Article January 26, 1935 Issue

Bible Notes

"Charity" (I Cor. 13:1)—The word "charity," which in modern English is generally a synonym for "almsgiving," is used in this and the following verses to represent the Greek "agape," which means literally "love," and is thus translated by Moffatt, Goodspeed, Weymouth (5th edition), and others.

"Now we see through a glass, darkly" (I Cor. 13:12)—The Greek term "esoptron," here rendered "glass," means literally "mirror," and it may be added that "the mirrors of the ancients were made, not of glass, but of steel" (Thayer: Greek Lexicon, p. 253). Moreover, the Greek preposition "dia" is evidently not employed here in its literal sense of "through," since one cannot look "through" a mirror, but rather in the wider meaning which it, like the English "through," sometimes bears—namely, "by means of, with the help of" (cf. Thayer: op. cit., p. 133). The phrase rendered "darkly" is in Greek "en 'ainigmati'" (the root of our modern "enigma"). Weymouth has: "At present we see things as in a mirror, obscurely;" and Moffatt: "At present we only see the baffling reflections in a mirror."

"With lovingkindness have I drawn thee" (Jer. 31:3)—The verb rendered "draw" also means to "draw out" and so to "prolong or continue"; and the word for "with" is not in the original—consequently, an alternative rendering would be: "I have prolonged kindness to thee" (Brown, Driver, Briggs: Hebrew Lexicon, p. 605). So the margin of the Revised Version reads: "I have continued," and the margin of our Common Version: "I have extended lovingkindness unto thee."

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