Samuel anoints Saul as king
Whenever we translate, our goal is always for the meaning of the text to be clear to those who will read or listen to it. Since many phrases are unfamiliar to those who have not grown up reading the Bible and attending church, we work hard to ensure they can grasp the implied information that the Bible’s original readers would have known intuitively. Here are a few examples from our work in 1 Samuel.
In 1 Samuel 28:6, it says that the LORD did not answer Saul’s request for guidance “by dreams, nor through the Urim, nor through prophets.” Because some will not know that the Urim was one of two stones (Urim and Thummim) used by the priest, like lots, to determine God’s will, we translated the phrase as “nor through the Urim stone.”
First Samuel has many references to the “ephod”. The word “ephod” would be meaningless to many of our readers. Some Croatian translations say “vest”, but we made the meaning clearer by translating “the priest’s vest”.
Sometimes the lack of clarity comes not from a single word but from a cultural or background issue unfamiliar to today’s Roma readers. For example, the draft translation of Gurbet of 1 Samuel 4:12 said, “That day a Benjaminite escaped from the battle in Shiloh, his clothes were torn and on his head was dust.” However, readers might think the man just happened to be dirty or ragged from the war or from running, and might miss the symbolic meaning of his appearance. We made this clear by adjusting our translation to say “… His clothes were torn and on his head he had put dirt/ashes to show his sorrow.
Another unclear verse is 1 Samuel 26:19c, where David is speaking to Saul while he is fleeing for his life from him: “Now they have driven me from my part in the LORD’s land, saying: ‘Go and serve other gods.’” The participle “saying” in Hebrew can sometimes have a clarifying meaning, such as “in other words” or “that is”. Here, David is saying that Saul, by chasing him and driving him out of the land of Israel and away from the land of the tabernacle, is forcing him into a pagan land where he cannot worship properly. We made this clearer in our translation this way: “Now they have driven me from my part in the LORD’s land. This is like they are saying to me: ‘Go and serve other gods.’”
