Telling It Like It Was

Orlinsky, Harry

TELLING IT LIKE IT WAS Next year, the Jewish Publication Society will release A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures, possibly the most extraordinary scholarly achievement in American Jewish...

...Now, why a new translation...
...So what do they do at first...
...But as a translator, he's a philologist, he's not a theologian...
...and perhaps a bit bolder in terms of recreating the kind of atmosphere of the 50s whose passage you just lamented a few minutes ago...
...And the Jewish community decides to embark on a new translation too...
...With all the revisions going on, with all the new discoveries, all the new meanings, it was still word-for-word...
...This was the McCarthy period, 1952, and my being Jewish—or maybe they thought I was Polish, I don't know— they knew I was worse than a fellow traveller, and so I was denounced as a Unitarian...
...The Revised Standard marks the end of the third era...
...When you were commenting before on the kind of social revolutions that lead people to want new translations, if I understood you correctly you were saying, "Look, here we are, obviously in a revolutionary age...
...However, in footnotes, you offer all kinds of emendations, suggestions, you indicate without saying it that the text probably is corrupt, the Septuagint reads one way, the Dead Sea Scrolls another, an emendation would read yet another...
...We were the kind of community to whom such a translation could be offered...
...So I was very careful about that...
...We are all so thoroughly familiar with the traditional translation, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One...
...The answer is plain...
...What's it got to do with one...
...When the NOW people became active in the early 70s, they began to bombard the Revised Standard Version committee with their objections...
...Now there isn't the slightest doubt that we're correct...
...There is a "wind...
...Is there, in the course of a translation, an ideological tool...
...It's a revision...
...It doesn't even occur to people...
...So if you are going to pick any word at all that represents both genders, in a male-dominated society, the male will stand for both the male and the common gender...
...one has his subjective notions which he thinks are absolutely right, you offer a draft and then wonder how these two or three fellows will react, how the other guy will react...
...So echad means "the only...
...I'm only a translator, and for what you have in mind, for example, I would have to start going to the ancient Near Eastern texts, the extra-biblical material that is pertinent to this, and we have a lot of creation stories in western Asia, Mesopotamia, and they all begin, by the way, with the temporal clause, "When"—when this, and when that...
...But I would, however, hesitate to try to prove that from the existing Hebrew text that we have...
...Now, when you say, "Happy is the man who does not walk in the way of the wicked," let us say, how about the woman...
...I think it was...
...On that day, God will be the only one, the single one...
...To be specific, you will find much more male-oriented language in the K'tubim than you will in the Nevi'im...
...One what...
...And that's wrong...
...Let him deny the authenticity of the Bible from the beginning to the end, let him do what he wants...
...Do you have your favorites...
...The female students certainly have made the male members of the faculty more eager, livelier, with the result that the young men and women whom we are graduating into the rabbinate today have got to be, in the course of the next decade or two, more sensitive and...
...Now I'm talking about committee work...
...Because it's word-for-word...
...Archaeology has come along, and brand new ideas, brand new meanings, authentic ones never known before...
...The point is this: Hebrew has only male and female gender, no neuter...
...They just have no other way of saying it...
...The result is that K'tubim, I think, was done under the influence of a more traditional outlook and attitude than was the case with Has Nevi'im, or with the Torah...
...They came from a yeshiva to the Jewish Institute of Religion, a Reform seminary...
...If there was a tie, then the reading of the American Standard Version of 1901 prevailed...
...The Hebrew authors had available to them the full vocabulary...
...We can prove it: Following that we are told, "A river flowed out of the Garden of Eden and it divided into four...
...It's as though nobody's looking over your shoulder anymore...
...Now, what they did was to translate the Hebrew text, in effect word-for-word, into Greek or into Aramaic...
...When you make a translation yourself, there's no one bossing you around...
...And so, not being in any way inhibited by word-for-word translation, where very, very naturally ben is "son" and av is "father" and ish is "man"—that's word-for-word—but being interested in idiom, I was as careful as I could be, without being aware of any kind of sexist ideology, to reproduce the intent of the original Hebrew...
...The word used there is an adjective, harah, and the word for "bear" is not in the future, it's a present participle—she's on the verge, she may be in her eighth or ninth month...
...And he goes on to tell you right away what echad means: that you shouldn't have any other gods...
...Unfortunately we don't have yet female members of the faculty, but that too will be forthcoming in the near future...
...I myself am not arguing against that...
...It's an interesting thing...
...However, even in Jewish translations you have, "shall conceive and bear...
...there are also new tools available to us—archaeology, language, all the variety of tools of this trade...
