The Neapolitan writer Erri De Luca, a nonbeliever, is nonetheless a devout student of the Old Testament. Every morning he rises at five o’clock and begins his day by turning to a verse, a psalm, a story, in the original Hebrew. De Luca is not a scholar; he is wakened by a lean body that, for many years, routinely rose before dawn to labor in cesspits, to lug baggage across airport tarmacs, to work aloft on scaffolding, coffee-smelling and sunburned. Through those years of hard labor, his morning minutes with the Bible, each day nudging his self-taught Hebrew a few words nearer to fluency, fortified him. “During the period when I was exposed to the Bible for the first time, I was in the desert of my life, and I needed a desert book,” De Luca told a reporter for the Hebrew-language newspaper Haaretz in 2003. He reads its stories for the self-scrutinizing distance they give him, for the sober elegance of their sentences, for the company of their characters. He reads them as literature (“the God of Israel,” he once wrote, “is the greatest literary character of all time”). Other books—he thinks—suffer in comparison to the Bible. To his mind, only the Bible makes no attempt to flatter the reader.
The habit De Luca, now sixty-six, acquired half a lifetime ago has become the foundation of his prizewinning career as a writer: alongside biblically cadenced novellas, plays, and poems are his translations into Italian (each an exercise in idiosyncrasy) of Exodus, Leviticus, the tales of Samson and of Ruth, the stories of Noah’s Ark and of Jonah gobbled down by a whale, commentaries on the Psalms, the Tower of Babel, and Ecclesiastes.
“The sun also rises”; “There is nothing new under the sun”; “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Ecclesiastes is perhaps the best known of the Old Testament books. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” This is perhaps the best-known line in all Ecclesiastes, from the Latin vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. De Luca, in his translation (I am working from a French version in Noyau d’olive, by the excellent Danièle Valin), manages to make it sound intriguingly unfamiliar. The original Hebrew, he tells us, is havel havalim, Havel being the figure in Genesis whom English readers know as Abel, brother of Cain—mankind’s first murder victim. In De Luca’s interpretation, he is the first waste of life. Havel havalim: “waste of the waste.”
It is the rare Bible reader who learns Hebrew in order to peer beneath the layers of centuries of translation. For most believers—let alone nonbelievers—Hebrew remains lingua incognita. I am impressed by De Luca; I want to learn more; I decide to get in touch. We frequent the same literary circles; and, a few days after sending him an email (in French, a language he learned while working in Paris as a day laborer), he replies graciously.
Ancient Hebrew has around five thousand root words. Like other Semitic languages, its written sentences are composed only of consonants; vowels have to be supplied by the reader’s imagination. Imagination, De Luca tells me, is something the Bible’s translators often had in excess; they saw things in the words that were not there, as sky gazers see hunters instead of stars and fortune tellers see death instead of tea leaves. “Etzev,” he writes, when I ask him to give an example. In Genesis 3:16, God declares that women will give birth with etzev. The translators write it as “sorrow” or “pangs” or “pain.” But De Luca says the “pain” is illusory. “The divinity does not condemn women to suffer.” Where etzev’s letters, ayin, tsade, and bet, occur together elsewhere in the Old Testament, they are understood to mean “toil” or “effort.”
De Luca answers no when I ask him whether he considers translation to be an art. “For me, it’s an exercise in admiration. He who admires knows his place, doesn’t want to usurp the author. He who admires retains the distance necessary for admiration. It’s a bad translator who thinks he knows best.”
Sober as De Luca is in his translating, a stickler for simplicity, he revels in punctiliously restoring the Hebrew’s original poetry. He confides to me his joy at opening the pages of his chestnut 1984 edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia—bought long ago in a Milanese bookstore—and “brushing away their dust with my eyelashes.” Psalm 105:39 shows De Luca’s eye to advantage. It tells of the Israelites in the desert, where God at one point spreads (in other translators’ vague words) “a cloud for their protection” or “a cloud for a covering.” Only in De Luca’s suave Italian “una nuvola come tappeto” (“a cloud for a carpet”) do the words shine.
