“It was interesting to find how similar some of the Hebrew ways of expression are to Bari idiom. (…) [For instance], in Genesis 49:14 (‘Issachar is a strong(-boned) donkey’) Hebrew literally has ‘a bony donkey.’ In English this would convey the opposite meaning, as we associate ‘bony’ with ‘thin’; but when we came to translate this, Daniele [the language assistant] told me that Bari says ‘You are a man with bones,’ or ‘You have ribs,’ meaning that you are strong. So it seems that it is the bones and ribs in Bari which denote strength, as seems to be the case in Hebrew, rather than the muscles, as in English.” (Source: P. Guillebaud in The Bible Translator 1965, p. 189ff. )
The Samaritan Pentateuch reads this as “ass of sojourners” ( חמר גרים ) or more probably “castrated ass,” which is the meaning that the New English Bible (1961/1970) follows with “gelded ass.” (Source: Jan de Waard in The Bible Translator 1974, p. 107ff. )
The Hebrew term that is typically translated as “rest” in English is translated in Bari as “stand.” P. Guillebaud (in The Bible Translator 1965, p. 189ff. ) explains: “The normal word for ‘rest,’ yukan, which had been used originally had to be rejected, because, as [the language assistant] Daniele pointed out, it also means taking a rest or ‘breather,’ and so implies the resumption of work after a pause. As the point here is the cessation of work, we had to use a different term altogether, literally ‘God stood from work.’ (In Exod. 31:17 God is said to have ‘rested’ and to have ‘refreshed himself’ after the labours of creation.)”
In Orma it is translated as “God removed his hand.” George Payton explains: “We were translating Genesis, and we came to the verse in 2:2 where God ‘rested’ from the work of creating. Of course we did not want to communicate that God was tired from that work, as the English suggests. So I asked my translator, ‘When you finish working in your field preparing it before the rainy season and you have done all you can, there is nothing more you can do until it rains. What would you say that you have done in relation to the work? Finished? Stopped? Or something else?’ He said, ‘I would say that I removed my hand from that work, meaning it was finished and I am done with it.’ In 2:2 we used what he said and rendered the verse ‘On the 7th day God removed his hand from all the work that he had done.'”
The Hebrew that is typically translated as “all who went in at the gate of his city” in English was translated in Bari as “all who gather together at the gate of his city” because “if we had translated this literally we should have conveyed the opposite meaning, i.e. that it was the country people coming in to market from outside that was intended, instead of the people of the place. So we have used a word meaning ‘to gather together’ in place of ‘went in’, ‘those who gather together’ by implication being the inhabitants of the city.”