...In committees things happen, but by and large I would say that K'tubim could have been a lot more idiomatic than it was...
...Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (edited by Harry Orlinsky, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), particularly the Introduction...
...We weren't afraid to introduce this...
...That idea of mine was wrong...
...It's very tempting to have room for revisions—but I will keep them to a minimum...
...On the other hand, when He's through with the second day it doesn't say shnei yamim, two days, it says, "yom sheni," "the second day...
...It's not the man...
...We weren't actually Reform then, we were liberal, we were graduating men who were going into the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbinate...
...We are now getting students, increasingly from non-traditional and Reform environments, who are eager to learn, who are far more social-minded, who really want to learn, and we react positively to them because, having such a receptive audience, we are eager to meet them more than half way in giving them all that we've got...
...There are, presumably, still more fundamental aids that are as yet uncovered, and that will inform the work of the committee that revises your revision, whether ten years from now or 100 years from now, in the same way that the difference between 1911 and 1955, in archaeology and so forth, informed your work...
...They would no longer be beholden to the old feudal system and to the religious authorities who represented it, the Roman Catholic church...
...And if a woman steals, she's exempt...
...When I was asked by the Jewish Publication Society in the very late 40s, and increasingly in the early 50s, to embark on something more up-to-date for the American Jewish community than the JPS translation of 1917, all they had in mind was a Jewish revision of the 1917 translation that would correspond to the American Revised Standard Version revision of 1901 and 1881-85...
...while I i did prepare the draft, and the draft does set a certain tone, the fact is it is a committee product, and the translation is the product of a committee of seven of us...
...every word was sacred...
...And I think I said that in print...
...Orlinsky recommends the following: Essays in Biblical Culture and Bible Translation (Harry Orlinsky, New York: Ktav, 1974...
...In the Torah translation, which was your baby, is there any particular innovation in translation that you regard as an especially exquisite victory or as especially enlightening...
...Yes...
...Do you see a parallel decline in the quality of the rabbinic students you're getting...
...They take the word almah, because it's used parallel to b'tulah in, say, the newly discovered Canaanite text, the Ugaritic text, and try to force that meaning, "virgin," into the Hebrew when it never had that meaning to begin with in extra-biblical sources...
...Which was not our intention...
...Our English Bible in the Making, revised edition (Herbert Gordon May, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965...
...It was the older committee that did the Megillot...
...it could mean parent, it can even be grandparent or ancestor...
...In my volume of notes on the new translation of the Torah, I list five utterly independent arguments in favor of "wind" as against "spirit," proving that the word "spirit" actually is early Christian in origin and the Jews took it over without even realizing it...
...There is no spirit to begin with...
...They are so entirely different...
...There's nothing in the text that we have in our translations that would preclude that, but I myself would not argue that...
...But it turns out, on closer study, that b'tulah doesn't mean "virgin...
...But I am merely trying to translate the passage as we have it...
...So it came out officially in 1963...
...The old order was the Roman Catholic church, and the official Bible for them was the Vulgate, the Latin translation...
...The Revised Standard Version is, as its name indicates, revised...
...Might it not be easier for somebody whose native language is Hebrew to read a thoughtful translation, that is purposely geared to translate the authentic classical text into modern idiom, than it is to struggle with the original text...
...But when you have to prepare a draft for six other members of the committee, and especially when not everyone on the committee is in your judgment as objective as you always are, and each Harry Orlinsky is Professor of Bible at the New York School of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion...
...Both are revisions of the King James translation of 1611 which itself is nothing more than an updating and revision, the eighth such, of Tyndale's first English translation of the Bible in the 16th century, at the beginning of the Protestant movement...
...Not infrequently what came out as our final draft was something that none of us had envisaged to begin with...
...Was that a live issue for you throughout...
...They found it very hard to understand the Hebrew...
...It is a committee that is far more responsive to a right-wing shift in our society, Jewish and non-Jewish...
...Now when a reader gets to the new translation and gets to the wind from God, he says, "Hey, what's going on here...
...My eight Protestant colleagues were denounced as "fellow travellers...
...And the motive and the tools produce the project...
...Whenever you get a major social change involving concrete historical circumstances, involving any large group of people, Jews, Catholics, or Protestants, these changes are going to manifest themselves not only in the character of the church, the leadership of the church, the primary interest and direction of the church or of the synagogue, of the various trends, the right, the center, the left, and all those in between, but also in Bible translation...
...they don't even know what you are talking about...
...What is that going to be...
...You're sponsored by a responsible organization...
...The English is antiquated, the translation's antiquated...
