I’ve not got much to say about this, but please check out Cliff Martin’s post that describes his thinking on the unchanging nature of God, progressive revelation, and the inspiration of Scripture. I don’t think I disagreed with anything he said. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe that the Bible is a unique book, inspired from Genesis to Revelation. I believe it is the very book God wanted us to have. I hold to the authority of the Scriptures in matters of faith and practice. I believe the Bible provides a solid and dependable foundation for Christian living. I read it. I study it. I love it. I teach it. I find that it is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). I believe all the Scriptures are infallible. Infallibility, as I use the term, means that the Bible, in its totality, does not mislead on issues of faith and practice, though it may not be without error in all respects. In my years of reading and studying the Bible, this view is more consistent with the Scriptures themselves than what I consider a forced claim of inerrancy.

Lawrence Boadt’s excellent Reading the Old Testament has a chart on page 79 that illustrates some key differences between the way the ancients viewed history and the way we do today. We tend to be shocked when we discover that there might be any deviation from what we subconsciously have accepted as the only viewpoint. These are examples Boadt gives for distinctions that should inform our study of the Old Testament, even the parts written in some sense as history. Here is the chart:

Before I “took the road less traveled by” into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and of course Hebrew so that I could study the Ancient Near East (ANE) and how it related to the Bible. The more I read on my own, the more I realized that such studies did not confirm the Bible as a purely divine record of history. ANE archaeology and history demonstrate the ANE heritage of the Bible; but once we acknowledge the ANE context of the Bible, we should not expect to see those aspects which differ from 21st century Western ideals to be omitted from it and should likewise not expect to see our modern ideals in place. Sadly, it is difficult for readers of literature to approach any text fully aware of the ideals, mindsets, and motivations of the authors even when contemporaneous with them, much less when separated by changes to culture, social context, and language wrought by millennia of intervening time; the unconscious anachronistic depositing of ideas and concepts foreign to the author and original audience are also hard to identify and purge from our readings.

Readers of this blog should know that I believe the Bible is no less subject to anachronistic misinterpretation than other literary works, and I would point out to those who disagree that there are myriad cases in which they themselves make provision for this problem - any time they insist on doing anything beyond a surface reading that doesn’t take into account the history and culture of the people involved with the writing of the Bible. Educated evangelicals in particular have a tendency to eat up any book they can get their hands on that purports to show the Bible in its original context, provided the conclusion is “conservative” and is treated as upholding the historicity of the Bible. I myself tend to do this even today, and with some just cause: zealous secularist debunkers approach the text looking for erroneous information they suppose invalidates the message of Scripture. For most evangelicals, an appeal to historical/cultural contextualization is especially lauded when is used to clear up apparent challenges to scientific inerrancy. Take for example Edwin Thiele’s observation of Judah and Israel’s alternating usage of accession and non-accession year dating in recording regnal lengths in First and Second Kings, a situation somewhat perplexing to anyone advocating the “plain reading” approach. This has caused some conservatives (especially fundamentalists) to attack Thiele’s explanation as an end-run around God’s intention to provide us all truth provided we use a plain, literalist hermeneutic (witness one such person reviewing Thiele’s book, Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, on Amazon).

The plain, literalist hermeneutic is useful for upholding the current ideals of historiography in the Old Testament narratives. The problem is that this is a dreadfully anachronistic endeavor: the modern genre of historiography was not developed before a Greek movement that took place centuries after the supposed origin of the stories, and even then it took quite a while for those ideals to saturate Greek historiography and then the rest of the world through Hellenism. It’s not that those before the turn of the first millennium A.D. were incapable or too ignorant to write history the way we expect it in our post-Enlightenment world. It’s just that they had different ideals for what they wanted from a story. Cold, dispassionate, scientific history without any foreseeable application failed to supply the meaning or entertainment they demanded from their stories. They wanted colorful stories that gave them meaning, not history for history’s sake. Modernists, however, tend to believe that an exact recounting of history is the highest or most important use of narrative. As I wrote elsewhere, “The difference between the ancient and the modern motivations for and method of speculation about unknowns is that the ancients used mythological stories in order to apply meaning to the subject of their speculation and we tend to use scientific enquiry to sever meaning from the subject, and are thus generally skeptical that any meaning can or should be applied. The ancients were content to be ignorant of the mechanics of how, as long as they knew why. Modernists feel satisfied to have discovered the natural causes, the how’s, and seem convinced that this abolishes meaning.”

