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Punctuation makes all the difference

As you may or may not be aware, there is no punctuation (at least, not like we have in English) in biblical Greek or biblical Hebrew. Both languages rely on context to get the meaning across. This can be the cause of some ambiguity and confusion when we translate from those languages into English. Translators must make informed decisions as to how to punctuate the sentence in order for it to make sense and, often enough, there can be more than one possible reading. How then do they make their decision? They are, after all, only human. Is is possible then that they allow their own beliefs and doctrines to influence how they translate the text? Some would say, “yes”.

This article demonstrates just such a case. When you’re reading this, if you disagree with it, ask yourself, “why?” Is it because of what you’ve been taught,according to the traditions of men, or because of your own study of the text (in its original language and context)? Or for some other reason (e.g. “I just don’t like what that implies” or “it seems to contradict other scriptures”, if in fact it does). Be honest with yourself.

It would be fun to see if we can think of other passages where this may also apply; where the shifting of a comma, the addition of parentheses or some other change to the punctuation would significantly change the reading.

I’ll give you one example before we get to the article. An English teacher wrote the following sentence on the blackboard (these days it’s probably a whiteboard) and asked the students to punctuate it:

“A woman without her man is nothing”.

The boys punctuated it thus: “A woman, without her man, is nothing”.

Without exception, though, the girls punctuated it like this: “A woman; without her, man is nothing”.

Now for the article…

Dig in...