...and you have to use the plural because "ha'ish asher" is the way biblical Hebrew says "those who...
...It's none of his business whether the event that he is translating happened or not, whether he likes it or not...
...And they have plenty, plenty to eliminate...
...In addition to that, we now enjoy the presence of female students...
...Simply because I'm trying to translate a text...
...A short 20 years later it's as though it's a different world...
...We couldn't offer it today...
...The old one, 1917, is antiquated...
...Now, more recently, after World War I and the Great Depression of the 20s, the inflation, the Wall Street crash and so on, and the rise of totalitarianism, the breakdown of the classic capitalist system, new social orders were coming into being...
...Then you begin to realize that ?Hear O Israel ! the Lord is our God* and "Adonai echad" where echad means "He alone—the only one" has nothing to do with "God is One," unless you say, "God is the Only One...
...The Protestant Revised Standard Version—the New Testament in '46, the Old Testament in '52—the Catholic Confraternity Bible in this country in the 40s—that became in 1970 the New American Bible—a new one over in England...
...But let me say that when people talk about the Torah being my transla- j tion, I always correct them...
...More recently, I began to write an article for someone's Jubilee volume, and in working on that aspect of Bible translation I found myself unable to finish the article...
...Why didn't others introduce it...
...there is a return to religion that's the motive...
...Let me give you a specific example of that...
...Now, if you forget, if you will ignore this word-for-word translation, "the Lord our God, the Lord is One," which makes no sense whatever in any language, then you realize that echad is not at all infrequently used in biblical Hebrew in the sense of "the only one, the single one, there isn't any other," and not merely the numeral "one...
...What the fifth great age of Bible translation will bring and when, who knows...
...Interestingly, one of the major aspects of the revision currently going on of the Revised Standard Version with the view to publication around 1990 is the elimination of male-oriented language...
...That's not what the Hebrew says...
...In the case of the New Jewish Version, here's how we worked: We used to meet only a day at a time...
...If he wants to write a history, let him write a history...
...Now it's going to be brought together with Nevi'im, Prophets, which came out in '78, and with K'tubim, Writings, which was completed in '82, all in one volume, scheduled for publication in 1983-84...
...Whatever happens, happens...
...Virgo in Latin means "a girl who is sexually mature" and if you want to say she's a virgin in our sense then you say, "who has not known a man...
...Because it cannot mean that they are distinguishing between the male and the female...
...And so, beginning in the 30s and the 40s, new translations come into being...
...No matter what I wanted, I could not have gotten the JPS today or five years ago even to agree to that philosophy...
...What the Hebrew says is, "When God began to create heaven and earth...
...There were a number of us burned in effigy...
...So that they didn't have to, unless they wanted to, go and examine these things...
...At first, yes...
...They are all revisions and they are all word-for-word revisions...
...You just argued that one could say it means "to be first," that is, to be superior to the other gods...
...Greek was their language...
...it is not Jewish...
...So, it should have a revision...
...There certainly is a right-wing shift in Israel, and a number of the men on the K'tubim committee live in Israel...
...That's exactly my point...
...people were now turning away from all those who promised them Utopia in the new economic order...
...The Catholic and the Protestant Bible translations followed our work...
...they have brought a dimension into the classroom that has been lacking before...
...But I couldn't finish the article...
...It was word-for-word translation...
...He is not allowed to read his philosophy, his history, that is to say, into his translation of the text...
...A lot of them turned back to religion for the first time in half a century...
...She's had no carnal knowledge...
...Won't the reader of the translation miss the point that it was a male-oriented society if you neuter the words...
...That's all...
...What's its function...
...Let me say a word about the volume of notes...
...Well, when you turn back to religion you turn back to the Bible...
...they have stimulated discussion, intellectual argument...
...He doesn't have to believe in God, or he can believe in God...
...They're not going to accept that, so what do they do...
...That was the first major Jewish community in history for whom Hebrew was no longer the vernacular—Greek had become its natural language—and these Jews found it very difficult to understand their Bible, which at that time consisted largely of the Hebrew Chumash, the Torah...
...And I prepared the draft of the entire Chumash...
...We who were responsible for the new Jewish translation however, in the case of the Torah and in the case of the Nevi'im, have far less...
...I don't know...
...The males have to be a little more on their toes...
...We tried a few times to meet for two days in a row, but it exhausted everyone...
...But how in the world can you argue that, when the Hebrew expression was formulated four, five, six, seven hundred years BCE...
...We, in the New Jewish Version, have actually made a revolutionary breakthrough in Bible translation by introducing consciously, deliberately, a new philosophy—idiom rather than word-for-word...
