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Conies ???

I always thought they were rabbits

Precisely. That's how Coney Island got its name!
Incognitus

I think that Ps. 103 is the only place where conies/rabbits are mentioned.

Ak

Or perhaps harts [Jordanville Horologion] or hares [St. Tikhon's Horologion]? A very good example of diversity in translation.

Yes, there is definitely diversity in translation-hares, rabbits and conies are the same thing-hares and harts are not. So why is this? (St Tikhon's and Holy Trinity should be using the same recension of text). Is this a difference of recension of text, or a mistake? It makes it hard to learn the texts by heart, if every tranlsation is different, and even the same translation is inconsistant (or the same publisher reworks things or whatever).

The Melkites who are from Syria and know firsthand the ecosystem of the Levant say harts, as does the Douay-Rheims based on the Latin Vulgate of St Jerome. The KJV coming from Greek texts gave us the mighty bunnies. (conies)

I take the opinion of Arab Christians over the opinion of the heretical sceptered isle. The buck stops here, straight from the hart.

Attention Akemner: check Proverbs 30:26 (King James Version).
Incognitus

I'm sorry to be getting into this so late, but the critter referred to on Psalm 103 was never really identified in this thread. The English versions are almost all misleading, but then so are most other translations--and that for sufficient reason.

The beast in question is the hyrax, which in not at all either a mustelid ("badger" or "rock badger") or a lagomorph ("coney" or "hare"). It is a small relative of the elephant, and it lives in rocky mountainous terrain in Africa and parts of Asia only. Consequently the translators usually have had no real word for it; it simply was not known, so how could they have had the vocabulary?

"Coney" is the same as "rabbit," not quite the same as "hare"; in fact "rabbit" is a comparative neologism introduced because some were embarrassed at the sound of "coney"--it was pronounced to rhyme with "money" or "honey." ("Rooster" was invented for the same reason.) But the 16th-17th century English translators did not have "rabbit" (or "rooster") in their vocabularies. "Coney" was better than nothing; probably the translators, and certainly most of their readers, did not know there was such a thing as the hyrax.

The LXX used _choiro-gryllios_, which seems to have been invented by the Greeks (both halves mean 'pig') for the hyrax when they encountered it. Hebrew has a perfectly good word for it, _shaphan_.

"Hart" (Greek _elaphos_) occurs in the *first* half Ps. 103.18, and "hyrax" in the *second*; they are not alternative translations, and both belong there.

It remains a problem in English: 'coney' and 'hare' and 'badger' are all wrong (although Afrikaans and South African English _dassie_ for the critter is of course from the Dutch word for "badger"); but how many readers will know what a "hyrax" is?

Stephen

Some more on the zoology of Ps. 103:

As I mentioned yesterday, two animals are mentioned in verse 18, in the LXX the _elephas_ and the _choirogryllios_; the Hebrew words are _ya�el_ and _shaphan_. The latter is the hyrax (_Procavia syriaca_); what is the former? The Melkites may indeed say 'hart', but have they looked beyond the series of translations that underlies the present wording and asked the question: what animal is in fact intended here? 'Hart' in Hebrew would normally be _�ayyal_. That probably means the male of either the red deer (what in North America we would call an 'elk'), now quite extinct in Palestine but flourishing in the Biblical period. The LXX may have interpreted _y�l_ as the same as _�yl_--same three consonants, different order. But the _ya�el_ is pretty universally recognized as the ibex or wild goat (Capra ibex). _Tragos_ would perhaps have been more accurate than _elephas_, but I propose that _elephas_ could be used for almost wild animal with horns or antlers. 'Wild goat' will probably serve here, unless one wants to use _ibex_ and sent people to their dictionnaries (not necessarily a bad thing).

How should we translate _shaphan_ / _choirogryllios_? This is not easy. "Rock rabbit," "rock badger," "coney," "hare" are all misleading. I think there are only three good candidates, and not one of them is familiar to most English speakers. First, "hyrax", which is as close to an "official" English word as we have. Second, "dassie," which will be clear to most English speakers in Africa and nowhere else. Third, "daman" (the first syllable is pronounced like "dam" and the second has the reduced vowel); this is the usual word in most European languages, and exists in English but is not widely known. It comes from Arabic _daman_ in which the second 'a' is long (not reflected in the English pronunciation); this word means "sheep," but got into Western languages with the meaning "hyrax" because in Arabic there is an idiomatic term for "hyrax," _dama:n isra:�i:l_ 'sheep of Israel.' So we have a lot of possibilities, but they come down to words that are wrong or misleading and words that are unknown to most English speakers. The problem is not ultimately linguistic; the hyrax itself is unknown to most English speakers, so why should we expect them to know a word for it?

Stephen

Stephen, thanks for the Septuagint etymological study. While I don't disagree at all with your work, I am not sure you are going to easily convince the Jordanville brethren to change their text.

I suppose this is another reflection of the scriptural maxim that "true" and "exact" often don't always meet together in the same place. Certainly in the extolling of creation in Psalm 103 rabbits and hares have a place, and truthfully they were created, but that in this case is not the "exact" translation nor intended meaning.

"the rock for the hyrax"

Well, Stephen, you inspired me to do a little searching. I have had "game" dinners that featured both elk and red deer. Are they the same or different?
Here's a nice site for finding out.
http://www.suwanneeriverranch.com/reddeer.htm

Diak, good points for translation criteria.

They are the same species (Cervus elaphus) but different subspecies; there are about a dozen subspecies. The European Red Deer a bit smaller than the North American Elk, but that is likely to be the result of a longer history of hunting and habitat decline in Europe, as is the case with the Brown Bear (same species as the Grizzly and Kodiak bears).

"Elk" in Europe is Alces alces, which is the Moose of North America. The original English-speaking colonists were unfamiliar with the animal in Europe, as it exists only on the Continent, and did not know what to call it when they encountered it in North America, so they adopted "Moose" from one of the Algonquian languages, leaving "Elk" free to be applied to Cervus elaphus in the New World.

Did they taste the same?

Stephen

Wapiti I assume is strictly a Native American name? Never had red deer before, but having hunted and consumed elk, it is very tasty. Preferable to moose.

Very similar in taste. I think the big distinciton in taste derives from the grass diet. Grass-fed (versus corn-fed beef) is similar, and much healthier.

Grass-fed buffalo is quite different from grass-fed beef.

Deer are browsers, elk grazers, and while I do enjoy elk whitetails that feed on acorns, pecans, walnuts, etc. are especially delicious.