I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Chronicles 1.

I have stated before that genealogical lists like those in today’s passage do very little for me.  So, when I come to such passages I need to approach them a bit differently.  I spent more time than usual looking at the translators’ footnotes.  My first comment regards a large number of comments which result from the fact that Ancient Hebrew did not contain vowels as we understand them today.  This results in different manuscripts indicating the vowels differently, which means some of the names look different when transliterated to English (a similar thing sometimes happens today with Arabic names for different reasons, so that Muammar Gaddafi and Moamar Khadifi refer to the same person).  More interesting, the translators decided to introduce the phrase, “The sons of Noah were,” in front of the names of Noah’s three sons (which we know from other sources).  What makes this interesting is that all of the names before that are one generation followed by the next.  So, in the Hebrew there is no clue that Shem is not the father of Ham, who is not the father of Japheth until the verses where it starts to list each of their descendants.  Finally, by comparing to the NIV translator notes we discover that the translators made judgement calls as to whether or not to translate certain words/phrases as “father of” or “ancestor of” and “son of” or “descendant of”.

Which reinforces something I first became aware of some years back.  We must be careful about reaching conclusions about what a passage means for us based on the connotations of the English word the translators selected.  I first became aware of this when a good friend, whose Biblical understanding I generally respected, supported their understanding of Bible verse on the connotations of a word used by the King James Version which I knew to have not applied when the KJV translation was made.  My point here is that, since I have never learned to read Hebrew or Greek, I must look at multiple translations when I want to do a deep dive into what a particular passage means.  There are many places in the Bible (and in other translated documents) where the translator needed to make a judgement call on what words to use in the translation.