February 6th, 2021

The Old Testament reading for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany of our Lord goes back to Isaiah, chapter 40[:21-31]. The first eleven verses of this chapter was the Old Testament text a few weeks ago, for the second Sunday in Advent. This chapter is important enough to go back to hear from it again.

The fortieth chapter of Isaiah is the start of some very good news. And it comes quite clearly. That may be especially easy to see in the Greek translation of this chapter. Here is a somewhat-literal translation of the Greek of the first two verses and the ninth through the eleventh verses:

‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ says the God. ‘Priests, speak into the heart of Jerusalem; comfort her, because her lowliness has been fulfilled; her sin has been forgiven, because she has received from the hand of the Lord double, her sins.’

Upon a high mountain, go up, the evangelizing one of Zion. Raise with strength your voice, the evangelizing one of Jerusalem. Raise it up, fear not. Say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold, your God! Behold, Lord! Lord comes with power, and the arm with lordship. Behold, his wage is with him, and the work is before him. Like a shepherd, he will tend his flock, and in his arm he will gather lambs, and those having in womb [i.e., pregnant] he will comfort.

Things that are repeated are important. Right at the beginning, there is the repetition of the word ‘comfort’. That is also in the Hebrew text. But the entire sentence in Hebrew is this: “’Comfort, comfort my people,’ says your God.” The Greek translation leaves out the word ‘your’. It is interesting that, with this word left out, a greater emphasis is given to the word ‘my’. And that seems like a good emphasis to have.

There is a famous Italian saying, ‘Traduttore, traditore.’ It basically means that a translator is a traitor. And that basically means that any translation cannot give everything that is in the original text. Something must be left aside, and that decision of what to leave aside is left in the hands of the translator. If something is left out of the translation, the translator is to be blamed.  

It seems that this translator of Isaiah wanted to emphasize the good news. This is also seen in the use of the word ‘evangelizing’. We often think of the word of someone who is evangelizing as someone who is described after the New Testament started, but an evangelizing one in the Old Testament is a messenger who had a very important message, usually authorized by the king. The basic word in the Hebrew is the word for ‘flesh’ and emphasizes the importance of a person bringing the message. But we see in the Greek word ‘evangelizing’ the importance of it being GOOD news.

There are basically two opposite emphases within the verses of the text. There is the reminder that God, like a king, has power, and there is also the reminder of God’s love—more specifically, his comfort. In the above Greek translation, the word ‘comfort’ appears four times, but it is only in the Hebrew twice, the first two words of the text. In the second half of the first verse, the word ‘comfort’ is used instead of the word ‘proclaim’. At the very end of the eleventh verse, the word ‘comfort’ is also used, but this time it appears instead of the word ‘guide’ or ‘lead’. A similar word is used in Isaiah 7:19 and is usually translated as ‘watering places’ [See the work by William L. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1971; page 230]. There are some wonderful and comforting pictures within these words, whatever language they are.

With these slight changes within the Greek translation, some people have thought that the original Hebrew text that the Greek translators had was not the same one as the text that we have today. But there is another option. Traduttore, traditore. The translator may have betrayed the language in favor of the good news.