Proverbs 14 Part IV (Hebrew and/or Greek in translation)

This is Part IV of a series on Proverbs 14. In this particular post, I'm interested in how the Hebrew and the Greek in English translation may compare and contrast. Below is the literal translation of the Hebrew by Julia E. Smith in 1876, and then immediately following verse-by-verse is the more-or-less literal translation of the Greek by Lancelot C. L. Brenton in 1851.  These two literal translations are much different from the ones done by Robert Alter in 2010 and by the Common English Bible translation team in 2011 and by the New International Version team in 2011; our much newer translations consider both the Hebrew and the Greek together, and they seem to use the Greek translation of the Hebrew to correct the Hebrew; and, furthermore, (in the context now of much translation theory and many translation debates about literal vs dynamic equivalence and such) the 21st century English is also much more nuanced and sensitive to gender differences in English and thus in the Hebrew and Greek.

However, the translation by Smith tries only to bring across the meanings of the Hebrew; and the translation by Brenton attempts just to render the meanings of the Greek translation of the Hebrew.  Furthermore, Smith's and Brenton's 19th century translations have English that included gender-neutral or gender-inclusive uses of "man" for "men and women" (without all the added burden of whether a literal translation really gets at the meanings in a dynamic-equivalent way).

I've appreciated all the insights and questions offered in comments made following the first several posts in this series.  (I've also been fascinated elsewhere by the description of the Greek by blogger and UC Berkeley linguist Rich Rhodes:  "the LXX was in Biblish to the writers of the NT," which somehow suggests that the writers of the New Testament did not have access or give much priority to the Hebrew and whether it also seemed "biblish."  In conversation with Rhodes, blogger and Hebrew poetry enthusiast John Hobbins calls the Greek quoted in the NT "Septuagintalisms."  Wonder what they'd make of how Brenton translates the Greek translating the Hebrew compared with how Smith translates the Hebrew?)  To help in reading the two translations side by side, I've now put in bold font the translation of the Hebrew by Smith; the italics in the translation of the Greek by Brenton are his.  Now what do you make of the differences and the similarities of the respective translations of Proverbs 14 by Smith and by Brenton? 

1 THE wise woman built her house: but the foolish will pull it down with her hands.
 Wise women build houses: but a foolish one digs hers down with her hands.

2 He going in his uprightness will fear Jehovah: and he perverted in his ways, despised him.
He that walks uprightly fears the Lord; but he that is perverse in his ways shall be dishonoured.

3 In the mouth of the foolish one a rod of pride; and the lips of the wise shall watch them.
Out of the mouth of fools comes a rod of pride; but the lips of the wise preserve them.

4 In no oxen the stall clean, and much increase in the strength of the ox.
Where no oxen are, the cribs are clean; but where there is abundant produce, the strength of the ox is apparent.

5 A witness of faithfulnesses will not lie: and a witness of falsehood will breathe out lies.
A faithful witness does not lie; but an unjust witness kindles falsehoods.

6 He mocking sought wisdom, and none: and knowledge being easy to him understanding.
Thou shalt seek wisdom with bad men, and shalt not find it; but discretion is easily available with the prudent.
 

7 Go from before to the foolish man and thou knewest not the lips of knowledge.
All things are adverse to a foolish man; but wise lips are the weapons of discretion.
 

8 The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way: and the folly of the foolish is deceit.
The wisdom of the prudent will understand their ways; but the folly of fools leads astray.
 

9 The foolish will mock at guilt: and between the upright acceptance.
The houses of transgressors will need purification; but the houses of the just are acceptable.
 

10 The heart will know the bitterness of its soul, and in its joys the stranger shall not mingle.
 If a man’s mind is intelligent, his soul is sorrowful; and when he rejoices, he has no fellowship with pride.

11 The house of the unjust shall be destroyed: and the tent of the upright shall nourish.
 The houses of ungodly men shall be utterly destroyed; but the tabernacles of them that walk uprightly shall stand.

12 There is a way straight before man, and its latter state the ways of death.
 There is a way which seems to be right with men, but the ends of it reach to the depths of hell.

13 Also in laughter the heart shall have pain, and its latter state of joy, grief.
 Grief mingles not with mirth; and joy in the end comes to grief.

14 He drawing back the heart shall be filled from his ways: and a good man from above him.
 A stout-hearted man shall be filled with his own ways; and a good man with his own thoughts.

15 The simple will believe to every word: and the prudent will understand to his going.
 The simple believes every word: but the prudent man betakes himself to after-thought. 

16 The wise one feared and departed from evil: and the foolish overflowing, and being confident.
A wise man fears, and departs from evil; but the fool trusts in himself, and joins himself with the transgressor.

