THE NAMES OF GOD

This post celebrates Father's Day. We call God our Heavenly Father, but prophetic literature (the scriptures) has hundreds of names, titles, descriptions, characteristics and symbols for Deity. See my articles, The Names of God, and Los Nombres de Dios.

My wife and I served a six year mission in the Spanish branch in our stake from 2000 to 2006. During this time I translated my Names of God article into Spanish. Well, into Spanglish, actually. Así que si hay imprefecciones, son mías, y agradezco todas las sugerencias que me quieran enviar.

While I was translating the article, I made a lot of very interesting discoveries that I tried to include in the Spanish version. I'd be interested in your comments, both pro and con.

As an aside, you might be interested to know that the Quran contains 99 Names of God.

I have about twenty English translations and one Spanish translation of the Quran. The two that seem to be the best (and most impartial) are the Ali Quli Qara'i (2005) and the Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem (2005) translations. Warning: these are both fairly large PDF files. I think it would be worth everyone's while to read this great book.

The Foreword to the Pikthall (1930) translation says, "The Koran cannot be translated. .. Every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Koran, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. .. (English) can never take the place of the Koran in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so." Watch Abu Rumaysah's video series about translations of the Quran.

I wonder if some of the same things could be said about the insights you get reading The Book of Mormon in other languages.

I have the audio files for both the English and Spanish scriptures on my computer and I like to listen to both. Now I'm not going to get into an argument about the merits of reading versus listening except to say that both methods have their pros and cons.

The important thing is that you immerse yourself daily in the Book of Mormon, in whatever language, and by whatever method works for you.