“We must pass over the little streams of opinion and rush back to the very source from which the Gospel writers drew… the Hebrew words themselves.” It could be De Luca writing (in recent years he has also turned his attention to the New Testament). But this is Saint Jerome, writing more than sixteen centuries ago, in a long Latin letter about the origin of hosanna. Jerome, then a young Roman priest with a training in the classics, was already at work on his Vulgate translation of the Bible, already figuring out how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John should sound in Latin.
The Gospels were composed in Hellenistic Greek; the Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament completed two centuries before the Christian era, was made in Hellenistic Greek. Hebrew had long retreated to the synagogues (synagogue itself a Greek New Testament word for beth k’neset, a “place of gathering”). But by the fourth century CE, Greek, supplanted by Latin, had become as incomprehensible to many Christians as Hebrew. A good Latin translation of the Bible was required. The first attempts, from the Septuagint, were bad. It took Jerome, a scholar who knew his Greek, his Hebrew, and his Latin, to put them right. “Why not go back to the original… and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?” he wrote in the preface to his translation of the Gospels in 383. Years later, in about 391, in a little cave in Bethlehem where he had settled, he began translating the many books of the Old Testament iuxta Hebraeos (“according to the Hebrews”) by candlelight. Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
De Luca learned Hebrew while “in the desert of [his] life”; Jerome learned Hebrew while living in the desert. The desert was east of Antioch, and it was during his ascetic time there in his twenties, struggling to “endure against the promptings of sin” and tame an “ardent nature,” that the young monk decided to distract himself by learning the language from a Jewish Christian. He later reminisced:
Thus, after having studied the pointed style of Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero, the weightiness of Fronto, and the gentleness of Pliny, I now began to learn the alphabet again and practice harsh and guttural sounds. What efforts I spent on that task, what difficulties I had to face, how often I despaired, how often I gave up and then in my eagerness to learn began again.
Eventually, through perseverance and the encouragement of his teacher, Jerome’s Hebrew grew to the point where he could find a certain elegance in its succinctness and the multiple meanings of its words. He could relish, for example, the wordplay in Jeremiah 1:11–12, in which God asks Jeremiah, “What do you see?” Jeremiah replies, “I see a branch of an almond tree” (shaqed). God responds, “You have seen well, for I am watching (shoqed) over my word to perform it.” He could smile, pages later, on reading in Jeremiah 6:2–4 that shepherds (roim) shall flock to Zion, since the city had just been compared to a comely woman and the same Hebrew letters spelled out lovers (reim). And by assimilating Hebrew grammar, he could place this new knowledge side by side with that of Greek and Latin to contrive original and theologically pleasing arguments: ruah (Hebrew for breath or wind or spirit) is, he noted, a feminine noun; its Greek counterpart, pneuma, is neuter; in Latin, spiritus is a masculine noun. Ergo, the Holy Spirit is genderless.
In his high regard for Hebrew, Jerome differed from many of his contemporaries, including Augustine, who thought translating the Bible in this way a waste of a Christian scholar’s time and intelligence. It was enough accuracy, Augustine believed, to put into Latin the Old Testament books from their versions in the Greek Septuagint, which were widely held to have been divinely inspired. God had first spoken in Hebrew; but He had then gone to the trouble of repeating Himself in Greek. For the Greek reader, the Old Testament held no secrets. Jerome disagreed. There was the matter of mistakes. Working from the Septuagint amounted to translating a translation: always a risky endeavor. An earlier Latin scribe, sticking to the Septuagint, translated Psalm 128:2 as “labores fructuum tuorum manducabi,” an ambiguous phrase whose meaning became an object of dispute: did understanding it as “the fruit of labors” make any more sense than as “the labors of fruits”? Jerome could only shake his beard in dismay. A simple blunder; the scribe hadn’t realized that the Greek karpoi means “fruits” but also “hands” (literally, “wrists”). The original Hebrew text actually reads (as in the King James translation): “For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands.”