17 He reaping anger will do folly: and a man of mischiefs will be hated.
 A passionate man acts inconsiderately; but a sensible man bears up under many things.

18 The simple inherit folly: and the prudent shall be surrounded with knowledge.
 Fools shall have mischief for their portion; but the prudent shall take fast hold of understanding.

19 The evil bowed before the good, and the unjust at the gates of the just one.
 Evil men shall fall before the good; and the ungodly shall attend at the gates of the righteous.

20 Also the poor shall be hated by his neighbor: and many loving the rich one.
Friends will hate poor friends; but the friends of the rich are many.
 

21 He despising to his neighbor, sins: and he compassionating the poor, he is happy.
He that dishonours the needy sins: but he that has pity on the poor is most blessed.
 

22 Shall they not go astray, seeking evil? and mercy, and truth to those seeking good.
They that go astray devise evils: but the good devise mercy and truth. The framers of evil do not understand mercy and truth: but compassion and faithfulness are with the framers of good.
 

23 In all labor will be profit: and the word of the lips only to want.
With every one who is careful there is abundance: but the pleasure-taking and indolent shall be in want.
 

24 The crown of the wise is their riches: the folly of the foolish, folly.
A prudent man is the crown of the wise: but the occupation of fools is evil.

25 A witness of truth delivers souls and deceit will breathe out lies.
A faithful witness shall deliver a soul from evil: but a deceitful man kindles falsehoods.

26 In the fear of Jehovah the trust of strength, and to his sons a refuge.
In the fear of the Lord is strong confidence: and he leaves his children a support.

27 The fear of Jehovah a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death.
The commandment of the Lord is a fountain of life; and it causes men to turn aside from the snare of death.

28 In a multitude of people the king's decoration: and in the cessation of the people the destruction of the prince.
In a populous nation is the glory of a king: but in the failure of people is the ruin of a prince.
 

29 The slow to anger of much under standing: and the short of spirit exalts folly.
A man slow to wrath abounds in wisdom: but a man of impatient spirit is very foolish.
 

30 A heart of healing, the life of the flesh: and jealousy the rottenness of the bones.
A meek-spirited man is a healer of the heart: but a sensitive heart is a corruption of the bones.

31 He oppressing the poor reproached him making him: and he honoring him compassionated the needy.

He that oppresses the needy provokes his Maker: but he that honours him has pity upon the poor.

32 The unjust one shall be driven away in his evil: and the just one trusted in his death.

The ungodly shall be driven away in his wickedness: but he who is secure in his own holiness is just. 

33 In the heart of him understanding, wisdom shall rest: and in the midst of fools it shall be made known.

There is wisdom in the good heart of a man: but in the heart of fools it is not discerned.

34 Justice will exalt a nation: and sin a reproach to nations.

Righteousness exalts a nation: but sins diminish tribes.

35 The acceptance of the king to a servant of understanding: and his wrath shall be to him causing shame.

An understanding servant is acceptable to a king; and by his good behaviour he removes disgrace. 

A Woman Gets Paul's Greek Better

Women do count in Bible translation.  Here, I want to illustrate just one example of how a single woman translating the bible alone, by herself, renders Paul's Greek better than entire teams of men do.

First, let's (A) look at Paul's Greek and (B) one standard with which we might evaluate English translations.  Then let's see (C) the English of the men before we show (D) her translation.  Second, we'll tell who she is.

(A) Paul's Greek:  We're looking again at that neologistic phrase of his, (τὰ) πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν.  He writes it to several Greek readers of Greek -- not only to Greek citizens but also both to Greekish Jewish readers and to Jewish Greek readers -- in different cities of Greece.  Presumably, they find it to be a striking, novel, and rather poetic turn of phrase.  The ones in Corinth get it twice in the very same letter. 

(B) One standard:  Sue, in a conversation several of us are having, reiterates a good standard for assessing a translation.  She says it's this (quoting John): "that a neologism should be translated 'in the same way across all of its occurrences'."  She goes on to make clear how this applies to the phrase Dannii has drawn attention to:  "It seems obvious that the phrase (τὰ) πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν should be translated in the same way in 1 Cor.12:6 and 1 Cor.15:28."

(C) The English translations of teams of men:  Sue goes on to show how certain teams of men have translated this Greek of Paul's, "fall[ing] sadly short" of the standard mentioned by their English renderings.  In particular, she shows both the NLT teams' translation and the ESV teams' translation.  Respectively, they are as follows (with my bolded italics to emphasize):

NLT

God works in different ways, but it is the same God who does the work in all of us.

Then, when all things are under his authority, the Son will put himself under God’s authority, so that God, who gave his Son authority over all things, will be utterly supreme over everything everywhere.

