Subject: I'm very sorry, but I find this hilarious.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-12-12 04:35:00 UTC
Really, I do. Mostly because it's a wee bit mistaken, and the mistakes are amusing me. This is not your fault at all, though--you don't have the background knowledge, which I shall now clarify...
Basically, yes, I'm from those three countries. However, um, America's actually the country I've spent the least amount of time in--I lived there for all of two years, right before moving to Canada. So I was born in Canada, lived in Israel for just under a decade, moved to America for two years, and have now been in Canada for approximately a decade. And I spent the last year in Israel, which was awesome.
On the other hand...the Bible thing isn't actually related to living in Israel. My encounters with Bible (using that as a simplifying term, since otherwise I'm going into Torah, Tanach, and half a dozen other things--at least if I say 'Bible', everyone knows what I mean...*refrains from going on about why a Bible is called a Bible*) when I lived there were more in the form of children's versions of some of the stories, until last year...okay, it's slightly connected. Most of the Bibles I saw last year were purely in Hebrew, except for the one I brought with me (it was recommended for the program I did) and the ones that the other girls from abroad brought with them.
Mostly, however, it's just that the Jewish Day Schools I've attended in Canada have taught any Bible--oh, blast it, Tanach--classes in Hebrew. All my textbooks for those classes were pure Hebrew; I didn't even own a purely English translation until it was required for a class I took in high school (at home we have it with the Hebrew and English side by side). So, you see, it's not that I've been living in Israel so long that an English Bible seems odd to me--it's that I didn't have a purely English edition at home until, oh, grade 10 or 11 (or maybe 9, I don't know), and that every Tanach class I ever took in school was taught in Hebrew and with a Hebrew text. So I'm just much more used to seeing only the Hebrew, or to seeing the Hebrew and the English side by side.
And that's why it was really weird for me to glance over at what that woman on the bus was reading and find that not only was it about Jesus--she was reading one of the gospels, I think--it was also completely in English. And I caught myself looking around for the Hebrew before realizing that while I'm pretty sure the original is in Aramaic or Greek or another language that isn't coming to mind right now, it certainly wouldn't be common practice to put it in. And I don't think I'd ever actually considered that before--I mean, you hear about people using the King James translation, or something, and I used to see Gideon bibles in hotel rooms sometimes, but...I don't think I had really properly considered it properly before.
And on that note, I really hope you don't mind getting long answers, because that happens rather a lot when people talk to me--especially if they get me talking about my own experiences or about something else that I really care about and/or know a lot about. So...yes. Hope this clears things up...and, uh, get used to long answers if you keep having conversations with me, I guess :)
~DF