3
translation is comparable to KJV: "The fining-pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold; so
let a man be to the mouth that praiseth him."
3
JB supplies a participle in the last clause to
explicate the function of the crucible: "A crucible for silver, a furnace for gold, a man for
testing the words of flatterers."
4
ABPS has a fairly good translation of this verse: "A refining
pot for silver, and a furnace for gold; So is a man to the mouth that praises him."
5
Departures from the simple translation:
All the other versions depart from this simple translation. They in effect change the
syntactic order of the nouns in the third clause by supplying or implying a passive verb.
6
Another way of saying it, is that the actor becomes the undergoer and vice versa. That is,
when they supply a verb to make explicit the function of a crucible, instead of following the
order as written, "A crucible tests gold, a furnace tests silver, and a man tests his praise,"
they all imply that "praise tests a man" by saying "a man is tested by his praise." Wycliffe
reads, "As siluer is preuyd in a wellyng place, and gold is preued in a furneys; so a man is
preued bi the mouth of preyseris."
7
Except for KJV, Darby, JB, and ABPS,
8
all the more than forty
9
English versions I
looked at supplied or implied a passive verb in the third clause in this way, suggesting that a
man is tested by his praise. Look again at the Hebrew three-part pattern, this time with a
header:
Object of testing
Testing agent
PRsR;k
-Al
PérVxAm
-w
bDhÎz
-Al
r...wk
-w
wølDlShAm yIp
-Vl
vyIa
In the first line, the testing agent is the crucible and the object of testing is silver. In the
second line, the testing agent is the furnace and the object of testing is gold. In the third line,
the testing agent is the man and the object of testing is the mouth of his praise. A man tests
his praise. In order to say that a man is tested by his praise, the Hebrew would have to read:
3
Unlike the KJV, which preserved the ambiguity, Darby made the proverb prescriptive and interpreted the pronominal
suffix as the objective genitive.
4
Like Darby, JB also interprets the genitive as objective. However, "flatterers" is not a good translation of
llhm
; the
concept of flattery in Proverbs is usually expressed with
qlj.
5
Again, the genitive is taken as objective.
6
The Geneva Bible of 1599 reads essentially the same as the KJV, but a footnote forces the passive interpretation, that a
man is known by his praise.
7
In the first two clauses, the nominal elements are inverted, and thus the implied verb is passive: instead of "A crucible for
silver" he translates "Silver is proved in a crucible." The third clause is also given a passive verb, but the order of the
nominal elements is not reversed, so he is not treating the third clause the same as he treated the first two.
8
And the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible, mentioned in the footnote above.
9
I looked at a total of 48 English versions. See the list of abbreviations and copyrights. LBLA, RVR60, and Luther are
similar to the majority of English Bibles. Many of the citations of Scripture versions in this paper are dependent on
Accordance 6.8, from OakTree Software, Inc. Some others were found on the internet, e.g., www.studylight.org and
bible.gospelcom.net.