But the use of mythology to convey meaning is not something that disappeared without a trace with the onset of the Age of Reason. Gordon Glover likes to point out that the American tall tales about such figures as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill are not intended to explain topographical features such as the Grand Canyon, but they do acknowledge the existence of those features as integral aspects of the frontier and use fantastic stories about their creation as entertaining vehicles of meaning to illustrate character virtues such as strength and courage which have now successfully been associated with the frontiersmen who tamed the wilderness.

Would it be so scandalous if the Israelites, like all their neighbors, had little use for a cold recounting of geological, astronomical, and biological history, preferring stories chock-full of meaning? What would be wrong if God saw it fit to communicate the truths most relevant and significant to them in the way most familiar to them? The self-centeredness of the objection that this genre isn’t as relevant to us is readily apparent and needs no comment here.

ANE scholarship has long pointed out the similarities between the early Genesis stories and the myths of the ANE, from the obvious Utnapishtim/Noah parallel to shades of Enki and Ninhursag in the Garden narratives. Nevertheless, literalists have a few preferred methods of explaining these parallels away. First, they will deny any similarity of style between the Genesis narratives and the ANE myths. Other times they will insist that the similarities are merely chance or so general and vague that they are hardly significant. Lastly, when the parallels are undeniable, they break out their ace in the hole: they claim that Genesis is the original, historical basis for the ANE stories, regardless of the fact that the latter predate Genesis by as much as a millennium.

I want to share a few of my thoughts on these literalist responses.

Summary of Part One

• God the Gardener created a son (Lk 3.38) to tend the garden.

• God, as a father, was training up his children Adam and Eve in the garden.

• Adam was put in a garden for instruction because gardening requires faith: both faithfulness in tending day by day and faith that what is planted and cultivated will one day grow. Planting and tending a garden is an exercise of faith.

• The prohibition against the Tree of Knowledge, like the dietary laws of the Mosaic Covenant abolished in the New, was intended to be a temporary restriction.

• The Tree of Knowledge was made for Adam and Eve when they matured.

Support for the last two points is found in Hebrews 5:13-14 (all quotations hereafter are from the NRSV): “. . .for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.”

• Adam did not have to earn his place in God’s Garden: rather, God gave good gifts to His children.

• Adam was gifted with gold, precious stones, rivers teeming with life, and authority over all living creatures; no dowry was demanded for him to take Eve as his wife.

• God created the world so that faith was necessary from the beginning. Adam lacked faith in what God told him, and impatiently asked for his inheritance before time (cf. the Prodigal Son).

• The temptation was a shortcut to glory (Genesis 3:5).

• Satan tempted them with something they already had (Genesis 1:27).

• God didn’t just throw His son out of the garden for the first mistake he made. God warned Adam of only one sin.

• Adam was being taught to trust His Father and His goodness. Adam’s sin was his rebellion against his own experience of what God was doing in his life, impatience with God.

The Garden in the New Covenant

Is this motif shown elsewhere in Scripture? Martin gives examples of the gardening metaphor in the NT, specifically as regards life under the New Covenant:

In this week’s installment of Theology Unplugged, a podcast I highly recommend, Reclaiming the Mind Ministries president Michael Patton made the following comments about full preterists (like myself):

Now I would say, you can believe that, and you can make your arguments — and many people do from Scripture. I’m not persuaded at all by them — but at the same time I would say that this is an unChristian way to believe about a particular issue in the end times. It’s an unChristian way or, another way to put it, unorthodox; it is outside of the sphere of orthodoxy within historic Christianity. Now, the next thing we ask is, ok, if it’s outside of the sphere of historic Christianity, does that make… [you] automatically a nonbeliever, someone who is outside the grace of God, someone who is unregenerate as we sometimes put it, or someone who does not have a relationship established with the one true God? And I would say no.

This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

Part 7: Case study: the Fall

So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?

Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.

This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first sin caused a rupture in the whole race’s ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways: the federal view says that Adam’s fall from God’s favor was effective for all humanity because he was the “head” of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam’s very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.

Regardless of how they explain it, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called “Original Sin”. This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to all. For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, “falling”, but as for “fallen”, what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.

