“If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”
That quip by Miriam Amanda “Ma” Ferguson to her Texas constituents last century actually reflects a common attitude toward the Bible. While of course most people know that it wasn’t originally written in English, they also think that the ancient text is conveyed pretty accurately in the familiar English quotations: “The Lord is my shepherd . . . ,” “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth . . . ,” “Thou shalt not covet . . . ,” “Let my people go . . . ,” and so forth. Most people think they know what the Bible says because they’ve read it in English.
But they’re wrong.
Sometimes the familiar English is just misleading, obscuring the focus of the original or misrepresenting an ancient nuance. Other times, the mistakes are more substantial. But the errors are significant and widespread.
This book is a straightforward exploration of where things went awry, how we can recover the original meaning of the Bible, and what we learn from better translations. As we work toward answers, we’ll travel a fascinating path that meanders through history, metaphor, sociology, ethics, the law, and even such obscure topics as zoology and Babylonian mathematics, in addition to our primary tools of linguistics and translation theory. Modern linguistics will guide our understanding of ancient Hebrew, and translation theory will help us render what we understand in English.
Because the familiar English translations are, well, familiar, we’ll use them as a reference point, looking at where they succeed and, perhaps more importantly, where they fail, starting with an appreciation of the magnitude of the problem.
The majority of English translations stem from the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), first published about four hundred years ago. Named for King James of England, who commissioned it in 1604, the KJV is a literary classic, a volume so central that, like Shakespeare’s works, it helped shape the very language in which it was written. But a lot has happened since the early 1600s. English has changed over four centuries. Our understanding of the past has improved. And advances in translation theory and linguistics have opened new doors into antiquity.
Like medieval scholars trying to understand Egypt without carbon dating, or a doctor two hundred years ago trying to fathom the Black Plague, Bible translators throughout most of history have been working blind, struggling—though of course they did not know it—without the numerous benefits of twenty-first century knowledge.
Some people initially don’t like the idea of mixing modernity and the Bible, because, as they correctly point out, the Bible isn’t modern. Nor, they observe, is the Bible scientific, and they therefore wonder why a book like this one introduces linguistics, history, archaeology, and other modern approaches as we probe the Bible. But the matter is more nuanced than that. Even though the prophets who commented on the Five Books of Moses were unaware of modern literary theory, for example, we can still use that framework to help us understand what the prophets were doing and how they wrote. For that matter, they may not even have known about the rhetorical devices they used in the poetry, but we can nonetheless use our modern understanding to understand their ancient work.
We might compare the situation to that of a Renoir painting found languishing in a garage somewhere. Even though the painting is a nonscientific work of art, we’d use science to determine its authenticity. And if it were authentic, we’d use more science to clean it up and to recover as much of the original as possible. Depending on the state of the painting, we might want cleansing agents, infrared photography, or even a complete reconstruction. These modern nonartistic steps would restore the older art. Similarly, modern science, rather than turning the Bible into what it was not, helps us retrieve what it was.
Because the KJV is so widely used, and because it has been so central in English translations of the Bible, we’ll start by looking at that translation more closely. When we do, we’ll find three main sorts of shortcomings. The first problem is that English has changed in 400 years. The second is that the authors misunderstood some of the Hebrew, so they didn’t always appreciate the meaning of some parts of the Bible. And third, their conception of translation was seriously flawed, so that even when they did understand the Hebrew, they were not always able to convey it properly in English.
These problems are not limited to the KJV. They afflict other translations, too. The proportions differ, with more modern versions from last century offering (obviously) more modern English but frequently and surprisingly sometimes doing an even poorer job of translation. First things first, though. Let’s look at the KJV and see how it actually blurs and distorts the meaning and beauty of the Bible.
Not surprisingly, the English of the twenty-first century differs from that of the seventeenth century.
Some of the changes in English are obvious, such as the verbs in “Abraham clave the wood for the burnt offering” (modern English demands “cleaved” or, better, “split”), “The LORD God of heaven . . . which spake unto me and that sware unto me” (“spoke” and “swore”), or “God hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do” (“has” and “shown”). Similarly, the fifth plague in Egypt is called “a very grievous murrain” (“murrain” is a disease of cattle and sheep) and the sixth “blains upon man” (“boils,” perhaps), both times using terminology that modern readers find foreign. Isaiah 31:3 warns, “He that is holpen shall fall down” (“helped”).
