this would be a good time for us to talk about some of the dominant ones.

So, with that, here's one of those questions that people have posed. One is, were there any systematic yet subtle changes in the Old Testament? We're thinking about like a verb translation, a verb tense that was brought out, similar to how we did the imperfect in the Greek New Testament, in the New Testament translation of the Scriptures.

Is there anything like that? People know about the translation of Yahweh, they know about the major things, but were there subtle things on that line that we brought out? >> Well, that was part of our goal and part of our desire, part of our translation philosophy to make things as consistent as possible, but also as precise as possible.

So, there were a few things. One thing that I'm thinking right off the bat is our treatment of the element, the macro syntactical marker or the discourse marker, which sometimes introduces a paragraph, other times it brings the paragraph to the climax. So, in Hebrew, it would be the "vayehi" form or the "vihaya" form, the "vayehi" being in the past tense, the "vihaya" being in the future tense, and again, for the most part, you know how it is sometimes.

So, when we worked with that, we were basing our translation on Nazbi, so it was already there, but we tried to make it more systematic. >> So, how would it appear in the Nazbi at times? >> So, let's take an example from Genesis chapter 4. This is where Cain kills Abel, and then God appears to Cain, and God speaks to Cain, and He says to him, "Where's your brother?" And so, in that conversation, God speaks, God says to Cain that He's going to send him out, and He's going to cast him out, and Cain, in a way, laments that, and he says, "I have been cast out from your presence, and I'm going to be a vagrant and a wanderer," and then most of the translations have it as, "Whoever finds me will kill me." Well, that's a climax of that verse and of Cain's statement, and so really, in the Hebrew, it says, it has the discourse marker which shows to us that this is a climax, and so really, it's supposed to be, "And it will be that whoever finds me will kill me." And so, we introduced that element into the LSB translation so that you can see that it's a climax.

>> So, for the reader now, when they see phrases like, "Now it happened," or "And it will be," they know this could be a start of a new paragraph, this could be a climactic moment, this could be even a conclusion to an entire idea. Is that what's going on?

>> That's exactly right, and just since you brought up the past tense, you can think about the Joseph narrative, and one of the famous parts is when Mrs. Potiphar, so to say, she tempts Joseph, and so in that description and the discussion that they have in chapter 39, you have the part where Joseph goes into the house, and in a way, that's the beginning of the paragraph.

So it says, "Now it happened that Joseph went into the house," and that introduces that portion of the paragraph, and Joseph is alone in the house, and Mrs. Potiphar happens to be there, all the men are gone, and so she tempts him there, she grabs him by the clothes, and she takes his garment, and he flees without his garment, and then it says that, "And now it happened when she saw that she had his garment," so that the part, "Now it happened," is also the discourse marker, but in this case, it brings the whole story to the climax.

It's in the middle of the story, it's in the middle of the paragraph, and it says there that she saw the clothes that she had with him, and she was going to make a decision, and so when she sees that she has the garment, then she cries out, then she calls out to the men, and the men come in, and she begins to explain to them the story that their leader brought in this slave who was going to tempt her, if you will, and she repeats this discourse marker, and she says that, "And now it happened that when he saw that he left his clothes, he ran away and he fled." So the Hebrew uses this marker, "Now it happened," to introduce a paragraph, or it uses this discourse marker to bring the story to a climax, to show that this is the central point, or this is the peak of the narrative where something very important happens, and so she does this.

And it happens actually throughout Genesis 39, so that you see where the paragraph begins and where it climaxes. And so we did that throughout the Old Testament, just making sure that it's visible, making sure that it's clear, so that the readers can take note of it, and again, this is building on what Nazbi had already been doing, we just made it more systematic.

So when you read the Hebrew Bible, you look for those discourse markers, you look for those narrative markers, and the va'iktol, and such, is that right? That's exactly right. You see those, you take note of them, and you actually see what are they doing. And one of our philosophies of translation, or parts of the philosophy, was to make sure that if it's in the Hebrew text, and we can bring it into the English text and make sense, we want to do that, because we want to bring everything from the Hebrew into the English, so that when the people treat the Bible and they study it, they see exactly what the Hebrew had.