This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the doctrine of the Fall, and specifically how it is influenced by my view of the Bible. The purpose of this post is apologetic rather than polemic: my purpose is less to convince anyone of the view I hold and more to explain how someone who holds it deals with doctrinal issues. The earlier posts in this series argued that our Scriptures are not inerrant and are not in fact completely without scientific and historical errors. I also made a plea for interpreting the Bible as literature: that is, we need to recognize that the words of Scripture were not completely isolated from the words written by their authors’ contemporaries and we must therefore identify the literary genre in which they were composed as a first order of business when interpreting the Bible. I cautioned against a view of the nature of Scripture that overspiritualizes its origins, pointing out that if God had wished to set down a series of unanalyzable propositions free from all impurities and the influence of man’s fallibility, He could definitely have chosen a more suitable means than using words written in three different languages over several centuries that must in turn be passed down through many more centuries and translated into countless other languages. Moreover, Christians are left bickering and head-butting each other while trying to determine the supposedly undistilled, pristine, immutable, and uncontradictable truth for almost any given passage. The fundamentalist might understandably wish that God had provided an inerrant and infallible key to interpretation, one decidedly more reliable than the deceptively straight-forward “literal whenever possible” model, which itself all too rarely yields a single, indisputable outcome in its application.

The problem is that the idea of not having an inerrant and hence perfectly uncontestable final authority makes many Christians uncomfortable, and sets many to wondering how rejecting inerrancy limits the Bible’s value and usefulness. The next few installments of this series are meant to address two concerns related to that question. First, I will summarize my belief in the Bible’s origins and nature; second, I want to present a case study of the resultant hermeneutic, with a brief and tentative exposition of how I interpret the passages that have resulted in the doctrine of the Fall.

This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

The Importance of Determining Genre

Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense of it, we must interpret each of them in the manner in which it was intended, viz. according to the appropriate literary category. Surely the principle of interpreting things in the manner in which there were intended approaches tautology, but how many Christians ever really follow it through? As mentioned before, the assumptions that determine the “manner in which it was intended” are too often based on what meets the eye alone. So what do I mean by interpreting the Bible as literature?

You read a novel in the same way that you read the newspaper, realizing that they are both forms of narrative. How you interpret the narratives in each, however, depends on your recognition of the type of literature you are reading. No one would say that Great Expectations was “errant” or “a pack of lies” unless he thought it was written as history. The same goes for the Bible, which is far from uniform in literary genre. We have farmers, shepherds, doctors, and kings for authors; what thoughtful person, recognizing that God chose this diverse crowd rather than three or four prophets or priests to bear witness to Himself, would conclude that God would homogenize their testimonies into one nameless genre, erasing the distinctiveness of each one in His quest to dole out a series of unanalyzable propositions? Instead, within the pages of Scripture we find a broad range of writing styles that includes poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle.

Moreover, there is not always a one-to-one genre-to-book correlation. Not every segment within the book of Genesis, for example, is to be interpreted as the same sort of narrative, as is somewhat obvious to someone doing comparative literary analysis on the type of stories being told. The Creation part of Genesis shares many characteristics of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, whereas the stories of the Patriarchs remind us of the Icelandic sagas, collections of family stories that give a group of people a common heritage.

The historical-grammatical (or grammatico-historical) method of biblical interpretation is the practice of taking into account the original language and the culture of the original audience when researching the original meanings of Scripture. By and large, though, inerrantists have used this principle as a defensive and reactionary measure to clear up problems rather than as an active interpretive method: for instance, it is responsible for the observation mentioned before that Judah (and later Israel) used accession year dating, because Edwin Thiele looked at Persian (and that of other ANE cultures) record-keeping and saw that this explained a lot of long-supposed errors in the dating of the kings. The historical-grammatical method has been modified by many exegetes to act as a sort of middle-ground that suspends the value of a plain reading if by any means it helps to demonstrate the scientific inerrancy of the Bible. What is missing from that version of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is the principle we have been discussing that insists upon interpreting the Bible in terms of the literary characteristics, devices, and genres that make it up. We may call this the literary-generic principle; this principle is a tool that cannot be neglected by anyone claiming to use the historical-grammatical method of interpretation and exegesis.

