Barry:

A few simple questions about your reading, if I may. Why then does the following explanation limit a man's life to 120 years? Does that not reinforce the point about transience? How does flesh equal earthly? Is that not the same kind of move you complain about in a dynamic equvalence?

Your comparison of noun versus adjective reflects English not Hebrew, I think. Does a rendering like mortal make an English concordance work harder? Not if it is done right and checked against the original Hebrew word. Otherwise you need to insist that an English word always get the same gloss and we all know that is liguistucally fallacious. The translation I choose only forecloses options if (1) a person does ntocheck for other options and (2) marginal options are not noted (And the NET, for example, does give the alternate gloss, thus no forclosure of the option).

Nothing you have said to me in these posts seems to show definitively the benefits of only working with formal equvalence {In fact, the claim to preclude an interpretation works both ways, IF one chooses only to work in one way- that is, only in one of either way} What I am sensing is an insistence that only that option is best (Sorry to be so frank, but if you look at the point of my original post; it was on the value of working with both kinds of renderings, for reasons I think our exchange in our various posts shows).