by Mark D. Taylor, NLT Bible Translation Committee

The Greek word diathēkē (pronounced dee-ah-THAY-kay, with a soft TH, as in “thaw”) appears thirty-three times in the New Testament. In English translations, it is usually rendered as “covenant,” even though that word is not used much in everyday speech. But “covenant” is an extremely important word in biblical theology, so English translations, including the NLT, generally retain it.

When Jesus instituted the new covenant at the Last Supper, the Gospel writers used the word diathēkē:

After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant (diathēkē) between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.” (Luke 22:20)

But what did Jesus mean by saying that he was instituting a new covenant? For context, we have to go back to the covenants of the Old Testament. The Hebrew text uses the word berith (typically translated “covenant”) to describe the nature and terms of God’s relationship with his people. God established multiple covenants in the Old Testament. We see the first covenant in the story of Noah:

I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth. (Genesis 9:13)

God later established a covenant with Abram (Abraham):

So the Lord made a covenant with Abram that day and said, “I have given this land to your descendants, all the way from the border of Egypt to the great Euphrates River.” (Genesis 15:18)

This covenant with Abraham (and his descendants) forms the basis for God’s intervention on behalf of his people in the Exodus:

God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Exodus 2:24)

Following the Exodus, God established another covenant with his people through Moses:

Then Moses took the blood from the basins and splattered it over the people, declaring, “Look, this blood confirms the covenant the Lord has made with you in giving you these instructions” (Exodus 24:8).

Finally, God established a covenant with David, promising that his descendants would reign forever:

But the Lord did not want to destroy David’s dynasty, for he had made a covenant with David and promised that his descendants would continue to rule. (2 Chronicles 21:7; see 2 Samuel 7:1-17)

Throughout the Old Testament the term berith (“covenant”) is used to describe the relationship between God and the people of Israel. As the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the translators employed the Greek term diathēkē, which can refer to an agreement, a will, or a testament, to render berith. So diathēkē was a familiar term to the Jewish people of Jesus’ day. With this background, Jesus indicated that his death (his blood) would institute a new relationship with his people. This notion is explicated in depth in the letter to the Hebrews, for example, in Hebrews 9:15:

That is why he [Christ] is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant.

We are very familiar with the term testament (another possible rendering of diathēkē) because we refer to the two parts of the Bible as the Old Testament and the New Testament (though they could also be called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant). The King James Version uses the very term “new testament” in Jesus’ words at the Last Supper:

Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament [diathēkē] in my blood, which is shed for you. (Luke 22:20)

The NLT translators have opted to use the term covenant in line with the familiarity of the Old Testament covenants and its importance as a theological term.

May we be people who fully enter into a covenant relationship with God by accepting Jesus’ gift of an abundant life, which he freely offers to us.

by Mark D. Taylor, NLT Bible Translation Committee

The New Testament’s use of the Greek word sarx is both straightforward and complicated. The NLT uses a variety of words to translate sarx. In this article, these different English translations of sarx are marked with yellow highlights for clarity.

The literal meaning of sarx is simply “flesh,” as in the outer layer of the human body. So we read in Hebrews 2:14, “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.” Or in Revelation 17:16: “The scarlet beast and his ten horns all hate the prostitute. They will strip her naked, eat her flesh, and burn her remains with fire.”

In a similar sense, sarx can also represent the physical body as a whole. Jesus says to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

Paul makes reference to his present, temporary physical body—in implied contrast to something more permanent—when he writes, “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Sarx can also represent humankind in general, as we see in Luke 3:6, where Luke is quoting Isaiah: “And then all people will see the salvation sent from God.”

It gets more complicated when sarx is used to refer to Jesus’ human existence on earth. In the passage where Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” he goes on to say:

51 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and this bread, which I will offer so the world may live, is my flesh.”
     52 Then the people began arguing with each other about what he meant. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they asked.
     53 So Jesus said again, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you cannot have eternal life within you. 54 But anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise that person at the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:51-56).

Throughout this passage the NLT renders sarx as “flesh.” Jesus is looking ahead to his death, which would be a sacrifice for humanity. Sarx here refers to his physical, earthly life as the true sustenance (“the living bread”) that people need for eternal life. It is essentially a synonym for the Greek term sōma, which means “body.” Sōma is the term used in connection to the Last Supper: “As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying. ‘Take this and eat it, for this is my body [sōma]’” (Matthew 26:26).

In Jesus’ teaching about divorce, we read, “This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one” (Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:7-8). In these two passages, most translations render sarx mia literally as “one flesh.” Here sarx is used in a metaphorical sense to show the absolute union of a married couple in their life together—physically, spiritually, and emotionally. So the NLT (both in these passages and in Genesis 2:24, which Jesus quotes here) renders the metaphor as “united into one.”

Paul uses sarx frequently in a different metaphorical sense. For example, he uses it to refer to our (sinful) human nature in contrast with our spiritual nature:

When we were controlled by our old nature,* sinful desires were at work within us, and the law aroused these evil desires that produced a harvest of sinful deeds, resulting in death (Romans 7:5).

7:5 Greek When we were in the flesh.

The footnote in the NLT is provided to clarify that the Greek text uses the word sarx (“flesh”), but Paul is using the term as a metaphor for our old nature.

