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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Voice crying in the wilderness
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peter damian
Shipmate
# 18584
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Posted
We are studying John at the moment. 1:23 says, unambiguously ‘I [John] am the voice of one crying in the wilderness’. Thus it is the voice that is in the wilderness.
But this appears to refer to Isaiah 40:3, which has differing translations. Douay Rheims and a few others have ‘The voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God.’ The voice is in the desert, the paths to be made straight are also in the desert. This is consistent with John. But other translations, e.g. English Standard, have ‘A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’ So it is not the voice that is in the wilderness, but rather the ways to be prepared.
Which is correct? I would have thought that the writer of John would have been closer to the Hebrew than Western translators.
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Posts: 73 | From: london | Registered: Apr 2016
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Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
# 17047
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Posted
I'm not an expert, but my recollection is that the New Testament writers are largely thought to have relied on the Septuagint. Whether they were also familiar with Biblical Hebrew is an open question. There's a further (possibly more fringe) question over whether the Septuagint, rather than the Masoretic text used for many translation of the OT, represents a more accurate record of the original OT text. Additionally to that, based on what I'm seeing, the distinction between the two translations is one of punctuation, and plenty of English texts render the text from Isaiah the same as that in John. I don't have anything like enough Hebrew or Greek to know if a particular punctuation can be implied from eithers (unpunctuated) text.
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peter damian
Shipmate
# 18584
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Posted
There is a Hebrew parallel here, but makes little sense to me.
Septuagint is here
φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν
My Greek is not brilliant, but reads to me like ‘voice of one crying in the desolation’.
[ 20. May 2016, 06:47: Message edited by: peter damian ]
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
I am in no position to know which is correct. Suspect the Isaiah interpretation.
But it enables a two point sermon exploring the alternative translations since I think both are valid truths
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
The grammar does not rule out either translation, in Hebrew or Greek or English. The problem is the phrase "in the wilderness"--is it modifying "voice" or is it modifying what follows ("prepare a way for the Lord..." ? )
Either way is equally likely if you have no original punctuation (which we don't, in either Hebrew or Greek), so you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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pimple
Ship's Irruption
# 10635
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Posted
"abandon all hope..." rings out. And the ridiculous word by word literal "translation" of the German "original" of The Heavens are Telling
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Nick Tamen
Ship's Wayfaring Fool
# 15164
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
The grammar does not rule out either translation, in Hebrew or Greek or English. The problem is the phrase "in the wilderness"--is it modifying "voice" or is it modifying what follows ("prepare a way for the Lord..." ?
To be honest, I wonder if that really is a problem. I mean sure, for a translator, it presents choices. And Westerners do like things tied up neatly.
But in terms of understanding Isaiah, I don't really think it's a problem if it could mean more than one thing. I suspect that Isaiah's original audience would not have thought so.
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The first thing God says to Moses is, "Take off your shoes." We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know. — Anne Lamott
Posts: 2833 | From: On heaven-crammed earth | Registered: Sep 2009
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Adam.
Like as the
# 4991
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Posted
Isa 40:3 in Hebrew is poetry. That means we can use the parallelism to determine the structure. The RSV gets it right when it punctuates:
quote:
A voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
If the wilderness was describing the voice, we wouldn't have parallelism between the first and second stich of what the voice is crying.
Everyone seems to take the Greek (of Isaiah as well as of John) as putting 'in the wilderness' with the voice rather than with the preparing. Looking over it now, I'm not quite sure why. Maybe just because John is in the desert at this point? Unpunctuated, the Greek looks ambiguous between the two readings to me.
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
The voice could still be crying from the desert. Or, from anywhere else since the location of the speaker is unspecified.
The John 1:23 verse is interesting, because certainly at that time John wasn't in the wilderness. He was at "Bethany on the other side of the Jordan" (1:28). Though the Synoptics have him preaching in the Desert of Judea, coming down to the fertile valley of the Jordan to baptise.
Is the same grammatical ambiguity present in the Greek of the Gospels? Could John also be reciting "A voice of one calling 'In the desert prepare the way for the Lord'"?