While these obsolete words give the modern reader the mistaken impression that the Bible, too, is obsolete, they also red-flag their own shortcomings. Words like “clave,” “blains,” and “holpen”—and many more like them—don’t mean anything in modern English. So they don’t convey the wrong meaning of the Hebrew so much as they sometimes fail to convey any meaning at all.
Other changes in English are more subtle and insidious, because the older words still exist in modern English but with different meanings. The KJV translation “I shall not want” had nothing to do with desire but rather with lacking, so “I will lack nothing” is the real point. Moses is called “meek,” but to indicate humility, not powerlessness. The “vail under the taches” that adorns the Tabernacle might now be called a “curtain.” (And “taches” are clasps.) On its face, Proverbs 28:21 seems odd: “To have respect of persons is not good.” But “respect” meant “to be partial,” and the point was to avoid favoritism.
Similar changes include “let,” as from Isaiah 43:13, “[God] works; who can let it?” The text there uses “let” not in the modern sense of “allow” but, rather, its opposite, “hinder” (a term preserved in tennis but otherwise rare nowadays). “Prevent” (from the Latin praevenire) used to mean “go before” or “precede,” which is why Psalm 59:10 reads “The God of my mercy shall prevent me” in the KJV, while now we would say, “. . . will go before me.” The beautiful imagery of Song of Songs, “the flowers appear on the earth . . . the voice of the turtle is heard,” now wrongly suggests a turtle; the animal is in fact a bird, now called a “dove” or a “turtledove.” And modern readers do not immediately think that a talking donkey is the same as a talking ass.
In addition to changes in the meanings of English words, we find differences in what linguists call “register,” such as how formal language differs from informal, spoken from written, casual from stiff, etc. (We cover this more in Chapter 3.) The authors of the KJV purposely chose formal but not archaic English, English they would have called modern (though now linguists classify it as “Middle English” or “Early Modern English”). Twenty-first-century readers who encounter the lofty, archaic English of the KJV wrongly conclude that it was meant to reflect lofty, archaic Hebrew. It was not. Back then, “I shall” was standard, while “I will” was used only for emphasis. The word “thou” was intimate, sometimes used in contrast to “ye.” Verbs like “goest” were commonplace. The effects of these changes combine in sentences like “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” which was originally no more formal than “Who told you that you were naked?” Similarly, “draw not nigh hither” is just “come no closer.”
So far, we’ve seen cases where the KJV had the right translation for its time, but English has changed enough to make that translation wrong for our time. But while the scholars and theologians who worked on the KJV did a surprisingly good job, they were not perfect, and sometimes even in the seventeenth century the English in the KJV was wrong.
For example, Leviticus 25 deals extensively with the “jubile year,” now spelled “jubilee.” It’s the fiftieth year of a cycle, a year in which to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land.” (The concept proved so compelling that the forgers of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia co-opted the line.)
The Hebrew for “jubile(e)” year is yovel, a word that refers to a kind of horn, perhaps a ram’s horn, and, presumably, is associated with the fiftieth year because a horn is to be blown in that year.(In Chapter 2 we learn how we know what the Hebrew means.) The Latin form of yovel, based on the Greek, is iobileus. By pure chance, that Latin word sounds like iubileus, connected to the verb iubilare, “to celebrate.” That is, the Latin words for “yovel horn” and “jubilation” sound almost the same. Based on this Latin coincidence, the Hebrew word for a kind of horn turned into an English word that suggests celebration. The KJV translation is simply wrong.
(A similar process gave us the myth that the fruit Eve eats in Genesis is an apple. It’s never called that, but the Latin word for “apple” is malum, a word that also happens to mean “evil.” Because the tree from which the fruit comes is the tree of “knowing good [bonum in Latin] and evil [malum],” some people assumed that the fruit, too, must be a malum—that is, an apple. At least that mistake never made it into the KJV, but the coincidence still caused enough widespread confusion that most people think the Bible calls the fruit an “apple.”)
The KJV didn’t get just individual words wrong. The translators made mistakes about Hebrew grammar, too. The very common Hebrew word leimor, literally “to say,” introduced direct quotation in an era that predated punctuation. But the authors of the KJV, not knowing that the word was the equivalent of quotation marks, translated the word as “saying.” That’s how we get the common but wrong “God blessed them, saying . . .” or “God spake . . . saying . . . ,” etc. It’s so common that people who read the Bible find it familiar, but it’s a mistake. (We talk more about “saying” on page 37.)
