I assume you’re joking …
I don’t feel like you understand how translation works. The translators don’t just make stuff up based on something that sounds plausible to them, they compare the text to other Hebrew texts and related languages, they look at the ancient translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek (the Septuagint) and Latin (the Vulgate) and get more clues about how things were understood at the time. Scholarship is based on studying things, not what sounds good or seems reasonable to people thousands of years removed from the culture and language in question.
You realize that there are many conventionalized comparisons and expressions in English that wouldn’t be intuitive to a speaker of another language, right? Like what does bat excrement have to do with being crazy? Or what do cats and dogs have to do with rain?
The word that is translated sinews in English is a guess because it only appears one time in the whole OT and translators don’t know exactly what it means. It’s not that sinews means testicles, it’s that the Hebrew word sometimes translated sinews, should have probably been translated testicles, as it was in the Vulgate, a translation much closer in time to the speakers of biblical Hebrew than ourselves.
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Testify/ testimony
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Right, in a simile only one feature of the things being compared is in view. In this case, the point of similarity is hardness, not leafiness, or height, or being covered with bark. If I say the night was dark as pitch, I’m not saying it smells like pitch, or is sticky like pitch, or will stain your clothes like pitch, I only have the color in view in my comparison.
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Why? Why do you?
Clever boy!
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As when in the Song of Solomon the bridegroom says to the bride,
“Your hair is like a flock of goats”
I hope he doesn’t mean it smells like a flock of goats. Especially since the bucks urinate on themselves to attract the ladies.
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What, me joke around?
I think this is a great point, Christy, and one that others in this conversation could do with reflecting on. I’ve worked alongside many folks for whom English is not their first language, and this element of conversation English has been something that they’ve particularly struggled with. Life-long English speakers miss it because it is part of our cultural atmosphere. However, English is a highly idiomatic language, many of which are not always clear to the outside interupteror at first glance… and you can quote me on that! 
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Here is a blog entry that discusses the importance of cultural context, even in our own not-too-distant culture:
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That’s too funny! I was literally thinking about that conversation earlier today! 
Apparently I wasn’t the only one. 
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I thought it was about someone working on dinosaurs and not Hiob or ’î·yō·wḇ 
Where have you been?
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Well now!
Living life and thinking like crazy!
I still lurk here, though, and I miss participating as much as I used to. Maybe a day will come when I will have productive things to say again.
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Okay, no pressure.
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I am rather disappointed in seeing someone post an image such as this apparently in support of the idea that there is no difficulty in reconciling the argument against biological creatures breathing fire without suffering burns.
Some very obvious problems should be noted with the image above…and it doesn’t take much intelligence to discredit it:
- Note the distance between the actual flame and the man’s mouth
- Note that he is, for want of a better term, spitting out the liquid at quite high velocity from his mouth. Then using known flame-rates of flammable liquids used in this activity, what might the velocity of that “spitting” be and why is it necessary? (the answer should be rather obvious here even if the actual rate isn’t known…the reason for the high-velocity spit should be quite obvious!)
- he is holding a bottle of said liquid in his left hand
- whilst it is hard to see in this image, most often these flames are ignited using an external source of ignition such as a lighter or torch! (note what he has in his right hand)
may i add some references and an image of of my own that illustrates the inherent dangers in biological creatures using fire in unsafe ways! Where safety is usually that which is aimed at protecting one from harm by advising abstinence from engaging in stupid behaviour!
The image below shows exactly why i have trouble reconciling the idea that biological creatures can literally breath fire out of their mouths.
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Now i know that we fart methane gas…and of course i cant say whether or not an animal would be capable of farting/burping such a gas out of its mouth (noting the gas would have to travel out of its digestive system)…perhaps dragons had some special pipe from their bowel back up through the neck to the throat in order to allow for this?
Yeahhhhhh. Blowing vertically with mistimed ignition is an evolutionary dead end. At either end. And no way did dragons have to evolve a gas pipe. That’s just silly. They must have been ruminants with multiple stomachs. OR!!! They never breathed fire!!! They otherwise eructated it. But like a tail as firm as cedar don’t mean a tail, fire breathing don’t mean breathing! Comes uh eatin’ beans as we know, includin’ human, due to the fermentation of the oligosaccharide verbacose in the large bowel.
I generally agree with this Klax with the exception of the tail waving like a cedar tree. I don’t see any issue with this, its very plainly obvious that the writer is describing a very large tail. (that is self evident) However, for the purposes of the discussion, i wonder what sorts of biological “parts” and animal capable of fulfilling the medieval fire breathing creatures might look like? What sort of stuff on the inside would such a creature need in order to be capable of being called a flying, fire-breathing, dragon? (anyway this might be offtopic…perhaps better on a new thread?)
(please note, i am not making any relationship between this and scripture illustrations of the devil being called a dragon)