And that's exactly it, isn't it? It's so that when they see the English, it's as if they're like you when you see the Hebrew. It's a parallel kind of experience. Yeah, and this goes back to the analogy that we've been using, looking at it through the window. That's really helpful, and now when people see those words, they know the significance, the role, the important role, that they play as the author, inspired by God, writes it all down.

Yeah, exactly. Really, really good. Here's another question, and I think this one's addressed to me. People wonder about the translation of chesed. They say, "Can you change it? Can you change it to something else?" And they have all kinds of suggestions about it. I get a lot of these, and the question is why, as already the New Testament Psalms of Proverbs has indicated, why keep it as loving kindness?

Why retain that? And I think our answer, as we discussed it, was that there is a tradition behind this word. It goes back to some of the oldest English translations, and there's something to be said for connecting what we have today with things back in the day, with those who have preceded us.

It demonstrates that the faith, once and for all, delivered to the saints is exactly that. It is what we have is what they had. What they had is what we have. We do not have a different doctrine. We do not have a different scripture. Our scripture is the same, and that tradition reflects that.

And on top of that, retaining loving kindness, I would say, prevents an assumption. If we kind of translated it a little bit more idiomatically, people could presume that they understood what the word chesed meant. They might think, "Oh, yeah, it's just steadfast love. That's all that it is. I understand it.

Let's move on." But there's a bigger story to that word chesed. There's a bigger story to the word loving kindness. In fact, Halot, the major dictionaries, don't emphasize love in that term as much as they emphasize loyalty. They emphasize fidelity. They emphasize faithfulness and commitment. And there's good reason for that, because Psalm 136, God causes the sun to rise and to set because of his loving kindness.

In Psalm 107, the parallel of loving kindness is not with God's love or affection to his people, but with his miraculous wonders and his awesome works. That's the parallel to loving kindness, because in essence, loving kindness is more about God's commitment, a commitment and loyalty to, say, even the covenant that drives him to do whatever it takes to do what is right and do what he promised for the good of his people.

And this flows even into the New Testament, because the New Testament authors sometimes translate chesed as grace. God is full of loving kindness and truth in the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, Jesus is full of grace and truth. But we know grace is not the same thing as love.

Grace is something distinct from love, and it reflects God's intervention, his irresistible grace in our lives. And in the same manner, chesed is God's ultimate commitment and thereby his driving omnipotent power to do what is best for us. And that is packaged in this one word. And I think sometimes when we just translate it in a sensible way, people won't dig deeper.

And so retaining the word loving kindness is very, very useful in this way. And along that line, sometimes because of translating with multiple words, you can run into a conundrum, translationally speaking. In Isaiah 55, it talks about the great and steadfast love shown to David. Well, it's not great and steadfast love.

It's just great loving kindness, abundant loving kindness. But because if you use multiple terms to describe this one word, you're going to have to fiddle a little bit with how it is described and modified, which causes a shift in emphasis and maybe a misunderstanding what's going on in the original language.

So there's this kind of cascading effect that happens when sometimes we deviate from word for word. And plus, the word loving kindness as a translation of chesed is a good translation. And so we're retaining that to affirm the translation that NASB has because it is a good translation. Yeah.

So those are some of the reasons behind loving kindness therein. And the traditional way to go about it has actually a lot of advantages. And ultimately, it just reminds us we shouldn't take words for granted. We should continue to pursue and study them. We shouldn't assume that we really understand all that's packed in there because often there's a lot.

Speaking of words and the importance of words, another question that has crossed my desk is why did you guys change Song of Solomon to Song of Songs? There's a funny story and not a funny story, a good story. I like it behind this. And that is that in Old Testament survey, I teach a lot of students at the Masters University and I talk about how the opening of the book of the Song of Songs in Hebrew is Song of Songs and not Song of Solomon.

