Bats, swallows, and birds …: Bats are not birds but flying mammals. In cultures that do not have bats, it may be necessary to transliterate the word and provide a footnote describing the mammal. Swallows are present in many parts of the world, but in the case where they are not known, we may combine them with and birds and say something like “Bats and many kinds of birds….”

The presence of cats (otherwise unknown in Scripture) along with the bats and swallows makes this verse difficult. Despite what is in almost all the versions, the Greek does not say that the bats, swallows, and other birds light, “perch,” or “sit” on the idols. It says they flutter over them. But it says cats do the same. And cats don’t fly. English translators have tried to find a verb appropriate for all the creatures mentioned, but they really haven’t succeeded, because bats do not perch any more than cats fly. The cats present a long and unsolved problem for scholars—this is an obvious place to search for textual solutions, but there are none that are convincing. So it is left to the translator to deal with the cats. Maybe the Greek verb rendered light is used to refer to a kind of two-dimensional fluttering, the kind of quick back-and-forth movements cats make when trying to catch insects. Or maybe it is three-dimensional; the cats go climbing up on the idol to catch the birds. It is not out of the question, given verse 21, that the reference is to the creatures defecating on the idols, but this is really guesswork. We can only offer the following as a practical suggestion for translators: have the flying creatures “flutter” and supply a different verb for the cats; for example, “Bats, swallows, and other birds go fluttering about their heads and bodies—even cats go scampering about [or, over] them.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Shorter Books of the Deuterocanon. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2006. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.