Re feminine pronoun in Genesis 3:15: Just before this thread we had a RC insisting that was correct. I have the Douay and it is quite similar to the KJV, except in some places like Lk. 24:47. But it looks like the American RCs are stuck with the NAB - though after i was born again and really began to get into the Bible, i thought the NAB is much better than the “Living Bible” and the GNB which i began with (went to the store and the first had a nice picture, but what did i know?)
This is from book I am writing:
...any affinity that Eve may have had with the serpent is destroyed utterly and enmity takes its place. The enmity will extend through generations: through Eve’s seed and the Satan’s seed. But this is what is remarkable: the children of Eve cannot be called “her seed” [link], -- fathers have seed, not mothers. We can pass this by as a botanical metaphor (plants have seed but are not differentiated as male and female), but the application of the “seed” to specifically Eve (with Adam standing nearby) nevertheless seems awkward. Awkward unless we remember one woman who gave birth to a Child Who indeed crushed Satan’s head: and Christ was not born of a woman but of a man’s seed. Indeed, this is exactly the promise that God makes here: that a “seed” of Eve shall crush Satan one day. This verse, Genesis 3:15 is known as Protoevangelium, -- the First Gospel, where the Old Testament, from the mouth of god Himself, in a veiled and concise form predicts the paschal victory of Christ.The translation I quote from does not say “he (i.e. the seed, implying Christ) shall crush thy head” but rather “she will”. This is now understood as a mistaken translation by St. Jerome, whose Latin translation from Hebrew is the primary source of the preferred by me Douay-Rheims English translation. We don’t know the exact reason: it could be a corrupted source from which St. Jerome worked, or some incorrect interpolation of the Hebrew masculine pronoun as feminine or plural. This is another reason that I wish St. Jerome had worked primarily from the Greek Septuagint, which was the living scripture of the Jews at the time of Jesus, and not from Masoretic version of the Hebrew scripture. Surely the interpolation, if that is what it was, would be natural here: the passage speaks of the serpent “lying in wait for the heel” of the woman, so we imagine that very heel, and not her mysterious seed that will do the crushing. That Holy Moses would forego this logical and dynamic scene in favor of the indirect crushing of the serpent lying at the heel by the inexplicable woman’s seed shows that truly his work was divinely inspired.
Indeed, Douay routinely translates espiscopos as "bishop", presbyteros as "priest" (with few contextual exceptions) and metanoia as "penance" in contrast to KJV; that is the principal reason I prefer it. Also Mary's kecharitomeneh is "full of grace" and not "you did God a favor, gee-thanks" in other translations.