Illumination for the Unchurched

...in 43.11, Jacob sends Joseph pistachio nuts, as he does in Rsv (after they had been simply "nuts" for centuries...

...the entire translation had been submitted to a "panel of literary advisers" for style...

...the episode of Noah's drunkenness "is mitigated somewhat by filial piety...

...It is also profoundly nonhistorical or ever antihistorical (" 'history' in the Old Testament has more in common with drama than with history," "King David and King Solomon are no more likely to be historical than are King Agamemnon and King Menelaus...

...he bases arguments on that frailest of reeds, "common-sense grounds...

...But it may be that greater accuracy in translating the Bible is in itself indefensible, and perhaps even mischievous...

...here it is "gum trag-acanth" (rsv somewhat anticipates this with "gum...

...Thus in 21.16, in eight other translations, Hagar sits down one bowshot away from Abraham...

...Since the neb ot with its Apocrypha (those books which were in the Bible of the Jews of Alexandria, but not in that of the Jews of Jerusalem) runs to formidable length, I studied only Genesis carefully, comparing it with a number of other English translations done over the past four and a half centuries, and checking words with the Hebrew of the Massoretic Text (mt) and the Greek of the Septuagint (lxx) where my little learning allowed...

...Catherine's College, Cambridge, and a neighbor of Leach's...

...I reviewed the neb nt in these pages ("Under-standed of the People," May 15, 1961), preaching mainly on the dangers of making a Bible, or sacred mystery book, too easily comprehensible...

...23.13...

...The Authorized Version (av) of 1611 reads (commendably using italics for words not in the Hebrew): And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him...

...Thus in Gen...

...here, he goes out "hoping to meet them," with a footnote giving as an alternate reading, "to relieve himself...

...My other principal charge against the neb nt in 1961 (and I was far from alone in making it) was the extraordinary inelegance of the language, although (or because...

...This is how it reads in the neb ot: During the journey, where they were encamped for the night, the LORD met Moses, meaning to kill him, but Zipporah picked up a sharp flint, cut off her son's foreskin, and touched him with it, saying 'You are my blood-bridegroom.' So the LORD let Moses alone...

...the three authors of Isaiah "obtain to some extent their characteristic unity from subsequent redactions...

...Leach's little book has its weaknesses, certainly...

...Now in the neb all Messianism has evaporated: The sceptre shall not pass from Judah, nor the staff from his descendants, so long as tribute is brought to him The truly radical loss comes not in Genesis but in Job, ironically fulfilling F. F. Bruce's promise in The English Bible (1961) that "When the Old Testament part of the New English Bible appears, Job will read like a new book...

...Apocrypha, 362 pp., $4.95), which had been awaited since the neb New Testament (nt) in 1961, and in process since 1948...

...in 24.22, what every early translation has as an "earring" for Rebecca, and the rv and rsv boldly have as a "ring," the neb still more boldly has as "a gold nose-ring," and all three join in reading 24.47 as "Then I put the ring in her nose...

...14.18, the famous foretelling of the Eucharist, where Melchizedek brings forth "bread and wine," is no longer anything of the sort, because he now serves Abram "food and wine...

...Lot was a notorious figure, both for his rescue from Sodom, the turning of his wife into a pillar of salt, and his subsequent drunken incest instigated by his hus-bandless daughters...

...Jezebel behaved in a fashion inconsistent with Israelite democracy because she "was a Phoenician woman, who understood only tyranny...

...turbulent as a flood" instead of the traditional and lovely "unstable as water" in Jacob's prophecy for Reuben (49.4...

...New wine and old steal my people's wits...

...4.24-26 (discussed above), shows "that we are dealing with the attempt to describe the attributes of Jehovah in their non-rational form...

...The neb ot's introduction, by G. R. Driver, says the translators tried "to keep their language as close to current usage as they could, while avoiding expressions likely to be proved ephemeral," hoping thus to furnish "illumination" for "ordinary readers...

...3.15, God's statement that Eve's "seed" shall in the future bruise the head of the serpent, understood to be the conquest of Satan by Christ, loses all that when it is Eve's "brood" which shall strike at the serpent's head...

