October 2009 Archives

I just finished an interpretive translation of the biblical book of Numbers for "The Voice," a multi-volume project to which many extraordinary Christian writers have contributed. I'm honored to be in their company. Numbers is a funny book -- one minute you can be slogging through mind-numbing details of genealogies or ritual details and the next you're suddenly smack in the middle of high drama. Remarkably economical, few biblical narratives go in for the kind of backstory, landscape, or inner thoughts that enrich modern stories. And sometimes the result is heart-breaking.

I am finally following Donna Freitas' enthusiastic recommendation to watch old episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Hey, just because it's research doesn't mean it has to be dull. As I investigate how the Bible portrays supernatural beings and places and how that portrayal has influenced pop ideas about evil personified, angels, the undead, heaven, and hell, I'm finding connections everywhere. In "Buffy," consider how it is that "the anointed" is a little boy... and rules (?) the evil contingent of demons below; and the head vampire called "The Master" rises to life again after three days. Strikes me that a lot of Bible language associated with Jesus is co-opted by the dark side in "Buffy." More watching to do...

I had the great good fortune to read a couple of new Bible translations and communicate, albeit briefly, with their creators for an article that will appear in Publishers Weekly Religion BookLine (10/28). In both cases, the translators are poets in their own right. Not only that, but both have worked for decades with these biblical texts, one with the Hebrew Hebrew Bible, the other with the Greek New Testament. The results -- beautiful, thought-provoking renderings with more poetry than English translations normally reflect.

Anyone's who's read through the book of Genesis, from The Beginning to its portentous end in Egypt, knows that it's pretty darn graphic -- horny gods mate with human women, men try to rape angels, there's fratricide and the near murder of a boy by his father (commanded by God, no less), a daughter-in-law rights wrongs by seducing her errant father-in-law, and brothers massacre an entire town of freshly circumcised adults. And that's just some of what goes on. Well, now R. Crumb has rendered the story as a bona fide graphic novel. Here's a sample. I'd love to hear what you think!

I saw the movie, "The Invention of Lying" last night, not expecting to find any biblical or religious associations or messages in it. Hah. I should know better! They're everywhere. It's really quite a sweet story in which the main character becomes a kind of Moses, even standing before an expectant crowd with two tablets (pizza boxes, actually) of written info from "the man in the sky." If I could hang out with you in person, at a cozy coffee shop for some post-movie conversation, here are some of what I'd want you to tell me and to talk about: How do you think the effects of the movie character's declarations are like or unlike the effect of Moses' great Sinai moment? In some ways, the main character seems modeled also on Jesus -- his knowledge of things greater than what anyone else can see, the sacrifices that he makes out of what can only be a kind of love... Yes? No? And most general: what about this character is like (or not) any religion's founder, or (person aside) what circumstances does the movie share with the founding of a religion?

Over the past couple of days, my editor, agent, and I have been scrambling to deal with an ironic case of mistaken identity in Bible Babel. In short: the main character's name isn't correct in the version poised to go out to reviewers and potential endorsers. Yikes! One of the reasons that I wrote Bible Babel was to help people understand big and little puzzlers such as why God is sometimes referred to as LORD (appearing as big capital L, small caps ORD) and other times Lord. The former, LORD, is the way many English translations render the Old Testament's four-letter, personal name for God (transliterated YHWH). This is THE NAME that God revealed to Moses, a stand-in for God's very presence in the Jerusalem Temple, and by which God's people could specially know their particular God. "Lord," on the other hand, is the translation of a different Hebrew word, a generic noun meaning just that -- "lord, master," or (brace yourselves, feminists) "husband." YHWH or LORD never appears in the New Testament, and the transition from LORD to Lord (especially the manner in which "the name of the Lord" functions in the New Testament) signals a provocative theological shift -- finally defining what makes a Christian a Christian. Well, just before the book's galleys (final form "lite" -- i.e., possibly containing typos, etc) were produced, a typesetter misunderstood copyediting instructions and changed some cases of Lord to LORD. The result -- sometimes there's an error that may confound though a reader wouldn't necessarily identify it as the typo it is, and sometimes the text simply doesn't make sense. Even though the galleys clearly state that this is an "uncorrected proof," to the credit of my superb editor and the team at HarperCollins, the plan now is to correct manually every instance in which the word appears erroneously before sending the copies out. Whew!  

