Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible > Status Update

"And we should also always acknowledge that we are reading a translation - not the original text, and that there is another voice in the room, another mind at work, as we read" - she hasn't addressed this at all, in what sense God is the mind at work in the bible? In the end my impression is that the Bible is in some sense a product of the Hebrew language.

"What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and God, and between man and man - but most of all, between man and himself" - this is the conclusion of a plausible argument. It is shocking how changes in presentation - the numbering of verses, and the use of headings - can have such a significant impact on intepretation.

"...the idea that ordinary people would be able to read the Bible in their own language, and to make their own decisions about what it meant, was viewed as a threatening possibility." - there is also the argument that in order to truly understand the word of God, you have to understand the language of God.

[Who is wise? He who learns from every human being...Who is wealthy? He who is happy with his lot.]

"...I am not rebelling against tradition but following history that beleives that to truly understand anything you must duke it out, on the inside, both with yourself and with God."

"And yet in dropping these body parts from their translations, the translators may be losing an important component of the ancient world's understanding of the body: the physical as a reference point for the world around it." - Ancient world, or Hebrew world, does Latin and Greek work like this?

"Yet the meanings of these Hebrew names are lost in translation because the names are simply transliterated - not translated (although Eve's name is neither)"

"The essential connection between man and the earth is missing. Without the reader's knowing that Adam is ADAMA - the ground he...will eventually return to."

"No matter how many readers have read before him, the reader must read again, must investigate, must lift the veil to seek the face of the text, over and over again." - for discovery or reassurance?

xxxiii "Slowly I understood that the way I read is interwined with the way my family reads." - does it expand or limit the individual's horizons, if reading becomes a family tradition.