Passages Where the Reading Is Contested

Bellows numbers this stanza 77 and records that the manuscript order is 77, 78, 76, 80, 79, 81, while the standard Neckel and Kuhn numbering makes it Havamal 76. Even the address of a four-line verse about the death of cattle and kinsmen and the survival of a good name depends on which edition is cited.

Only the first two lines of this stanza on the coming of Ragnarok are quoted, because Bellows notes that lines 4 and 5 look like an interpolation and that editors arrange the seven lines in several different ways. The edition decides how much of the stanza can safely be cited.

Palmer numbers the verse 257 while the Kufan count makes it 256, and both are given. Beyond numbering, some classical jurists held that the statement that there is no compulsion in religion was abrogated by later verses on fighting, while others treat it as a settled principle.

Everything turns on one Hebrew word. Almah means a young woman of marriageable age and the word for virgin is bethulah, yet the Septuagint rendered almah as parthenos and Matthew quotes the Greek. The American Standard Version prints virgin in the text and maiden in its margin.

The word Word renders the Greek logos, which in Greek philosophy meant reason or ordering principle as much as speech, so translating it as Word is itself a decision. The last clause of verse 1 lacks the article in Greek, which some read as the Word was divine rather than was God, a reading most Greek grammarians reject.

The Gathas are the oldest and most difficult layer of the Avesta and every translation is heavily reconstructed; Mills prints the words he supplied in round brackets. Whether the two spirits are coeval or both derive from Ahura Mazda is the central dispute of Zoroastrian theology, and this verse is the evidence on both sides.

Tat tvam asi, one of the sentences later Vedanta calls the mahavakyas, is spoken by Uddalaka Aruni to his son. Sankara reads it as an identity of self and Brahman while Ramanuja reads it as a relation between them, and the whole Vedanta dispute follows from which reading is right.

Muller renders the third mark of existence as All forms are unreal, translating sabbe dhamma anatta. That is now generally regarded as wrong, since anatta means without self rather than unreal. The atlas flags a public-domain translation that states a doctrine the tradition does not hold.

The opening sentence of the Book of Formation is the source of the thirty-two paths of the Tree of Life. Westcott renders the three sepharim as Number, Writing and Speech, one reading of a threefold pun on the root s-p-r, and his loose version is the standard public-domain English text rather than a critical edition.

The Mul Mantar is the root statement of Sikh belief. Macauliffe himself notes in his apparatus that the True One is, was, and also shall be is a defensible alternative rendering of the last line, and his selection is not keyed to the standard ang numbering, so the reference names his edition.

The butterfly dream is reached through Legge, who romanises the author as Kwang Kau. The book is numbered but not versed, so the reference names the paragraph position rather than inventing a verse number, and the missing comma after enjoying itself is in the printed text.

The passage expands the two obscure verses of Genesis 6:1-4 into the myth of the fallen Watchers and is the source of most later Jewish and Christian demonology. Whether it counts as scripture at all is itself contested: 1 Enoch is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox churches and nowhere else.