How did the Bible translate Biblical Hebrew into “the angel of the Lord / God”?
A. The Construct Relationship This question takes one into the grammatical study of the Hebrew noun. During the process of translation, translators take into account how a noun is related to a sentence. In this simplified presentation of Hebrew grammar, a noun has three possible cases, which is a syntactical form that indicates the sense of its relationship to the sentence: Nominative – a nominative noun is the subject of a verb (i.e. the Father loves Jesus). Genitive – a genitive noun is the object of a preposition (i.e. the angel of the Lord). Accusative – an accusative noun is one that is the direct object of a verb (i.e. the Father loves Jesus). Biblical Hebrew indicates the genitive function of a noun by using a grammatical method called a construct relationship, which is formed by stringing 2-4 nouns together. In the study of “the angel of the Lord,” the first noun is the construct noun, which may or may not have its form altered (a noun’s meaning may be altered slightly by how i
