This article examines the use of honorifics in the New Korean Translation (NKT), focusing on dialogues between kings and prophets, and offers a comparative analysis with the New Korean Revised Version (NKRV) and the New Korean Revised Standard Version (NKRSV). Although Biblical Hebrew lacks a grammaticalized honorific system comparable to that of Korean, it nevertheless encodes social hierarchy and interpersonal relations through terms of address, pronominal choice, and discourse strategies. In particular, royal– prophetic dialogues exhibit a clear pragmatic distinction between scenes of request or report and scenes of rebuke or judgment. While the former typically employ politeness strategies oriented toward face preservation, the latter characteristically utilize impoliteness strategies that deliberately threaten the addressee’s face. Drawing on politeness theory (Brown & Levinson) and impoliteness theory (Culpeper), this study investigates how the functional features of Biblical Hebrew discourse can and should be represented in Korean Bible translation. Special attention is given to the treatment of second-person reference and to shifts in sentence-final speech-level markers, which function as key indicators of authority transfer and judgment declaration within the discourse. From this perspective, the NKT demonstrates a notable strength in its flexible deployment of modern Korean speech levels to reflect character relationships and situational contexts. At the same time, however, it reveals a significant limitation: by consistently retaining honorific titles and elevated speech levels even in rebuke and judgment contexts, it tends to attenuate the confrontational force and directness intrinsic to prophetic discourse. By contrast, the NKRV preserves, in certain passages, direct second-person address and unmitigated expressions, thereby more faithfully conveying the authority and tension characteristic of prophetic judgment speech delivered before kings. This article argues that honorifics in royal-prophetic discourse should not be applied uniformly as a fixed norm but rather adjusted strategically according to discourse type and theological function. In particular, it proposes that in contexts of rebuke and judgment, the restriction or suspension of honorifics may more accurately reflect the pragmatic and theological force of the biblical text.
Sung-On Kim (Fri,) studied this question.