ESV

and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

We should remember that the ESV's is a team that entirely excludes women from translating the Bible for publication.  And we might recall that the NLT's is a team of 90 translators, 87 of whom are men and 3 of whom are women.  One of the women, Dr. Linda Belleville, worked on translating Paul's Greek in his second letter to the Corinthians (i.e., 2 Corinthians); but it was men only in this majority-male NLT team who worked on the translation of Paul's first letter (i.e., 1 Corinthians) to produce the translation above that, by John's standard which Sue repeats, "fall[s] sadly short."  I'm only emphasizing the men work and the women work here, really, to back track in history a bit.  There's a legacy in Bible translation that allows men to work on translation of the Bible a lot, but women?  No so much.  I'm not going to try to correlate the bunches of man only or mostly man translations with the failure to meet John's standard noted above.  I am going to give one woman's translation that does better than her male counterparts have done, by this same standard.

Let me first, however, give the translation that her contemporaries -- all males -- produced.  They were the Revised Version teams who completed their work in the late 1800s.  Specifically, they were three separate teams of 101 men, and no women.  They were updating the King James Version of the Bible.  So here's how they "better" the KJV when looking at Paul's Greek:

RV

And there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all.

And when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all.

(D) her translation:

Her The Holy Bible

And there are distinctions of performances, and it is the same God performing all things in all.

And when all things be subjected to him, then also shall the Son himself be subjected to him having made all things subject to him, that God might be all things in all.

What is clear is that her translation (i.e., the English version and updating the KJV translation of Paul's Greek by this woman translating alone, all by herself) meets the one standard we've been using here.

Sue had already given the KJV, which she rightly notes "offers the insight that 1 Cor. 15:28 might be related to 1 Cor. 12:6" in the "underlying language" of Paul.  The KJV (for your comparison) is this:

KJV

And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.

And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.

So, this single woman updates the English of the version of the 1600s better than her male only counterparts in the 1800s.  She gets the underlying language of Paul and also offers the insight that his neologistic phrase is repeated and is related in his letter to Greek readers in Corinth, Greece.

Who is she?

She is one who was beguiled by men.  She is the one who would not be allowed by the Church of England to join the Revised Version translation projects, even the one in America where she lived.  She is one who was snubbed by the men teams of revising translators and whose translation was ignored by them too, although she was most knowledgeable and that translation of hers had been available for for some time.  She is the one who learned the underlying biblical languages in order to translate by the best standards she knew.  She is one who begins the preface to her translation this way:

It may seem presumptuous for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world, and thought to be the most difficult to translate....  Over twenty years ago, when I had four sisters, a friend met with us weekly, to search the Scriptures, we being desirous to learn....  We saw by the margin that the text [of the King James's forty-seven male-only translators] had not been ....  I had studied Latin and Greek at school, and began by translating the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint....  I soon gave my attention to the Hebrew, and studied it thoroughly.... 

She is one of whom other women observed meeting various standards for excellence in Bible translation:

Frequently her wording is an improvement, or brings one closer to the original than the common translation. Thus in I. Corinthians viii, I, of the King James translation, we have: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” [Her] version: “Knowledge puffs up and love builds the house.” She uses “love” in place of “charity” every time. And her translation was made nearly forty years before the revised version of our day, which also does the same....  This word “charity” was one of the words that Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of English, charged Tyndale with mistranslating. The other two words were “priest” and “church,” Tyndale calling priests “seniors,” and church “congregation.” Both Julia Smith and the revised version call them priest and church. And she gives the word “Life” for “Eve:” “And Adam will call his wife’s name Life, for she was the mother of all living.”....  Her work has had the endorsement of various learned men. A Hebrew professor of Harvard College (Prof. Young)....  examined it. He was much astonished that she had translated so correctly without consulting some learned man....  She received many letters from scholars, all speaking of the exact, or literal translation. Some people have criticised this feature, which is the great merit of the book.

 She is Julia Evelina Smith Parker.

ESV, Luther Bible, and Jewish Women

43 million people hours will be spent nationwide in Israel's cleaning preparations for Passover this year. How does that break down? Of those cleaning hours, 29 million are done by women and 11 million by men. Persons paid to clean do the remaining 3 million hours
--Judy Lash Balint, Jerusalem Diaries

As usual in our own day the Jewish women were allowed to give generously, work untiringly and beg eloquently to build altars and Tabernacles to the Lord, to embroider slippers and make flowing robes for the priesthood, but they could not enter the holy of holies or take any active part. in the services.
--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible

Moreover, a focus on women uncovers women's distinctive perspectives on public life, which often differed from those of men. . . . For example, the Nazis murdered a disproportionate number of elderly women, suggesting age and gender were a fatal combination. . . . Even if ultimately Jewish women, seen as procreators, were also enemies in the Nazi's "race war," at the beginning Jewish women saw their men arrested. . . and tried to rescue them.
--Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair

John's post (comparing the 1984 revision of Martin Luther's translation of the Bible with the 2001 English Standard Version) overlooks the issues of racism and sexism in the translations, which makes their marriage in a bilingual volume now so curious. Suzanne posts an excellent analysis of some of the differences between the Luther revision and the ESV, saying, "In no way is the Luther Bible an equivalent to the ESV in terms of general translation style or gender philosophy." My post here is to offer some illustrations of what Suzanne is saying.

