One More Reason For Diversity

Nehemiah 5-9

I tire of the seemingly ceaseless fights among some Biblical scholars over which translations are the most anointed or most liberal etc.. I have little room in my faith for their legalistic wrangling partly because each time I read through the Bible, God opens new verses to me that I did not see before, or seeing didn't understand, or even understanding didn't trust. I seriously doubt that a well-intentioned, suitably educated translator of the Word can do harm to the Word... for the Lord directs our ways even now.

I read through today's reading during a break at work today in a compact NIV version I have at work. In that version, Nehemiah 6:15 reads as follows:

So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days.

It is interesting that it took such a short time span for Nehemiah to rally the troops to repair the breaches in the wall, given how long it had been down and it makes one wonder why anyone else did not have the same success previously, but we can see that the Lord's hand was on Nehemiah and that it was the Lord who got it done, etc., but the verse isn't as readable or personal as it could be, partly because the "25th of Elul" means absolutely nothing to me.

In the New Living Translation, which I presently prefer for general reading, the verse is rendered slightly differently. It goes like this...

So on October 2 the wall was finished—just fifty-two days after we had begun.

Now that makes all the difference in the world to me, because October 2nd is my birthday. Logically I know that I share that same birthday with approximately 1/365th of the world's population, but emotionally it means something that the previous rendering left out. Vive la différence!