This is the fourth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

In the discussion of the mode of the Bible’s inspiration I pointed out that the Bible is a compilation of literary contributions empowered by God and intended to thoroughly equip His people for every good work. My main point could be summarized that God authorized the Scriptures, but was not the author of them.

An admittedly limited analogy of this point draws a parallel between the Bible and the King James Version of the Bible. King James commissioned it, and it is therefore known by his name, although the translators and not he carried out his intentions. In reading the KJV we are realizing one of the ultimate purposes King James had for it. One of the chief purposes for the Bible’s commissioning was for our instruction, and we fulfill that goal when we allow ourselves to be taught by those men He commissioned to write it. One of the limitations of this analogy is the observation that God had a lot more to do with the Bible’s content than King James did with the Authorized Version: specifically, we discussed how God invaded the literature to deliver specific messages through His prophets. Even in these instances, however, the actual sentences and structure with which they framed these messages constituted their own works of literature.

Each of these literary contributions must be approached on its own terms, and never held to the preferred standards of the day and culture in which it is interpreted. Currently, the two standards that are the default for many Christians today are the standards of plain reading and scientific inerrancy (this term is discussed below). This view says that God constructed the Bible so that the most obvious reading is the intended one so that no one, even (some say especially) the least educated would be deprived of the truth, which is always presented in a way that precisely mirrors all relevant historical and scientific facts. Any part meant to be understood using anything besides a literal interpretation is plainly explicit. This approach might be understandable if the “plain” interpretation were consistent across the board, but things that are plain to some are not plain to others: for example, when does Jesus say that His parables are fictional? It is sometimes hotly debated whether the story of the rich man and Lazarus is history or a parable, due to the fact that he actually names a character rather than referring to him obliquely as “a certain man”. Someone from a remote culture with an animistic background might find comfort in a literal reading of Psalm 91:4, where God’s pinions are promised to cover the believer. When does Revelation say that the dragon or the vials or the Lamb are symbolic of other things? Obviously, even the most adamant “plain reading” advocates are making judgments on genre and style in their “plain reading”. This standard is “plainly” inadequate. How about the standard of scientific inerrancy?

This is the third of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

We can summarize the previous discussion by saying that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 teaches that these writings collectively known as the Bible have been infused with the breath of life from God’s own lips, and we may confidently infer that the Bible has therefore taken on all the practical properties for which God ordained it. This post examines those properties.

This is the second of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

This leads us to the specific meaning of the word theopneustos. The phrase “inspired by God” seeks to render this enigmatic near hapax legomenon which is a compound adjective with the components theos ‘God’ and pneustos ‘breathed’, represented quite literally in many translations as “God-breathed”. It is often argued whether this word designates Scripture as the manifestation of or as the target of the breath of God: God’s breath is either the source of Scripture or is merely the reason each writing is divinely effective. This last option is closely related to the source of the term “inspiration” pertaining to this doctrine, because the Vulgate translates it “divinely inspired”, or literally, divinely in-breathed. It has been claimed that this reading would require a missing Greek preposition en- ‘in’ before pneustos, so that we should have theëmpneustos.^[1] This form may perhaps have been more conclusive,^[2] but aside from the fact that this is in effect an argument from silence, such a preposition is not grammatically or semantically necessary. The extra-biblical usage of this word is altogether indecisive on the precise mechanics. Are there any other factors that might give us some direction?

Paul used a compound so exceptionally rare that even then it likely had the potential for confusion if left to its own inherent meaning; this suggests that Paul did not use it in complete isolation and probably assumed it would be understood in terms of some implied context. Is there a reference elsewhere in the Bible to God’s breath being manifested as an object, as is claimed with the notion of “writings exhaled by God”? Although I am unaware of an example of this, the argument from silence is of course no more instructive for my argument than for anyone else’s. Rather the strength in my argument comes from asking the same sort of question about the other proposed meaning: what other Scriptures can be found that reference God’s breath infusing something? If so, what is God’s breath doing there?

The notion of God-breathing seems to be a rather explicit allusion to the Genesis account of man’s transformation into a “living soul” as a consequence of God’s “into-breathing” - His inspiration. This was very probably what Jerome had in mind in the Vulgate’s rendering. With an already existing (albeit obscure) compound, it would likely never have occurred to Paul to insert a directional preposition such as the proposed en- (or eis-) before the deverbative element when the allusion was clear enough without it. Paul said “God-breathed” knowing that Timothy would immediately associate that expression with Genesis 2:7.

