Monday, March 31, 2008

Well, this is interesting ...

I'm not actively reading this book, but it's laying around - for appearances' sake probably - on my night-stand. Not that my bedroom is a high-traffic area, except with the front stairs still blocked off, the kids run through morning and night on their way to the back stairs. I'm not trying to impress the little ones with the books on my night-stand.

So, I picked the book up last night for the first time in several months, other than to move it to get at other books. And I started reading at Chapter 2, "The Temptations of Jesus." I muttered a quick rebuke, Probably should have read this for Lent and moved on. Within four pages, I stopped dead, hung up on a reference to Abraham, Mount Horeb and the sacrifice of a son.1

"It isn't Mount Horeb! It was only a three-day journey!"2 I blurted out to my drifting-off-to-sleep husband who frankly couldn't care a drip. I thought and thought and thought again of how I could be wrong. And I concluded that I wasn't wrong. It isn't Mount Horeb. The text is wrong.3

My point isn't about the error but that somebody like me who knows nothing can find an error in such a book in under five minutes. Drives me nuts. Well, if by some grace I continue reading in this book, don't think I'm doing it in the hopes of finding more errors. Very unsettling.


1 That's on page 29 for those of you following along at home.

2 Genesis 22:2,4

3 Folks are saying the translation is wrong, in the comments (search the page for "horeb"). I haven't any other reference but my English version. The suggestion offered to fix the text (substitute "Elijah" for "Abraham," based on 1 Kings 19:8) doesn't work perfectly, so if there is a phrase that fits, I haven't found it online yet.

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