The Canopy of Translation: Research on the Biblical Hebrew Verbal Tense System in the Light of Bible Translations Ohad Cohen

https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/4362-the-canopy-of-translation-research-on-the-biblical-hebrew-verbal-tense-system-in-the-light-of-bible-translations  

In the epigraph, the translator of The Wisdom of Sirach brooded over the frequent disparities between an original text and its rendering. These words, which were put to parchment over 2,000 years ago, reflect a problem that is just as relevant as it was back in the second century BCE. Against this background, the present article examined the problem of rendering the Biblical Hebrew tenses into English and other European languages. With this objective in mind, we compared several verses from the Hebrew Bible with their modern translations. This comparison attests to the intricacy of any transition from one syntactical “code system”54 to another. We saw that the heart of the problem is the transition from a relative to an absolute tense system. For example, the speech time in absolute systems serves as the main point of reference, so that everything before this point is in the past and everything after in the future, whereas the speech time in a relative system does not constitute a reference point. As a result, the tenses signify anteriority, synchronicity, and posteriority rather than the past, present, and future.