Recently in Bible translation Category

Enjoyed a fun conversation about Bible Babel with radio host Faith Ranoli yesterday. Listen live in a week or so.

We talked for about an hour about all things Bible -- where it came from, what's the best translation, how people use the Bible to argue different sides of the same issue, why the Bible says people lived for centuries, and what's with all those names for God. I'm afraid I rambled an awful lot but it sure was fun.

Today, Christians celebrate Palm Sunday -- the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem to great "Hosanna!" acclaim. But just exactly how did he do it? The stories disagree in a puzzling way... unless you know something about the conventions of biblical Hebrew and that the New Testament writers (Matthew, especially) often looked to the Old Testament, for ways to understand Jesus. 

Mark and Luke agree that Jesus rode in a donkey, and that's the story that's told in thousands of churches today. Matthew, on the other hand, has Jesus riding two beasts at the same time. An odd, albeit remarkable(!) feat to include. Unlike the other two, Matthew explains that Jesus did so to fulfill the scriptures (Hebrew Bible), and he partly quotes the reference in Zechariah, writing, "Tell the daughter of Zion, 'Look your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.'" That quote usually makes it into contemporary Palm Sunday retellings because of how it underscores the unusual nature of Jesus' kingship -- humble, in this case. But the bit about simultaneously riding both a donkey and a colt gets glossed thanks to Mark and Luke.

Zechariah's text appears as poetry, and the primary characteristic of biblical Hebrew poetry is parallelism. In its purest form, one line is followed by another that repeats its sense. Here's a great example from Proverbs 4:6 (about the importance of wisdom): "Do not forsake her, and she will keep you/ love her, and she will guard you." Get it? "Do not forsake her" is parallel to "love her," "she will keep you" is parallel to "she will guard you." Sometimes the parallelism is not so tidy, though, but rather integrated into a sort of stepped structure that builds with repetition. That's true in Zechariah 9:9 which ends, "riding on an ass [hold the jokes here];... on a donkey, the son of a she-beast." Now add this additional bit of info about Hebrew convention: one single letter serves as every conjuction (our "and," "but," or "or"), and sometimes it shouldn't really be translated at all.

That little letter appears right before "on a donkey," so together with what you now know about Hebrew poetry, you can see that Matthew went literal with his quote. He read Zechariah without poetic parallelism (but rather as a straightforward narrative) and translated the shadow conjunction literally, too. The result: Jesus enters Jerusalem straddling two animals. Spoiler alert: this will not be Jesus' final miracle. The "good news" gospel writers agree on that.

  

Did you know that "Eli" means "my God," in Hebrew? Yup. In one form, anyway. So, even if you'd missed all the previews, reviews, and commentary in between on the movie "The Book of Eli," you still might guess that the book in question is the Bible. The English translation King James Version, to be precise. I'm no film critic, so I'll leave that to the pros. But I can say that the movie gives viewers some interesting Bible things to think about, like: Is Washington's character somehow protected supernaturally in his quest to bring the Bible west -- protected by God, or by the Bible itself? If he is, what does that make of God, of the Bible? And: the KJV is undeniably a valuable literary artifact, even if one doesn't believe in it at all. So it would make sense to include in that post-apocalyptic library on the west coast. But does the movie suggest that that particular version is The (one and only) Bible? And do you think that a person knows the Bible if he or she has memorized a particular version? [Me? I think yes... and no...] Then of course there's all the violence. Our Bible-toting hero is no turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy. Timeless question: when should one and when should one not be such a radical pacifist? Finally, how about the evil megalomaniac, certain that if he had that book, his power to control and manipulate toward his own twisted aims would be complete? Does he know the Bible so well? Questions to contemplate, debate.... 

One of the most iconic images of western art is Michelangelo's "creation of man" in the Sistine chapel. You know the one -- a stirring painting depicting an impressive old man God reaching from the clouds to touch the outstretched hand of a young Adam. But just what, exactly, is that image based on? Genesis tells the creation of human beings in two places -- the first chapter, in which an invisible God creates humankind, male and female, in God's image; and the second chapter, in which an anthropomorphic God fashions a human out of humus and breathes life into this creature. It is endlesslessly fascinating to me how biblical texts are interpreted and reinterpreted, sometimes uncovering hints or suggestions embedded in the rich layers of biblical texts and sometimes adding layers to the layers that are already there. This is the Bible as living text. And interpretation at the hand of creative masters in their medium of choice is intriguing delight. The Vatican Museum in collaboration with the Italian Il Sole 24Ore is publishing a series of four volumes called "The Painted Word" that discusses the ways that artists interpreted the Bible in the visual feast that is the Sistine Chapel. Mom, Dad: great gift idea, but in English, please.

I've just begun (re)reading Milton's "Paradise Lost." Truth is, I don't remember ever reading the whole thing through before. Snippets here and there for lit classes over the years but never from the beginning to the end. What a ride it is! And to think that Milton wrote it blind. Contemplate that, for a minute.

This, too, impresses: Where most English translations read Gen 1:2 as "the spirit of God hovered over the face of the deeps," Milton follows the Hebrew verb describing the spirit like a bird "brooding" over the waters. That's the way that verb appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible -- the protective hovering of a bird over its nest... though Milton imagines the spirit in a masculine form impregnating "the Abyss" below despite the Hebrew's feminine Spirit subject in this verse.

But that's small stuff -- a tiny example of the thousands of ways that Milton appeals to and shifts the biblical text. Fascinating. I'm still a little puzzled by the bad guys that open the story. I mean, Satan appears to be a different character than Beelzebub, and there are cherubim and seraphim in hell. Well, back to it, as the dark powers prepare for war.

Countless visual representations of the Garden of Eden creation story narrated in Genesis chaps 2-3 depict a crisp apple as the downfall of Adam and Eve. Yet the original Hebrew reads simply "fruit." Without knowing that, we English speakers (and readers) can be excused for assuming that it was specifically an apple such as a Gala or juicy Granny Smith, since that's the way that the Hebrew is often translated -- Eve ate from the apple, shared it with Adam, and bye bye Paradise. Translating like that makes a certain kind of sense, since "apple" used to function in English to describe all sorts of fruit. But even before that, when the text began to be translated into Latin, the translators introduced an evocative wordplay: they translated the Hebrew "fruit" with "apple," which in Latin is malum -- not incidentally related to malus, meaning "bad." Poor guys clearly never had my mom's apple pie...

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 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!

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.