burnt-offering

The Hebrew olah (עֹלָה) originally means “that which goes up (in smoke).” English Bibles often translates it as “burnt-offering” or “whole burnt-offering,” focusing on the aspect of the complete burning of the offering.

The Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate Bibles translate it as holokautōma / holocautōsis (ὁλοκαύτωμα / ὁλοκαύτωσις) and holocaustum, respectively, meaning “wholly burnt.” While a form of this term is widely used in many Romance languages (Spanish: holocaustos, French: holocaustes, Italian: olocausti, Portuguese: holocaustos) and originally also in the Catholic tradition of English Bible translations, it is largely not used in English anymore today (the preface of the revised edition of the Catholic New American Bible of 2011: “There have been changes in vocabulary; for example, the term ‘holocaust’ is now normally reserved for the sacrilegious attempt to destroy the Jewish people by the Third Reich.”)

Since translation into Georgian was traditionally done on the basis of the Greek Septuagint, a transliteration of holokautōma was used as well, which was changed to a translation with the meaning of “burnt offering” when the Old Testament was retranslated in the 1980’s on the basis of the Hebrew text.

In the Koongo (Ki-manianga) translation by the Alliance Biblique de la R.D. Congo (publ. in 2015) olah is translated as “kill and offer sacrifice.” (Source: Anicet Bassilua)

The English translation of Everett Fox uses offering-up (similarly, the German translation by Buber-Rosenzweig has Darhöhung and the French translation by Chouraqui montée).

See also offering (qorban).

Translation commentary on Ezekiel 40:38

There was a chamber with its door in the vestibule of the gate: Most translations assume that Ezekiel continues to describe the area around the inner north gatehouse here (so Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version). He refers to a chamber, that is, a room, “small building” (Contemporary English Version), or “annex” (Good News Translation), whose door was in the vestibule of the gate, that is, the door of the annex opened into the porch of the north gatehouse. Good News Translation helpfully specifies that this room was “In the outer courtyard.”

However, the renderings in Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation involve a couple of changes to the Hebrew text, which reads literally “And [there was, or, I saw] a room, and its door [was] beside the doorframes of the gatehouses.” The Hebrew makes perfectly good sense. While looking at the north gatehouse, Ezekiel saw a room in the outer courtyard, right next to the front of the gateway. The door of the room opened into the courtyard very close to the doorframes of the doorway that led into the porch of the gatehouse.

One unusual aspect of the Hebrew clause here is that it refers to the “gatehouses” in the plural, not just the north one. Although the plural word “gatehouses” does not fit well grammatically, it probably implies that all the gatehouses were the same, that is, each had a room attached to it; for example, New International Reader’s Version follows the Hebrew here by saying “A room with a doorway was by the porch of each inner gateway” (similarly New International Version, New American Standard Bible, Hebrew Old Testament Text Project). Another possible model is “[At the north gateway, I saw] a room [in the outer courtyard], right next to the doorframes of the gatehouse. There was a door into the room. There was a room like this beside each of the gateways.” If translators wish to follow the traditional reading, namely, that this room was only at the north gatehouse, they may simply omit the last sentence from the model.

Where the burnt offering was to be washed is the purpose of these rooms beside each of the inner gatehouses. They were the places where “they washed the carcasses of the animals to be burned whole as sacrifices” (Good News Translation), “where the meat for sacrifices was washed before being taken to the altar” (New Living Translation [1996]). After the priests killed the animals that were about to be sacrificed, they washed the bodies, especially the intestines and the back legs, to make sure that no excrement was on them that would make them ritually unclean. The burnt offering refers to burning the body of a bird or an animal whole, so that it was totally consumed by the fire (see Lev 1.3-17). Translators may use a general expression, such as “the sacrifice/meat that was burned completely to honor God.” Because it refers to all the burnt offerings, most languages will need to use a plural expression here, such as “the sacrifices/meat of the animals that were burned completely.”

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .