Honorary "rare" construct denoting God (“give”)

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Like a number of other East Asian languages, Japanese uses a complex system of honorifics, i.e. a system where a number of different levels of politeness are expressed in language via words, word forms or grammatical constructs. These can range from addressing someone or referring to someone with contempt (very informal) to expressing the highest level of reference (as used in addressing or referring to God) or any number of levels in-between.

One way Japanese shows different degree of politeness is through the usage of an honorific construction where the morpheme rare (られ) is affixed on the verb as shown here in the widely-used Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible of 2017. This is particularly done with verbs that have God as the agent to show a deep sense of reverence. Here, atae-rare-ru (与えられる) or “give” is used.

(Source: S. E. Doi, see also S. E. Doi in Journal of Translation, 18/2022, p. 37ff. )

Translation commentary on Joshua 22:4

The contents of the first sentence in this verse may be slightly reordered: “The LORD your God promised peace to your fellow Israelites. And now he has kept that promise.” As pointed out in the earlier chapters in this book, it may be more natural to use “the LORD our God” in place of the LORD your God, which might imply that he is not the Lord of all the tribes.

Given your fellow Israelites peace may be too abstract; if so, it is possible to translate “caused your fellow Israelites to live in peace.” For previous comments on the expression “give peace,” see 21.44. Many languages will have appropriate idiomatic expressions.

The second sentence of this verse, So go back home … gave you, is rather lengthy and should perhaps be divided into several smaller units. But before suggesting how this may be done, attention should be called to several other aspects of this sentence. Go back home translates “turn and go” (Revised Standard Version) of the Hebrew text, while the land which you claimed for your own translates a noun phrase in Hebrew (“the land of your possession”), in which the root meaning of the noun “possession” is “land taken by force,” the same meaning it obviously has here. Finally, it may not be advisable to repeat the LORD’s servant so soon as an identifier of Moses. The entire sentence may then be translated, “Moses gave you land on the east side of the Jordan River, and you have already claimed that land as your own. So you may now go back home to that land.”

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Newman, Barclay M. A Handbook on Joshua. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1983. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .