you learn something new every day

I was doing some research on Ps 110:1 in the New Testament (which is still ongoing) and I ran into something kind of strange, but pretty interesting. The theme I'm researching is Messianic hope "at the right of YHWH" as a priestly king in the line of David, which is all over the NT.

In Zech 6:13 there's a difference in the MT Hebrew and Old Greek (just saying LXX might be too general here). If you look at the Hebrew in v. 13, you see "and/then there will be a priest on his throne" ("on his throne = a'l kis'o). The Greek has kai estai ho hierus ek dexiwn (and to be the priest on his right).

I'm not sure why this substitution of right for throne happened. Most commentators give it a quick once-over. Some do grapple with the difficulties in the Hebrew grammar and conclude that the Greek was changed to make more sense of the construction for Greek readership. However, there are often exegetical reasons for differences between the Old Greek text and the Hebrew MT. I wonder if theological expectations about Messiah (a hot and developing topic following the restoration and 2nd temple period) might not have had something to do with this switch?

Hopefully when I do further research I will come accross a fully developed argument about the LXX vs. MT here. Of course, it will be in German like all the really cool journal articles. Luckily for me, I'm learning German.

I got tired of looking at the footnotes of exegetical commentaries and seeing articles (on the best topics) in other languages and not being able to even read the title of the article!

Today I learned a little bit more about how complicated working in the Hebrew text is. Specifically, once you get serious about translation, you have to go beyond simply translating the text as it appears in the BHS standard text (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia presentation of the Leningrad Codex), and you begin to find all sorts of things that make you want to pull your hair out (English idiom for frustration).

Today we were working through Ruth 3 in our Hebrew Narrative roundtable study. We all had a question about verse 5, where you get to the second to the last word and find nothing but vowels hanging in thin air between the lines, no consonants to be seen anywhere. Turns out that the word is 'ly "to me," which is attested in the Qere off to the side. Now, I would be more than happy to reference the Qere every 30 seconds for Text Critical issues -- except it's written in Aramaic! Fortunately, the kind people at BHS have a nice textual apparatus, where we read that (translating loosely from Latin, which I know little of and have to use a dictionary for) "multiple Manuscripts as Qumran" and that the Septuigant reads it as'elay which nails things down pretty square.

I found this nice blurb to ease my apprehension that this anomoly was going to be happening a lot more.
Qere without Ketiv is found in ten places in the Hebrew Bible: Judges 20:13, 2 Samuel 8:3, 16:23, 18:20, 2 Kings 19:31,37, Jeremiah 31:38, 50:21, Ruth 3:5,17. Other examples of anomalous mixed forms of Ketiv and Qere include the examples of �Letters with more than one vowel� and �isolated dagesh� and the 30 cases of �Missing letters� listed by Haralambous, pp.10-11.

10 times. I can handle 10. Unfortunately, there are about 9,999 other weird things that can happen in the Hebrew Scriptures!

Fudge.
Don't try to make a regular recipe of chocolate fudge on a humid day.
If you're not sure how humid it is, but if you stop and think, "This is a humid day," then I think it's humid enough to ruin your fudge.

Let me explain what will happen to your fudge on a humid day. You will not read this on the side of the Hershey's Cocoa Powder:
Your fudge will not harden. It will not ever be fudge, but a fudgy goo forever. You will not be able to eat it with a cup of coffee in hand, unless you a weird person who would eat fudge soup with a spoon. Instead, you will have to turn your fudge into an auxillary syrup for something else. You will have to go out to the store, spend $3.50 on Breyer's Vanilla Ice Cream, which will turn your cheap desert into a less cheap delicious desert. You will be satisfied with the delicious flavor, yes, but you will have this gnawing wish that it had turned into what it was meant to be instead of what it was not meant to be. On top of that, people may make fun of you for making delicious syrup (which you can buy in a plastic squeeze bottle) instead of delicious homemade chocolate fudge.

I found plenty of people who echoed my experience, and was curious to find out why this is. I found out that "once the candy has cooled to the point where it is no longer evaporating moisture into the air, it can actually start reabsorbing moisture from the air." I found out that relative humidity above 35% is DANGER ZONE for your fudge -- you will not get to cherish the fudge that you have in your creative imagination and industrious will.