Another aspect of grammar is syntax—that is, word order. In every language tiny differences of word order can make a huge difference (“working hard” is not “hardly working”), but until last century researchers lacked a solid understanding of these matters. So it should come as no surprise that the KJV translators erred here as well, misunderstanding subtle clues with far-reaching implications. We’ll see examples in Part II, particularly when we look at poetry and imagery.
Sometimes the KJV translators understood the Hebrew but rendered it incorrectly in English. One clear example comes from the snake in Genesis. The snake tells Eve that eating the fruit won’t kill her. But the English reads, “Ye shall not surely die,” rather than the correct “[You] surely will not die.” That is, the KJV leaves open the possibility that Eve could die (you won’t surely die, but you might die), while the Hebrew is more reassuring.
Another example comes from Ezekiel’s famous vision of the dry bones, in which God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to dry bones in a valley, commanding them to re-form into people. Describing part of the reassembling, Ezekiel 37:7 in the KJV reads, “The bones came together, bone to his bone.” Whose bone is “his bone”? The Hebrew simply means “one bone to another,” a fact the authors of the KJV must have known, but—and again, we go into more detail in Chapter 3—the primitive state of translation theory (combined with the near lack of the word “its” back then) blocked an accurate translation.
Sometimes the point of the Hebrew was not merely to convey information but to do so poetically. While the KJV certainly possesses a certain poetry, it does not match the original Hebrew very well. Take for instance Job’s humble admission that he is but “dust and ashes.” Thanks to the KJV, that phrase has become an English expression. But the original Hebrew had two nearly identical words. The question of exactly how the words were pronounced when the Book of Job was written is a complicated one, but we can see for sure that the words for “dust” and for “ash” (it’s singular in Hebrew) both have three letters, and the final two pairs are identical: ayin-peh-resh for “dust” and aleph-peh-resh for “ashes.” The effect in Hebrew is difficult to reproduce in English, but a pair like “oil”/“soil” gives the right idea. “Rhyme”/“reason” is also similar to the original Hebrew effect. “Dust”/“ashes” is not.
We’ve seen examples of three kinds of problems in the KJV: The Hebrew was misunderstood. The English didn’t represent the Hebrew. And the English, even though it used to match the Hebrew, no longer does because English has changed. Unfortunately, the KJV is not the only edition that suffers from these common problems.
The Bible shelf of most bookstores offers dozens of choices for the potential Bible reader. That’s because we are not the first to think about the KJV or about translation, and many others have tried to improve on the flawed but familiar renderings, to correct the antiquated English of the KJV, to apply new theories, or to promulgate religious doctrine.
But even as newer tools to understand the original Hebrew became available, translators generally worked in the shadow of the KJV, either trying to emulate it or, occasionally, specifically trying not to. Some Biblical scholars grew up with the KJV, so they knew it best and unwittingly relied on it. Others, like Ma Ferguson, saw God’s own work in King James’s mission. And still others simply bowed to economic realities, betting that a KJV-based translation was more likely to sell copies. (The Bible remains the all-time bestselling book ever written.)
In other words, the general methodology has been to start with the KJV and either purposely keep as much as possible or (rarely) change as much as possible. But neither approach makes much sense. There’s no sound reason to start translating ancient Hebrew by using a four-hundred-year-old English translation any more than, say, a study of a fifteenth-century Ming vase should start with a photograph instead of with the original.
So in the end, even though more modern translations address some of the shortcomings in the KJV, they are still tainted by it, and even suffer problems of their own. We discuss and evaluate various translations in detail in the Appendix, but for now here’s a sample of what’s available and why none of the current translations is satisfactory.
The widely used New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) was published in 1989, following the Revised Standard Version, itself a revision of the 1901 American Standard Version. But the American Standard Version was based on the KJV. So even though the English in the NRSV has largely been modernized, a lot of confusing language remains in the translation. The NRSV replaces “draw not nigh hither” from the KJV with “do not come closer,” but, for example, it keeps “want” in Psalm 23, hoping the reader will understand that the verb means “lack.”
The history of the NRSV also demonstrates how even modern translators base their work on the KJV. The introduction to the 1971 edition of the Revised Standard Version not only refers to the original introduction to the KJV (published with the original edition of the KJV); it actually quotes the part of that introduction that denies creating a new translation: “We never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation . . . but to make a good one better.” That attitude pervades most of the translations.
