Maggie's Farm

1. Your verse 64:1 is counted as the last verse of chapter 63 in the traditional Jewish division.

2. When "the mountains quaked" - the Hebrew uses a word that means "flowing" - so the mountains melt rather than quaking. Compare "the mountains dissolve like beeswax" in Psalm 97.

3. Wrong translation of 64:4 - it's not "no other god" but:

What never was heard, attended to or seen, except by you, O G-d - you do for those who wait for you.

IOW wonders not seen by man, but known to G-d.

64:5 - the word for "meet" can also be translated as "injure/insult/wound" - the meaning is then that the righteous suffer because G-d is angry.

64:8 The word for potter comes from a root that means creator/creation. Testimony to how ancient and essential that craft is, and offering another layer to the choice of this analogy.

The Masoretic text isn't really a "rendering" - it's in the original Hebrew/Aramaic, and reflects a mainstream communal scholarly effort that probably included texts now lost to us.

At some point you have to pick an "original" or "authentic" text and call the others "variants". That's based on several considerations, including consistency, provenance, and quality of a text, and the presence of other texts that corroborate any variations. On all those scores the Masoretic text does very well - including its consistency with the Dead Sea scrolls and other recent finds from ancient Israel.

I love the legend behind the Septuagint. But if we're talking accuracy, the Talmud mentions 13 deliberate mistranslations made by the translators to avoid misinterpretation by the pagan Greeks. Miraculously, they all were inspired to make the same changes.

Hebrew is a terse language. Two and three letter roots are given prefixes, suffixes, and varied vocalization to create nouns, verbs, and adjectives with the same core meaning.

A Hebrew sentence is like a handful of pebbles thrown into water - each word radiates multivalent circles of meaning. Across the Bible the prophets carefully choose words and phrases that deliberately echo other verses. Much of this is inevitably lost in translation.

Like the Eskimos with their many words for snow, Hebrew has unique words for spiritual states that do not translate exactly. The most obvious example is the mess made of "pure" and "impure" in translation. The word translated as "defiled" "impure" or "unclean" has nothing to do with cleanliness. It implies immersion in one's material experience, to the detriment of one's spiritual/moral self. A cognate of that word is used in modern Hebrew for lamination or embedding items in clear plastic - again, being immersed/absorbed in material.

Another example: the word translated as "repentence" comes from a root meaning to turn, return, or to dwell, with no implication of misery or regret as in English.

Similarly: the English word for charity comes for caritas - pity that moves one to give beyond one's obligation.

But the Hebrew word for charity (Zedaka) is simply the female form of the root Zedek meaning "justice" or "correct". (A Tzadik is a righteous man - same root.) The necessary masculine virtue of justice must be balanced by the female understanding that we really are children of One parent - and from that perspective charity is "only right" and not "extra credit because I pity you"...

How to translate that?

(BTW the singer Neil Sedaka's last name comes from the root mentioned above... perhaps an ancestor was an almsgiver.)