...We have enough trouble trying to understand what the author is trying to tell us and how it should be worded in the English language...
...They are antiquated...
...In preparing the draft, I recognized the fact that not every time you find the word ben for "son" does it mean son...
...It is right-wingish today...
...Let me ask you a question that speaks to the phrase, "more correct translation...
...And there's nothing wrong with that sort of thing...
...Now, obviously what they really meant there was, "Happy is the person who avoids, who does not walk in the way of the wicked...
...Unlike the Revised Standard Version, I would prepare a draft of a chapter or part of a chapter with a tremendous amount of commentary culled from the readings and translations from sources going back to the ancient Near East, the Septuagint, Targum, Vulgate, Syriac translation, Talmud, the medieval commentators, medieval grammarians, Sa'adia's translation, the rationalist Protestant translation of the 16th century, the Catholic, and of course, the modern translations...
...No, maybe they meant that the woman is irrelevant...
...And so we would work one day, usually a Thursday, usually in my office at the Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan, about 15 miles from Ebbet's Field in Brooklyn...
...there are fist fights...
...Another passage that I felt was not to retract...
...Will you say a few words about the Sh'ma...
...And so on for the rest of those days...
...For example, we laid down the principles, which they had agreed to follow, that the Hebrew text itself cannot be emended, changed in any way, in translating the text...
...You've got to be very, very careful when you deal with the extra-biblical material not to read into it preconceived erroneous biblical passages and then turn around and say, "You see, the biblical, traditional meaning has been reinforced...
...Let me give you an example...
...No, the quality of the students today is superior to that of the students we used to get...
...We may go through a century, or more or less, of revisions, and nothing more than revisions, of these new translations...
...I have very little doubt that were our committee alive and well today—unfortunately .four of the original seven have passed on, a fifth one has been living in Australia a long time now, and there are only two of us functioning here, both of us in New York City—but if we were all around today, 1 think we would introduce many, many scores of changes in the translation...
...And then we got together, mostly at the Yale Divinity School, for two weeks in June, two weeks at Christmastime, weekends during the year...
...Everybody thinks echad is "one...
...That was our norm, and you had to have a majority against the reading there, and if you didn't get a majority, but a tie of 4 to 4, the vote was recorded as 5 to 4 to save the older reading...
...That I objected to vigorously, and I refused to cooperate in any way, because I felt that although that philosophy of translation may have served a good purpose previously, it no longer represented an honest and correct attempt at making available to people—to sophisticated, modern, cosmopolitan, intelligent, college graduates in the 50s—what the original authors back 3,000-2,500 years ago wanted to convey to their readers...
...What you say may be implied in the whole context of the Bible...
...It's none of his business...
...I wish it were...
...The word "idiom" is the key...
...when biblical Hebrew wants to say "each one" it says, "ish ish," literally, "man man...
...TELLING IT LIKE IT WAS Next year, the Jewish Publication Society will release A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures, possibly the most extraordinary scholarly achievement in American Jewish history...
...Our intention was simply to translate the Hebrew as we feel the author wanted it to be understood...
...It was often quite different...
...B'tulah means nothing more than "a woman who is sexually mature, of marriageable age...
...In practice you are right—up to a point...
...The way you put that—"I'm at liberty to introduce revisions into the Torah"—can serve as an introduction to the entire subject...
...Translating the Torah is a terribly intimidating assignment: On the one hand there can be no greater challenge to a scholar in your field...
...The idea of "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" is nothing more than an utterly ridiculous, meaningless word-for-word translation that people got used to...
...The Hebrew text does not say that...
...These were, people who were opposed to land ownership, to domination by landlords, to domination by the Roman Catholic church— which was a tremendous real estate corporation—and now you had Protestants coming in...
...Jews didn't have that need and so we rendered it "young woman...
...To the world...
...the name of the second...
...Bible translators are being executed, obviously not for grammatical errors—although some deserve it for that—but because the Bible translations involve a tremendous economic, political, social, cultural, as well as religious change in who is going to be the power in society...
...We had it all before us, and we could all study it before we came...
...I insist that we must make available to the reader today a correct translation, in as elegant English as possible...
...Which is it...
...The Torah translation has to be reset completely for the new volume, so there's a chance to make a few changes...
...A majority of those voting was necessary to make a change...
...And your question's very pertinent then...
...It's a compromise translation...
...Never before had any committee of Bible translators—Jewish, Protestant, Catholic—accounted for its translation, especially where it parted company with the older, traditional renderings...
...After all, it's a parallel to b'tulah...
...But actually that's hard to say...
