H8210

• {"n":"Genesis 9:6","s":"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The Hebrew word order is a mirror around the center.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-9-6","r":"Genesis 9:6","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed, correctly following the sense, but English sentence order, subject before verb, cannot reproduce a mirror shape the way Hebrew's more flexible word order can."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"English can say **the punishment fits the crime**, but that is commentary, a sentence about the sentence. Hebrew builds the fit directly into word order: sheds, blood, man, man, blood, shed, the same words running forward and then backward around a hinge in the middle."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"The Hebrew runs shofekh dam ha'adam, ba'adam damo yishafekh: sheds blood-of-man, by-man his-blood shall-be-shed. The verb for shedding opens the first half and closes the second, the noun for blood and the noun for man swap positions around the center, a structure grammarians call a chiasm, an A-B-C-C'-B'-A' pattern that visually and aurally enacts the very reciprocity, blood for blood, that the sentence is announcing."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English word order is comparatively fixed, subject-verb-object, so it cannot rearrange itself into a mirror shape the way Hebrew's freer word order allows here. A translation can state the principle of equal retribution but cannot make the sentence's shape perform it the way the Hebrew does."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Look for chiastic word order whenever a verse states a principle of exact correspondence, reciprocity, or reversal. Hebrew narrative and law use mirrored word order as a rhetorical device in its own right, not merely as a stylistic accident, and it rarely survives translation intact."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"The legal content itself isn't contested; every version agrees on the sense. What is lost is entirely formal: the chiastic shape itself, which is not a matter of word choice but of an arrangement English syntax is not free enough to reproduce."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05e9\u05b9\u05c1\u05e4\u05b5\u05da\u05b0 \u05d3\u05b7\u05bc\u05dd \u05d4\u05b8\u05d0\u05b8\u05d3\u05b8\u05dd shofekh dam ha'adam (chiastic word order) \u00b7 H8210 + H1818 + H120"}],"src":["The chiastic ABCC'B'A' structure of the Hebrew clause: standard treatments of Hebrew poetic and legal syntax","Genesis 1:26-27's image of God as the stated ground for the principle"]}