© 1982 by the United Bible Societies

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form without the written permission of the United Bible Societies.

The text of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible used in this publication is copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission.

Quotations from Today’s English Version are used by permission of the copyright owner, the American Bible Society, © 1966, 1971, 1976.

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L.C. Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Clark, David J., 1937–

A translator’s handbook on the book of Micah.

(Helps for translators)

Bibliography:p.

ISBN 0-8267-0102-7.

1. Bible. O.T. Micah—Translating. I. Mundhenk, Norm, 1943–

II. Title. III. Series.

BS1595.2.C58 1982 224′.91077 82-8481.

ISBN 0-8267-0129-9 AACR2.

ABS-1990-200-2,200-CM-3-102709-(08567)

Introductory Information

Preface

This Translator’s Handbook on the Book of Micah is similar in format and purpose to other recent volumes in the United Bible Societies’ series of Helps for Translators.

The text is divided up according to the sections in Today’s English Version.

*[A modified format had been adopted for the electronic version of this handbook, which eliminates the citing of tev and rsv at the beginning of each section. However the user of this electronic media is expected to be able to refer to these versions along with the discussion presented here.]

At the beginning of each section, there follows a discussion of the structure of the section and its component paragraphs, together with its main themes.

The tev text is to be consulted as a running text to serve as the base for the comments on each verse or group of verses. The tev text used is that of the most recent American printing, which occasionally differs from both the 1976 American edition and the British editions. In the discussion of the text, quotations from tev are underlined and those from rsv or other versions are placed in quotation marks, or “double inverted commas.” rsv, as a fairly literal translation, gives in most cases a clear idea of the structure of the Hebrew original, while tev provides a model of how the meaning of the original can be expressed in modern English. Both translations are regularly referred to in the discussion of the individual verses.

An attempt has been made to keep technical terminology to a minimum. Whenever it has not seemed possible or desirable to avoid technical terms, these terms have been explained in a glossary which is found at the end of the Handbook.

One of the aims of the series of Translator’s Handbook is to deal with matters of importance ...