...And that marks the beginning of the fourth great age which has now come to an end because we now have the Protestant New English Bible which came out in 1970, the new Roman Catholic Bible, called the New American Bible, which came out in 1970, and the New Jewish Version which started in 1955, before either of the other two did, and has now come to an end in 1982...
...Now here for the first time, the public can come and read our volume of notes, and see how we justified our departures, and then say, "Now wait a minute, we don't think that you were justified in translating this differently, and we think that your translation here is wrong," in which case our committee would have renderings in the Torah that I feel are very important, very meaningful...
...Obviously "yom echad" is not "one day" but "first day...
...They want a new Bible, a new translation...
...Dualism...
...there won't be any other god recognized in the world...
...I let it go for a few months and I came back to it toward the end of the summer and I realized why I couldn't finish the article...
...I hope within a year—but I've been hoping that every year for the last four years—to complete my monograph on male-oriented or sexist language in the new official Bible...
...They were good minds, they were knowledgeable, but their contribution to the school was relatively meager and they weren't ready to accept very much from their teachers because they came with an attitude of know-it-all...
...And in another part of the world, in western Asia, Aramaic was the vernacular, and so there we have the Targum in Aramaic coming into being...
...What you are saying is that the new tools that will be found will be helpful only if we have people who know how to use them responsibly...
...That's known as Gan Eden...
...Regardless of almah, the Hebrew indicates that she is already very pregnant, good and pregnant...
...It could mean a person, it could mean someone, anyone...
...You began the translation a little before gender issues became particularly sensitive issues, culturally, in America and you finished it after those issues crested...
...But it ain't necessarily so...
...Four...
...Is the woman happy or not...
...The Revised Standard Version is due to his efforts more than to anybody else's...
...For further reading on the subject of Bible translation...
...For example, I think that when we produced the translation that began with, I'm not punning, but began, "When God began to create the heaven and the earth, and the earth being this and that and so on," this was a landmark...
...I think so...
...it can be mankind or humankind...
...Every translation made had to be made from the Latin, not from the Hebrew text— the Hebrew Bible—not from the Greek text—the New Testament—but from the official Latin translation...
...What do we have here...
...There are wars...
...God brings all these things into being, but before He does, here's a little spirit running around...
...every word, therefore, was important, so you translate word-for-word...
...Unofficial, anybody can do what he wants, but official's something else...
...Not every time you find the word ish does it mean man...
...Because a new social order was coming into being...
...That's in any case inevitable...
...So you lose in debate, you lose a few votes, and you hope maybe you'll win a few...
...So that time and again, ben was "child" or "offspring" rather than "son" and av became "parent" rather than "father...
...Yet I have no assurance that the 13th revision was better than the first or the third or the fifth...
...Any interesting differences...
...Recent English Versions of the Bible" (Duke Divinity School Review, Durham, NC: Spring 1979), which has excellent, readable chapters on eight or nine recent translations, including the new Jewish version...
...Not infrequently, it was the other way around...
...The Lord our God, the Lord is One,' well that's probably as against the Christian concept where God is three...
...But you've got to do what you feel is the right thing...
...And it made people feel immediately that here was something different...
...That is precisely the difference between what I insisted ought to be the philosophy of translation for the Jewish community in this country as against the philosophy of word-for-word, the mechanical, verbal, pony type of translation...
...The Chairman of the committee, the late Dean Luther A. Weigle, was one of the most remarkable personalities I've ever met...
...and if he has the patience, the time, the desire, to read the explanations justifying these new renderings, then we have finally made a breakthrough in the attempt to let the Hebrew Bible, for the first time in 2,000 years, speak for itself...
...What happens very often is that any ancient Near Eastern find is pounced upon because it's something new, something different...
...Well, let's go back to the Hebrew of the Old Testament, let's go back to the Greek of the New, and make a new translation...
...So the Revised Standard Version of 1952 is nothing more than the latest and most authoritative revision of all-earlier English translations of the Bible, but still following the philosophy of word-for-word translation...
...That's part of the game when you work in committee...
...In some cases I know it was worse...
...However, you cannot really generalize, because from one half-decade to another, convictions can change very drastically, and they have...
...What happened was this: When I began to prepare the draft of the Chumash back in 1955, none of us was aware of the NOW movement...
...Yes...
...And so this group of Jews was responsible, one way or another, for the translation of the beginning of the Torah into Greek, called popularly the Septuagint...
...As a matter of fact, in our own committee, the translation of Genesis that appeared in 1962 was, I believe, the 13th revision of the original translation that we had made back in 1955...