Either way, I think John is being deliberately self-effacing, even evasive in answering the priests and Levites sent to question him (a family trait, as his cousin also seems incapable of giving a straight answer to the priests and pharisees). Effectively he says "I'm just a herald ... you need to pay attention to the person who I'm announcing".
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
The ambiguity is there in the Greek of John 1 too. From John the Baptist's words you can't tell just how he understood it.
Does anybody know from sight what John's location looked like? Because it is quite possible to have a fairly desolate landscape right up to a river's edge, as with the Kern in California. And the biblical concept of wilderness appears to focus more on the lack of human settlement than the lack of water, so even the lion-haunted thickets of the Jordan might have qualified IIRC.
[ 21. May 2016, 02:31: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
Wikipedia (I know) gives the location as Al Maghtas between the Dead Sea and Jericho. Interestingly this is a site also associated with the Israelites crossing the Jordan prior to the fall of Jericho, and with the ascension of Elijah. Which would make it a very symbolic location for John to be baptising.
According to that Wiki article, there had been small scale agriculture there since about 3500BC, with particular signs of habitation during the Hellenistic period just prior to these events. The buildings on the site include Jewish ritual baths similar to those at Qumran, and later larger Christian baptismal pools. Which would suggest a Jewish (possibly Essene) community living there at the time John was baptising, with a later conversion to Christian use.
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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peter damian
Shipmate
# 18584
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adam.:
If the wilderness was describing the voice, we wouldn't have parallelism between the first and second stich of what the voice is crying.
That was exactly my thought. The problem is that John is forcing the other interpretation by describing himself as the 'voice in the wilderness’. From Wikipedia “The Gospel of Mark introduces John as a fulfilment of a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah (in fact, a conflation of texts from Isaiah, Malachi and Exodus) about a messenger being sent ahead, and a voice crying out in the wilderness.” Matthew 3 says ‘In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea’. So Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled by John, the man living in the desert or wilderness on locusts.
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
I think there's a certain amount of playing to his audience, and laying it on thick with the subtlety of several tons of bricks.
There's ambiguity when there's no punctuation. Both "a voice crying 'in the wilderness prepare a way'" and "a voice crying in the wilderness 'prepare a way'". So, John does both. He's in the wilderness as a herald, prepare the way. And, the Way is coming to him to be baptised in the 'wilderness' (or somewhere close to the wilderness depending on exactly where he was baptising and whether it was occupied) and, subsequently to be tempted in the same wilderness. He wants to make certain there can be no mistaking who he's claiming to be ... and yet the religious leadership don't see it, and need to ask him whether he's the Messiah.
Jesus does something similar. The prophecy says the king will come riding on a donkey, on the colt the foal of a donkey (another poetic parallelism) and so arranges for his disciples to find a colt with it's mother still there so there can be no doubting this is a colt, the foal of a donkey, he is riding. The crowds see immediately who he's claiming to be, and those who have followed him from Galilee know he deserves the acclaim. Yet, again, the religious leaders are blind to the obvious.
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
The parallelism is an excellent argument for the one reading. John's translation is a fairly good argument for the other -- translations are often used to gauge how the translators understood the urtext.
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
It's also fairly likely that someone crying "Prepare a way in the wilderness" would himself BE out in the wilderness, or at least on the edge of it. It's not the sort of thing one focuses on in an urban ministry. No surprise that JB is where he's preaching about, both literally and metaphorically.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Chamois
Shipmate
# 16204
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Posted
My own understanding of the Isaiah passage is that both readings are correct. In Isaiah, the voice is addressing the impassable hills and valleys of the desert due east of Judah and due west of Babylon. The valleys are to raise themselves up and the hills are to cast themselves down in order to create a level road for God's people to walk straight back to Jerusalem rather than walking in a huge detour north and then back south around the fertile crescent. This is a task that couldn't possibly be done by humans - I understand that this desert is so impassible that there was no road at all through it until modern technology was used to install an oil pipeline in the 20th century. The divine voice of God is speaking directly to the landscape. And the voice has to speak IN the desert so that the hills and valleys will hear it and obey. But the road will, of course, be through the desert. That's also the point.
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