Do we believe Solomon wrote it? Amen. Because the text says so. Exactly. And Solomon said that when I wrote it, the title is Song of Songs. And so I talk about that with the students. And so a bunch of my Old Testament students wrote me and even talked to me in class and said, "Hey, when you do Legacy Standard Bible, aren't you going to do that change?" And so they kind of got involved in the process.

It was one of the joys as a prof to see that, that they were involved, that they wanted to say in it. And we kind of decided together, "Yeah, I'll bring this before the committee." And we kind of pushed it forward in that way. That's a good joy. And there's a theological reason for this.

And it was an easy decision to make. I remember when we talked about it initially. You talked to the students and whoever sees the Bible and knows what it says, for them, this is a given. It should be Song of Songs. Yes. Right. Exactly. Of course, we're going to translate it as such.

That's right. That's what the text says. So call the Bible by the title the Bible gives it. Exactly right. And there's a reason for it because the most beautiful song of all is a song celebrating the highest human love, a love that ultimately, as we see throughout the whole breadth of Scripture, reflects God's redeeming, saving love for his bride, the church.

So there is this beautiful nature to this ultimate kind of song in and about human marriage and Song of Songs, but as we see it canonically, a bigger, grander theological idea. So that's kind of the logic behind it. Another question that's come across is about the term fool in Proverbs.

And there are some different nuances. I don't think people realize, perhaps, that there are multiple words for fool in the Scriptures. And why did we bring that out, and how did we bring that out? Yeah, so that was already brought out in Proverbs. And like you said, the word fool itself appears many times throughout the Scriptures.

And especially in Proverbs, it appears many, many times because there's a focus on wisdom and on folly. And so when you read Proverbs, or any part of the Bible, but especially Proverbs and the Psalms, you see the word fool appearing. And when you read it in English, and I think most of the translations preceding the Legacy Standard Bible, you see the word fool and fool and fool and fool appear all throughout.

And you see that this is a discussion about fools, how not to be a fool, and what fools do and how they think. But there are nuances to different types of fools. And the Hebrew Bible has those nuances in each of the words that it uses. So there are different words for the word fool.

Let me just bring out three of them, the three main ones. If you look at Proverbs, Psalms, you will see that the noun for fool appears a hundred plus times. So it's very common. And you think about the most common one, which in Hebrew is kseed, appears in Proverbs many times.

And if you think about the very familiar passage, do not answer a fool according to his folly, answer a fool according to his folly, so that he doesn't think that he's wise, or so that you show him that he's not wise. Well, there, the nuance is that this is kind of the general type of fool.

Yes, he has nefarious implications or intentions. This is an insolent type of folly. And because this is the most common type of fool, we've retained that as fool. And so when people read the Proverbs and read the biblical text and they see fool, they will know that this refers to the most general type of fool.

Now you keep reading the Proverbs and you get to Proverbs, or you start with Proverbs 1. There's another very common passage and this is Proverbs 1 verse 7. And there you see the word evil for fool. Now this is a different type of fool with a different nuance. And the nuance here is that this fool is ignorant.

Fools despise wisdom and discipline. That's the typical translation. Now if you read the Legacy Standard Bible, you will see that it says ignorant fools despise wisdom and discipline. Well, the nuance here is that they do not have sense, these types of fool. They're lacking common sense. I mean, to understand that discipline and wisdom is good for you is common sense, right?

And so you receive it. But these types of fools, the ignorant fools, they reject it and they despise it because they lack the common sense that you should have in order to accept discipline and wisdom. And there is one more major one, and this is kind of the worst one of them all.

The fool who is a godless fool or who is a wicked fool, and we rendered it as a wicked fool. You think about Psalm 14. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God, right? So this type of fool is Naval. Like Nabal and Abigail. Exactly. Yeah, that's the exact same word.

And so there, the fool is a wicked fool, and we translate it as such. We said the wicked fool has said in his heart or says in his heart, there is no God. And so this is the type of fool who rejects the presence of God. He sees the things around him.

He understands the things around him and the complexity of them, but he says there is no God. And this is the wickedness of the fool coming out in its nuance. And so when we translated and we see all of these references to fools, we wanted to make sure that the difference and the nuance and the distinction between them comes out.

