Text:

After ōmosen ‘he swore’ Taylor and Kilpatrick add polla ‘much,’ which is omitted by all other editions of the Greek text.

Exegesis:

ōmosen (14.71) ‘swore,’ ‘vowed,’ ‘took an oath.’

heōs hēmisous ‘up to one-half,’ ‘as much as one-half.’

Translation:

Vowed means ‘swore an oath,’ a practice which in its so-called proper sense is more common in other cultures than in ours. In English to swear usually implies cursing and indiscriminate use of names of Deity. But in this passage one has an instance of a culturally common practice of making a promise while calling on God to witness and implying that failure to perform an oath would invoke divine sanctions. Such an action is describable in quite different ways, e.g. ‘God sees me, I tell the truth to you’ (Tzeltal), ‘he loaded himself down’ (Huichol), ‘to speak-stay,’ implying permanence of the utterance (Sayula Popoluca), and ‘to say what he could not take away’ (San Blas Kuna).

Half of my kingdom may be ‘half of the land I rule over’ (Sayula Popoluca) or ‘half of my land’ (Shipibo-Conibo).

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .