Continuing the Oddball series, here’s another one, 倚靠 {yi3-kao4}. The word seems harmless enough. Go for “rely/reliance/reliant” or “depend/dependence/dependent” and you won’t be wrong. But the Biblical equivalence for 倚靠 is not that straightforward.
Where 倚靠 appears in the Bible, the English version predominantly uses the word “trust“. In the example of Psa 22:4, “In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them.” or “我們的祖宗倚靠你；他們倚靠你，你便解救他們。” On any normal day, we wouldn’t immediately equate 倚靠 with trust, so what gives?
For that, we must first understand that we didn’t get the English Bible versions from the Chinese Bible, nor the other way around. Versions in both languages were derived through a long history of translation and textual studies from the Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek texts (plus a dash of Aramaic). Sometimes, the same original word follows divergent trajectories in different languages and lands at slightly varying interpretations.
The Chinese versions elect to translate several Hebrew and Greek words all as “倚靠”, such as בָּטַח, מִבְטָח, סָמַךְ ,מַשְׁעֵן, ἐπαναπαύομαι, ἐλπίζω, etc. On the other hand, English versions tend to find a unique word for each of those instances, such as trust, rely/reliance, depend, confidence, lean on, etc. In the grand scheme of things, there’s no wrong approach, as long as the overall meaning is conveyed faithfully. But that does leave the interpreters with the conundrum, “How do we interpret 倚靠”?
If you sense that the speaker is referring to a Bible verse, use “trust“. If the speaker is simply talking in general, then “rely” and “depend” work well. This rule of thumb works well with verbs. But when the speaker says “我們所以靠的“, then we use the clause “in whom we trust“. Lastly, people also commonly use it as a noun such as “我們的依靠“, in which case we can say our “trust“, “reliance“, or even “security“.
That should cover most of the cases. Of course, there are even odder cases where English uses prepositions such as “by” and “in” for 倚靠, most famously in Zec 4:6. Sometimes, you can’t even find a trace of equivalence in English when Chinese uses 倚靠 (Eze 24:25, 1 Tim 5:16, Dan 11:6). But really, there is no need to complicate interpretation that much if we can just trust in “trust”.