‘Crying’ and ‘Children’ in Translations of the one Fragment of the Book of Proverbs: Possible Interpretation or the Digression from the Original?

Abstract

Relevance of the problem . The subject matter related to the rendering of the Holy Writ is relevant, which is backed up in recent decades with the emerging of a large number of the Bible translations into different languages, as well as with the presence of certain fragments in the original that allow for the ambiguous interpretation. The material for the research is a fragment from the Book of Proverbs ( yassēr binḵā kî yēš tiqwā wǝ’el hǎmîṯô ’al tiśśā’ nap̄šeḵā ) (19: 18) (“Punish your son while there is hope, and do not be indignant with his cry”) in a number of the Bible translations (the Synodal translation, the King James Bible, etc.) into various languages, as well as an analysis of comments on them related to different historical periods. Scientific novelty. The paper proves the groundlessness of the statement about the interpolation of the lexeme “cry”, supposedly contained in the Russian Synodal Bible, caused by subjective reasons, and also considers the validity / wrongfulness of replacing the word “son” in it with the inclusive form “children” based on Jewish written sources. The method of the research. The article uses the method of comparative study of various translations of this fragment, identifying its interpretations contained in them and correlating them with the exegetics available in the Jewish tradition. General results: 1) The coincidence of rendering this fragment with that which we find in the King James Bible, while being different from its representation in a number of translations into other languages, allows us to put forward a hypothesis about its possible influence on the Russian text. 2) The availability of such interpretation among some interpreters, both ancient and modern, indicates in this case the absence of any deliberate distortion of the original in the Synodal translation. 3) The use of inclusive and gender-neutral forms for male people in relation to this fragment instead of those presented in the original should be qualified as a deviation from the original, since according to the norms of Biblical Hebrew, such use is permissible only when the word “ son ” is used in the plural form ( bānîm ), while in the singular it is not used in a similar sense.