H7363

• {"n":"Genesis 1:2","s":"Moved, hovered, or swept. One rare verb and a bird.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-1-2","r":"Genesis 1:2","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Modern versions read hovering, or was moving, or sweeping over. The NET reads moving."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Suppose you found a word that appears three times in every book ever written in English, and only once does the sentence around it make sense. Every dictionary entry for that word is a guess built on that one sentence. You would want to see the guess. That is exactly the situation here."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"The verb is rachaph, and it turns up in just three verses of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1:2, Deuteronomy 32:11 where an eagle flutters over its young, and Jeremiah 23:9 where a prophet's bones shake. The third one is a different verb stem and BDB lists it as a separate entry, which means the hovering sense may have only two occurrences, and one of those is the verse being explained. Every lexicon entry for this word is reasoning from a single clear context."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"With three occurrences there is no statistical base. Translators are reasoning from one clear context to two unclear ones, and reasonable people weight that differently."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Look up how many times a word occurs before you trust a definition, and then check whether all those occurrences are even the same word. Under about five, a lexicon is making an argument rather than reporting a fact, and you should want to see the argument."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Hovering imports the eagle from Deuteronomy 32:11 and reads the opening of Genesis as protective and parental. Moving treats it as motion over water with no bird attached, which is what the King James, Tyndale, the Geneva and the Revised Version all chose. Hovering is a twentieth-century preference, entering the major English versions with the NIV. Neither is unreasonable and the evidence base is two verses."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e8\u05b8\u05d7\u05b7\u05e3 rachaph \u00b7 H7363"}],"src":["All three occurrences: Genesis 1:2; Deuteronomy 32:11; Jeremiah 23:9","Brown-Driver-Briggs lists two separate entries: rachaph I, Qal, to tremble, at Jeremiah 23:9; and rachaph II, Piel, to hover, at Genesis 1:2 and Deuteronomy 32:11","Deuteronomy 32:11, the eagle fluttering over its nest, is the only context that interprets itself","Tyndale 1525, the Geneva 1599, the King James 1611, the Revised Version 1881 and the RSV 1952 all read moved or was moving; hovering enters with the NIV","Syriac and Late Hebrew cognates carry senses of moving gently, cherishing and brooding"]}