Eternal and Forever: Unending or Just a Very Long Time?

i'll have a look at the article, but i hope that's not what he means. — (olam) is the hebrew word for "world," as in — — "the whole world." (unlike it means the planet as a whole, not just a country or the physical land). a common concordance will show that olam is often translated as "forever." this is kind of an error -- with the people reading concordances at least. concordances provide a list of how specific words are rendered in english, NOT what they mean. often, to make a translation make any sense at all, a word is translated a little differently than its actualy meaning, idiomatically. you've just found one of the FEW cases of the kjv doing this.olam literally means, and only means "world." other meanings are idiomatic. but it appears in a two-word phrase that corresponds to the english phrase "for ever." the first word is rendered "for" and the second "ever" by most translations, and so — pops up a lot in a concordance as "ever" or "forever."the two word phrase is -—, which literally means "as far as the world." ie: as long as the world exists. while that doesn't neccessarily mean "forever" literally, it's apparently a common idiom in hebrew. it's even in the dictionary (copy and paste -— into the search box. i can't link to an aspx generated result). similarly, "to-world" —— and variants have the same meaning, idiomatically. so, for instance, in genesis 17 (an example) the lamed on the phrase —‘ — (l'briyt olam) modifies the whole phrase, briyt-olam. olam serves like an adjective but it's really part of the noun-phrase and the two function as a single word. so it means (as best as i can explain) "to be a convenant to the world." and thss, "for a covenant for ever." it's a little hard to explain, as it doesn't quite work in english.looking over the article, most of the hebrew points seem a little over-literal. like we really mean eternity when we tell someone we'll love them forever.Edited by arachnophilia, : typoe

---

well, that's relatively the same way we use forever, isn't it? we very rarely use it to mean eternity. it kind of depends on usage, context, who's saying it, and yes probably who's hearing it. always a good idea.

---

they are useful tools, just not always as dictionaries. it's not even an issue of "contrary to their literal meaning" but more of how that literal meaning gets rendered in another language. a lot of our idioms wouldn't make sense in other languages, just like if they wrote "to the world" in english we wouldn't understand the implications. i'm utterly unqualitifed to critique an argument about greek. ah, yes. sorry for not being more specific. the inhabitants as well. it's like when we say "the whole world" we don't just mean the physical ground, but the cultures therein as well. well, more literally, it's until the world ends. less literally -- and by far the more common usage in modern hebrew -- it means "forever." that's not to say, however, that this is what the original authors meant. modern hebrew is largely based off biblical hebrew, and the traditions of what certain things meant could concievably have affected the modern idioms. i'll look a bit later tonight (going out in a bit) and see if i can find an specific usage that demands it mean one or the other. well, yes and no. it does mean "without end" because that's how we read it. to origin of the word may have meant something else. i'm not sure. as i said, i know very, very little about greek. it might simply be that there is no comparable word in greek? it's bit of a hard phrase to translate. but, should the greek word specifically NOT mean eternity, and CANNOT mean eternity, AND there is another word that would have been better fit for eternity, it would be a rather strong indication that "ad-olam" and "l'olam" were not read as "forever." while a lot of hebrew grammar is pretty straightforward, there are some weird little exceptions. i posted on above, where olam was being used like an adjective as part of a noun phrase. that's actually a different idea. it might actually be closer to the greek "age." qedem is the word for "east" but is also used repeatedly to mean "ancient." in the strictest sense, i suppose we could say it's from the beginning of creation, or before. but implication, i think is like eternal but in reverse (when applied to god, anyways). i'll have to check...

---