And I am wanting to complicate the race and gender and translation issues a bit more. I'm wanting to show that women matter, that Jewish women matter, in Bible translation.

Luther overlooks the Jews (when translating their bible) - if he did break away some from Aristotle's misogyny. The all-male ESV translation team overlook women - even if they were trying to stay true to the Hebrew (and to the Jews' Greek also in the case of the NT and the LXX).

But women such as Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner (aka Gertrud Kolmar) and Julia Evelina Smith show that both race and gender are inherently important to Bible translation. Jewish women are not unimportant in translation of the bible.

Luther wrote however that "Whoever would speak German must not use Hebrew style. Rather he must see to it—once he understand the Hebrew author—that he concentrates on the sense of the text, asking himself, 'Pray tell, what do the Germans say in such a situation?'" Whether this is one of his infamous antisemitic statements, I don't know. What is apparent to me is that Luther presumes that Hebrew style is nothing that a German man would use. More on that in a moment.

The ESV team wrote that "In the area of gender language, the goal of the ESV is to render literally what is in the original. For example, 'anyone' replaces 'any man' where there is no word corresponding to 'man' in the original languages, and 'people' rather than 'men' is regularly used where the original languages refer to both men and women. But the words 'man' and 'men' are retained where a male meaning component is part of the original Greek or Hebrew." Now, that sounds pretty good, except when we keep reading their statement it becomes clear that there is a male bias, and a Christian male bias at that. The default English pronoun is "he," and the default referent to mortal humans (vs. God) is "man," and the default original language of the bible (in terms of gendered examples) is Greek of the Christian New Testament (never Hebrew of the original testament), and when there is mention of "an important familial form of address between fellow-Jews and fellow-Christians" then the default is the masculine "fellow" during the default Christian time period, "in the first century." One is left to wonder how "gender language" is worked out when the Hebrew text of the bible explicitly refers to women, and Jewish women at that. How is there consistent "transparency to the original text, allowing the reader to understand the original on its own terms rather than on the terms of our present-day culture"? So there again is the aristotelian presumption Luther makes: there's this binary that one culture's terms and style are necessarily and purely different from the other's.

Before going on to how Kolmar and Smith rise above Luther's and the ESV male-translation binaries, I'd like to give you a bit more of what Marion Kaplan says:

Women's history asks the kinds of questions that are central to an understanding of daily life, revealing crucial private thoughts and emotions. Moreover, a focus on women uncovers women's distinctive perspectives on public life, which often differed from those of men. But such a focus shows more than how gender--the culturally and hierarchically constructed differences between the sexes--made a difference in the way people perceived and reacted to daily events. It also shows how gender made a difference, ultimately, in matters of life and death. . . . To stress women's history, however, is not to exclude men--quite the contrary. To understand how gender operated, men's history is also required; their memoirs and diaries are also essential. In addition, the memoirs and interviews of Jewish women provide an inclusive viewpoint. Men and children, as well as extended family and friendship networks, were central to women's recollections and hence are visible and active at every term. Although the clamity that hit German Jews affected them as Jews first, they also suffered based on gender. (Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, page 7)

Notice that "German Jews who are women" may just conflate some of the binaries of Luther and of the ESV male-only Christian-only team. And German Jews who are women may just give a perspective important to the histories of those who are not women, who are not Jews, and who are not German Jews. If you are not a German Jew who is a woman, then her history can help with the telling of yours anyway. To parse out gender and race affects the parser outer negatively, no?

