The reader will perhaps already be aware of common examples: the English word ‘love’ can be a rendering of any one of at least four different Greek words, each of which denotes a slightly different type of love.
The English words ‘angel’ and ‘messenger’ represent one single Hebrew word, which can refer to either a supernatural being or a flesh-and-blood mortal deliveryman.
Greek has two different words for ‘time’ — one referring to a point in time, the other referring to time as a segment or continuum.
Aside from such lexical examples, there are syntactical instances which provoke further investigation, e.g., Hebrew pronouns. The English pronoun ‘you’ can stand for any one of four Hebrew words. The second person pronoun in Hebrew is inflected according to number and gender. Consider this:
If a person asks, “Are you going to the party tomorrow?” to a man or to a woman, in English, the question is the same. But in Hebrew, the word ‘you’ would be different. There is a masculine form of ‘you’ and a feminine form of ‘you,’ and the speaker will choose one or the other, depending on who is receiving the question.
Or a teacher might say to a student, ‘You are doing this very well.’ Again, in Hebrew, there would be two different forms of this question, with one of two different forms of ‘you,’ depending on the gender of the person receiving the question.
A moment’s reflection shows that there is much happening behind the scenes when one reads the Bible in an English translation. Behind every occurrence of the word ‘you’ or ‘your’ is one of several Hebrew words, specifying gender, and also specifying whether the ‘you’ is singular or plural.
A further semantic compilation — and in all these instances, semantics and syntax are intertwined — in the conjugation of verbs. Hebrew verbs are gendered: if a man says, “I’m eating a hamburger,” then that sentence will be different than if a woman says, “I’m eating a hamburger.” The Hebrew language expresses the present time by using a present participle, and there are masculine and feminine forms of this present participle.
Again, underneath the English words printed in a translation of the Bible lie a variety of forms in the original languages which add information beyond the meaning of the English rendering.
