Nancy and I are reading through Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the New Testament, and yesterday we came to Luke 21. This is the place where the disciples were gawking at the Temple, and Lattimore says that the Temple was done up with “fine stones and dedications.” That made me wonder what the word underneath “dedications” was, so I went and looked it up. As it turns out, the word there is anathema, which we are most familiar with as referring to the rejected subject of church discipline.
In Hebrew, the word for dedicated can also mean cursed, and it appears that this double categorization has been transferred over to the Greek.
Robert Alter has a new translation out of the history books/former prophets, from Joshua to Kings. So, it’s now possible to read all of the narrative sequence from Genesis to Kings in his translation.
(He hasn’t done the Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah sequence nor the independent narratives like Jonah, Esther, Ruth.)
Interesting observation. To add to that, I particularly favor looking at the preceding story of the Widow’s Mites in light of the predicted destruction of the Temple. Jesus clearly doesn’t praise the poor woman for the putting in all of her money. Rather, he offers a visual demonstration of what he had just explicitly condemned, the religious leaders who “devour widows’ houses” (Lk. 20:47). Many seem to forget that the Temple that would be destroyed was built with “gifts dedicated to God,” those very gifts which both the rich and poor put into the temple treasury (21:1). So was Christ… Read more »