And so we made that evident in the translation. Another thing we made evident in the translation is acrostics. I think some translations, a lot of translations do that for Psalm 119, but there are other passages involved too, Joe, explain to us the nature of an acrostic. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here.

Tell us what an acrostic is and then tell us where else it happens in the Old Testament and such. Yeah. Well, if I forget where else it happens, please remind me, but Psalm 119 is a common passage we refer to when we see an acrostic, but what's an acrostic?

An acrostic is when you start each verse or each line of poetry or a stanza with the letter of the alphabet in the order of the alphabet. So you look at Psalm 119, the famous one, the first stanza begins with Aleph because Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The next stanza begins with Bet because the next letter is Bet and Gimel, Dalet, et cetera. And so it follows the order of the alphabet from Aleph until Tath, from the very beginning until the very end. And we already said that Psalm 119 is one of the famous ones, but it's not the only one.

There are other passages in the Bible where it appears and sometimes, or I should say many times commentaries refer to it and they bring this out, not always, but many times. And I think sometimes other translations make reference to it, but again, not always, but we do see it in other places.

So you think about lamentations, right? Lamentations one, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, all of those have their own acrostic from Aleph until Tath. And you see it all throughout the Psalms. You have it in Psalm nine and 10 where it begins in Psalm nine and then it runs into Psalm 10 and it ends in Psalm 10.

You have it in Psalm 37, for example, that you preached on a little while back. - Yeah, I call that one the ABCs of someone who's been through their one, two, threes. It's writing Psalm 37 as an older individual, and he's writing the different, each line, each verse is a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

And it's walking through the most basic things in life in a memorable way. That's what acrostics often do. They show completeness, they show memorability. And he's reminding us, teaching us the life lessons we need to know from an older person to someone who is about to experience life. - Yeah.

And I think that's exactly it. It goes to the meaning of the acrostics, right? They're not just there for aesthetics. Of course, they bring beauty to the Psalm or to the poem, but there's much more. There's exegesis, there's theology behind it. And I think that this actually goes to a question that may be taken for granted sometimes, that the acrostic is there because the author of the biblical text intended it for it to be there.

And if the author intended it for it to be there, then it's inspired because God used the author to write the biblical text. And I think that we're going to have a section somewhere in the introduction where it's called "Acrostics and Authorial Intent," right? Because we want to explain that this is not just there by accident.

It's actually there because the author's intended so that we get the theology from the acrostic as well. And order or the ABCs or the completion of the idea is all of it that comes out from the acrostic that is within the Psalm. And actually, if you think about Psalm 9 and 10, this is the interesting one.

This is two Psalms, and the acrostic begins in Psalm 9, but then it stops at, I think, letter Kaf, which is actually exactly halfway through the alphabet. And then it picks up in Psalm 10 and then completes the acrostic in Psalm 10. And for this reason, you look at some of the translations, you look at the Greek translation, you look at the Latin translation, and they put those two Psalms together.

Because of the acrostic, there's other things. Of course, there's theme and ideas within the two Psalms, so they bring them together. But that's what the acrostic does. It shows completion. It shows a step-by-step instruction of how to fulfill something. And you preached on this in Psalm 37, as you said, and it was, you know, this is something that helps us interpret the biblical text as well.

Yeah, and that, I think, goes back to our translation philosophy, which is to be a window into what the author intended, what the author designed. And the more we can reflect that, whether by what we talked about earlier with macro syntactical markers, or to reflecting a word so that we study it more according to the author's intent, like loving kindness, or just bringing out that there are different words for fool, or even that there's an acrostic present in the text and we identified all the acrostics and labeled them as such so that the reader will know this is what the author did.

It's a window back to what the author wanted. And that's kind of, that is, the reigning theme and philosophy and drive behind the whole Legacy Standard Bible and the entire Old Testament by extension, of course. And so thanks, Joe, for this time. Thanks for answering some questions with me, and I hope it's been very edifying for you.

Thank you. Thanks, Joe. Thank you.