Paragraph 16:25–28
16:25a–b
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them: The tenses of the verbs “pray,” “sing,” and “listen” indicate doing these things for some time, perhaps for an hour or as much as ten hours. Paul and Silas prayed and sang until the earthquake, which occurred About midnight. But it is not clear when they began praying and singing. Translate in a way that indicates that Paul and Silas prayed and sang for some time, and the prisoners listened for that time.
Some languages must explain this length of time in the translation. For example:
⌊That night⌋ about midnight Paul and Silas had been praying and singing hymns to God ⌊for some time⌋, and the other prisoners were listening to them
-or-
⌊That night⌋ about midnight Paul and Silas had been praying and singing hymns to God ⌊for a long time⌋, and the other prisoners were listening to them
praying: The word praying refers to speaking to God, either to praise Him, thank Him, or ask Him something. This term does not refer to ritualistic words or words of magic. Use the proper word or phrase in your language. See how you translated this word in 1:24 or 14:23.
Paul and Silas prayed aloud, because the prisoners heard them praying. In some languages a literal translation would wrongly indicate that Paul and Silas prayed silently or quietly. If this is true in your language, indicate that they prayed aloud. For example:
praying ⌊aloud⌋
singing hymns to God: The Greek word that the Berean Standard Bible translates as singing hymns refers to songs that praise someone. Paul and Silas sang songs that praised God. Another way to translate the Greek word is:
singing songs of praise to God
-or-
singing songs that praised God
to God: The prayers and songs were directed to God. Paul and Silas did not do this for the benefit of the prisoners but were happy that they were listening.
© 2001, 2021 by SIL International®
Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.