richardf8 | Another mystery.

I am looking through Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, rendered from German into English by A.E. Cowley. When Gesenius seeks to explain the meaning of a Hebrew word, he will often do so by rendering it into Greek. Our translator leaves this Greek intact, and this poor Jewish boy, who understood the Hebrew perfectly well, is left stumbling over the Greek, as I, quite frankly, have no desire nor reason to learn it.

This I can almost understand. Someone taking a Degree at Oxford can reasonably be expected to have learned Greek to the degree that Gesenius uses it.

Now comes the REAL puzzler.

I also have the Metsudah Chumash with Rashi. Five lovely volumes beautifully bound, with the Rashi present in normal Hebrew letters, a linear translation by the side. Rashi, in the course of his commentary, will occasionally render a word into Old French (written with Hebrew characters), the vernacular language of his community. Rabbi Avrohom Davis, the translator, whose target audience is mostly English/Yiddish/Hebrew speaking yeshiva buchers leaves the Old French intact, with no reasonable expectation that his audience will understand it. Why not simply render the Old French, which was Rashi's vernacular, into contemporary English which is Davis' vernacular?