Fundie Fail of the Week*

[lunadelcorvo]

This is posted on Slacktivist, but I just HAD to share. Below is a screen cap from Left Behind II: Tribulation Force. This is one of the crappy movies based on the equally crappy, but wildly popular 'Left Behind' books by Tim LaHaye, all about the horrors of the apocalyptic nightmare those of us 'left behind' will endure after the 'righteous' are raptured up to heaven. In addition to comprising nearly a dozen novels which glory in violence and bloody chaos, they exhibit about as much literary quality and depth as Twilight. Apparently the movies follow the books quite closely, in all regards.



In this scene, we see a sign in Jerusalem, showing a message in English and Hebrew. Except, they didn't translate the message into Hebrew. They transliterated it. Well, sort of. They took the Hebrew letters to match the English sounds (dalet (ך) for 'd,' beth (ב) for 'b,' and so on) and strung them together letter for letter. This would be nonsense to any Hebrew reader under the best of circumstances; Hebrew phonetics don't work the same way. (Actually, they probably just tried to change it to a Hebrew font...) However, they also made one really, really, huge mistake (even bigger than just swapping out letters). Hebrew reads from right to left, not left to right. So it's not Hebrew, and it's backwards.

(*Seriously, maybe I should make this a weekly item. Goodness knows there's plenty of fodder out there....)

Comments

[girlspell.livejournal.com]

First thing I noticed. Right to left instead of left to right. LOL.. very funny. Hebrew is a left handed person's dream of a language to write in. Well Arabic too.

I understand Chinese and Japanese can be written anyway. Right, left, up, down, in circles, etc.

kooks for jebus

[cernowain.livejournal.com]

I started reading the Hebrew when I got to the line where you said it was tranliterated... and I thought, no it is not... but it is not Hebrew... then I went back and read that the letters were written left to right. And yup, that's what those geniuses did!

I think that since 9/11 most of those Left Behind books became outdated. I'm not saying apocalypticism and endtime hysteria is waining, only that they will have to have to reinvent the schema as they have done so many times before.

bb,

Cern