“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Note the rhythm, contrasts, poetic license starting with “It” when the author has not yet established which time frame “it” was. All of these rhetorical devices (and more) are in the toolbox of good authors.

I haven’t read all of Dickens’ works, so I’m sure I can’t speak about them as well as you can.

Thanks for your comment.

Could the copyright issues prevent the ESV from translating certain verses the way they want to for fear of being accused of having words sound too close to the way the NRSV or some other translation and thus be in violation of the copyright laws?

Well, copyright issues are way out of my area of training which is Bible translation and translation checking. But I would think that the issue you have raised would be at least a theoretical possibility. In practical terms, the ESV team had such a different ideological approach to translation of the Bible from the NRSV or NIV/TNIV, that I don’t think there would have been much danger of their translation being so similar that there would be a risk of copyright infringement. The ESV really is just a very minor revision of the RSV (but a relative major revision theologically). The NRSV is a much more extensive revision of the RSV. And the NASB, which is probably the closest to the ESV in terms of translation philosophy, was a revision of the ASV of 1901, not the RSV, which was also a revision of the ASV of 1901. And, although the RSV and NASB used the same English base translation, their theological and textual decisions were different enough that the NASB does not read very closely to the RSV, either.

So, even though there are these relationships among these English versions, all of which are in the Tyndale-KJV tradition, there are significant enough differences in translation theory, theology, and desire to update obsolete language that there was little chance of copyright infringement problems for the ESV team. Now, if the ESV team had used the RSV as its base translation without the appropriate copyright and payment arrangement with the RSV copyright holder (National Council of Chuches), then there would definitely have been copyright infringement.

Re your two psalms crits here: face for nose is definitely wrong IMO in Psalm 10. It does not cohere with the later face in the same translation in verse 11 and it thus creates a false repeated word in a genre that uses root and word repetition as an intimate part of micro and macro structures. ‘Looking down his nose’ might be a starter for the verse 4.

Re the owl/cup of psalm 11:6 – this is too important a strange word to get short shrift. I rendered it ‘offering’ in this context – but it needs some shrewdness given the potential to consider it a Hebrew-Greek connection to the treasure in earthen _vessel_s