The New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible is by far the worst translation on almost any metric you can think of, except maybe understanding how evangelical Christians read the Bible in the 90s and 2000s. The NIV has so many inexcusable translations that reinforce a theological worldview that matched the conversation on atonement and justification that was happening in the 90s and 2000s. There's a g…
It's been eye opening to read books from the Old Testament in the word-by-word translation of ancient Hebrew. A lot of the semantic accretion over the millennia comes off and you get a more raw iron age tribal wisdom glowing through. One example is that often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations. It happens that words interpreted as names of people are also abstract noun…
That in itself would still make a lot of sense to me though; as far as I know, property and power was mainly transfered through the lines of first born males (so a patriarchy, in the literal sense). If that, social status and so on hinges on who your father, grandfather etc. was, then I think it makes sense for geneology trees to be something important enough to write down, especially in literature that was partially written to capture/produce a peoples cultural identity (i.e. parts of the creation story where written while the jews where forcibly integrated into the babylonian empire, and struggling to keep their own cultural identity. That's another good "use case" for genealogy, I would say.)