Importance of Reverting Back to Original Sources When Studying Scripture

Often times languages will carry over words from another language that phonetically are the same rather than carrying over the literal meaning. A funny example of this is that in Farsi the name for popcorn is “chos-e-fil” چوس فیل which literally translates to elephant fart. The origin of this is that the first brand of popcorn that was introduced to Iran was Chesterfield which sounds a lot like “Chos-e-fil” and the rest is history. This same phenomenon also happened in Farsi with the word for gum, which is adams (aah-daah-mss), which comes from Adams Chewing Gum.

In Arabic there isn’t a letter that has the sound found in the English letter P, so instead any words that have this sound are often replaced with the Arabic letter ب which make a B sound. So in the below example for the word meat ball, rather than providing a literal translation this label provided a phonetic translation which carried the literal meaning of Paul is Dead.

While these are funny examples, this has serious consequences when translating more important text like scripture. This is why it is ever more important to always refer back to the original sources when these kind of interpretations arise.

An example of this in the Bible can be observed in Pslams 84, where the the phrase for “the valley of Baka,” which is a name of a city, was translated in early Greek translations as “the valley of weeping”. This is because the early Greek translation assumed the word בכא = Ba-k-a had the same meaning as the word בכה = ba-k-há which means “crying or weeping”. Similarly the Arabic word Bakka (بكَّ), with double “k”, should not to be confused with another unrelated Arabic word baka (بَكَى)(single k) which means to cry or weep. Despite sounding the same these two words have completely different meanings in both Hebrew and Arabic as the are associated with different roots.