Dear Editor,
Jordan Brown’s review of Bible Hub (en October 2022) is disappointing.
Using Bible Hub to check the NIV against the ESV is like picking up crumbs from the floor when faced with a sumptuous banquet. Bible Hub presents those with a minimal knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, or even a basic competence in English grammar with a powerful tool to check the English translations against the original languages.
Click on the ‘Interlin’ at the top of the page and an extremely useful interlinear version appears. Not only do you have a very literal translation under every word in the Hebrew or Greek text (with the original word transliterated into English characters for those who cannot read the original script) but the bottom line gives you the part of speech. This is gold dust for anyone who could never, with any confidence, tell whether a noun is accusative or dative, feminine or neuter, or what is the tense or mood of a verb or even whether it is singular or plural.
Thanks to this powerful tool, when I last read through the Psalms I was able to identify the many places where English translations render a Hebrew imperfect as a third person imperative rather than a future. Frequently, I found that the more literal translation transformed a weak expression of hope (‘may it…’ or ‘let them…’) following a psalmist’s inspired prayer into a confident assertion of what was expected in answer to that prayer.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Proud Bristol
