I wanted to share this interesting comment from a new reader of the Transparent English Bible translation samples:

In reference the feeling that it will be awkward to read the TEB out loud: I am just enthralled at how beautiful the wording is and excited to read it aloud to the children especially! Talk about a fascinating story! It reminds me of a play being read. I can imagine someone like Mark Twain doing a reading with such life and beauty and meaning that you feel like you are there. It makes me stand up and move around and use body language as I read because I can visualize the whole scene. Believe me, my grandchildren are going to LOVE the bible now! Like the word soil-man, how much more explanatory can a word get? And boy, when God says, “To dust you will return because dust you were and dust you will return” it really causes you to see just exactly what he means, after- all, he is called soil-man! Thank you for ALL your work.

I hope this response can serve to reinforce what I wrote in my previous post on Reading the TEB Aloud.

We plan to release another segment of Genesis this weekend. Please continue to send in your comments and feedback. All are read carefully and saved.

We welcome feedback and input from readers. From the start of this Project, over a decade ago, we have greatly benefited from the views of hundreds of interested students of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, on every aspect of the translation.

If you do want to provide a comment or ask a question the method we are using is e-mail. You should send your message to:

originalbible@earthlink.net

We have disabled the “Comment” feature on the Web site itself because in our experience it is too difficult to properly monitor a public comment forum on the world-wide Web, particularly one dealing with religion. The range and volume of input one gets, both sincere and questionable in motive and agenda, can be overwhelming, so much so that I would have to spend large chunks of my time just going through and monitoring and responding to embedded comments on the Web site. Only a small percentage of visitors to the Web site take have the time or inclination to work through vast lists of comments back and forth.

A much more effective way to handle questions and feedback is in the Blog itself. I find that people tend to ask many of the same, or related questions, and they can then be grouped together, sorted for relevance and priority, and then properly addressed. We will have a new category on the Blog called “Reader Response” in which I will begin to feature key questions and issues people are asking and raising. This also serves to put the issues right “up front” in terms of visibility and allows the hundreds of visitors to our site to easily follow the ongoing discussion in an organized and concentrated way.

All e-mail messages are read and most are sorted and archived, so you can be sure your response was noted, even if what you asked might not immediately be covered in the Blog. In some cases I will respond directly to e-mails from individuals asking something that can be dealt with quickly.

Let us known what you think of the first TEB Translation Sample…

James D. Tabor