There are some lines or phrases in the Bible that do not make sense to us on the surface. When we come across some of these seemingly random phrases, the issue may be that something was lost in translation. A good example of this is Amos 8:1-2:
This is what the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. And He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.”
Why did God give the prophet a vision of a basket of summer fruit, and then not mention it again? Did I miss something?
If we were reading Hebrew, not only would it make sense, it would be kind of funny. There is a play on words here, specifically, word sounds. The Hebrew word for fruit is pronounced like ka-yis, and the word for end is pronounced kes. The basket of summer fruit is no longer random. It was an object lesson to drive home the point: the end is near. This is something Amos would never forget. (By the way, the end does not refer to the end of the world, but to the breaking point in which Israel would be taken captive by the Assyrians)
In English we can teach people the pithy maxim “look before you leap,” but translated into Spanish the phrase becomes “mira antes de saltar.” It is not effective in Spanish because it loses the alliterated sound of the hard L. We have to remember that the Bible was not written in English, so some of the clever word plays are lost in translation. Don’t worry, though. None of this changes the truth of the gospel. Any person can read the Bible and come to the right conclusion about who we are and who Jesus is.
Sometimes we might have to put a little extra work into understanding the occasional random summer fruit, but it is always worth the effort.
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