So we might want to listen to Kolmar. A (Jew, German, Hebrew-reader, translator) woman. The wikipedia folks call her the "the finest woman writer in the history of the German language." Here's a long quote from one of her letters to a family member perhaps explaining why:

You bought yourself a Bible--and I own four! An old Luther Bible from the year 1854, it was given to Mutti's mother (according to the inscription); then I have the, though incomplete, Bible with pictures and marginal illustrations by Lilien; then the completely new, handy, thin-paper edition (without new testament), which cites Professor Torczyner, a Hebraist at the University of Jerusalem [sic; Hebrew University], as the responsible editor and which presumably also offers the most reliable German text. The translation is by various scholars; for example, the prophet Samuel was translated by Thea's father. Torczyner proofread everything and translated large parts himself and that which has its own rhythm in the original language has been presented by him for the first time as recognizable poetry, as hymn, also from the outside. This is also the reason why laymen and professional critics alike are very divided in their assessment of the new work. Thea's father, for example, was, of course, quite satisfied with his own work but did not approve of Torczyner's rhythmic texts. Mrs. Feld, on the other hand, whose father had originated the idea for a new complete translation, though Torczyner's psalms and prophets beautiful but was not at all enthusiastic about the prose of the other contributors. She much preferred the Luther Bible, and event he later Zunz Bible. I, myself, reach again and again for the Torczyner, especially when I'm reading my Hebrew Bible--for I own this one as well--and need help with translating. I had been reading the Luther Bible all my life, and some people who are in a position to judge such things have claimed that its language has clearly influenced by poetic language. I remember a colleague at Döberitz saying once: "You talk like Martin Luther." Because I said: "This towel is dirty beyond all measure." I'm less well versed in the New Testament, and I have read, if at all, always only the Gospels; Paul and the other epistles rarely, and hardly at all the apostle stories. I would very much like to participate in your course. For even though, as I said, I know and honor the Bible, there is a good deal about its development that I could learn. (My gaze is turned inward: letters 1934-1943, By Gertrud Kolmar, Translated into English by Brigitte Goldstein, pages 87-88)

Notice how facile, how humble, Kolmar is with the Hebrew, with the German translation including her own translating. Notice how she, a Jewess, writes like the German Martin Luther, while understanding poetry and rhythm and style - a German Jewish, Jewish German, Hebrew womanish, like the manliest man of German bible translation, range of styles.

Listen to her poem, "The Woman Poet" (as you're trying to forget, trying not to think about, the horrors in her holocaust poetry):

. . . You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink,
Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb,
And cannot touch you. . . .
[But] you hold me now completely in your hands. . . .
So then, to tell my story, here I stand. . . .
You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?

Do you hear? Hear how dependent this Jewish woman poet is on you, the reader? To catch the "here I stand" resemblances to the Martin Luther you think you've heard before? Who has had to do more work? Who was sentenced to die, who died, because of her race, her gender, her voice?

Now, when turning to Julia Smith, I really want to turn to her own translation of the Hebrew and Greek bible. She does write a philosophy of translation and a bit of commentary on her translation (as do some of the contributors to The Woman's Bible). But given how long this post is already, it's worth just comparing Smith's translating to the Hebrew and to Luther's (1984 updated) and to the ESV men's. Given the time, I'll try to do that in another post another time.

Listening to Moses in the Desert? Why? How? Who?

Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
. . . and the bible didn't mention us, not even once.
--Regina Spektor's "Samson [and Delilah]"

I knew all the stories
and I learned to talk about How
You were mighty to save
Those were only empty words on a page
--Jenny Simmons' "What Do I Know of Holy"

So we want to understand what Moses said to men to say to their wives? We want to get a handle on the words of God, to him, to them? Now why would you or I want that?

Some today believe the words are meant for them; yes, the Hebrew words. Yes, the words rendered, translated in a book, as an inspired bible, the God-breathed Bible. Others read the words as male dominance of women then and there (if not also a perpetual force here and now).

There are lots of readings in between:
>"If God said it, then how can I question it if it were sexist!";
>"Since I'm a cultural and linguistic relativist, and since Tvi Abusch has researched 'a number of cultures' using prescribed ordeals in which women inflict abuse on the poor men, then who am I to judge Moses?";
>"The whole thing's a fable, so who cares?";
>"Might be history, but it's not mine, so who cares?";
>"Water torture of those not yet proven guilty? Sounds like the Bush administration so it stinks";
>"It's the old covenant - read Jesus or Paul or Emerson Eggerichs instead";
>"It's the error of the infidel - read the Quran's Surah 24 of the holy Prophet of Allah instead";
>"Did somebody say 'chocolate'? - if housewives are fooled by such 'sweet' womanizers, then shame on them!"

If you've come around this blog of mine before, you know I'm interested in Aristotle's persistent influences on us. It's a curious thing, of course, to bring Aristotle into a discussion about Numbers 5 (or a segment of the fourth book [ בַּמִּדְבָּר, Bamidbar] of the Torah). Or is it?

What I'm doing in this post is pausing a bit. Responding to some of the comments of the previous post. Giving everyone time to look over the Hellene translation of the Hebrew linked to there.

