Proverbs 25:4 and...

Last night I was reading The Bible to Jacqueline. We read one page per day, and we're halfway through now. (And just for the record, we previously read a different translation all the way through.) This time we're reading the Orthodox Study Bible--published by Thomas Nelson, New King James Version--which was a gift from one of my dearest friends...who is also quite a religious fellow, and of the Orthodox persuasion. It's an interesting edition of The Bible. For one thing, the commentary ranges from very helpful--historical context, connections to other Bible stories and characters, that sort of thing--to the absolutely absurd--I can't think of a specific example off the top of my head, but along the lines of, "It rained, and rain is a symbol of baptism" kind of thing...forcing associations which do not seem to have any validity whatsoever. For another thing, though, I am often struck by the way a phrase is rendered here and feel compelled to note it down, and when I do that I often find that the language of this translation is quite different from any of the other versions of the phrase that I find online. 

Last night, for instance, I was struck by this line from Proverbs:

"Beat drossy silver, 

And it will be made entirely clean."

It's 25:4 if you need that information, by the way.

One of the things that struck me was this it was very close to one of my all-time favorite lines of poetry--a line from "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

"...shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine...."

How important is that line to me? THIS important:

Oops. Sorry. Ahem. THIS important:

That was the wrist I tried to slice open with a razor blade on one of my Very Bad Nights following Divorce #2. Fortunately, I was very woozy from the overdose of drugs I had taken and did not do an effective cutting job, otherwise I'd not be writing these words, would I? (To be honest, I have no idea why the drug overdose didn't work. I did my research, and it should have been more than enough. As it was it just damaged my liver. Unless it DID work, and this is my afterlife. Hmmm. Not bad if it is...but I have to admit that I expected things to be a bit livelier.) At any rate, once I Got Better, I had the tattoo put overtop of the scars as I reminder. Because...

...essentially Hopkins is saying You Got To Keep On Keepin' On, Brother. And fringe benefit: IF you Keep On Keepin' On, you will become shiny. AKA Entirely Clean.

As the blade of the plough moves through the hard, stony soil...

                                                                                   ↑ this part of the blade is abraded, and thus becomes shiny. The sheer plod of pushing the plow through the sillion (soil) makes the blade of the plow shiny. And continuing to push one's self through the hard soil of this life makes one's soul shiny. 

I consider it to be one of the most positive lines in all of the poetry I've read.

So as I was thinking that, I had a look at some other translations of Proverbs 25:4. Thirty-eight other translations, to be exact. Most of them used words like "remove the dross" or "take away the dross." In fact, I only found one other translation that used the diction of the Orthodox Bible:

Brenton Septuagint Translation

"Beat the drossy silver, and it shall be made entirely pure."

Which makes me wonder which Bible Mr. Hopkins was alluding to. Hopkins lived from 1844 to 1889, so obviously Not the New King James translation of the Orthodox Bible. So I checked out this Brenton Septuagint Translation. Cue the Wikipedia:

"The Septuagint version of the Old Testament is a translation of the Septuagint by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, originally published by Samuel Bagster & Sons, London, in 1844, in English only." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Septuagint_version_of_the_Old_Testament_(Brenton)

So of course I'm now thinking, I Would Like To Get A Copy Of That. Which is possible...in some pretty nice editions...for $30 to $35. But then Second Thought: why would I need that if the reason I want it is because it has the language of the Orthodox version that I'm already reading?

So I stopped.

ADDENDUM: As usual, I continued to chew these words over after I'd hit the Publish button. It's kind of irritating...but it's just the way I'm built. I do the same thing with conversations. Chewing my cud. On this particular cud chew, I started wondering if my reference to a suicide attempt had come off as flippant or less than serious. That's not what I was intending. I was aiming for a "This was one of the shittiest moments of my life, but I survived it and I'm glad that I did." Because I know there are a lot of people who think about killing themselves, a lot of people who try it, and a lot of people who die this way. And I was hoping that telling this little bit of my story would say that if you stay away from that temptation and hang on, things will get better. This immense pain will recede and you'll be glad that you didn't die. I thought about just going back and editing my blog entry, but decided to do this instead.