Similar to the Revised Standard Version is the New American Bible (NAB). A 1943 encyclical by Pope Pius XII put the project in motion, but it wasn’t published until 1970. As in other modern Bibles, the text, though still based on the KJV, is generally readable. Instead of the KJV’s “draw not nigh hither,” we find “come no nearer,” which is comparable to the NRSV’s “do not come closer.” The end of the first line of Psalm 23 in the NAB reads, “There is nothing I lack.” Though it claims to be “a completely new translation throughout,” the NAB frequently mirrors the flawed text of the KJV, sometimes only approximately and sometimes exactly.
While the NRSV and the NAB try to modernize the KJV, the New Living Translation (NLT) has a different approach based on a different agenda. The year 1971 saw the publication of the Living Bible, an attempt by Mr. Kenneth Taylor to paraphrase the Bible. The NLT is a 1996 rewrite of Taylor’s 1971 publication, and it goes even further in coercing the ancient Hebrew into colloquial English. Instead of “I shall not want,” it offers “I have everything I need.” The translation is marked by other chatty phrases like “do not come any closer,” “you won’t get a single bite of meat” (Deuteronomy. 28:31), etc. While this idiomatic phrasing frequently captures the general point of the original Hebrew, it completely fails to convey the tone, poetry, imagery, etc.
The year 1978 brought yet another modern, popular translation: the New International Version (NIV). It falls very loosely between the KJV-based NRSV and the free-flowing NLT. According to its committee on Bible translation, the NIV strives to be “idiomatic but not idiosyncratic.” (Its rendering of Psalm 23 reads, “. . . I shall not be in want.”) Unfortunately, the decision to produce “idiomatic” English even when the Hebrew might have been idiosyncratic is a fundamental mistake. When the Hebrew is idiomatic, the NIV does a reasonably good job with its English renderings. But, like the NLT, the NIV destroys the poetry and much of the imagery of the original Bible.
While the NRSV, the NIV, and in particular the NLT are generally more readable than the KJV, and while they solve some of its problems, they are not always more accurate. As we just saw, one fundamental problem is represented by the NIV’s goal of a translation that is idiomatic. The problem is that the Bible contains a great variety of writing styles, and only some are idiomatic in Hebrew.
The modern translations—particularly the NLT, but others as well—and, for that matter, the KJV, all dull down the text by assuming that it should all sound more or less the same in English. So the NLT’s translation of the direct prose of Genesis (“God created the heavens and the earth”) sounds the same as the lofty poetry of Job 38:36 (“Who gives intuition and instinct?”). The NRSV recognizes that Job is poetry, but rather than giving us poetry in English, it follows the KJV and offers the barely comprehensible “Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” The NIV does better with the poetry—“Who endowed the heart with wisdom or gave understanding to the mind?”—but still uses “heavens” in Genesis for what should be “sky.”
In short, to homogenize the English is a fundamental mistake. In spite of the authors’ intentions, the KJV is now uniformly formal and frequently archaic. The NIV is, by design, idiomatic. The NRSV walks a middle ground. These three represent the translations that are available, and none of them does justice to the varied nature of the original Hebrew.
We thus add to our growing list of translation deficiencies.
Modern linguistics has proven extremely useful in decoding the ancient message of the Bible, because the science sheds new light on all languages, including ancient ones. And the modern field of translation has been invaluable in providing English renditions of foreign texts. Unfortunately, there are no English translations of the Bible that fully take advantage of these advances.
English speakers who read Ovid or Aristotle or Pushkin in translation have a better sense of the original texts than do readers of any existing English translation of the Bible. But there is no reason that English speakers can’t have the same access to the Bible that they do to other great works.
This book demonstrates, step by step, how linguistics and translation theory combine to make the Bible clearer than it has been since the days it was first penned.
In a game called “broken telephone” or sometimes just “telephone,” children sit in a circle and pass a secret to one another. One child thinks of a word or sentence and whispers it to his or her neighbor. The neighbor follows suit, again whispering the message and passing it on. As the message makes its way around the circle, it mutates. Some people don’t speak clearly. Others don’t hear so well. And some players can’t resist the temptation to change the message into what they want it to be. By the time the message returns to the person who first started it, it is all but unrecognizable.
Latecomers to a global and millennial game of “broken telephone,” we, too, rely on revisions of modifications to outmoded and ill-conceived approximations of an original message first committed to parchment more than two thousand years ago. Like the children playing “telephone,” some generations made translation mistakes. Others changed the message into what they wanted it to be. And sometimes generations, speaking slightly different dialects, just misunderstood one another.
But unlike the children playing “telephone,” we still have the original.
And it’s time to recover the initial message.