Jerome and Augustine corresponded. Each attempted to persuade the other of the respective merits of translating from the Hebrew and translating from the Greek. But each man was stubborn; their arguments well rehearsed. Augustine’s dubiety was not to be assuaged. With an eye to shaking his correspondent’s resolution, he wrote with an alarming report from a North African bishop. If we believe Augustine, the bishop read aloud from Jerome’s translation of Jonah—and prompted a riot in the pews. God, the bishop read, had given Jonah the leaves of a hedera (“ivy”) for a parasol. While the bishop was speaking, he heard a sudden commotion, angry voices. Ivy? What do you mean, ivy? Frescoes showed Jonah recumbent in the cool shade of a gourd. Gourd was the plant named in the Septuagint. (Modern scholars identify the castor-oil plant as the likeliest candidate for the Hebrew kikayon.) “Gourd! Gourd!” the congregants shouted in unison. The bishop was silenced. He read no more for fear of losing all control over his flock.
But Jerome was unrepentant. And eventually his Bible superseded its competitors. For the next thousand years it was to his Vulgate translation that clergy the world over referred.
In early sixteenth-century Germany one of these clergy members was stout, sharp-tongued Martin Luther. Luther admired Jerome, a scholar after his own heart, and he resolved to do for the Saxons what Jerome had done for the Latin-literate monks. He studied the Septuagint in the Greek, Jerome’s Vulgate in the Latin; he consulted the Old Testament’s ancient Hebrew. Translating from the Hebrew he found particularly hard going. “Oh, God! What a vast and thankless task it is to force the Old Testament authors to talk German,” he complained in a letter to a friend. “They resist, unwilling to abandon their fine Hebrew for coarse German just as if a nightingale were asked to abandon its sweet melody for the cuckoo’s song.” Elsewhere he compared the translator to a plowman smoothing out his lines until a reader might run his eyes over three or four pages without ever imagining they had once been ridden with clods and stones.
The clods and stones were any words or turns of phrase that might get in the way of the ordinary German reader’s appreciation. More than Jerome, or any other translator of the Bible before him, Luther thought of his reader: he wanted his work to be read and understood by the men and women in the street. So shekels and denarii, funny money, became silberlinge (literally “silver-pieces”) and Groschens; centurion became Hauptmann (literally “captain”). When Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, cautions those who speak in tongues to speak sense, lest they turn “barbarian” to listeners, Luther has Paul say not barbarian but undeutsch (“un-German”).
If one part of Luther’s intention was to bring the Bible to the hausfrau and the bratwurst-seller, another was to remove what he considered was the papist gloss Jerome and others had put on certain words. The angel Gabriel who hails Mary (Ave Maria) as “plena gratiae” (“full of grace”) in Luke 1:28 had been mistranslated, Luther argued. Gabriel would have greeted the young woman in Hebrew, with the same sort of warm words that he’d addressed to the prophet Daniel: ish chamudoth (“dear man”). Luther translated the angel’s greeting to Mary thus: “Gegrüsset sei du, Holdselige” (“Greetings to you, dear, happy one”). No mention of grace at all. Heresy! But a printing press knows nothing of heresy. Within a generation of Luther’s death in 1546, one hundred thousand copies of his Bible were being read, scribbled in, and argued over.
The Bible is the world’s most read book—and the most translated. According to the Wycliffe Bible Translators (named after the fourteenth-century Bible translator John Wycliffe), the complete text is presently available in 554 languages; the New Testament alone exists in a further 1,333. Nearly two thousand different translations, yet they represent only a fraction of the world’s languages: another four, possibly five, thousand still await an alphabet, an orthography, literacy. So every month, Wycliffe continues to dispatch its linguist-missionaries to the farthest corners of the globe. Every month, following their faith, men and women swap their suburban house and youth for years in a village hut, embowered in rainforest, in which to listen, repeat, write, and teach.
