H1121

• {"n":"Genesis 6:2","s":"The sons of God saw the daughters of men. The oldest reading takes sons of God as divine beings, not a human family line.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-6-2","r":"Genesis 6:2","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Most modern versions read sons of God without further comment, leaving the identification to footnotes or study notes. The King James likewise reads sons of God, unglossed."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English son of can mean a literal child or a member of a category, **son of the soil**, **sons of thunder**. Hebrew bene elohim works the same way, and here the category in view, sons of the divine realm, is a real option English son of does not rule out but does not spell out either."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Bene elohim and the singular ben elohim identify members of the divine council elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, at Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, and Psalm 89:6, all contexts where no one reads the phrase as human beings. The earliest interpreters, including the Septuagint tradition, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees, took Genesis 6:2 the same way, as heavenly beings intermarrying with humans. The alternative, that sons of God means the righteous line of Seth marrying Cain's corrupted daughters, is a later reading associated with Julius Africanus and Augustine, developed in reaction against the angelic view rather than growing from Hebrew usage of the phrase itself."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English sons of God carries no built-in link to a divine council, an idea unfamiliar to most modern readers, so the phrase reads as loosely poetic rather than as a technical term with a fixed range of reference elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Before deciding what a phrase means in one passage, survey every other place the same phrase occurs in the same corpus. Bene elohim is not ambiguous where it appears elsewhere; the ambiguity here is imported by later theological discomfort with what those other passages already say."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"The divine-council reading is both the oldest attested interpretation and the one that matches every other biblical use of the phrase. The Sethite reading, sons of God as godly men, has no other biblical use of the phrase to support it and arose specifically to avoid the angelic implications, which makes it weaker as a reading of the Hebrew even though it became dominant in later Western Christianity."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d1\u05b0\u05bc\u05e0\u05b5\u05d9 \u05d4\u05b8\u05d0\u05b1\u05dc\u05b9\u05d4\u05b4\u05d9\u05dd bene ha'elohim \u00b7 H1121 + H430"}],"src":["Bene elohim \/ bene ha'elohim as divine-council beings: Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Psalm 89:6","1 Enoch and Jubilees read Genesis 6:2 as fallen divine beings; so does the Septuagint tradition and Josephus","The Sethite view associated with Julius Africanus and developed by Augustine, City of God 15.23"]}
• {"n":"Genesis 15:2","s":"The steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus. A rare word, ben-meshek, that nobody fully agrees on.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-15-2","r":"Genesis 15:2","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Most versions read steward of my house or heir of my house, smoothing the phrase into a clear English office. A few older or more literal renderings preserve more of the Hebrew's actual strangeness."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine a legal document naming an heir with a title so unusual that lawyers today still argue whether it means owner, manager, or errand-runner. That is roughly the situation with ben-meshek here, a phrase modern translations gloss confidently while quietly disagreeing about what it actually names."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Ben-meshek is unusual enough that proposals range from son of acquisition, meaning the one who will inherit, to a verb related to running about in service, to reading meshek as a proper name, Masek, making Eliezer the son of a servant woman by that name rather than a household title at all. Many scholars additionally note that ben-meshek was likely chosen partly for its assonance with the following word, Dammesek, Damascus, a wordplay layered on top of an already rare and difficult phrase."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English steward reads as a clear, ordinary job title; the Hebrew phrase behind it is contested enough that no single English word can represent the genuine uncertainty scholars still have about what ben-meshek names."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a translation reads smoothly and confidently, check whether the underlying Hebrew is actually that clear. A fluent English rendering can paper over real uncertainty that specialists are still debating."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Steward or heir of my house gives English readers a working sense of the passage without pretending to settle a genuinely contested phrase. No consensus exists on ben-meshek's precise force, and every translation is making a judgment call the Hebrew itself does not fully support."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d1\u05b6\u05bc\u05df\u05be\u05de\u05b6\u05e9\u05b6\u05c1\u05e7 \u05d1\u05b5\u05bc\u05d9\u05ea\u05b4\u05d9 ben-meshek beythi \u00b7 H1121 + H4943"}],"src":["The proposed assonance with Dammesek, Damascus: noted in Jewish Bible Quarterly and standard commentaries","Alternative readings, heir\/owner vs. a servant's proper name Masek: surveyed in major Genesis commentaries"]}
• {"n":"Psalm 29:1","s":"Ascribe unto the LORD, O ye mighty. Literally, sons of the elim, gods, the divine council again.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=psalm-29-1","r":"Psalm 29:1","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Most versions read O ye mighty, sons of the mighty, or heavenly beings, a range reflecting real disagreement about how directly to render bene elim's divine-council background into English."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English mighty ones reads as a vague compliment, powerful people or important figures. Bene elim is the same technical phrase already met describing heavenly beings surrounding God's throne, an audience of gods, not an audience of impressive humans, being summoned to worship."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Bene elim, sons of the elim, gods, occurs only here and at Psalm 89:6, and closely parallels the Canaanite divine-council phrase sons of El attested in Ugaritic mythological texts, where it names the assembly of lesser gods surrounding the high god El. The psalm opens by summoning this same heavenly assembly, not human worshippers, to acknowledge the LORD's glory, the same divine-council imagery already met at Genesis 6:2 and Psalm 82:1."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English mighty ones or you heavenly beings both lose the specific technical weight bene elim carries as a recognized ancient Near Eastern divine-council term, so a reader cannot easily connect this opening line to the same council imagery running through Genesis 6, Psalm 82, and Psalm 89."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Track bene elohim, bene elim, and edat el, each a variant of the same divine-council phrase, across their several occurrences rather than treating each one as an isolated poetic flourish. The psalms and Genesis are drawing on one shared, coherent picture of a heavenly assembly."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Mighty ones or heavenly beings both work as general English glosses. Sons of the gods, or sons of the elim, kept closer to the Hebrew, more directly connects this opening summons to the same council-of-gods imagery already established at Genesis 6:2, Psalm 82:1, and Psalm 89:6."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d1\u05b0\u05bc\u05e0\u05b5\u05d9 \u05d0\u05b5\u05dc\u05b4\u05d9\u05dd bene elim \u00b7 H1121 + H410"}],"src":["The same phrase at Psalm 89:6","The Canaanite parallel, 'sons of El,' in Ugaritic divine-council texts","Psalm 82:1's edat el, council of El, as the closely related phrase"]}