Here are three examples.

Leviticus 20:10 (dittography)

In Leviticus 20:10, we find the phrase “a man who commits adultery with the wife of” repeated, almost certainly inadvertently. So the Hebrew text reads, literally:

and
a man who commits adultery with the wife of
a man who commits adultery with the wife of
his neighbor:
[in that case the adulterer and adulteress shall be put to death.]

Three translation options seem to present themselves:

1. Translate the text as it is, repetition and all.

2. “Fix” the text by ignoring the repetition.

3. “Fix” the text by making sense of the repetition.

Most translations take the second route. The ESV, NRSV, and The Message, for example, translate the repeated phrase only once. (The ESV and NRSV note the Hebrew duplication in a footnote.)

I don’t know of any version that follows the first strategy exactly, but the KJV comes pretty close: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” If we disregard the italics, the duplicated phrases are almost identical. But even so, the KJV doesn’t reproduce the effect of having the same phrase twice.

The remaining translations try to make sense of the duplication, much as the KJV did. For instance, the NIV gives us, “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife — with the wife of his neighbor — …,” as if the second phrase is an explanation of the first.

The merits of Option 2 are pretty clear: Just because a scribe made a mistake doesn’t mean we should introduce a mistake into English.

I can understand Option 1 as well: We should translate the text, not emend it.

But it’s hard for me to understand why Option 3 is a good idea. Rather, it seems like a mistake born of misunderstanding the nature of the original text.

Deuteronomy 31:1 (parablepsis)

We find a different challenge in Deuteronomy 31:1. That verse starts in Hebrew, “Moses went [vayelech] and spoke…” The problem is that Moses didn’t go anywhere. In fact, it’s pretty clear that he’s exactly where he was in the previous verse.

It seems that the original text was not “Moses went” but rather “Moses finished.” While those two verbs seem unrelated in English, in Hebrew the first (without vowels) is V-Y-L-K, while the second is V-Y-K-L. Except for the order of the final two letters, they’re the same. Furthermore, we find V-Y-K-L (“finished”) in the Dead Sea Scrolls (“DSS”), and the Septuagint translates sunteleo, “finished.”

Again, we have three basic options: translate the text as is, ignore the mistake, or make sense of the mistake.

The KJV, among others, takes the first approach. (This is hardly surprising. Until the discovery of the DSS, it wasn’t clear that this was a mistake. Many people thought the Septuagint had it wrong. And, in fact, I suppose it’s possible that the Septuagint and DSS are both wrong.)

Other translations, such as the NAB and NRSV, simply translate “finished” here, as though the Hebrew read V-Y-K-L.

And other translations yet try to reconcile the text, with such options as, “So Moses continued to speak” (ESV).

Again, I understand the first two approaches better than the third.

Psalm 93:4 (haplography)

A third example comes from the poetry in Psalm 93:4. The Hebrew is, literally, “more than the sounds of much water mighty sea-breakers mighty on high is Adonai” — which doesn’t make much sense.

The Hebrew grammar here is complicated, but three basic points will help: The Hebrew letter mem (“M”) is used at the end of a word to indicate plurals. It is used at the beginning of a word to indicate nouns. And, also at the beginning of a word, it means “more than.”

So the plural of “mighty” (adir) is adirim. The word “breaker” starts with a mem: mishbar. And the first word of Psalm 93:4, mikolot comes from mi- (“more than”) plus kolot (“sounds”).

Accordingly, the way to say “mightier than sea-breakers,” if “mightier” is plural, is adirim mi-mish’b'rei yam, or, without vowels or spaces, A-D-Y-R-Y-M-M-M-Sh-B-R-Y-Y-M. However, the traditional text gives us A-D-Y-R-Y-M-M-Sh-B-R-Y-Y-M.

In short, if we add a third mem (back?) into the text, we get the much more sensible, “God is mightier than the sound of the water, mightier than the sea breakers.”

Here, every translation I know adopts what we’ve been calling the second strategy, fixing the text by ignoring the mistake.

Summary and Questions

Even though these three — and other — scribal errors are in principal the same, we find that translations deal with them differently.

1. Do you think a translation should fix erroneous text? If so, when?

2. When a translation does fix the text, should it also indicate what the uncorrected text means?

3. What value might there be to printing the uncorrected Hebrew (or Greek) next to the corrected English?

But in this case, our intuition leads us astray, which is why I’m not a fan of so-called “literal,” “essentially literal,” or “formal equivalence” translations.

Here’s an example that will make clear what goes wrong.

There’s a German verb blaumachen. Though the Germans write it as one word, we can look at the two parts: blau (“blue”) and machen (“to make” or “to do”).

The obvious translation of blaumachen is not “to blue make” — because that’s not English — but “to make blue” or “to do blue.” Both of these translations fit into the “literal” Bible translation camp: ESV, KJV, etc.

We can go one step further and note that neither “to make blue” nor “to do blue” is an English phrase, while “to be blue” most certainly is. So we might translate “to be blue” (which — for non-native speakers — means “to be sad”). That translation fits into the “make the English understandable” camp: CEB, NLT, etc.

We can go one step further yet and, trying to write better or more vivid prose, translate, “to lament.” This is what The Message might do.

But all of these are wrong, for a very simple reason. “To make blue” (blaumachen) in German means “to skip school.”

The translation issue here is that “blue” in English and “blue” in German convey different sets of concepts. In English, the word represents sorrow, while in German, truancy. In English we have “be blue,” “feel blue,” “the blues,” etc. (For non-native speakers, those mean “to be sad,” “to feel sad,” and “sorrow.” The last one is also a kind a music.) By contrast, in German we have not only blaumachen but also a “blue letter,” which is the letter the principal sends home to the parents of a child who skips school.

In other words, what looks like a “closer reading of the German text” — “to make blue” — is really just a misreading of the German text.

I think this pattern applies more generally. Frequently, what looks like a close reading of the Bible is just a misreading of it.

Unfortunately, “kill” is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew, which does not say, “you shall not kill.”

The Hebrew verb here is ratsach, and it only refers to illegal killing.

We see this pretty clearly from Numbers 35, which deals with different kinds of killing — somewhat like modern murder vs. manslaughter laws.

For example, in Numbers 35:16, we learn that one person who kills another with an iron instrument has ratsached. Verses 17-18 expand ratsach to include killing by hitting someone with a deadly stone object or a deadly wooden object. The reasoning seems to be that iron is assumed to be a deadly weapon, while stones and wood come in both deadly and non-deadly varieties. Hitting someone with a deadly instrument is a case of ratsaching.

The point of these clauses is that there are lots of kinds of killing, and only some of them are instances of ratsaching.

Other kinds of killing — for example, killing the assailant from verses 16-18 — is not only allowed but required. That sort of required killing (capital punishment, as we call it now) is not ratsaching, and is not forbidden by the Ten Commandments.

Similarly, many other kinds of killing are not addressed in the Ten Commandments.

I go through much more evidence in Chapter 7 of And God Said, so I won’t repeat it here.

Much of this information, though, is not new.

The commandment — from Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17, quoted in Matthew 5:21, Matthew 19:18 and Romans 13:9 — is translated into English with the verb “murder” instead of “kill” by many popular Bible translations, including the ESV, NIV, NRSV, and JPS renditions. “Murder” is not exactly right either — again, I go through the evidence in And God Said — because “murder” is too narrow. (A note in the ESV correctly points out that, “The Hebrew word also covers causing human death through carelessness or negligence.”)

But “you shall not murder,” though also wrong, is closer than “you shall not kill.”

I can understand why lay readers of the NAB (which sticks with “kill” here) might not know what the commandment really means.

But it seems to me that people like Thomas J. Reese, S.J., a “senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University,” ought to know better. So I was surprised when he wrote for the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” that, “[f]or a person with AIDS not to use a condom when having sex is a sin against the Fifth Commandment–Thou shalt not kill.”

Then USA Today‘s “Faith and Reason” blog quoted Reese, confusing more people.

It seems to me that religious leaders have a right to believe what they want. But to publicly base a belief on a known mistranslation strikes me as a poor way to proceed.

So perhaps instead of “baptism” we should translate “washing.”

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

Greek Baptism

The Greek word for “baptize” is baptizo.

We know from passages like Mark 7:4 that the word can mean simply “wash”: “[The Pharisees and Jews] do not eat after returning from the marketplace unless they have washed [baptizo] … [Other traditions include] the washing [baptismos] of [various eating vessels].”

We see similar evidence in Luke 11:38: “The Pharisee was amazed to see that [Jesus] didn’t wash [baptizo] before the meal.”

We also see the verb in the OT, once in II Kings 5:14, where it’s the Greek translation of the Hebrew taval (“dip” or “immerse”), and once in Isaiah 21:4, where the word seems out of context.

Equally, we find the verb baptizo in non-Biblical Greek texts — more on this below. In those contexts, too, the verb seems to be a general one.

From all of these sources, it’s clear that baptizo is a common verb, and the specialized “baptize” in English misrepresents the original Greek.

“Baptize” in English

If “baptize” in English is a misrepresentation, the obvious question is: what is the right translation?

Reasonable options are “wash,” “dip,” “rinse,” “plunge,” “clean,” etc.

But deciding among these is particularly difficult.

In this context, one of the most widely cited sources on the Internet is a recipe by the 2nd-century BC writer Nicander. Do a quick search on “baptism,” and both his name and recipe will come up immediately, with language along the lines of the following: “A clear example that shows the meaning of baptizo is a text from the Greek poet and physician Nicander, who lived about 200 B.C. It is a recipe for making pickles. Nicander says that in order to make a pickle, the vegetable should first be ‘dipped’ (bapto) into boiling water and then ‘baptized’ (baptizo) in the vinegar solution.”

Then the question becomes how the (related) Greek word bapto is different than baptizo. The answer is usually that bapto is temporary while baptizo produces a permanent change.

But this approach is problematic.

First, Nicander wrote many decades before the NT was written. The meaning of the words could well have changed over that time.

Secondly, we only know about Nicander’s recipe because Athenaeus — writing hundreds of years later — quotes it in book 4 of his Deipnosophists (133D).* Athenaeus may have gotten the words wrong.

Thirdly, Nicander wrote in hexameter. For all we know, he chose bapto versus baptizo to make the meter work, or for other poetic reasons.

Finally, even ignoring the span of several hundred years, we expect words to cover a range of meanings. For example, we have an expression in English “[go for a] dip in the pool,” which means to swim. It can refer to completely immersing the body in water. Yet we do not want to conclude that “dip the chicken cutlet in the flour” necessarily means that the cutlet ends up completely submersed. (Also, “submerse” isn’t what happens with “flour.” I know.)

These four kinds of problems impact other ways we might learn the exact nuance of baptizo.

For example, the exact text of Mark 7:4 is in doubt. We don’t know for sure what taval means in II Kings. And so forth.

So even though the matter is of some theological importance, we can not definitively narrow down the meaning enough to decide unequivocally on an English verb.

Some Current Solutions

So what do common translations do?

For Mark 7:4, which represents one of the cases of ordinary washing, translations range from “wash” to “immerse” to — based on a different textual understanding — “purify.” (The NJB’s “they never eat without first sprinkling themselves,” seems particularly unfortunate to me.)

Translations generally agree on “wash” for Luke 11:38.

In Hebrews 9:10A, we find “washings” (KJV, ESV, etc.), “ritual washing(s)” (NAB, NLT), “ceremonial washings” (NIV), and “baptisms” (NRSV).

But almost every translation then uses only the specialized “baptize” for other cases of baptizo, misleading the English reader.

The Impact

Matthew 3:6 (equally, Mark 1:5) is a good example. The NRSV reads, “[people of the region] were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” Like most translations, the NRSV thus gives the reader the (wrong) impression that a specialized action, baptism, is connected to an extension of an ordinary one: confession. (This is not the modern notion of ritual confession.)

But a reader of the original Greek would understand something closer to, “they were submersed in the Jordan river as they confessed their sins.”

Or to think of it another way, the original text connects two worldly actions — washing and recognition — while the English translation “baptize” wrongly suggests one specifically religious action and only one worldly one.

Acts 22:16 similarly demonstrates. The NRSV reads, “…Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.”

Paul is connecting two worldly actions — washing [baptizo] and cleansing [apolouo] — with conversion. The English translation, again, substitutes a specifically religious action. (The verb apolouo is complicated and interesting in its own right.)

We see the same thing in Hebrews 6:2. The Greek lists four worldly things that take on heightened importance as part of Christ’s fundamental teaching: washing, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. Yet standard English translations (e.g., “baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment,” NRSV) leave the reader wrongly thinking that the first item in the list is different than the other three. Almost as wrong would be, “washing, epithesis, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.”

Summary

So the questioner on the About page is correct. The original Greek baptizo is not a technical term the way “baptize” is in English, and it’s usually a mistake to use a technical term to translate a non-technical one.

Yet as early at the Vulgate, it was recognized that there was something special about baptism.

So what do you think: Should the translation reflect the original point or later tradition?

(*)Gulick in Volume II of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Deipnosophists translates:

But they also ate as an appetizer turnips done in vinegar and mustard, as Nicander plainly shows in the second book of the Georgics; for he says:

“…the turnip roots, you cut in thin slices, gently cleaning away the undried outer skin, and after drying them in the sun a little, either dip [bapto] a quantity of them in boiling water and soak them in strong brine; or again, put equal parts of white must and vinegar in a jar together, then plunge [baptizo] the slices in it, having dried them off with salt.”

Amos 15:5

The first part of Amos 15:5 reads (NRSV), “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate;” What goes in to that translation? What does the translation miss? What other options might be better?

As we go through, I’ve italicized questions that the translator needs to answer. I offer my answers to some of them toward the end.

Words

We start with the words, most of which are straightforward:

There are details of the words which are not conveyed in these English glosses.

Imperatives

The verbs (“hate,” “love,” and “put in place”) are plural imperatives. We don’t have plurals like this in English, but there are ways of expressing the same point if we want: “all of you, hate…,” for example. (The LXX‘s “we hated” and “we loved” doesn’t match the Hebrew here.)

Is the nuance of the verb forms important to convey in translation?

Evil

There are at least two reasonable translations for ra: “bad” and “evil.” The Hebrew is the common opposite of “good” (tov), so “bad” seems like the better choice. Unfortunately, while “good” and “evil” in English function both as adjectives and nouns, “bad” is only an adjective. “Hate bad” isn’t English. The KJV ops for “hate the bad” to preserve the pair “good/bad.” Modern translations almost all go with “hate evil.”

Is the substitution of “evil” for “bad” warranted? Or should the translator find a way of making the more accurate “bad” work in English?

Love

There are lots of ways of loving. Clearly, one doesn’t love a spouse the same way one loves what is good. Perhaps for this reason, the CEV goes with “choose good.” (In a similar vein, the Greek agapao is frequently glossed along the lines “love, primarily of Christian love.”)

Should the translation reflect how “love” (ahav) is used here?

Establish

The verb I gloss as “[put in] place” is usually used for people and physical things. In Genesis, “present” is often a good translation. In Deuteronomy 28:56, the verb is used for “set” in the phrase “set the sole of her foot on the ground.” In Judges 6:37, it’s used for “set” in the phrase “set the wool fleece” on the ground.

Is “establish” too grandiose here?

The NIV offers “maintain justice” here. But the broader context of the passage makes it clear that justice was lacking and that it had to be restored. (The LXX gives us “restore.”)

Should the translation of “establish” include the context here?

Gate

For me, the issue of “gate” is one of the most interesting. The “gate” (sha’ar) here is a city gate, but when I think of “gate” in English, I think of the gate of a fence. (Similarly, the famous phrase from Deuteronomy 6:9, “write them … on your gates” deals with the entrances to cities.) Maybe “city gate” is better?

