Fatherless Boys (and other refugees)

Sometimes reading the Bible (whether in its Hebrew or in its Greek of Egyptian Diaspora Jewish translation or in English) helps us to confront the othering we encounter or ourselves commit.

Why would a translation of Exodus 22, for example, need to specify boys without fathers and wives without men and men without a fatherland? In Joseph Bryant Rotherham’s “Emphasized Bible” we find this rendering:

Likewise in the “The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures” by the Jehovah’s Witness translators we find this:

Nonetheless in our own world we discover in our own privileged education those among us crying out for education like this:

and this:

which makes us more grateful for educated translators like Craig R. Smith and the Inclusive Bible, the first egalitarian translation; why not read the Hebrew or its Greek version more like this?