ABSTRACT
The purpose of text translations was to render clearly passages that seemed obscure to a community whose tongue had evolved - first to a new dialect, then to a new language and finally to a new language family, though in the land of Israel there is evidence that educated people spoke all three. Innovations too were often hidden in the translation, innovations sometimes great enough to call forth a new divine revelation for justification. That pattern is exemplary of many hermeneutical problems in scriptural religions: every significant translation problem also conceals an even more significant problem in changing cultural forms or religious ideas because so much can hinge on one verse of scripture. The rules and clues within the society differ, depending on whether possession or trance is expected of revelations and, alternatively, the decisions may be entirely due to social processes.
