Still Waters Revisited

In my further discussions with my Choctaw instructor regarding the line in Psalms 23 about “still waters,” he reads that line as “the edge of the water”—oka ontulaka, with ontulaka meaning “the edge of something.” He also stated that he thought that Byington tried to translate directly from the Hebrew to Choctaw. There is a source (Holisso Anumpa Tosholi: English and Choctaw Definer) that shows how Byington did his translations with some samples. However, the samples show English to Choctaw, not Hebrew to Choctaw.

I did look at various translations of the Hebrew Psalms 23 (http://www.hebrewoldtestament.com/B19C023.htm), but I cannot find that particular wording anywhere. That line is variously translated as “still waters” (KJV, American Standard Version, Darby’s English Translation, Noah Webster Bible, and World English Bivle). It is translated as “quiet waters” in two versions (Bible in Basic English and Young’s Literal Translation) and as water of refreshment in Douay Rheims Bible, which translates that entire line this way: “He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment.”

My translation of the Choctaw makes the ka on the end of ontulaka as a grammatical particle indicating the location and the ontula as a participle meaning “stranded” (according to Byington dictionary). However, if my Choctaw instructor is correct, Byington’s translation significantly differs in meaning from the original, shifting the meaning from the imagery of the condition of the water to the location of where the person is being lead.

My Choctaw instructor reads that line to mean to “rest on the edge of water,” but that is problematic too as he and I discussed early 19^th century Choctaw notions of water, which included stories of water monsters, not to mention mosquitoes, snakes, and other unpleasant creatures that often live by water in the Southeastern part of the U.S.  It occurs to me that this line might have been more meaningful to a Choctaw of the early 1800’s if the line had been simply rendered as  “he leads me to water.”