Finding myself excited that Robert Alter would ask, "From what do you translate the Bible? . . . . from what language? . . . . from what text? . . . . The oldest of . . . translations, the Greek, or Septuagint, done in Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., is the one that scholars have drawn on most heavily for solutions to puzzles in the Masoretic Text. . . . And the fact remains that the Greeks were translators, obliged as translators to clarify obscure points, resolve contradictions, and otherwise make the Hebrew text with which they labored intelligible to their Greek readers."

Reminding myself that these are Alter's notes "To The Reader" [of English] on "The Text" [in Hebrew and in Greek] of "I and 2 Samuel," which he translates beautifully and comments on intelligently.

Thinking about what Aristotle taught Greek men only, that flowed into the alert mind of and the mighty army of Alexander the Great. Considering how Sylvie Honigman at Tel Aviv University says it's not the "Alexandrian paradigm" or the "Exodus paradigm" but the "Homeric paradigm" that most informs the history of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah.

Wondering if the Homeric paradigm isn't what Krista Ratcliffe has recovered in theorizing "rhetorical listening" by listening rhetorically to an afrafeminist or two. Noticing the reductive difference Aristotle makes in certain words that Homer and the Hebrew-to-Greek translators of Numbers 5 use.

Therefore: what if we, any of us, were to listen to Moses speaking in the desert? Could we hear (as Alter does in his translation of The Five Books of Moses) how "The woman is rhetorically buttonholed" in this text? Might we have eyes to see and ears to hear (as Julia E. Smith does in her translation of Numbers V, a literal translating, as if a writing of the woman's body)?

18 And the priest made the woman stand before Jehovah, and uncovered the head of the woman, and gave upon her hands the gift of remembrance, this is the gift of jealousy: and in the hand of the priest shall be to him the waters of contradiction, causing the curse.

Julia Smith's Bible -- to download

Google books has just made Julia Smith's Bible available again, to fully search and even to download. The company removed it for some time just after I'd posted it was available.  [update with link:  http://books.google.com/books?id=03gdC1EPvEMC&source=gbs_navlinks_s]

Here is Smith's translation of Genesis 3:20,

And Adam will call his wife's name Life, for she was the mother of all living.

Smith calls her translating "literal." Would you agree that "Life" is a good and a literal translation for what usually is rendered "Eve"?

Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part IV

David Ker is learning Hebrew backwards. This post should be the last Part in that series here. So much was unsaid in the earlier three parts; I think we may have to go backwards to 1971, and earlier. Earlier, I think I suggested:

In Part IV, let's look at the Helen of Hellenism and hear how she learns language. Let's really do listen to Rahab (not) of the Hebrews and watch how she learns Hebrew backwards.

In 1971, there were women in Bombay learning English whose mothers spoke Marathi. Yasmin Lukmani went to their high school, listened to how they were motivated to learn, and looked at their test scores. She found that they 1) were using English as an instrument to access the Western world, and that they 2) were learning quite well despite the fact that they 3) weren't especially motivated to integrate into that Western world. The correlation she was able to establish (i.e., between 1 & 2) led her to publish an article in Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies.

Linguists in the Western world began to argue. First, they produced a slew of research articles trying to disprove (or to prove) what was seen as Lukmani's great findings: that an "instrumental" motivation for learning a second language was completely different from "integrative" motivation; that one motivation or the other correlated directly with success in learning; and that the "instrumental" motivation was the stronger predictor of measurable success.

Second, the binary "instrumental / integrative" seemed to fit in so well with the Chomskyan linguistic revolution just getting steam in the U.S. The Aristotelian binary joined with the other "either / or" attempts to abstract out "language / languages" even for women learning for their own reasons in Bombay.

But Yamuna Kachru says, "Hold on; not so fast." And, she writes this:

Observations and analyses in this laboratory [of World Englishes and not just U.K. or U.S.A. English] bring important SLA [second language "acquisition"] concepts and claims into focus and reveal cracks in theory-building.

For example, Mesthrie (1992), on the basis of his study of South African Indian English... observes: 'The New English data suggest that we are not dealing with discrete settings ('off' and 'on'; 'plus' or 'minus'; etc.), but with a continuum of settings. This makes the acquisition process more fuzzy and susceptible to social conditions than Universal Grammarians would allow'...

The world Englishes perspective has shown that concepts such as interlanguage (Selinker, 1992), fossilization (Selinker, 1992), input (Krashen, 1981), as currently formulated are of no relevance to indigenized varieties of English. Indian, Nigerian, or Singaporean English speakers follow the norms of their own varieties rather than the norms of American, Australian, or British English.

While theories of formal linguistics seek the most efficient representations of phrase and sentence structures and theories of bilingualism continue to grapple with basic questions such as how many grammars bilingual people have in their brains, the study of world Englishes reveals the research focus that may be brought about by tying data to theory, rather than the other way around. Consequently, questions of uses and functions of the language, rather than how it is acquired, come to the fore as the salient face of the inquiry. (page 81)

Did we hear that? "rather than the other way around"? Sounds like Ker's learning backwards.

