As I have mentioned before, we are sight reading in Hebrew and Greek each Thursday. We are still slogging through Mark in the GNT, but in the HB, we are now in Ezekiel. We made our way through Ruth, then voyaged through Jonah, landing on the banks of the Chebar river in Ezekiel. John assured us that it was readable.
Right! It might be readable, but is it understandable? Between convoluted syntax and changing genders on the pronouns, I'm not sure I understood a word we translated. Of course, you have to add all of the interesting comments Zimmerli (the BHS editor of Ezekiel) makes, deleting every duplicate, rearranging other ones, emending the text (when it doesn't agree with him!), and you have the perfect setting for a laugh fest. And that is exactly what happened yesterday. We were all laughing at our feeble attempts to understand a description of a supernatural vision in a dead foreign language 2500 years old. Now I understand why there is a Jewish tradition that you should never read the visions in Ezekiel until you are over 40!
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Can someone arrange for the age to be raised, I'm well over forty, but have no desire to try to disentangle the Hebrew of Ezekiel!
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