Re: [asa] Gen 2, NASB vs. NIV -- Which came first, animals or man?

I'm forwarding your prior question to a seminary Hebrew professor that I know.? On this one I don't want to forward too many questions since he's very busy, so let me just tell you what a pastor once told me.? He said that it is well known that the Hebrew mindset was not particular about chronology as your and mine are.? Therefore, it was within the Hebrew norms to say things in a way that is not chronological.? So in this passage, where?it is dealing with mankind's relationship to the creation, it woud not really imply the order of creation when it simply says (in the NASB, by far my favorite translation) that God did such-and-such a thing.? The fact that Moses put it into an order with man first doesn't in any way imply that it occurred in that order.? The NIV was probably doing some paraphrasing for the masses when they adding the time-sequencer to the text, trying to do a little harmonization for the sake of those who don't know about the Hebrew mindset and might therefor
 e wrongly consider it to be an error.? So I would bet that they added the time-sequencer to keep people from wrongly inferring error.

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
To: AmericanScientificAffiliation <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:26 am
Subject: [asa] Gen 2, NASB vs. NIV -- Which came first, animals or man?

Here is another interesting translation question.

?

In the NIV, Gen. 2:18-19 reads:

?

18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
?19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.

In the NASB, however, the text reads as follows:

?

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; (S)I will make him a helper [a]suitable for him."
?19(T)Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and (U)brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.

This difference in translation is crucial if one wants to read Gen. 2 literally and harmonize it with Gen.1, because the NASB translation implies that the man was created before the animals -- that the animals were created specifically in response to man's need for a helper.? The NIV, in contrast, uses the past perfect to indicate that the creation of the animals already was complete.

My general understanding is that the NASB is a more direct translation than the NIV (and in my sorry efforts to learn Greek, trying to translate small parts of the Gospel of John, I've found that to be the case in spades).? If the NASB is correct, that would seem to suggest that these really are different versions of the story, which probably suggests something about genre and interpretation.

?

?

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Received on Fri Feb 1 01:02:12 2008