So let's go backwards further, to Helen. Yes, I'm talking about Helen of Troy, Goddess, Princess, Whore, the very same person Bettany Hughes has written about. How unlikely that the mother of the Hellene mother tongue would be motivated to learn that barbarian language of the men of Troy! Hughes recalls the problem of Greek men:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

So the Greek men, and we, ask "How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time" for learning a foreign language? What would motivate her? As if laughing, the man Gorgias writes:

πῶς οὖν χρὴ δίκαιον ἡγήσασθαι τὸν τῆς Ἑλένης μῶμον,

ἥτις εἴτ' ἐρασθεῖσα

εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα

εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα

εἴτε ὑπὸ θείας ἀνάγκη ἀναγκασθεῖσα

ἔπραξεν ἃ ἔπραξε, πάντως διαφεύγει τὴν αἰτίαν

For those of us not native speakers of Gorgias's Greek, Laurent Pernot summarizes:

Gorgias undertakes to excuse her by arguing that...she could only have done so for one of these four reasons: (1) she obeyed the gods' commands; (2) she was carried off by force; (3) she was persuaded by speech; (4) she succumbed to love.

We are back to motives. And to directions. For learning a language not our own, a language dead, if moribund to our own culture.

Men like Socrates, who taught Plato, would believe in 1) a dialogue that demands a give-and-take, between one's own position and another's, a kind of trans-position.

Men like Alexander, who was taught by Aristotle, would be convinced mainly 2) by force, by an im-position.

Men like Aristotle, who ultimately rejected the teachings of Socrates and Plato, would recommend only logic: 3) the language of "either / or" proposition.

Either of these three / or what's laughable. Either a man's centrism, his hard unyielding power, and his logic / or its opposite: extreme, soft, irrational love. Or is it opposite? Perhaps it's radically altered. Like an apposition (a non-position with respect to the positions of men; a grammatical appositive in which two side by side are different and the same in the same instance). So maybe it's backwards.

Is Ker motivated: 1) to obey a divine command (a mixing of heaven with earth, of Hebrew with English)? 2) to do something he absolutely has to (with no choice on his part)? 3) to listen to experts who reduce language and the Hebrew language to essential features?  Or?/and?

Since we've mentioned Hebrew, lets turn to the woman who had to learn it. To Rahab. Like Helen, a "most sluttish femme fatale" among men. Yes, I know, some will say she didn't have to learn Hebrew. She did fine in Jericho with the non-Jewish men, speaking with them. And those Jewish spies? Those guys were the ones who had to learn the language of Jericho; it's what spies do, right? So I'm asking why the "either / or"? The Trojan spies learned what Greek men liked, and Helen learned Trojan too. The Hebrew spies knew what the men in Jericho liked, and Rahab learned Hebrew too. The motives? Well, I think we may just want to ask the questions. Don't some motives allow people (men and women) to acquire, as if not really having to change their nature or their identities?

And what about this puzzler? What's this word? In Joshua 2, there's silence in the text, where Rahab speaks?

אמֶר

So many times in so places, she's learning Hebrew, speaking the language.

Helen having learned (of men, of love, of language) overhears. She translates:

καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῇ οἱ ἄνδρες Ἡ ψυχὴ ἡμῶν ἀνθ' ὑμῶν εἰς θάνατον. καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν Ὡς ἂν παραδῷ κύριος ὑμῖν τὴν πόλιν, ποιήσετε εἰς ἐμὲ ἔλεος καὶ ἀλήθειαν.

(see Joshua 2:14, the Hebrew, the Hellene;

notice Sir Lancelot Brenton's rendering the Hellene into English:

"And the men said to her, Our life for yours [even] to death: and she said, When the Lord shall have delivered the city to you, ye shall deal mercifully and truly with me."

and now Dr. Leonard J. Greenspoon's:

"And the men said to her, 'Our soul for yours unto death.' And she said, 'When the Lord hands over to you the city, you shall show me pity and truth.'"

Greenspoon says nothing in his commentary about how it is that the Greek language of some unknown translator forced by Alexander the Great's lackey king in Alexandria would let Rahab speak. In fact, I can't find a single commentary ever published by men that explains what motivates this translator who's learned Hellene and Hebrew and who lets Rahab speak.

See the traditional Hebrew text, and the traditional English translations, all of them here have Rahab silent. All let the men only speak. Are we surprised? Things are backwards here.)

