8:8 Then Noah 1 sent out a dove 2 to see if the waters had receded 3 from the surface of the ground.
11:5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people 4 had started 5 building.
41:41 “See here,” Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I place 6 you in authority over all the land of Egypt.” 7
1 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Noah) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
2 tn The Hebrew text adds “from him.” This has not been translated for stylistic reasons, because it is redundant in English.
3 tn The Hebrew verb קָלָל (qalal) normally means “to be light, to be slight”; it refers here to the waters receding.
4 tn Heb “the sons of man.” The phrase is intended in this polemic to portray the builders as mere mortals, not the lesser deities that the Babylonians claimed built the city.
5 tn The Hebrew text simply has בָּנוּ (banu), but since v. 8 says they left off building the city, an ingressive idea (“had started building”) should be understood here.
6 tn The translation assumes that the perfect verbal form is descriptive of a present action. Another option is to understand it as rhetorical, in which case Pharaoh describes a still future action as if it had already occurred in order to emphasize its certainty. In this case one could translate “I have placed” or “I will place.” The verb נָתַן (natan) is translated here as “to place in authority [over].”
7 sn Joseph became the grand vizier of the land of Egypt. See W. A. Ward, “The Egyptian Office of Joseph,” JSS 5 (1960): 144-50; and R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 129-31.