1 Timothy 3:2 says an overseer should be "apt to teach," right? Actually, I did some hunting and found out that this word has a different sense in most ancient contexts of which we are aware.
Didaktikon may mean teachable (valuing the receiving of instruction).
I am actually leaning toward that definition in this context because:
1. The chronologically relevant extra-biblical uses of this rare term known to date all point to the sense of "teachable," which make this choice most viable on the basis of primary evidence.
2. At least some doubt should be cast on the use of "apt to teach," which is most often chosen on the grounds of context, since use of primary sources does not comply with this meaning. 3. The other argument for the use of "apt to teach" is reputedly based on etymology, but the evidence is split on this: The suffix stressing verbal force does not increase the possibility that the sense would be "apt to teach," since both possibilities connote implicit action.
4. The close cognate didaktos (subjectively, "instructed"; objectively, "communicated by teaching") with its emphasis on receiving instruction strongly suggests that the word should be translated "teachable."
5. The emphasis of the passage is on moral qualifications, not on technical giftedness, which makes the argument for "apt to teach" even less viable in my estimation.
6. In the background to this passage, the responsibility is apparently on Timothy to instruct and direct the activities of the church at Ephesus, which would work well with the overseers having a teachable spirit under the direction of apostolic authority.

Really the only places I could compare this word were in Philo's De Praemiis et Poenis 27 and De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia 35. The other reference given in BDAG is to Philodemus Rhetoric II, which I was unable to locate easily.

I'm loath to say that the Bible versions are incorrect here (so I won't!), but this is one of those spots where the evidence seems a bit shaky. At best, I could see at 2 Timothy 2:2, of learning in order to teach those who are teachable.

Well, if nothing else, try the gloss "teachable" next time you read the passage and see how it works. Not bad, eh?

GREEK
What I learned today...
The particle Ge (gamma-epsilon)
Function: to bring emphasis or prominence to a word with which it occurs.
Cognates: In Sanskrit there is a particle gha that has the same function. In Latin, qui seems to be a cognate form with the same function.
English Equivalent: None.
BGAD lists 3 function, (1) Limiting. For an example it gives Luke 11:8, "dia ge tan anaideian autou," in literal gloss translation, "because of yet/though the shamelessness of him."
(2) Intensifiying. For an example, BGAD gives Romans 8:32, "os ge tou idiou uiou ouk efeisato," in literal gloss translation, "who indeed the his own son not did spare," or cleaned up a little, "who indeed did not spare his own son." (3) Often added to other particles. Ei ge (eige), "if indeed/inasmuch as" with examples found in Ephesians 3:2 and 4:21. The ESV has the first word of Eph 3:2 "assuming" based on context, the NASB nails it literally, and the KJV disregards it and treats it as if it were only ei with no ge ("if ye have heard..."). The NKJV corrects this, by the way, by adding indeed!
Another particle combination with ge is ei de me ge, as seen in Matthew 9:17, "ei de ma ge rhegnuntai askoi," or in literal glossing, "if but not indeed/yet are being broken the bottles," or more understandably, "otherwise the bottles break." Most other combinations are pretty self-explanatory after this: kai ge, kaitoige (and yet), memounge (rather), metige (not to mention), ge toi (indeed), ofelon ge (would that indeed). Alla ge and ara ye are listed in the lexicons, but not fleshed out. Robertson's Larger Grammar argues that they add irony, argumentative climax, etc. to these otherwise commonplace conjunctions (page 1148 if you are a student who is interested).
Interesting Tidbit: Robertson's larger grammar states that the conjunction gar is actually a compounding of ge and ara.
Running a simple search, I found 26 independent occurances of ge in the NT and 134 in the LXX (Rahlf's edition of the Greek OT). I went to zhubert.com and ran a lemma search (no, I don't Biblework$ yet...), and found that his engine locates 199 occurences of the word in the OT/NT/Apocrypha. Interestingly enough, the book of Ecclesiastes far outranks all others in the quantity of uses. I think the function of these would make an interesting research project.

http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/test-archives/html4/2000-12/3361.html was an interesting discussion.

And after learning these things, I think I'm well on my way to appreciating this little particle when I come upon it in the text. If you are a koine student, hopefully you can say the same. Ge, by the way, seems to be extinct in Modern Greek as best as I can tell.

Maybe someone will be able to write back that "the salmon was indeed delicious when cooked in the dishwasher!"
(Babelfish renders the modern terms into Greek: ho solomos en malakos ge hotan hepsematos en planterio-piatwn)

COOKING:
Did you know you can cook salmon in your dishawasher?
So says this site.
It looks legit. If you try it, let me know. If I try it, I'll let you know.

I remember one time I ordered a salmon fillet in Brooklyn (the one in New York), and it came
out warm on the outside and frozen on the inside. At first I thought it was some kind of fancy-schmancy
New York salmon-fillet-sushi item. I quickly decided it was a horrible mistake, probably done with a microwave.
I like my salmon best when it's slow cooked in the oven, coated with dill weed, and given a few squirts of fresh lemon juice.