Emphatic Duplication
For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly practice justice between a person and his neighbor, if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor follow other gods to your own ruin, then I will let you live in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever. Jeremiah 7:5-7 NASB
Truly – No underlining. No italics. No exclamation points. No bold face type. Just the voice of the prophet. How do you express his passionate plea without any of these later linguistic conventions? Simple: repetition.
“Truly amend” is simply the verb yāṭab repeated. heṭeb teṭibu. “Truly practice” is ‘aso’ ta’asu’,
the repetition of the verb ʿāśâ. yāṭab means “be good, be well, be pleasing,” so the repeated verb is “extra good, extra pleasing.” ʿāśâ means “to do, to accomplish,” so the repetition is something like “over accomplish, over do.” “Truly” is the translator’s attempt to catch the emphasis, but, of course, in English grammar “truly” is an adverb used to emphasize the seriousness of the action (the verb), so the translation misses the verbal repetition in Hebrew. It’s probably the best we can hope for in English, but it leaves something out. What does it leave out? Jeremiah’s voice. What we should hear is the wail of the prophet, the shout, the shriek, the groan, the cry of grief and pain. What we should hear is God’s anguish. Emotion, that’s what we miss. We recognize the seriousness of the plea. That’s accomplished by the English adverb. But what we don’t hear is the rhythm of the repetition, the double despair in God’s word. We miss the point because we think “truly” is about truth, not pain. Maybe we should twist the English so that we are forced to hear the real sound.
“For if you make goodly good your ways . . . if you doingly do justice . . .” Something odd that shocks us into deeper investigation. Even Robert Alter seems to miss the double grief here: “If you truly make your ways and your acts good, . .” That misses the second verbal repetition entirely, combining both terms with one “truly.”
Can we fix this? I don’t think so. There are some things that simply get lost in translation. Sometimes what is lost isn’t crucial. Sometimes it is. I think this is one of the latter cases, since what we lose is God’s agonizing over Israel’s unfaithfulness. What we lose is His impassioned plea for them to really do what they know He wants them to do. We need the vocal Jeremiah if we’re going to really hear these verses. So, I guess you will have to be the intonation, the plaintive wail, the heartbreaking sound as you read this aloud. And in the process maybe you’ll hear something that isn’t in the English attempts to capture a Hebrew emotion.
Just remember this. This isn’t the only time this happens. The Bible is really an audio book, not a written manuscript. Speak it.
Topical Index: heṭeb teṭibu, yāṭab, ‘aso’ ta’asu’, ʿāśâ, good, practice, truly, Jeremiah 7:5-7
