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What a great question. I have grown up with these words (including "trespasses," "debts," "sins, even "wrong things") not to mention a few non-English versions. I never really thought about the odd word choice in "trespasses."
Congratulations for illuminating the text and context without falling for one of my pulpit pet peeves: "What this word really means is ... ." As a linguist and an erstwhile translator, little rankles me more than someone with a few years' language training ignorantly attempting to overthrow centuries of research and scholarship. However, I love to hear the other readings, other uses, other contexts, other word choices in similar contexts, as you provided, to round out the nuance of the words in question.
By the way, the largest translation challenge I ever took on was decades ago. It was a translation of "The Jabberwocky" into Russian. "What this word really means is ... ."
It seems to me that the caller in this segment was still a little bit confused at the end of Martha and Grant's explanation. Perhaps it could have been a little clearer if Grant had started with his explanation that "trespass" can carry a general meaning of "crossing a (moral or ethical or other abstract) line."
To me, this same concept is carried in the words "transgress" and "transgression," both of which are comfortably understood as equivalents of "sin." The "off-target" arrow word is a nice partner to this one giving a complete picture of wrongful acts (traditionally, sins of commission) and failing at needful acts (traditionally, sins of omission).
I believe the translation of this phrase says a lot about the people translating it, and their views of sin and God. At the time of Tyndale's translation, the most popular metaphors for God were that of King and Lord. In England these are the titles of landed gentry, so naturally sin was associated with trespassing. With the rise of democracy and the middle class, God became associated with another authority figure: a banker who keeps our accounts written in his Big Book. So, the metaphor for sin became debts and debtors.
We have yet to come up with a translation that will fit the next phase of human development, partly because we haven't figured out what's important to us. We've become a pretty fractured society with no overarching theological metapahors.
I tend to like "wrongdoings" and "those who do wrong to us," but wrongdoings doesn't have the poetry of trespasses or the simplicity of debts.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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