serve (Igede)

The Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek that is typically translated in English as “serve,” “minister,” “walk with,” or “service” is translated in Igede as myị ẹrụ or “agree with message (of the one you’re serving).” (source: Andy Warren-Rothlin)

See also serve.

swear, vow

The Hebrew and Greek that is translated as “swear (an oath)” or “vow” is translated as “God sees me, I tell the truth to you” (Tzeltal), “loading yourself down” (Huichol), “to speak-stay” (implying permanence of the utterance) (Sayula Popoluca), “to say what he could not take away” (San Blas Kuna), “because of the tight (i.e. “binding”) word which he had said to her face” (Guerrero Amuzgo), “strong promise” (North Alaskan Inupiatun) (source for all above: Bratcher / Nida), “eat an oath” (Nyamwezi — source: Pioneer Bible Translators, project-specific translation notes in Paratext), or sswa nak/”drink an oath” (Jju — source: McKinney 2018, p. 31).

In Bauzi “swear” can be translated in various ways. In Hebrews 6:13, for instance, it is translated with “bones break apart and decisively speak.” (“No bones are literally broken but by saying ‘break bones’ it is like people swear by someone else in this case it is in relation to a rotting corpse’ bones falling apart. If you ‘break bones’ so to speak when you make an utterance, it is a true utterance.”) In other passages, such as in Matthew 26:72, it’s translated with an expression that implies taking ashes (“if a person wants everyone to know that he is telling the truth about a matter, he reaches down into the fireplace, scoops up some ashes and throws them while saying ‘I was not the one who did that.'”). So in Matthew 26:72 the Bauzi text is: “. . . Peter took ashes and defended himself saying, ‘I don’t know that Nazareth person.'” (Source: David Briley)

See also swear (promise) and Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’, or ‘No, No’.

Translation commentary on Joshua 23:7

Associate (Revised Standard Version “be mixed with”) translates the Hebrew “go into,” which refers specifically to intermarriage (see verse 12). The danger in marrying Canaanites was that the Israelites would be led to worship their gods (see Bright).

In this verse, four different Hebrew verbs are used with reference to the worship of pagan gods: “to speak their names,” “to swear,”The Masoretic text has the hiphil (causative) form of the verb, “cause to swear” (so King James Version); the Syriac, Targum and Vulgate have the qal form, “to swear,” which is preferred by the other translations. “to serve,” and “to bow down.” The first verb in this series of four (“to speak their names”) may be taken as a reference to prayer. “To swear” by the name of a god means to use that god’s name in making promises. The last two verbs in the series carry essentially the same meaning and refer to the act of worship. One may then translate “Do not worship their gods. Do not pray to them, or use their names when you take an oath.”

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Newman, Barclay M. A Handbook on Joshua. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1983. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .