Episode 105: A holy ellipsis

At some point in your early education, a teacher probably told you that sentence fragments were unacceptable. Your sentences needed to express complete thoughts and end with a period. And Bible translators try to do the same as they work with the original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. But verse 13 of Psalm 27 is notoriously difficult to translate, because it’s a fragment that trails off, leaving the psalmist’s thought incomplete. Should we try to complete the psalmist’s thought, or leave it open-ended? I believe there’s virtue in the latter…