...God is supposed to be there all alone, and suddenly there's a living spirit...
...Nothing more...
...So that, for example, when I handed in the draft of the first five verses of Genesis, the first day of creation—and believe me I worked much harder than God did, the first day anyway—I had a half a page of the text and about 12 or 13 pages of all kinds of notes for myiother six colleagues to consult...
...We need new translations...
...Another committee was responsible for the K'tubim, a younger committee (although all Bible committees age rapidly as a rule...
...But that's not what the Bible says...
...But the fact is when Genesis begins with the creation, and God is very happy with the first day of work He put in, we are told, "Way'hi erev, vay'hi boker, yom echad," "And there was evening, and there was morning, one day...
...I don't think that that's the point...
...The whole thing started over 2,000 years ago, when the first translation was made, but I'll spare you all that and just use the example of feudalism...
...If you translate word-for-word, for example, you're going to get, "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, and the earth was...
...You see, I won't say that that was not their belief...
...That, too, was a committee project...
...I'd like to think we've learned something ourselves in the course of these decades...
...on the other, one must, I presume, approach it with extraordinary diffidence...
...You're not afraid of anyone, except reviewers—and everybody knows reviewers...
...Just so that we can position all this, when did the Torah translation, of which you were editor-in-chief, appear...
...With all the updating, and the new spelling and words and so on, that's all they really are...
...It's not i immense modesty on my part...
...I am, as they say, at liberty to make "as few changes as possible...
...Afterwards you don't even notice, you are not really aware of the problems...
...He was Dean of the Yale Divinity School...
...In other words, the 1901 version had a vote...
...Echad here means "the first...
...By 1962 our same committee of seven changed its own first version not once and not twice and not thrice but some 12 or 13 times...
...For me the most important thing is the verve, the sophistication of the Jewish community in the 50s...
...It was ready back in 1962, but its appearance was held up until the New York newspaper strike was over...
...The import of the new translation there is that creation is now perceived as a process which may have antedated that first day or the creation of light and which may still be ongoing...
...No one is ever fully satisfied with a translation because no one ever gets all his ideas accepted...
...What was He before...
...That's just a Hebrew expression for "universe...
...Now then...
...But the translator has to translate...
...And sometimes people abstained...
...And they did...
...But as a translator, he translates what the Bible says...
...At that time, I could...
...In theory, you are right...
...On the other hand, however, once we got together, the argument and the discussion pro and con would go far beyond what anybody had on any sheet of paper...
...we couldn't meet for two weeks...
...Officially, it's a revision of the Bible of the American Protestant movement, the American Standard Version of 1901, corresponding to the official Bible of the British Protestants, the Revised Version of 1881-1885...
...So, Tyndale in England makes a new translation into English, Luther makes a new translation in Germany into German...
...With our 1982 completion of the New Jewish Version, the fourth great age of Bible translation has come to an end...
...And we are told, uShem ha'echad, . . . shem hasheni," and so forth—"the name of the first...
...We were all denounced...
...That's all it is...
...we were the most sophisticated, we were a free, powerful community, unafraid, original...
...All it means is, "whole world, listen to me...
...That's biblical Hebrew for you...
...When you say "b'echad lachodesh," you aren't saying "in the one of the month," but "on the first of the month...
...Now you come up with, "Hear O Israel...
...Now, the word almah has been found in extra-biblical sources, in Canaanite, in Phoenician, in Akkadian, and actually some scholars, precisely because it is found parallel to the word b'tulah in the Canaanite and Akkadian, therefore assume that because b'tulah means "virgin," almah must mean "virgin...
...For example, the classical expression, "Fathers eat sour grapes and the teeth of the sons are set on edge," I changed to "Parents eat sour grapes, and the teeth of the . . ."—not necessarily the sons because the daughters also have teeth—"the teeth of the children are . . ." (Whether it means "set on edge" or "become blunted"—that's another story...
...When God began to create" is different from "when God created" precisely because you are talking about a process rather than a discrete event...
...As some might put it, Hebrew had become Greek to them...
...Now if there is anything at all that any Hebrew biblical writer would want to indicate, as against society generally at that time in the Near East, it would be.that whereas all the other people have many gods, we have one only...
...Now they don't have one single emendation offered in the entire K'tubim, not one except in the Megillot—which is ours...
...the Jewish community is frightened out of its wits today...
...The original Hebrew is the classical Hebrew, obviously, by definition...
...Actually, the Revised Standard Version of 1952 marks not the beginning of the fourth great age of Bible translation, it marks only the end, that's all, of the third...
...And believe me, when you think along those lines, you're so inhibited that you don't think of implications...
...In that connection, the most important thing for me is not the translation...
...When the Hebrew says, "Hear O Heaven and hear O Earth," you're not talking to the heaven, you're not talking to the earth...
...That's why at some point, probably in the not-too-distant future, someone will say, "Hey, isn't it time for a new translation...
...every word God Himself had uttered...
...It may have been worse...
...It was the word of God...
...What's it got to do with three...
...You were burned in effigy for your part in the Revised Standard Version, weren't you...
...Spirit of God" is Christian...
...Now, the word altnah has for a long time been rendered by "virgin" because of theological needs of Christianity...
...and so on...
...Can you contrast the styles of the two committees...
...Whether they understood it or not, or they accepted it or not, it hit them between the eyes, as it were, immediately...
...The Protestant church comes into being...
...The interesting thing is this: I, too, operated with the notion, I took for granted, that when a revision of our translation will come into being, it will necessarily be an improvement...
...Three...
...Maybe not always necessarily better, but different...
...they acquired a bit of an outlook but they thought they knew it all...
...And this is true in Babylonian, this is true in Assyrian, this is true in Greek, and this is true in Latin...
...You can't say echad is "first...
...It marks the end of the great revisions of the American Standard Version, the British Revised Version, the King James Version, and so on, of the first English translation of Tyndale...
...Virgo in Latin does not mean "virgin...
...When you have, for example, "Bayom hahu, yih'yeh Adonai echad," how can that mean, "On that day, God will be one...
...Whether you want to accept it or not, that's your personal prerogative, but you have no right to pervert the plain meaning of the Hebrew writers...
...I would send that off to the JPS where it would be run off and sent out to my colleagues...
...And I didn't know why...
...For that matter, the original text in Hebrew can't be conveyed to the modern reader, even if Hebrew is the reader's language...
...In the case of the Revised Standard Version, individual members of the committee were assigned the draft of a book, or, if it was a large book, of part of a book...
...I had all the material in hand...
...Now, in short, even the word b'tulah in the Bible, let alone the word almah, does not mean "virgin...
...More than once, I was convinced that my draft was not as good as I had thought originally—but my committee colleagues would disagree with me and outvote me in favor of my draft...
...If you ask them, "'is One...
...Its first editor-in-chief, Harry Orlinsky, talks about how and why it came to be...
...You're going to make the translation that you feel is the correct one...
...I know 1 said it in public...
...It is the age of the idiomatic philosophy of translation, and commentaries are already being written on the basis of that philosophy of translation...
...He was the first and only Jewish member of the committee that produced the Protestant Bible translation, the Revised Standard Version, and was the editor-in-chief of the New Jewish Version of the Torah, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America...
...That's all...
...And you say "the whole world" by saying "heaven and earth...
...So the Protestant translation was just a revision, while the new JPS translation was a break from the word-for-word tradition...
...It also means a child, and the child could be male or female...
...So what you begin to realize is that ish is not meant for "man," it's not meant for "woman," it's the plural pronoun, "Blessed are those who . . ." So the only correct translation literally is, "Blessed or fortunate are those who...
...there are executions...
...From decade to decade you can have a far more conservative, a far more reactionary atmosphere and you can have a worse kind of translation, you can have a retrogression...
...I knew it by heart, I'd worked on it for years...
...If they wanted to indicate "virginity" or a "virgin," as in legal cases, they said "a b'tulah who had," in our traditional sense, "never known a man...
...The male is happy, fortunate that he doesn't walk in the way of the wicked, but the woman is not happy...
...They would type that up and send that into JPS where, again, it would be run off and sent out, so that when we got together to do Genesis, and then all the way through, we would have the draft, we would have the comments of each of the committee members, as many as had reacted...
...They in turn would react, verse by verse or word by word, with counter suggestions...
...But I think the ideological shift is one to Orthodoxy, not so much in the word-for-word translation as in the content...
...And what Bible...
...We were very stimulated by the oral arguments back and forth...
...You've been at JIR almost 40 years...
...Now, it's all right for you to start figuring out, "Now let me see...
...They were worried...
...That's always translated, "day one" or "one day...
...It's pounced upon by scholars, given an authority that perhaps in a more sober mood the scholars would not grant, and immediately used to update, to correct, as it were, a meaning in Hebrew, simply because it's a new extra-biblical source...
...You've laid the basis for a type of medieval scholastic philosophy where you have a beginning in time...
...Only 25 years ago...
...Now unless you convey in idiomatic English (or any modern language) what the original author meant to convey, you are going to distort the meaning...
...But these are now the translations that will become the departure points for the next age...
...Earth isn't living, darkness isn't living, light isn't living, none of these things is living...
...The Lord is our God, the Lord alone...
...The importance of the New Jewish Version lies in this: I myself for a number of years had considered the Revised Standard Version of 1952 as marking the beginning of a new, fourth great age of Bible translation...
...Why is that obvious...
...And that marks the first great age of Bible translation, into Septuagint Greek and into the Aramaic Targum...
...One of the crucial passages in the Bible, theologically, is a passage in Isaiah 7:14 where we are told that the prophet Isaiah, talking to King Ahaz of Judah, says, "Behold ha'almah is going to conceive" (in the Bible nobody ever becomes pregnant, they always conceive) "and bear a son...
...So therefore we're One...
...Echad is "first...
...When feudalism was giving way to commercial capitalism, and ultimately to industrial capitalism, around the 15th or 16th century, the whole order in Europe was changing...
...Did they choose male-oriented language, or just language which we have come to understand as male-oriented...
...For example, let's take the question of gender in this translation...
...But all he's telling you here is, "Look, everybody, there's only one God that we recognize and that is Adonai echad or Adonai I'vado (alone), as it were...
...You were the only Jew involved in the Protestant translation...
...Jews take it over, and then they Judaize it by lowercasing the s, so it's not the Holy Spirit, it's just a little Jewish spirit running around, with a small s. Now it never occurs to anybody to ask, "What is a living being, a spirit, doing with God at the time of creation...
...When you want to say in biblical Hebrew "those who," you use the singular collective...
...The Bible of the old order is the Vulgate...
...I presume that what we referred to earlier as the tools—the new wisdom, the new findings, the new digs that cast light on these things—will continue to be developed and refined...
...And the draft was submitted, and each of us on the committee compiled at home our own notes and our own counter suggestions...
...They had ! no concept of virginity in the sense ! that there was one word for the term or concept "virgin...
...He would read a word, that's about all—sometimes it seemed to me a syllable—at a time, and he would ask for reactions, and individuals would react as they saw fit—discuss, argue and vote...
...Yet you think it's very important...
...We used to get more graduates from Orthodox and traditional homes, yeshiva graduates and so on, who came to us, not to acquire knowledge, not even methodology...
...What about the styles of the two committees...
...How do you say "first...
...I don't know what happens...
...Without "who did not have intercourse with a man" or "with whom a man has not had intercourse," you don't have a virgin...
...Those two words, the adjective harah and the present participle "to bear" are both mistranslated in the traditional Jewish translations because of Christian influence...
...The Bible doesn't tell you "in the beginning" at all...
...Now, there are a number of only correct but maybe had impact was the rendering in verse 3 of the "ruach Elohim" as "a wind of God," as against the traditional "spirit...
...It won't make these drastic departures...
...Israel has only one God...
...Once you do that, then you've got to go to work on the Hebrew text and see, from not only that passage but from a host of passages— preferably in the same book, T'hilim, but if necessary elsewhere in the Bible—how that construction is employed...
...j Let me ask you a very different kind I of question...
...On the other hand, in the Revised Standard Version, which was finished in the late 40s, there you have a word-for-word translation...
...not every time you find the word av does it mean father...
...You have to say rishon...
...As a matter of fact, I have been studying the history of Bible translation, which began about 2,200 years ago in the relatively large Jewish community of Alexandria in Egypt...
...And "heaven" does not mean heaven, and "earth" does not mean earth...
...Now there you've hit the nail on the head...
...This is essentially the philosophy of translation throughout the other great ages of Bible translation, down into the early 1950s—in short, until less than 30 years ago...
...Now the K'tubim translation misses that completely and^says, "Blessed is the man...
...Now, by translating word-for-word, you have distorted what the original author meant to convey...
...They are very, very intelligent, very receptive, very responsible...
...I hardly ever would prepare more than two or three chapters ahead of the committee so that I would be able to benefit from the decisions that the committee members reached...
...When you make a translation, you've got to try to convey to the reader what you, as an objective scholar, believe the original author meant to convey to his reader...
...That's very interesting, so you might have a point there, but I must confess that as a Bible translator I didn't think of that, didn't have it in mind...
...You must be tired of answering the question—but can you go back to the beginning and talk about why we needed a new translation...
...Adam doesn't always mean the male or man...
...Yes, and we are the ones who made the breakthrough...
...What's going to happen to us...
...The old translations, made a long time ago—in the 19th and 18th centuries, King James in the 17th century—you can't understand them, you can't read them in the old English...

Vol. 8 • December 1982 • No. 1


 
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