The tricky business of translating sacred scripture from the original into other languages is older even than Christianity itself. The book of Nehemiah suggests that when the Jewish exiles were able to return from their long captivity in Babylonia in the 5th century BC, the Levites orally translated the Torah so that the ordinary people could understand it. It may be that the Hebrew of scripture had become the learned language of bookish specialists; an extempore rendering into the Aramaic lingua franca of the Persian period Levant was necessary for public comprehension.
Likewise, a text known to us as the Letter of Aristeas purports to tell how the Torah was translated into the cosmopolitan Greek of 3rd century BC Alexandria, at the command of Ptolemy II, further to enrich the collected wisdom of the Egyptian entrepôt’s eponymous Library.
The Letter recounts that the Alexandrian monarch sent to Jerusalem for learned Jewish translators; 72 elders were dispatched to Egypt by the High Priest Eleazar.
After their number, the translated Torah – and, by extension, the whole Greek Old Testament – is known as the Septuagint. This was the Old Testament of the Greek-speaking Church of the Fathers. Thanks to the Septuagint translation, Christian Bibles contain texts outside the Jewish canon of Scripture, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the books of the Maccabees.
In antiquity there were nevertheless anxieties about the status of Scripture in translation. The Talmud transmits a pious retelling of the story we read in the Letter of Aristeas. Ptolemy has the 72 translators isolated in 72 separate rooms, each translating the Torah independently. “The Holy One, Blessed be He, placed wisdom in the heart of each and every one and they all agreed to one common understanding.” Under divine inspiration, the translators each produce an identical, authoritative Greek text.
The Talmudic story further stresses the theologically-fraught nature of scriptural translation. The elders finessed their Greek Torah in order to stave off misunderstandings of Jewish religion by Hellenistic pagans: so, for example, the Hebrew “Let us make man in our image and likeness” became a more carefully monotheistic “I shall make man in image and likeness.” It was a fraught and complicated business.
John Barton’s excellent new volume The Word: On the Translation of the Bible details the history, theoretical bases, difficulties and implications of biblical translation. As the former Oriel and Laing professor of the interpretation of holy scripture at Oxford, he is unusually well qualified to guide the reader through scholarly, ecclesial, ecumenical and wider cultural aspects of biblical study.
The Word offers, of course, an overview of the history of biblical translation from Nehemiah and Ptolemaic Egypt to the present day. Unsurprisingly, Barton also sets out the differing standard theoretical approaches to biblical translation: a “formal equivalence”, which attempts to stick closely to text being translated, at the price of difficulty or unfamiliarity to the reader; “dynamic” or “functional equivalence”, which aims to provide the reader with the text’s sense while smoothing out the wrinkles of alien style or syntax.
Barton’s book is neither dry nor unremittingly theoretical. Scholarly conundrums concerning translators’ priorities are illustrated with interesting examples from the biblical texts. How, he explores, are translators to deal with Isaiah 28:10, which seems to be deliberately meaningless: “precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.” Isaiah appears to be warning his audience that they will soon be hearing the incomprehensible, alien language of their Assyrian invaders.
He further addresses hot-button issues of the Church and academy. Debates over inclusive language are explored sensitively, without falling into the shallow dogmatisms of “liberal” or “conservative” approaches. He notes, for example, links between the long-term legacy of Christian antisemitism and translating hoi Ioudaioi in the New Testament as “the Jews”. The Apostles meeting in a locked room “for fear of the Jews” can certainly send aberrant signals, but Barton also correctly observes that a modern substitution of “the Jewish authorities” instead “is really a bowdlerisation of a text felt to be offensive rather than a translation of it”.
The Word is a fascinating and readable introduction to how we get from foreign texts in the ancient world to the modern English Bible heard in church or taken down from the shelf at home. The traduttore may be a traditore, but Barton is a faithful guide.
Dr John Ritzema is a theologian and biblical scholar
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