...and I shall discern my witness standing at my side and see my defending counsel, even God himself In many of its departures from familiar readings, the neb simply follows rv and Rsv...

...In 40.2 and 40.7, the neb translators decide, with no precedent in earlier translations, that Pharaoh's butler and baker are "two eunuchs...

...Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin ©f her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me...

...But I gain a fine new opening for the Tower of Babel story, Gen...

...Leach's question is: Why does the genealogy beginning The Gospel According to St...

...11.1: "Once upon a time...

...It is the famous 19.25, 26, as generally translated the strongest affirmation of redemption and the resurrection of the body in the ot...

...15.18 extends from the "river of Egypt" to the Euphrates—as Ben Gurion might say, with Numbers 21.29, "Woe to thee, Moab...

...I should have been warned off his book by its title, which all but guarantees a work of irrelevance, and by the fact that I had earlier read his book on Yeats' poetry, The Lonely Tower, which casts no great quantity of light on that subject...

...T M # R. Henn, the author of The Bible as Literature (Oxford, 270 pp., $7.00), is President of St...

...In the neb it is now reduced to: ". . . sacred prostitution...

...Despite these faults, it is a pleasure to get so much good sense and usefulness about the ot from an anthropologist, at a time when Bible scholarship seems to have turned into a squirrel track and climbed a tree...

...In the neb ot, I lose one of my favorite lines in all the Bible, Hosea 4.11, which reads in the av, "Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart...

...Finally, Henn is so slipshod that he refers to Professor S. Foster Damon as "Damon Foster" and has poor King David (as though his sins were not great enough) steal Naboth's vineyard and thus stir up the redoubtable Elijah...

...Much of this was undoubtedly occasioned by the publication of the New English Bible (neb) translation in March (Oxford and Cambridge: Old Testament, 1366 pp., $8.95...

...Henn's volume is remarkable as the approach of a learned English professor to the Bible (mainly the ot) in 1970, in that it takes a position of almost fundamentalist historicity...

...Again, my examples are from Genesis: in 12.9, "south" becomes "Negeb," following rsv...

...the Song of Deborah marks the first time "that infantry had triumphed over armour...

...David and Solomon were real kings of Israel...

...A most remarkable phenomenon, in a translation done by a broad collaboration of British Christian churches, is the disappearance of the traditional Christian proof texts, those passages in the ot which were first interpreted by the Jews as divine foretellings of the Coming of the Messiah, and then by the Christians retrospectively as prophecies of Jesus Christ and the nt story...

...Henn is in addition a Iiteralist ("The majority of the provisions of the Mosaic Law are admirable sanitary provisions...

...C. H. Dodd, the general director of the whole project, explained in a news release that "the work was not primarily intended for reading in church," but was aimed at "young people, the unchurched, and intelligent churchgoers...

...and so on endlessly...

...I list a few lines in Genesis which remind one of the nt howlers: Abraham's "If you really mean it—but do listen to me...

...in 14.2, "nations" returns to the Hebrew "Goyim," following both...

...in any case, this is what Burke calls "the socializing of losses," since Leach seems almost totally unfamiliar with the Higher Criticism...

...Joseph's "You might have known that a man like myself would practise divination" (44.15...

...Thus: "The words of Christ at the Last Supper, in their simplicity and beauty, reflect what ought to have been said on that occasion...

...In other places in Genesis the neb makes mysterious changes which have no precedent in any of the other English translations that I consulted...

...Professor Driver has defended the translators' practices at length in a letter to the New York Times, April 19, 1963, as means to the achievement of greater accuracy...

...The prose of the neb ot is much less inelegant, perhaps to some extent in response to earlier criticism...

...in the neb, it is two bowshots...

...o f all the other books dealing with the ot that have been published recently, I have space for a brief notice of only two...

...in many of the stories of the ot "what was accepted in childhood as fact has to be reinterpreted allegorically...

...The most famous of all such Testimonia in Genesis, which led to the belief that the Messiah or Christ would come (or, later, Imd come) during the reign of Herod, the first non-Jewish king of the Jews, is Jacob's prediction for Judah at 49.10: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come" ("Shiloh," probably from the root of "shaloin" was understood to be the Prince of Peace...

