sackcloth

The Hebrew or Greek which are translated into English as “sackcloth” are rendered into Chamula Tzotzil as “sad-heart clothes.” (Source: Robert Bascom)

Pohnpeian and Chuukese translate it as “clothing-of sadness,” Eastern Highland Otomi uses “clothing that hurts,” Central Mazahua “that which is scratchy,” and Tae’ and Zarma “rags.” (Source: Reiling / Swellengrebel)

“In Turkana, a woman removes her normal everyday skin clothes and ornaments and wears rather poor skins during the time of mourning. The whole custom is known as ngiboro. It is very difficult to translate putting on sackcloth because even material like sacking is unfamiliar. The Haya, on the other hand, have a mourning cloth made out of the bark of a tree; and the use of this cloth is similar to the Jewish use of sackcloth. It was found that in both the Turkana and Ruhaya common language translations, their traditional mourning ceremonies were used.” (Source: Rachel Konyoro in The Bible Translator 1985, p. 221ff. )

Click or tap here to see a short video clip showing what a sackcloth looked like in biblical times (source: Bible Lands 2012)

See also mourning clothes and you have loosed my sackcloth.

clothes

The Hebrew and Greek that is translated with “clothes” or similar in English is translated in Enlhet as “crawling-in-stuff” (source: Jacob Loewen in The Bible Translator 1971, p. 169ff. ) and in Noongar as bwoka or “Kangaroo skin” (source: Warda-Kwabba Luke-Ang).

Translation commentary on Leviticus 11:32

The first part of this verse may have to be restructured so that it is more natural in the receptor language. One way to do this may be to follow Good News Translation. Another possibility is to say “If any of them dies and falls on anything…” or “If, after having died, they fall….” Presumably death occurs before the fall and is not caused by it.

An article of …: or “any object” (New Jerusalem Bible), or “anything” (New English Bible). In some languages it may be necessary to say “a thing made of….”

Of the four kinds of material, wood and skin are probably easier to translate, although wood may be the same as the word for “tree,” and skin may have to be specified as “animal skin” to distinguish it from human skin or the bark of a tree. The word for “cloth” refers to something worn as a garment or used to cover an object. In the receptor language it may be a borrowed term or a relatively recently coined word. The fourth term is the same one that is used for “sackcloth” in other contexts. Here it refers to a coarse material made of goat or camel hair, or of flax, hemp, or cotton. It is distinguished from ordinary cloth by its coarseness and its use as a kind of sack. So one may have to say simply “coarse cloth” or “cloth used for sacks.”

Put into water: in this context the verb probably refers to the washing of the object, but it must be remembered that ritual rather than physical cleanness is of primary importance. The Good News Translation rendering “dipped in water” (also New Jerusalem Bible) is more precise than Revised Standard Version put …, which seems to imply that the object remains in the water. In some languages it may be better to translate “washed” (Knox and Bible en français courant) or “immersed” (New Jerusalem Bible).

Quoted with permission from Péter-Contesse, René and Ellington, John. A Handbook on Leviticus. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1990. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .