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Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

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Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#41

Post by indigoabstract »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #34
indigoabstract wrote: post #18

I'm not sure how this is accomplished, but I like the "poetic" translation a lot more than the "optimal" one. Which reminds me, do you think it's possible that the stories in the Bible are actually mystic symbolism and "veiled truth" (like the sort of stories that you might get in a dream) and people have mistaken it for actual physical history (with which it's obviously incompatible)? The parables of Jesus come to m…

There are a great many views about this depending on who you talk to. In Christian circles, it’s essentially the infallibility vs inerrancy topic, with fundamentalist denominations leaning toward inerrancy (which is the view that original manuscripts have complete historical accuracy). Obviously, you have to take a strong “religion first” lens to everything about the world from there. But of course, there were ancien…

Yes, the main churches can only stick to the traditional interpretation. What else could they do? Anything else would be pretty much well, blasphemy.

But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit.

I really like how that sounds like, but of course, there are probably not many others who see it in that light. Luckily for me, these days they don't burn heretics any more (at least where I live :)).

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#42

Post by hatsix »

_justinfunk wrote: post #8
jqpabc123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine? There is nothing "divine" in the story to relate to. It is a collection of unscientific, erroneous myths and beliefs that were popular in the culture at the time it was written --- by men. The only reason any divinity can still be subscribed to it is that these basic facts have been somewhat obfuscated through translation. I truly appreciate the fact t…

I think you would actually find biblical scholarship really interesting. It's way more fascinating than you give it credit for.

Biblical Scholarship is a lot like kindergarten art scholarship... I can look at my kid's art and identify the changing themes, influences of substitutes, changing friend groups, and step functions introduced by art class... And all of those are real and intensely interesting to me... but a random stranger will take a glance and notice that it's clearly in crayon by someone obsessed with the idea of cat and unicorn hybrids...

What I'm saying is that just because I could spend untold hours analyzing kindergarten art projects and present it to the parents in the class who will also find it intensely interesting, cat-icorns aren't real... they're just my child's way of imagining what's beyond their perceptions.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#43

Post by singlow »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #35
singlow wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Peshitta is 300 years after the Septuagint and the verse you mention was written in Greek in a gospel, not the Hebrew Bible. I don't know how the translators of the Peshitta would have any special access to sayings of Jesus that predate the Gospels we have now. I don't know if there is any hard evidence that the Gospel authors had actual eye witness written sources in the language that Jesus spoke. So you hav…

The Peshitta was over a few centuries. Have you never seen the threads of a rope becoming undone? To the rich man covered in wealth, it would be chaos if they love their wealth more than they love God. My point is that it makes way more sense and yes it is symbolic, but a camel never made any sense to me and to a lot of people for that matter.

Correct, the Peshitta translations of the Gospels were done in the 5th century ce. They were not closer to the Hebrew of the original as you suggested. If you like it better that's fine but it's not inherently better because it was earlier or had better understanding of original languages.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#44

Post by russian_bot »

indigoabstract wrote: post #41
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a great many views about this depending on who you talk to. In Christian circles, it’s essentially the infallibility vs inerrancy topic, with fundamentalist denominations leaning toward inerrancy (which is the view that original manuscripts have complete historical accuracy). Obviously, you have to take a strong “religion first” lens to everything about the world from there. But of course, there were ancien…

Yes, the main churches can only stick to the traditional interpretation. What else could they do? Anything else would be pretty much well, blasphemy. But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck , unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, sa…

If you read the Bible, there is no way to come to that conclusion. The Bible takes itself incredibly seriously; so to say that

> The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit.

is to betray just a general lack of understanding of the text. Just because you're exposed to the stories doesn't mean you understand the stories; the truth of the stories; or it's real intended meaning. It takes really smart people a lot of time and a lot of effort to just begin understanding the breadth and depth of the Bible. It's deeply humbling to begin to unravel it and see the story for how it portrays itself. I would really encourage you to take one story from the Bible, for example, the garden of Eden and see how it traces itself throughout the entire scope of the Bible and the different forms and iconography that shows up just from that one story.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#45

Post by krapp »

epsteingpt wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

What is the "expanse"? Answer: The sky. The ancient people who wrote the bible thought the sky was a solid dome that separated "the water's above" (aka rain) from the water's below. God lived on the other side of this dome. This is confirmed later in Genesis with the Tower of Babel story. They tried to reach this dome by building a tower. And "god" was so offended by their ignorance and stupidity (which he perpetrate…

Not here to have a religious debate - though given HN, it may turn into one! Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence. The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it sh…

>How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

Simply, the "divine" isn't real. Nothing within the Bible points to any truly incomprehensible truth. The God of the Bible is not beyond understanding, he is cut from the same cloth as other sky-father deities of the time.

