and breathe...

The translation team is currently working through Numbers, and recently we arrived at 16:22, which in one English version says:

“But Moses and Aaron fell facedown and cried out, 'O God, God of the spirits of all mankind, will you be angry with the entire assembly when only one man sins?'”

Translated literally back into English, our Monkolé draft translation began the reported speech in this verse, “God, because of whom everything exists ...”

Now in Hebrew it actually says something like, “God, God of the spirits of all flesh”. “Spirit” here is a word for spirit, breath or wind, and “flesh” is a word which can apply to human beings and/or animals.

I felt that our translation was missing the point. Moses and Aaron are afraid that in His anger God will kill (even more of) the Israelites, and so they are reminding Him that these people only have life/breath in them because He gave it to them, and they are urging Him to think twice before taking it away again.

One of the problems was that in Monkolé the word for “lives” and “exists” are the same, though in the above example from our first draft translation it has to be “exists” since we are talking about “everything” (and not all things live). But we managed to get closer to the (I believe) intended meaning by changing our translation to “God, because of whom all living/breathing creatures live/exist”. It isn't quite the same as the English because this translation chose to understand “flesh” as meaning purely human beings. It would actually be very hard to do this in Monkolé while keeping the idea of “breath”/“life” so we have left it as all living/breathing beings.