SIL Translator’s Notes on Acts 20:6

20:6a

And after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we sailed from Philippi: The Greek conjunction that the Berean Standard Bible translates as And here indicates contrast. The seven men went ahead but Paul and the others waited in Philippi until the Feast of Unleavened Bread ended. This is why many English versions translate this word as “But.”

the Feast of Unleavened Bread: This phrase in Greek is literally “the days of the unleavened bread.” It refers to the Jewish feast where they ate unleavened bread. So the Berean Standard Bible translates the words “the days of” as the Feast of.

Over a thousand years before Jesus was born, God freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt. On the night before, he told them to bake unleavened bread so they could leave quickly. The purpose of the feast was to help the Jews remember this and thank God for what he had done for them.

Some possible ways to translate this are:

Feast of bread made without leaven/yeast
-or-
Feast of bread made without raising/expanding agent/stuff
-or-
Feast when people eat bread with no leaven/yeast

See how you translated this phrase in 12:3.

Unleavened Bread: This was a thin bread that people cooked without yeast or leaven. Yeast and leaven cause dough to expand.

If people in your area are not familiar with making dough rise, here are other ways to translate this phrase:

Use a word or phrase that describes the leaven. For example:

bread without the thing that spreads to make bread rise/swell
-or-
bread without the thing that makes it expand

Use the word or phrase from the national language and indicate its meaning. For example:

bread without leaven/yeast that makes bread swell

Use the common language phrase. If people in your language are not familiar with this phrase, explain it in a footnote. An example footnote is:

Unleavened bread has no leaven. Leaven is something that spreads in flour dough and causes it to expand. After the dough expands, it is baked.

Philippi: See how you spelled this name in 16:12.

20:6b

five days later we rejoined them in Troas: This clause indicates that Paul, Luke, and probably other believers boarded a ship in Philippi. The ship took five days to cross the Aegean Sea and arrive at Troas. Other ways to translate this clause are:

boarded a ship,⌋ ⌊crossed the sea,⌋ ⌊landed at⌋ Troas five days later, and joined the others there

20:6c

where we stayed seven days: This clause tells the reader more about Troas. In some languages a literal translation would wrongly indicate that there are other places named Troas, and Paul, Luke, and the others only stayed in this one. If that is true in your language, translate this information in a way that tells more about what Paul did in Troas. One way to do that is to start a new sentence here. For example:

We stayed there seven days.

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Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.

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