Still reading the Ronald Knox Bible. Much amused by this text and footnote, which I encountered in the Book of Jeremiah today:
"Idols cunningly plated as palm-trees, yet dumb as they, and men must carry them to and fro, for movement they have none!". (Jeremiah 10:5)
Knox's note: "Cunningly plated as palm-trees"; literally, "fashioned into the similitude of a palm-tree"; the plates of the metal in which the wooden core of the idol was sheathed may have suggested the figure of a palm-trunk. But some understand the Hebrew text as meaning "like a scare-crow in a garden of melons."
(Most modern translations seem to go with scarecrows, but with cucumbers instead of melons. Hebrew must be an interesting language.)
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