Thank you to everyone for your prayers for the Translation Oversight Committee (TOC) meeting that occurred last week. We look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming weeks, especially next week when we start to share the answers to Adrian Warnock’s ten questions for the TOC.
The meeting was a great success. The translators got a lot of work done and really appreciate all the prayers they received during this time. We promise to blog some more about the meeting soon.
Here’s a first look at the upcoming ESV Children’s Bible. It will contain over 200 full-color illustrations right where the stories appear in the Bible text. It also has a concordance, charts, diagrams, and features designed especially for kids. We’ll talk about these features more in the coming months.
In the meantime, here are three pictures from the inside of the Bible to give you an idea of what it looks like:
You can pre-order this edition from Crossway.
(This edition is different from the Kid’s Bible for Life, which will include more study helps and is coming in 2006.)
What does the term “revocalization” mean in footnotes to the ESV?
The term “revocalization” has to do with the fact that ancient Hebrew was written using consonants only. Of course, to pronounce a word you must have vowels as well; and a reader fluent in the language would know from the printed consonants and the tradition of oral reading how to pronounce the words.
As the Jewish people came to use Hebrew less and less, their scholars invented a system of writing the vowels so that readers could pronounce the Bible texts properly. The process of supplying these vowel symbols is called “vocalization,” and this is what we have in the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament.
The scholars who carried out this vocalization project were so careful and dedicated that they produced a text that students of Hebrew widely regard as almost always accurate.
On occasion, however, the ESV translators believe that another set of vowels makes a more intelligible text. The process of providing another set of vowels is called “revocalization.” In some cases they conclude this because an ancient version seems to have presupposed these other vowels, and in some very rare cases they simply think the other vowels make more sense. In cases in which there is significant scholarly opinion in favor of the revocalization, but the Masoretic vowels are also defensible, the translators have provided a marginal note offering the revocalization as an alternative.
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