Someone at Wycliffe gives me the name and email of a returned missionary whom I could contact. I look up Andy Minch online and watch a video of a man in his late fifties, thin, bald, and quiet-spoken. In the mid-1980s, Andy and his wife, Audrey, flew from Illinois to the remote West Sepik province of Papua New Guinea, where they spent an engrossing, exhausting twenty years as Bible translators into the Amanab language. Living like the four thousand villagers, the Minches scuba dived in rivers, fed their dengue fever bananas and possum meat, and raised three children.
Andy’s faith has been in the Minch family for generations: before Americanizing the surname, his Prussian great-grandfather called himself “Muench” (Monk). His parents often had missionaries over for dinner. As a boy in drab Chicago, Andy sat mesmerized by one gray-haired visitor who regaled him with a description of Australian foliage and aborigines. The memory of the old man’s adventures stayed with him, and, after contemplating careers as a magician and locksmith, then graduating from the Moody Bible Institute, then marriage, the memory became something else, something insistent. Something like a calling. “It was in the fall of 1982 that my wife, a nurse, and I, a teacher, pretty much out of the blue looked at each other and asked, ‘Isn’t there more we could do with our life?’”
Wycliffe gave them a training in linguistics. But neither was fully prepared—how could they have been?—for their new jungle life. Barely fifty years before, the Amanab people had never seen a wheel or ice; they cut with stone axes and built their houses out of vines and brushwood, without nails. “We arrived,” Andy writes to me, matter-of-factly, “before the introduction of mirrors.”
“Early on, I took pictures of my village friends standing by their houses. That way I could learn their names and where they lived. I had a friend, Nimai, help me identify people. I showed one picture and after some examination of this two-dimensional representation, he declared, ‘That is Somangi.’ I showed another. ‘That is Wahlai.’ I showed another and he just could not figure out who was in the photo. Finally, I said, ‘That is you.’ ‘Oh,’ he laughed, ‘I wondered why he had my shirt on.’”
How had he and Audrey learned the villagers’ language? There had been no grammars, no classes.
We began by pointing to things like a rock until someone said foon, the word for rock, which I promptly wrote, using a phonetic alphabet. I’d point to a tree, and someone would say li. I’d point to a spider’s web, and they would say ambwamuhlaunalala, at which point I would walk over to a rock and weakly say “foon.” That was the beginning of our language analysis. We were like helpless babies, not knowing the language or culture. The people were so kind and gracious in caring for us as we lived among them learning their worldview and their wisdom.
Amanab is a language unlike any the Minches would have heard or read about in America. The distinction between horizontality and verticality is essential. To say, “the book is in the house” in correct Amanab requires you to recall whether the book is lying on the floor or table, or sitting on a makeshift shelf. If the former, you say buk rara gi (literally, “book house is”); if the latter, you say buk rara go. Similarly, you can’t just say “put it here”; you have to say something like wanayi faka (“put it here horizontally”) or wanayi foful (“put it here vertically”).
And you have to be as precise when talking about the past in Amanab. To tell someone you had drunk bu (“water”) was to tell your listener either that your thirst had been quenched recently, in which case it was correct to say “ka bu neg,” or some time ago, in which case you said “ka bu nena.” So there were two pasts in the Amanab imagination, not one: the near-to-present and the more distant.
The villagers, Andy and Audrey discovered, ordered days with their bodies. The Minches’ translation of Genesis has the Creator separating the light—day—from the darkness—night—on the “left pinkie day” (the first). Mankind He makes in His image on the “left wrist day” (the sixth). On the next, the “left elbow day,” God, basking in his accomplishment, deservedly rests.