More importantly, the gate in antiquity was a gathering spot, not merely a portal. In modernity, the “city square” serves the same purpose. (So does the watercooler, I guess, but not really.)

One purpose of gathering at the gate was justice. This is probably why the NIV goes with “courts” here instead of “gate.” The English translation that puts “justice” in the “gate” seems to put it in an odd spot, whereas originally the Hebrew put it right where it normally was.

Does “gate” in English correctly convey the Hebrew? Should the translation focus on the physical location of the gate or on its purpose? Is the translation successful if readers have to know details of ancient society to understand it?

Justice

The Hebrew mishpat is variously “judgement,” “justice,” “rule,” “law,” “sentence,” and more.

Does “mishpat” have to be translated uniformly throughout the Bible? What nuance is implied here? Should the translation indicate the nuances?

Poetry

Beyond the choice of words, the Hebrew is poetic.

The phrase starts with classic parallelism, juxtaposing two pairs of opposites: “hate/love” and “bad/good.” The previous verse also puts “good” and “bad” together, though there “good” comes first. (Surprisingly, the KJV translates “good/evil” in verse 14 but “the good/the bad” for the same Hebrew in verse 15.)

Then a new element, “justice,” is introduced. Stylistically the third clause is similar to the first two, but in terms of content it’s very different. (This has the effect of emphasizing “justice.”)

The object of the verb comes last in all three cases (“bad,” “good,” and “justice”). Should the English translation preserve this poetic device? Is it possible?

The NLT, correctly noting that “evil” is more commonly used as a noun than “good,” translates, “hate evil and love what is good.” Should the English translation preserve the single-verb-single-noun pattern for the first two clauses?

Reading Between the Lines

The connection between “justice” and the first two pairs is (purposely?) left vague. Should the translation fill in the details of the connection here? For example, The Message and God’s Word translations offer “then” instead of just “and.”

Noting that gates used to be where justice was administered and that courts now serve that function, the NIV, God’s Word and others translate “gates” as “courts.” The Message goes with “public square” in the phrase “work it out in the public square.” The NLT offers, “remodel your courts into true halls of justice.”

Other translations explain what happens with justice. For example, the NJB translates, “let justice reign.”

Should a translation explain the text in these kinds of ways?

English Grammar

Maybe it’s because of all of this hidden complexity that modern translations sometimes ignore English grammar. One immediate question is whether one meets “in the gate” or “at the gate” in English. (For me, “I’ll meet you at Jaffa gate in Jerusalem” is better than “I’ll meet in you Jaffa gate in Jerusalem.” I suspect this will be dialectal. Does anyone prefer “in” here?)

The NIV, NJB, and others forget about simple English punctuation. The NIV drops the first “and” (“Hate evil, love good;”), for example. Is there any reason not to use correct English grammar?

Summary and Answers

Summary

We’ve seen that the original text refers to hating what is bad, loving what is good, and (re)establishing justice in the place where justice was usually administered, that is, the city gate.

The text addresses people collectively.

The text is poetic and pithy. It consists of three clauses, the third standing out because it’s a little longer than the first two.

My Answers

I think it’s nice to convey singular/plural nuances in imperative verbs, but not necessary, primarily because ancient Hebrew uses both singular and plural for addressing a group. This doesn’t seem to be a big deal, and there’s no easy way to do it in English anyway.

I think that “evil” for ra is going too far. I see a statement about ordinary, daily life in the original. We use “bad” for that in English, I think, not “evil.”

I think that the English “love” covers roughly the same areas of meaning as the Hebrew ahav. It’s a mistake to try to spell out in English what the original did not spell out in Hebrew, so “love,” though broad, is right.

I think “establish” is not too bad for the Hebrew, and I can’t think of anything better. “Set up” might work, too, depending on the other lexical choices.

The issue of “gate” is, for me, the hardest. “Justice” in modernity has nothing to do with “gates,” and, in fact, this passage in Hebrew is not about gates except to the degree that gates are the locus of justice. It’s like “restore justice to the courts” in English. The focus there isn’t “courts” but rather “justice.”

