# Hiram the whole structure showed to King Solomon



## Colin.

Hello Everyone,
I have had an English sentence translated into Hebrew by an online programme. I am not sure about the correctness of Hebrew letters!
If I was to paste the translation here, with the English sentence, could someone write the correct Hebrew letters with the pronunciation in English beneath the Hebrew letters, please? (Both underneath the actual Hebrew letters, and separately again, from L to R in English?)

Hiram the whole structure showed to King Solomon

.חירם את המבנה כולו הראו את המלך שלמה 


Thank you in advance for any assistance,

Regards,

Colin


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## amikama

Hi,

Shouldn't it be _Hiram __showed __the whole structure to King Solomon_?
In this case, I'd translate it as:
חירם הראה את המבנה כולו לשלמה המלך.


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## Egmont

This English sentence is an excerpt from a Masonic ritual. It is described there as a translation from Hebrew "on the obverse of the keystone." Wouldn't it be better to get the original Hebrew from which it came, rather than trying to translate a strangely phrased English sentence into something that can at best only come close, and probably won't even do that?


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## Colin.

Amikama,
Under 'normal' circumstances it should be. However in this instance it is supposed to be as I originally wrote it! - "Hiram the whole structure showed to King Solomon."
I do not know if the Hebrew language differs as does English. In English one would write 'shown' but here, it is written in English 'showed.'

Thank you for your help, so far!

Regards,

Colin.


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## Egmont

Colin. said:


> ...In English one would write 'shown' but here, it is written in English 'showed.' ...


Actually, this is one of the few parts of the sentence that is correct. "Showed" is the past tense, while "shown" is the past participle. We say, in correct, modern and colloquial English, "I showed" but "I have shown." "I shown" would be an error. Since there is no auxiliary verb here, no form of "to have," it should be "showed."

Again, since you have returned to this thread: can you not simply find the original Hebrew in its Masonic source? This seems like the game where one takes a sentence in one language, passes it through a tool such as Google's translation tool to put it into another language, then translates it back to see what the process produced. The result is often amusing, sometimes absurd.


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## Colin.

Egmont,
Thank you for your reply.
The Masonic original is in English and that is why I wished to know the Hebrew translation and how to pronounce it. If the original had been in Hebrew, I would not have needed to ask this question here!
Regards
Colin.


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## Egmont

Colin. said:


> Egmont,
> Thank you for your reply.
> The Masonic original is in English and that is why I wished to know the Hebrew translation and how to pronounce it. If the original had been in Hebrew, I would not have needed to ask this question here!
> Regards
> Colin.


The point is that the Masonic "original" describes itself, a few words before the part we're disucssing, as a translation from a Hebrew original. That's the original I was hoping you (or someone else) could find. Unless the people who wrote this installation ritual were lying about its existence, which I tend to doubt, it's out there somewhere. In its absence, we can translate the words into Hebrew that means the same thing, but we're guessing as to whether or not we got them right.

If that's what we have to do, *amikama* got the Hebrew as right as anyone can. You asked how it's pronounced. It would be, approximately, "Khi-RAM herr-AH et ha-miv-NEH kool-OH li-shlo-MO ha-MEH-lekh." If you say those syllables they way they'd be pronounced by a regular English speaker, you'll be close enough for any Hebrew speaker to understand you. (Each of the seven words in the phonetic transliteration goes with one of the Hebrew words; English L to R, Hebrew R to L.)


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## Colin.

Egmont,

That was exactly what I asked for , and I thank you very much for your efforts.
Might I ask one further favour, as the words that you wrote in English appear to be without punctuation, would the higher case letters represent where the accent is given to the word and/or the end of the word? (as in khi - RAM for Hiram?) In other words, could you separate the Hebrew words in some fashion so that I may be able to pronounce each word?

Thank you,
Regards
Colin


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## Egmont

The upper-case syllables are accented.

Spaces separate words.

The words correspond to:

Khi-RAM: Hiram
herr-AH: Showed
et: No English equivalent; indicates the direct object of a verb
ha-miv-NEH: The structure
kool-OH: In its entirety (i.e., all of it)
li-shlo-MO: To Solomon
ha-MEH-lekh: The king


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## Colin.

Egmont,

Your answer has completely sat¡sfied my needs!
I have absolutely everything that I required and I thank you most sincerely for your help.
I wish you, and also Amikama, all the best.
Should I ever need any further Hebrew assistance, I now know where to go!

Kind regards,

Colin


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## ks20495

In Modern Hebrew, the word order is usually subject-verb-object (SVO) -- like English.

But, Biblical (and very formal) Hebrew are more flexible. 

So, you could write:
חירם את המבנה הראה לשלמה


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## Egmont

ks20495 said:


> In Modern Hebrew, the word order is usually subject-verb-object (SVO) -- like English.
> 
> But, Biblical (and very formal) Hebrew are more flexible.
> 
> So, you could write:
> חירם את המבנה הראה לשלמה


Absolutely correct. When I wrote that "*amikama* got the Hebrew as right as anyone can," I didn't mean to suggest that there are no alternatives. There are, including this one, which is just as good. However, absent any information about what the actual Hebrew original was, I don't think we can improve much on what *amikama* wrote, so I didn't go into this.

One benefit of the "et" word that indicates a direct object is that, much like cases in languages such as Latin and Russian, it identifies the direct object regardless of its position. That leads to the flexibility in word order that *ks20495* mentioned. This version could be translated literally as "Hiram the structure showed to Solomon." It's closer to the weird odd order of the English here, so it may be closer to the original Hebrew that the English is claimed to be based on - but we don't know.


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