Everything within the Bible was limited to what the authors themselves could comprehend given their personal and cultural biases, because they are a product of human imagination and intellect.

When the writers said the world was created in seven days, they meant seven days. When they said that people tried to build a tower to heaven and God struck it down, and created different languages to confuse humans so they never tried that again, that's what they meant, and believed.

You could bring up the Trinity as an example of God's incomprehensible truth but the Trinity doesn't really exist in the Bible, it's an extra-biblical concept created by Christians as a philosophical compromise between rival factional ideologies and a desire to maintain a monotheistic religion given polytheistic elements. It is intentionally irrational but there is no deeper truth behind it. It's just accepted as a matter of faith.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#46

Post by HanClinto »

ubertaco wrote: post #11

The Bible is too well-known a text that is too represented in training datasets for this _not_ to be skewed towards poorly reproducing existing translations. Beyond that, >there are hallucinations and issues seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully…

Not to be too much of a devil's advocate (ha!), but I kindof think I _want_ it to have biblical translation data in the dataset. So long as it's not simply copying something like the KJV or ESV into the output, then this should be a good thing, right?

Because much of what it produces (especially in the "poetic" mode) does seem to be very much "off the beaten path" for a good number of renditions.

I don't think that the goal would be to have a dataset that is completely free from scholarship on the topic of Biblical translation, but rather to synthesize the rules and principles from the collected body of knowledge and apply it (with steering) to the entire Biblical text.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#47

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

russian_bot wrote: post #44
indigoabstract wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the main churches can only stick to the traditional interpretation. What else could they do? Anything else would be pretty much well, blasphemy. But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck , unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, sa…

If you read the Bible, there is no way to come to that conclusion. The Bible takes itself incredibly seriously; so to say that > The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit. is to betra…

You present the Bible as one text composed at one time, but I’ve never known anyone to take that view. The Bible can’t “take itself incredibly seriously” because it spans millennia in time, including at least a hundred years after Jesus. Hundreds of years after that is when “The Bible” as we know it today was even assembled from pieces during unification. Before that, early Christians had hundreds of religious texts and through a process of negotiable, brought them together under the Roman state. I’m sure if you read something like the infancy gospels which are not included in the Bible, you could probably also find similar themes.

Of course the stories remained culturally relevant through oral traditions and Jewish law. The common thread is culture and the stories of a people.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#48

Post by dave1010uk »

anonymous344 wrote: post #16
giancarlostoro wrote: post #14

I would be really interested in this done to the Peshitta Bible, which is roughly as old as the Septuagint. Peshitta is in Aramaic a sister language to Hebrew. Over the years I've found interesting insights about verses that make way less sense in Greek but in Aramaic they make drastically more sense. It seems that somehow the Greek translated from some other source where in Aramaic or Hebrew the word used could have…

[flagged]

Genesis is a theological narrative, which is very different to most things we read these days, especially as a software engineer.

1. The general consensus is that there were more people. This is assumed in Genesis and it (annoyingly!) doesn't bother to explain it, as the audience at the time already assumed it. Also, the authors weren't interested in all the logistics and technicalities that we are today.

2. Cities referenced in Genesis were likely fortified settlements, rather than like modern cities.

The idea that people in Africa could only build simple huts is a myth that came from the colonial era. Africa had large cities, architecture and metallurgy while parts of Europe were still tribal.

If you're keen to learn more, there are some good books that explain this much better than a comment can, such as "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth" by Fee & Stuart and "Genesis for Normal People" by Pete Enns. I haven't read it but "African Civilizations" by Graham Connah is probably the go-to book on how African cities and technologies were so much further ahead than traditional European/US narratives place them.

The best resource for these kinds of questions is probably "The Bible Project". They have a load of YouTube videos and podcasts that cover these kinds of questions.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#49

Post by epsteingpt »

yayitswei wrote: post #31

What's up with these? Genesis 1:13, Eve optimal Replace 'Then' with 'And' in optimal ('And the LORD God said') and poetic_daily to preserve narrative vav-consecutive connective consistently.

Thanks for noticing. The blog has more detail; these are first iterations and the verse and editorial notes sometimes slip in :-(

Side project, big book.

Those will get ironed out soon.

Re: Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

#50

Post by epsteingpt »

orasis wrote: post #12

Is this translation public domain?

For the moment, no. But it will be in the next few months.

There are lingering errors (hallucinations, notes) that need to be removed before it would be reasonable sharing and studying broadly.

The other commenter has pointed out novel copyright issues, not that it's likely we'd go to court over this.

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