H7692

• {"n":"Psalm 7:1","s":"A Shiggaion of David. A label used only twice in the whole Bible, with no confirmed meaning.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=psalm-7-1","r":"Psalm 7:1","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version simply transliterates Shiggaion, since there is no settled English equivalent, treating it the way Selah is treated, as a technical term left in its original form rather than translated."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine a musical score marked with a term you find in only one other piece of sheet music ever written, no dictionary, no manual, nothing to compare it against except that one other piece. That is Shiggaion's situation: two data points, and centuries of guessing between them."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Shiggaion appears in the heading of this psalm and, in its plural form shigionoth, in the heading of Habakkuk 3, a prayer explicitly set to music. Proposed derivations connect it to a root meaning to wander or reel, suggesting a wild, emotionally intense, perhaps irregular musical or poetic form, a dithyramb or rhapsody in the loose sense of impassioned, less formally structured song, though no occurrence outside these two headings exists to confirm the guess."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English readers meet Shiggaion as an untranslated label at the top of a psalm, easy to skip past as mere technical scaffolding, with no way to sense how genuinely uncertain its meaning is, resting on only two attestations in the whole Bible."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"A technical heading transliterated rather than translated, especially one this rare, is worth pausing on rather than skimming past. The translator's silence is itself information about how much, or how little, is actually known."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"No translation is offered by any major version. The proposed sense, an intense, perhaps musically irregular or emotionally wild composition, is a reasonable guess from the proposed root and from the psalm's own agitated content, but remains unconfirmed by any third occurrence."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e9\u05b4\u05c1\u05d2\u05b8\u05bc\u05d9\u05d5\u05b9\u05df Shiggaion \u00b7 H7692"}],"src":["Only other occurrence: Habakkuk 3:1, shigionoth, explicitly set to music","Proposed root sense of wandering or reeling"]}