On the other hand, gates come up frequently in the Bible, so changing the word only here seems problematic. Just for example, the Hebrew in this passage matches Deuteronomy 6:9. If we change “gate” to “court” here we destroy the connection.

As for “gate” or “city gate,” I think “city gate” is more accurate, but the accuracy is irrelevant, because either way we end up with an odd place for justice. People who know about the role of ancient city gates will know what “gates” means, and those who don’t won’t find “city gates” to be particularly helpful.

I think the poetry is important, and, in particular, the translation should preserve the grammatical connection among the three phrases. I don’t think the translation necessarily has to use verb-noun each time, though; another repeated pattern would serve just as well.

I do not think that it’s the job of the translation to fill in details that are not in the text. I think that’s where commentary comes in.

And I think writing an English translation according to the rules of English grammar is important.

Translations

So one reasonable translation is:

“Hate what is bad and love what is good, and establish what is just among you.”

I’ve use the “what is…” construction to give all three clauses the same pattern, yet not force myself to use “evil.” I’m pretty happy with everything up to “among you.” Though I still think “among you” is better than “at the gate,” I’m left wondering if there is a better solution. I also worry that the sentence might be read as referring to “what is just among you.”

Another reasonable translation leaves out “gate” altogether. Perhaps every English translation is more misleading that not translating the word: “Hate what is bad and love what is good, and establish what is just.”

Or, to revert to “evil,” we might try: “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice among you.” While “evil” sounds stronger in English, it may be stronger than what the Hebrew represented.

What do you think?

(23) …”Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” [Genesis 15:6] … (24) You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

That translation, like most others, is ambiguous regarding the exact connection between Abraham’s belief (in James 2:23, which quotes Genesis 15:6) and faith (in James 2:24).

But in Greek, “believed” is pisteuo and “faith” is pistis. The text connects Abraham’s pistis with the general nature of pistis. It’s essentially a grammatical accident that we see a verb in Genesis 15:6 — so also in James 2:23 — and a noun in James 2:24.

Why do translations have such a hard time capturing this basic effect? The KJV, ESV, NAB, NIV, NLT, and NRSV all have “Abraham believed” here, instead of the obvious other choice: “Abraham had faith.”

(The NAB’s lapse is particularly surprising. In Genesis itself that translation reads, “put his faith.” The CEV opts for “had faith” in James 2:23, but then goes with “what we believe” in verse 24.)

I also think it’s no small matter that the same root appears twice, a topic I’ll turn to soon.

In Hebrew, they are d’varim in Exodus 20, either “things” or “words.” (This dual use of d’varim is a bit like “things” in English — I can own ten things or tell you ten things.)

To the best of my knowledge, of the major translations only the NAB renders the Hebrew as “commandments” in Exodus 20.

For that matter, the number “10″ doesn’t come from Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, but rather from Exodus 34:28 and two other places in Deuteronomy. There, the KJV and other translations (NIV, ESV, NAB, NRSV, and others) translate “ten d’varim” as “ten commandments,” sometimes capitalizing the phrase and sometimes with a note that the Hebrew doesn’t say “commandments.”

(Later Jewish tradition would replace d’varim with dibrot, which also doesn’t mean “commandments.”)

Two questions come to mind: Should we keep calling these the “ten commandments” even though that doesn’t seem to be what they are in the Bible? And is the NAB justified in its translation decision?

What’s going on is this: In antiquity, most people didn’t get enough calories to live. Today (in the U.S. and other “modern” Western countries) many people struggle to cut down their caloric intake. In the days of the Psalms, by contrast, people struggled to get enough. Old age in particular was a challenge, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to die prematurely because they couldn’t get enough to eat.

The lucky ones, though, did have enough food.

So “fat” back then was the opposite of “scrawny.” Or to look at the matter another way, “healthy and fit” is now represented by “thin,” but it used to pair with “fat.”

How, then, should we translate Psalm 92:14? It reads: the righteous shall bear fruit in old age, being dashen (fat) and ra’anan (fresh). Certainly, “they will bear fruit in old age, being fat and fresh” doesn’t have the right ring to it.