The James River Writers conference was a smashing success! Many thanks to Jason Tesauro, Ginny Pye, the Library of Virginia, volunteers, organizers, soiree hosts, agents, editors, panelists, moderators, and all who helped make it great! Although finally only writing is writing, talking about the craft, hearing the stories of how stories came to be, and simply hanging out with folks whose passion is the word is inspiring and invigorating. In the ups and downs of this business that some do pursue for the business of it all but most for love of the written word, the poem finely wrought, the tale that grabs and holds, the novel take on a nonfiction subject, it's good to be reminded that each book is unique and the whole process innately subjective. Another's success is to be celebrated as much as one's own. This isn't, as Katherine Neville pointed out, a zero-sum game. How great to have an opportunity to be with others sharing the experiences and products of our solitude.

Work is underway on a new translation of the King James Version designed to correct what its authors call a "liberal bias" in modern translations. Conservapedia, which claims to be "the trustworthy encyclopedia," has determined to correct what it sees as "three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one."

Although the first two have some real problems (e.g., re: #1 exactly what does this mean?! Most of the Bible [all, for Jews] predates Jesus and so its meaning doesn't have anything to do with Jesus except perhaps by later Christian interpretation), it's the third that this group aims to correct. Laughable as a lot of this project is ("government" is too liberal a word), they've got a point... to a point. Every translator must make choices. So, any given translation depends on a number of things besides the original text from which it's translating. By the way, as one of my astute students observed, this project claims to be working not from the Hebrew and Greek of original biblical texts, but from English -- the KJV.   

 

It's in! Check out the cover for Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time through the "Books" link on the home page. Because the book is for all kinds of readers, includes lots of popular culture references, and doesn't present a particular religious perspective, we wanted it to look hip and edgy rather than staid and pious. Hopefully, the cover accurately suggests that this is indeed a book to help people learn some basic information about the Bible -- that it can help readers make sense of the Bible references that permeate our culture without dissing religion on the one hand or promoting a particular interpretation and faith beliefs on the other... and that just may be fun to read! What do you think?

In preparation for this weekend's James River Writers Conference, I've needed to revisit my first book project on pain and the Psalms. (I have a terrible memory -- what did I write, again?! sheesh.) Among the most memorable discoveries in doing that project was the mystical paradox of darkness. Here's the first paragraph of a little essay on the topic: 

They call her "Ardi" and judge her, at 4.4 million years old, to be the oldest intact skeleton of an ancestor to humans discovered yet. Discovered in Ethiopia, she's all the news, not least because she's different from the chimps that many scientists had thought we humans evolved from, so many millions of years ago. Ardi wasn't a knuckle-dragger, but she probably did spend lots of time in trees (the thumb-like appendage among her toes makes it likely that she could climb pretty well.) She most certainly walked upright.

Science is a paradoxically humble endeavor -- theories can never be proven to be true, but they can be proven false. Science proceeds in this manner of discovery, evaluation and reevaluation that has made it vulnerable to the charge that "those scientists don't really know what they're doing." Therefore anything goes. But not everything goes.

I suppose that some creationists, determined to understand the Bible exactly as they read it (usually in English translation) will see as vindication the way that Ardi makes scientists rethink assumptions about human evolution. But of course it's much more complicated than simply filling in the blanks of human certainty in science with a different kind of human certainty based on interpretations of biblical texts.

I am especially interested in the ways that millions of other Bible believers reconcile their faith with the acceptance of scientific theories such as that of evolution. How do you?