Despite all these glaring problems, if the context pointed strongly enough in this direction then a case might be made for ray, or in theory even hill. If we did not know what ??? meant, we could still make a pretty good guess from a context as strong as this. Simmons derails the verse with his fanciful misuse of the dictionary.
To deal with all the issues raised by the translation would take a book many times longer than the original
This is a relatively minor error for Simmons, because at least the three words in question go back to a single word (‘horn’). There are many places, like Ps 117:1, ‘Praise the Lord,’ where things get worse. Simmons’s double translation is ‘Shine with praise to Yahweh!’ A footnote claims that ‘the word for praise is taken from the word shine’. This is a basic fallacy http://hookupdate.net/local-hookup/los-angeles/, which falsely assumes that the Hebrew ??? = ‘shine’ must be the same word as ??? = ‘praise’, just because they look the same. It’s equivalent to translating ‘He bowed before the Queen’ as ‘He bent forward before the Queen like the front of a ship,’ because two unrelated words just happen to be spelled ‘bow’.
Finally, the translations of Syriac and Greek referred to in footnotes are often simply wrong. Two examples: (1) Simmons renders ‘word’ in Ps as ‘prophecies’, claiming that this is translated from the Septuagint. The Greek word in question ( ?????? ) means ‘word’, ‘teaching’ or ‘saying’; thrice in the Bible it means ‘oracle’. But in Psalm 119 it is a key term meaning ‘word’ or ‘promise’ – and this is how Simmons translates all 18 other cases in this psalm where the Septuagint has ?????? . It appears that he was just looking for an excuse to slip prophecy in, despite the fact that the Psalm celebrates God’s written word, not the spoken oracles he gave his prophets. (2) Simmons rejects the line ‘The fear of the Lord is clean’ (Ps 19:9) in favour of ‘Every one of the Lord’s commands are right, / Following them brings cheer’. His claim, ‘as translated from the Septuagint’, is false. The Greek reads, ‘The fear of the Lord is pure.’ One gets the impression that Simmons felt more comfortable with a response of cheer than fear in this verse, and simply made up an excuse to distort the text. I’m not saying this is what he did, but it is the unfortunate impression the text gives.
Simmons seems as uninterested in linguistic accuracy as he is in textual accuracy. He searches the dictionary, and sometimes apparently his imagination, for ways to insert new ideas that happen to align with his goals, regardless of their truthfulness. What results from this process may still technically count as a translation of the psalms, because there are many ways to translate, including impressionistic and reader-responsive translations. But it does not count as a faithful witness to the original text. There is no possible way in which a reader of this translation could ever know whether a given unit of meaning in TPT has an equivalent in the original. And this severing of meaningful connection to the words of the inspired original firmly excludes Simmons’s translation from the category of Scripture.
3. The Translation Itself
So rather than simply pick and choose from across the book, it seems fairer to look closely at a block of text, to prevent the ‘cherry-picking’ of translation issues. I shall therefore look at an excerpt from Psalm 18. Along the way I will also make reference to other psalms.