...In the av it reads (and the italics show the fragmentary nature of the Hebrew): For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: The Revised Version (rv) of 1881 and the Revised Standard Version (rsv) of 1946 chip away at this glorious assurance, but by the time we reach the neb it is no longer any assurance at all: But in my heart I know that my vindicator lives and that he will rise last to speak in court...

...The first is Genesis as Myth and Other Essays by Edmund Leach (Grossman, 124 pp...

...he even believes (in the first, rather weak, essay) that this sort of analysis "could be done by a computer far better than by any human...

...We see a classic example of the problem here in the famous passage, Exodus 4.24-26, the J-writer's origin myth of circumcision, which is a bewilderment of pronouns without referents in all previous translations...

...in regard to Job, at least, "the findings of modern textual criticism" are useful...

...As if being a Bible Euhemerist were not enough, Henn is also a Jungian ("I believe, with Jung, that the human mind brings to the encounter [with the myth-ologems and the archetypes] a creative activity") and a Zionist (writing during the Six-Day War in 1967, he proudly reprints Psalm 83 as "of peculiar interest at the time of writing," and he reminds us that the Land of Canaan promised by God's covenant with Abram in Gen...

...Well, win a few, lose a few...

...4.00), consisting of three periodical pieces, with the long central one, "The Legitimacy of Solomon," being of particular interest...

...Leach is an anthropologist and Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and he is, perhaps for those reasons, so unsympathetic to Sir James G. Frazer that he fails to cast his essay in its natural form, the Plutarchian or Frazerian question, which is then answered, after a series of informative excurses, many pages or volumes later...

...So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision...

...the Book of Psalms "took the name of David from its chief writer...

...In 37.25, the Ishmaelite caravan to which Judah hoped to sell Joseph carries, in earlier translations, "spice" or "spicery...

...Leach's essay shows not only that structuralism works on ot material, but that it is also a functionalism ("the succession of Solomon to the throne of Israel is a myth which 'mediates' a major contradiction") and a dynamics ("In structuralist analysis, the elements of a myth—the 'symbols'—never have any intrinsic meaning," but when, for example, they become "permeated through and through with moral implications, the structure becomes 'dramatic...

...Then she said, 'Blood-bridegroom by circumcision.' This has gained enormously in clarity because the pronouns have been given referents (on what authority I do not know, since they seem unclear in the Hebrew), but the result is somewhat less than edifying...

...Matthew specifically list four women of dubious reputation—Tamar, Rachab, Ruth, and Bath-sheba—in the ancestry of King Solomon...

...He feels that structural analysis requires him to treat the whole Bible as a unity "regardless of the varying historical origins of its component parts," thereby voluntarily blinding the structuralist to many different authors with many different purposes at many different times...

...In 24.63, when Rebecca's party is on its way, Isaac leaves the town, in earlier translations, to "pray" or to "meditate...

...His answer is that this nt synopsis of ot genealogy shows that the Jews included in Solomon's ancestry Edomites, Canaan-ites, Moabites, and other of the peoples whose land they had seized, "so that he is the legitimate heir to all forms of land title however derived...

...J's origin myth of circumcision, Ex...

...This essay, like the other two, is an exercise in Levi-Straussian structuralism, and a bolder one than the master would write, since Levi-Strauss himself has taken the line that Old Testament mythology has been irrecoverably "deformed" by the intellectual operations of Biblical editors (that is, such compilers and over-writers as those the Higher Criticism called "P" and "D...

...He is gullible enough, or inconsistent enough, to believe in the existence of the mythic Twelve Tribes...

...Since I have already said my say on the mythic nature of the entire Bible in these pages ("The Bible as History," October 12, 1964) and of the New Testament in particular elsewhere ("History and Sacred History," the Atlantic, September 1970), I will confine myself at present to noting that even Professor Henn has moments of saving doubt...

...In summary, Bible history "is a history of which the substantial accuracy is certified by archaeology and what contemporary documentation remains...

...God in the Psalms "is frequently given human attributes, which we must, of course, construe in a figurative sense...