Sycophants

I was reminded today that's it's been a while since I posted. What with the holidays and this wicked head cold that has hung on longer than any sickness should dream.

Today someone asked about how Ecclesiastes 7:7 is translated. For conversation's sake, the TNIV renders it:
"Extortion turns the wise into fools,
and a bribe corrupts the heart."
The question was why the NIV renders "extortion" so and why the NASB translates it "oppression." I know. Big literal vs. dynamic equivalence showdown in the offing! I called on my co-worker's expertise in Hebrew and my prowess in Greek to figure this one out. (Confidentially, "expertise" and "prowess" mean "ability to parse respective alphabet and look up words in a lexicon.") The result? Lexically, the Hebrew word means "oppression, extortion" and the Greek used in the Septuagint means "oppression, extortion, blackmail" among others. Hm. That's like saying, "The Hebrew word for 'dirt' here means 'dirt.' " Said co-worker helpfully pointed out that the rendering should more likely be "extortion" since it makes more sense with "bribe" as a parallelism in Hebrew poetry. NIV wins. Yay!

What I found immensely more interesting is the Greek word for "oppression, extortion" is the root word for the English "sycophant." Etymologically, it means "to show figs." Go fig. Legend has it that there were suckups who would rat out people who were illegally exporting figs from Athens. They presumably blackmailed or extorted the black marketers, but at the same time, they were sucking up to the authorities. Also, peripherally, the verb translated in TNIV "turn into a fool" and in NASB "make mad" can be transliterated "periphery." Etymologically, the verb means "to bear around," and I'm wondering if it's a picture of someone "running around like mad" or if it denotes a person who is on the edges of society because they're crazy.

Enough geekery for one sitting.