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> Translators take certain freedoms in word choice, no matter what is being translated. Many of us have studied another language and understand that, many times, things just don't mean the same thing if translated literally.
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> In any case, the Bible is overwhelmingly clear on what is meant in that passage and in others. Translators should be bound to translate it as correctly as possible *including* connotations involved.
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Actually, I tend to believe that interpretation is one of the cardinal sins of translation. Here's a long quote from Robert Alter, a major biblical scholar, on the subject, taken from his awesome translation of Genesis (I've got to buy his new version of Samuel.) It's just that he can say it far better than I can:

"Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is -- here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the acitvity -- 'to disambiguate' the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible...The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language."

In other words, it is almost never overwhelmingly clear what the Bible is trying to say; even when a message is obvious, you're losing something if you don't attempt to represent the literary form and diction of the original. It's possible -- as I think Alter's book demonstrates -- to make a readable, basically literal translation that attempts to mimic both meanings and poetic forms of the Hebrew text, without resorting to presumptuous guesses at the connotations of terms or ideas.

Tom "You probably can't find a verse in the Bible somebody hasn't fought over the meaning of, anyway" Schmidt
tmschm@wm.edu