In twenty-four instances where Paul uses sarx in this metaphorical sense, the NLT translates the term as “sinful nature.” Many translations (including KJV, NASB, NKJV, and ESV) render sarx as “flesh” in most or all of these passages. Interestingly, the 1984 edition of the NIV used “sinful nature,” but the 2011 edition uses the more traditional “flesh.” But occasionally, the NIV (2011) adds an explanatory footnote. For example, we find this footnote at Romans 8:3: “In contexts like this, the Greek word for flesh (sarx) refers to the sinful state of human beings, often presented as a power in opposition to the Spirit; also in verses 4-13.”

We see that sarx is used with a wide range of meanings in the New Testament. For that reason, the NLT uses a wide range of terms to translate it rather than simply translating it across the board as “flesh,” a term that in modern English usually refers to the outer layer of the human body. As with many other words that appear in Scripture, the NLT seeks to translate sarx in a way that makes its meaning immediately clear to today’s readers in whatever context it appears and with whatever meaning the ancient authors meant it to carry.

I’m sure you have places and things in your life that don’t require additional explanation for listeners who share common experiences, places, activities, etc. This was true in Bible times as well. When Jesus spoke to the crowds, some references he made were simply “understood” because they were part of the everyday lives and shared experiences of his audience. But for us, who aren’t Jews living in a Roman dominated world, what was common knowledge can easily get lost in the centuries of separation and cultural differences.

This is an area where meaning-based translations are extremely helpful. Meaning-based translation views and translates the words of the Bible text through the lenses of the Bible’s contexts—culture, politics, geography, literary genre, and other elements of common knowledge for the original hearers. Accounting for the ancient contexts in translation ensures that the translated text’s meaning isn’t as likely to be missed by readers today who aren’t experts in the Bible’s world. As one of our translators says, “We’re not just translating words, we’re translating worlds.”

We received a great question about a choice the NLT translation committee made when translating the story of the Good Samaritan.

Question: When I checked Luke 10:30 in the NLT, I saw that the victimized man was described as Jewish. I saw that the ESV described him as just “a man.” Interesting. So I went to my online parallel Bibles and found that all the versions except NLT describe him as “a man” or “a certain man.” Is there any particular reason why the NLT identifies him as Jewish?

Answer from Mark Norton, member of the NLT Bible translation: This is a good question, and it does involve contextual interpretation, not just a simple argument from the wording in the Greek text. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter if the beaten man is Jewish. And as he lay there by the road, it would have been hard to tell if he was or not. But there are some reasons to presume that Jesus (and his listeners) had in mind that the beaten man was Jewish, and this presumption does strengthen the force of the story a good deal, especially for a Jewish audience.

Jesus was telling his parable with a radical surprise in it, and that surprise was clearly racially loaded. His listeners would have assumed that a traveler on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho was almost certainly Jewish. Why? The Jerusalem-Jericho road was the primary route Jews used to travel between Judea and Galilee. The reasons for this were various—the route straight north from Jerusalem, though shorter, led through Samaria (where Jews weren’t welcomed and didn’t feel safe), and it was a rough, mountainous route. The alternate route (and the route most taken) went east from Jerusalem to Jericho, then north up the Jordan Valley. The road between Jerusalem to Jericho was fairly mountainous too and it did make the journey longer, but then the journey north to Galilee followed the Jordan River, which had a good water source the whole way and was relatively flat.

The number of Samaritans on the Jerusalem-Jericho road would have been few. If they wanted to go to Jericho for trade, they likely would have taken one of their own roads to the Jordan and traveled the Jordan Valley south to Jericho, avoiding Judea altogether. The Samaritan hero in the story would have been an exception to the rule.

The other reason for assuming the wounded man to be Jewish is that Jesus didn’t identify the race of any of the first characters in the story—until the Samaritan. Here is the radical surprise in Jesus’ definition of the term “neighbor.” The person who culturally and historically had every reason not to stop was the one who in the story stopped to help the wounded man. If the wounded man had been a Samaritan too, it would have undermined the truth that Jesus was teaching, and no one would have been surprised at the attitudes of the Levite and priest, who might easily ignore a wounded Samaritan.

The BTC scholar team (and other commentators support this) believed that identifying the wounded man as Jewish was supported by the historical, geographic, and literary context. When translating the meaning of a text with clarity from one language to another, translators are forced to weigh contextual concerns along with the grammatical. Clear translation doesn’t only involve simple grammatical equations. This is clearly the case here. After close review, the BTC scholars saw the best equivalent for the literal “a certain man” to be “a Jewish man.” It is what the original listeners would have heard Jesus saying as he told the story.

Nebuchadnezzar II was king of Babylon for 43 years—from 605 to 562 b.c. He is mentioned in many ancient Babylonian documents, and he played a pivotal role in the fall of the Kingdom of Judah. As described in 2 Kings 24:1—25:26, Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah three times. The first invasion was in 605 b.c., the first year of his reign. The second was in 597 b.c., in the eighth year of his reign. Finally, he invaded again in 588-586 b.c., when he destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of the Lord.

The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s impact on the Kingdom of Judah is told in five Old Testament books—2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. His actual name is found 91 times in the Hebrew (or Aramaic) text, but it is spelled two different ways—Nebuchadnezzar (with an “n”) and Nebuchadrezzar (with an “r”). The translators of the King James Version (KJV), Revised Standard Version (RSV), and New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) chose to follow the different Hebrew spellings as they transliterated the name into English. Most English translations, including the NLT, use the more common spelling—Nebuchadnezzar—throughout the text to allay potential confusion on the part of readers. The NLT also provides a textual note for each chapter in which the Hebrew spelling Nebuchadrezzar (with an “r”) is transliterated as Nebuchadnezzar (with an “n”).

This is just one example among many, many ways the NLT translators have worked to make the English text as clear as possible for our readers.