Penei, a youngish male convert, helped the Minches with their translation. The story (in Genesis 43) of Joseph, whose brothers bring a gift of honey with them to Egypt, Penei greeted with an uncomprehending look. The only wild honey known to the Amanab wasn’t sweet-tasting, Andy explains. (The honey’s lack of sweetness, together with the absence of any village cows or goats, is why Exodus’s famous “land of milk and honey” in Amanab reads as a “lush and productive place.”) When, verses later, the pharaoh’s minister discloses that he is Joseph—“I am your brother whom you sold into Egypt”—another Amanab fine distinction is needed. No single word for brother exists in Amanab. The Minches and Penei chose sumieg, meaning “younger brother.” Kaba negerni sumieg (“I am your younger brother”) is what the Amanab-speaking Joseph says.
As the years passed, more and more villagers observed and learned the ways of literacy: how to hold a pencil; how to decipher the missionaries’ squiggles—like sago beetle tracks—on the pages, and transmute them, via the corresponding motions of the tongue and lips, to sound. A second Amanab man, then a third, joined Penei and made lighter work of the Minches’ translating. And their children, who spoke accentless Amanab with the villagers’ girls and boys, also helped them sharpen up their understanding.
Andy: “I had struggled for months to figure out the meaning or purpose of a little word—me. One day I overheard my five-year-old son use it as he played on the front porch. I rushed out and asked him what he had just said. He quickly answered, ‘I didn’t do it; it wasn’t my fault!’ ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you just said a sentence with me in it.’ He nodded. I eagerly asked him, ‘what does me mean?’ My son thought about it a moment and replied, ‘I don’t know, sometimes you use it and sometimes you don’t.’”
The five-year-old’s words put his father onto a new train of thought, leading him to the solution.
“It turned out me was a polite form; it softened a command, like the English please. We may say, ‘close the door’ or ‘close the door, please.’ Sometimes we use it and sometimes we don’t.”
Occasionally a biblical passage contained a word that had no meaning whatsoever for the villagers. Then the Minches and their assistants would have to think up a substitute. Such a passage turned up in Luke 9:62, in which Jesus warns, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” But plow was a word written for Greek and Hebrew eyes; the Amanab, jungle people, had never handled seeds, had never sown. The translation stalled. Andy and Audrey tried out various ideas on Penei, without success. Finally, the comparison with working the land, they threw out altogether. Instead, the Minches drew on the hunting life they had come to know. Luke’s plow they turned into arrows. The verse became “No one who shoots an arrow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
I ask Andy if translating a verse into Amanab had altered how he saw it. I wanted to know whether the experience of putting the Bible in another people’s words had given him a new way of looking at his faith. It had. Andy points to the moment in John 21 when the resurrected Jesus questions Peter. In English, it is the same question thrice asked: “Do you love me?” But in the original Greek, Andy tells me, John employs two words for love. Some scholars say the two—agape and phileo—are synonymous, but Andy, when he came to translate the passage for the Amanab, didn’t read it that way. Agape here, he thinks, is the stronger word, signifying unconditional love; phileo is something milder, fuzzier, like “to have affection for.” So when Jesus asks and asks again if Peter loves (agape) him, and Peter replies, “You know that I love (phileo) you,” the disparity between the two men’s words pushes Jesus to finally demand, as if in resignation, “Do you [even] love (phileo) me?”—“Do you even have affection for me?”
Andy: “In Amanab, membeg is “to have affection for.” It is the standard term for expressing love. But there is another, oningig lugwa, which is more dynamic. It means ‘to continually hang your thoughts on,’ similar to when in English we say, ‘he is really hung up on her.’” Jesus, Andy thinks, was telling Peter that affection wasn’t enough; the believer was being asked “to continually hang his thoughts on Jesus.” The Amanab term—so vivid, so picturesque—made the message clear. With it, Andy saw his faith in a new light.
Luther, five centuries earlier, wrote, “We shall not long preserve the Gospel without languages. Languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained. They are the case in which we carry this jewel. They are the vessel in which we hold this wine. They are the larder in which this food is stored. And, as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments.”