A Stack of Bibles!

Sometimes, when it comes to propitiating the Deity, circumstances warrant going right to the top – and with poor wretched Boston staring wide-eyed at the latest ferocious oncoming “monster storm,” today seemed like one of those times. So with fear and trembling, I crept to my bookshelves and assembled the proverbial stack of Bibles on the altar … er, that is, the couch, in the silvery light of an afternoon rapidly being crumpled under the building weight of the “snow hurricane” bearing down from the upper Midwest. There in those pages I sought to know afresh the mind of a Deity who suddenly doesn’t like navigable sidewalks, pretty sunsets, or the MBTA.

At first I naturally turned to what Christians refer to as the Old Testament, the home of the version of the Deity who seems most susceptible to region-smiting rages like the one Boston has been enduring for the entire month of February. And when it comes to the Old Testament, our modern era as seen two nearly-simultaneous and wholly impressive English-language translations:

The Five Books of Moses – this first volume in the Schocken Bible is Everett Fox’s 1995 rendition of the Pentateuch, a top-to-bottom re-conception that Fox comes right out and says he intends to be uncomfortable to complacent monoglot readers:

The purpose of this work is to draw the reader into the world of the Hebrew Bible through the power of its language. While this sounds simple enough, it is not usually possible in translation. Indeed, the premise of almost all Bible translations, past and present, is that the “meaning” of the text should be conveyed in as clear and comfortable a manner as possible in one’s own language. Yet the truth is that the Bible was not written in English in the twentieth or even the seventeenth century; it is ancient, sometimes obscure, and speaks in a way quite different from ours. Accordingly, I have sought here primarily to echo the style of the original, believing that the Bible is best approached, at least at the beginning, on its own terms. So I have presented the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice.

And certainly you can hear that “Hebraic voice” all throughout his translation, which features characters with names like Avraham, Yaakov, Yosef, and Moshe instead of the familiar versions, and which reads about as thoroughly alien to the steady old tradition of English-language Bibles as Fox could possibly make it without simply leaving it untranslated in the first place. A bit more approachable is:

The Five Books of Moses – this 2004 rendition by Robert Alter (in a gorgeous slip-case from the always-stylish folks at WW Norton) is less eye-openingly radical than Fox’s, although it starts off by asking many of the same questions, foremost of which is “why should we prefer your translation to any of the others?” … to which both Fox and Alter have the same answer, although Alter is a bit blunter about it:

Why, after so many English versions, a new translation of the Five Books of Moses? There is, as I shall explain in detail, something seriously wrong with all the familiar English translations, traditional and recent, of the Hebrew Bible. Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible – and, above all, biblical narrative prose – in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English.

Naturally, as you can already see in these comments separated by a decade, the shadow that falls over any new translation of the Bible is the mighty King James version done four hundreds years ago and still rightly considered one of the indispensable works of translation ever accomplished from any language to any other language. It’s the King James that Barnes & Noble chose for their gorgeous illustrated leather bound Bible (I enthused about it here), and it’s the King James that’s at the heart of the two best paperback Bibles on the market today:

The Oxford World’s Classics Bible -This 1997 paperback, edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, packs a world of research and annotation into a hefty brick of a volume, and our editors waste no time in putting translator cards face-up on the table:

Bibles are, by their very nature, partisan. As that plural suggests, there are many bibles, even in English, and each is the product of a particular interest group – whether religious, commercial, or, increasingly nowadays, both. This edition is no exception. The editors of this World’s Classics version have chosen for their text the 1611, King James translation – also more familiarly called ‘the Authorized Version’ – not because of any presumed impartiality, but because historically it has had greater influence on the development of the cultures and literatures of the English-speaking world than any other translation of the Bible.

And this opening-note defense of the source material is also sounded in the last of our stack of Bibles today:

The Penguin Classics Bible – the 2006 version edited by David Norton is so big and beautiful in the elegant Penguin tuxedo and with its durable binding! And Norton is such an indefatigably curious host throughout, asking questions, teaching effortlessly, taking nothing for granted, and starting things off, in the best Penguin Classics tradition (as I praised when it first appeared), with the basics:

The Bible is the world’s most translated book. It exists in more languages than any other book, and sometimes, as in English, it has hundreds of forms within our language. However much its words are revered, in practice we accept that the meaning and content do survive translation. The Bible itself gives us grounds for accepting this position. The New Testament is written in Greek. It usually quotes the Old Testament not from the Hebrew but from the Greek translation that had become current in the third century BCE, the Septuagint, and Jesus’ words are given in Greek, not the Aramaic he actually spoke … How then, can we think of any of the thousands of different bibles as the Bible?

As every one of these editors hastens to make clear, there is a mountain of English-language Bible translations on the market. These four are the merest fraction, although to my mind they represent the best, the four to have if four is all you can have, the perfect inexhaustible reading-matter if, for instance, you find yourself trapped indoors by a “snow hurricane” for the seventh time in 14 days. The relentless burying of the greatest city in the world is a slightly mystifying behavior for an older and presumably wiser Deity to undertake (Vatican II taught us that He is Love, but this February more strongly indicates that He is Snow Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus), but maybe all this Good Book re-reading is a part of some plan …