God’s breath consecrated and empowered the writings of Scripture formed from the dust of the ground (men), and not dictated or handed to man on tablets of gold by the Almighty. As C. S. Lewis put it, this body of the literature of men sovereignly foreknown and ordained was “raised by God above itself, qualified by him and compelled by him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served”^[3].

This is the first of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

In determining the value and purpose of the Bible, we have to begin by looking at its origin. While a description of the process that put the words of the Bible on the page in mechanical terms is interesting, the theological and philosophical answer to the question of origin is foundational. This we refer to as the issue of inspiration.

The passage in Scripture usually cited as the primary source of the doctrine of inspiration is 2 Tim 3:16-17. This begins, “Every Scripture is inspired by God…” The syntax of the phrase is the most problematic aspect, because in the Greek the word “is” (the copula) does not occur, a situation common in Greek that does not always carry any detectable significance. The ambiguity of where we should understand the copula is significant in this case when you factor in the word kai, which could be translated either “and” or “even” based upon where you insert the understood “is”: in other words, should we render this verse as “Every Scripture [is] inspired by God and [is] useful…” or “Every God-inspired Scripture [is] also useful…”? In the first, the point of the statement is that God inspired Scripture and hence it is useful for doctrine, etc. In the second version, inspiration seems to be the qualifier, and that seems to suggest that there are Scriptures that are not inspired and that those are not necessarily useful.

But would it really mean that? Keep in mind that the word graphe meant simply “a writing” when the word was used outside the New Testament, but within the New Testament it is always understood to mean “sacred writing” or “Scripture”. My understanding is that theopneustos, commonly translated “God-breathed”, was probably intended not to strengthen the already specialized “Scripture” sense of the word but rather to act as a specializing qualifier for the more general meaning “writing”, thereby forming a phrase meaning literally “God-inspired Writing” and hence “Scripture”. Besides this, the usage data gathered by Robinson and begrudgingly confirmed by House seems fairly conclusive about the use of that particular syntactic construction throughout both the NT and the Septuagint: in almost every instance the adjective is attributive (i.e. it modifies graphe to mean “every God-inspired Writing”).^[1]

If this interpretation is taken, we translate kai as “also”. So what is the significance of the phrase “also useful”? What was it useful for in the first place? Here, the context strengthens the case. If we look at the previous verse, we see that the start of this inspiration passage is not verse 16, but verse 15:

(Preterism is the belief that there are no prophecies in Scripture that await a fulfillment in the future. Hereafter I will use the term “futurist” to describe anyone who believes that there is a yet future fulfillment of prophecy, including partial preterists. Similarly, I will use “preterist/preterism” as ellipsis for “full preterist/preterism”.)

Now, I realize that some people aren’t even convinced of partial preterism yet. But to anyone willing to learn and analyze Scripture honestly, it is usually only a matter of time after presenting the preteristic framework that a futurist will become convinced that at least some Scriptures must have been fulfilled in AD 70.

Yet sometimes these hold out hope that only some of them were fulfilled, considering the principle of total fulfillment an overreaction. They want the best of both worlds.

Even after a cogent presentation of the arguments for preterism, objections understandably crop up. These objections come in two flavors: rational and sub-rational. This post will deal only with the latter.

Some objections are unvoiced, and are frequently accompanied by a queasy feeling in the stomach. These objections are usually never identified because they occur beneath the surface. Yet I contend that the sub-rational objection is the single greatest factor in the rejection of preterism. Let me be clear: I do not believe that just because you have not accepted full preterism that it is because of any of the following, since you may be an honest person with rational objections. But I would ask you to seriously ask yourself if any of these sound like you:

I, like Josh, don’t believe the Bible teaches a “rapture”. Shocking as that may be for some, the passage that serves as the primary source for the doctrine was never about a rapture, at least as commonly understood. That passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Let’s get a picture of what’s going on here.

Most modern translations of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 apparently take their cue from the KJV: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.”

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NKJV)

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of {the} archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NASB)

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NIV)

Close scrutiny of both the grammar and vocabulary made me question the propriety of this translation. Let’s start with the vocabulary.