Current Translations

The KJV’s “They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing” is perhaps literally accurate, but it misses the changing role of “fat.”

The ESV’s “They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green” might work with trees, but it doesn’t seem to extend felicitously to people — “full of sap” hardly sounds like a desirable trait for the elderly.

The NIV’s “They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green” seems to suffer from another problem. “Green” in English is usually a metaphor for “inexperienced.” When I read “fresh and green,” I don’t think of the elderly but rather new-comers just starting out.

The NLT goes with, “Even in old age they will still produce fruit; they will remain vital and green.”

The CEV offers “They will be like trees that stay healthy and fruitful, even when they are old.” That at least makes sense and seems positive, though it seems to miss the poetic impact of the original.

The Message‘s “lithe and green, virile still in old age” may be the point, though by spelling out “virile” instead of using imagery, it similarly strays significantly from the original. I also don’t think that trees are “virile.”

Lessons

I think this is a clear example of the need to look beyond the literal meaning of words — “fat,” in this case — and see how they function metaphorically.

The Challenge

How would you translate Psalm 92:12-14?

The first three words of the Bible demonstrate. In Hebrew, they are breishit (“in the beginning”), bara (“created”), and elohim (“God”).

The most direct mapping from Hebrew to English would therefore be, “In the beginning created God [the heavens and the earth].” But that’s not grammatical English. So translators change the text to, “In the beginning God created…”

Unfortunately, they stop there, reasoning (wrongly in my opinion) that a translation of the Bible that means something in English necessarily means the same thing in English as the original.

In our example, the reasoning is this: Putting the verb before the subject in English is bad because it’s not grammatical in English. So far, so good. But the next bit of reasoning is that putting “in the beginning” first is accurate merely because it’s grammatical. The question “does it mean the same thing?” rarely gets asked. And in this case, the answer is “no.” Putting something at the start of a Hebrew sentence does not always mean the same thing as putting something at the start of an English sentence.

In fact, a better translation would be, “it was in the beginning that God created…,” because the first line of Genesis answers the question “when?” not “what?”

More importantly, the reasoning that leads to “in the beginning…” is, I think, faulty. We should not be asking only “is the English grammatical?” but also “does it mean the same thing as the original?”

So Hebrew has three words. “Eternity” is olam. “From the beginning of time up to now” is mei-olam. And “from now to the end of time” is l’olam. Variations include ad olam (“until olam”) and la’ad, both of which mean the same thing as l’olam.

English has a convenient word “forever” that encompasses all time, but we don’t have the equivalent of l’olam or mei’olam. This creates a translation challenge when those two Hebrew words are juxtaposed as a poetic way of indicating “all of eternity.”

One example out of a great many comes from Psalm 90 (which recently popped up here and here). The end of verse 2 in Hebrew reads, “and mei-olam [eternity up to now] ad olam [eternity starting now] you are God.” The point is fairly simple: “You have always been God and you will always be God.”

But the KJV offers the barely coherent, “from everlasting to everlasting.” Here I have to wonder if the translators were even aware of the role that “from,” “to,” and “everlasting” played in Hebrew.

More surprisingly, modern translations generally keep this odd phrasing. The NRSV, NIV, and ESV mimic the KJV here. The NAB offers the equally odd “from eternity to eternity.”

The NLT (which I generally don’t like because of its inaccuracies) has an interesting solution: “you are God, without beginning or end.” I still don’t think the NLT’s translation here is accurate, but it’s certainly better than the others, in that at least it expresses the correct general thought.

The Message (which I usually find to be even less accurate than the NLT) also has an interesting option: “from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘kingdom come’ — you are God.” The story-like “once upon a time” and the theologically-laden “kingdom come” grate on my ear, but at least the English means something akin to the point of the Hebrew.

I think this is a perfect demonstration of what I called slavery to parts of speech. In this case, I think the two prepositional phrases “from everlasting” and “to everlasting” should be translated as past-tense and future-tense verbs, respectively.

So: “you always were and always will be God.”