When I agree with Ker (funny David Ker puning on the direction of the Hebrew text), I think he's on to something. It's not the "jug to mug model" of learning. It's something that will change him, that he will change. It's the kind of outsidergoingin learning that Helen and Rahab and Yasmin Lukmani and her students and Mary Sidney Herbert and Julia Evelina Smith and Ruth Behar and Mary Douglas have been doing. Backwards stuff, an awaking and an awakening of the dead language.

Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part II

David Ker has a plan: "I’m going to learn Hebrew backwards."

And in this post, I have an opportunity, the opportunity to continue an earlier post "Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part I."

What I really want to say is this: how linguists think of "language" really seems to determine what they think about how to "know" or to "learn" a language (like dead Hebrew).

(A while back, Mike Aubrey posted on "knowing" a language, which starts to descend from linguistics down into philosophy, and further down into epistemology. How do you know, or know that you know? So now I'm trying to get back to my claim that What you think you know language is sort of spells out How you think you can come to know a particular language. I'm going to postpone that a little by suggesting an add-on to the thesis and by telling some stories. The add-on is this: Generally, male linguists (which are most of them), as early as Aristotle, think of language as something that inherently belongs, by nature, to them--something at which they are deeply competent / something for which they are not blamed if their performance is imperfect; something acquired / not learned. Mike, in comments on Part I, wants me to acknowledge Joan Bresnan's work. So, now the stories. First, against charges that Noam Chomsky's a "traditionalist, . . . an old-fashioned patriarch [who. . . ] never really understood what the feminist movement was all about," Chomsky claims he hired Bresnan and Donca Steriade, according to biographer Robert Franklin Barsky. Maybe this was Mike's point, but I'm not so sure Bresnan has been a good Chomskian, like Steven Krashen has been. Seems like Steriade found her way back to MIT, but from her publications, did not find her way back to Chomsky. Second, women and men can participate in Aristotelian or Platonic--i.e., traditionalist masculinist--linguistics; and most do.

Last week, I had lunch with a Ph.D. in Linguistics who's a native English speaker who's been a student of Japanese in Japan and a user of French in the U.S. and in France, confessing "after a decade in French, I still don't know how to get the writing style right"; and with a Ph.D. in Physics from a U.S. university who's a native speaker of Japanese, confessing "I don't know how to speak English properly, exactly." To make them feel better, I cracked a joke in Japanese, which they both laughed at politely--laughed at, because my Japanese is really funny stuff since I don't know it well; and politely, because I hadn't made fun of her French or his English. During dessert, we talked about my "knowing" dead ancient Greek and Hebrew, but neither asked how. They were more interested in how one of my teachers, who had learned more directly from Tommy Wildcat, gave me some pointers on awaking nearly-dead Cherokee from the now-dead Elias Boudinot / Ga-li-ga-na? Watie).

I'm not sure anyone ever asked Mary Sidney Herbert or Julia Evelina Smith how they awoke dead Hebrew (although their translating is good proof that they did, and here's some blogging on the translating by Sidney and Smith).

I do understand that Ruth Behar is "somebody who understood displacement from an early age" who learned Hebrew (as she had to learn her anthropology that breaks your heart) by "displacing" herself "to try to understand another" by "coming from the outside. . . while trying to become an insider." Behar's father, who reads the Torah, is not speaking to her; she calls it, "A nightmare: Seventy-five translated women are burning in the flames. And there my name, the name I took from my father, is burning too" (page 71).

I am fascinated to read how Mary Douglas starts in awaking dead Hebrew, saying: "It will be painful and a failure." Some time back, I shared this fascination with you, saying:

Douglas is "going to change Hebrew by learning it. Of course, she must change too."

You remember, I went on to conjecture more, saying:

1. There’s no law that tells her What she must learn to “learn” Hebrew.
2. There’s no enforcement officer forcing her to Do certain drills or exercises a certain way.
3. There’s not even a living speaker of ancient Hebrew to negotiate with her various meanings.
4. Rather, there is a good bit of listening, hypothesizing, observing, reading, did I say guessing, failing, and hurting she must do. She may listen to texts and she may read living and dead experts. But she cannot stay the same person and still learn Hebrew. The how requires adult human conversion to one profound degree or another.

Let me backtrack again to the thesis statement of this post: how linguists think of "language" really seems to determine what they think about how to "know" or to "learn" a language (like dead Hebrew).

Mary Sidney Herbert and Julia Evelina Smith and Ruth Behar and Mary Douglas think of language (even dead Hebrew) much differently from linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Krashen.

Such linguists think of language as this abstract thing. At least, it's an abstractable thing. Hebrew of the Bible, for example, is what's written in the Bible. At least, to begin with, it's אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי or אלפבית. Especially if you're a man (and not a woman such as Mary Sidney Herbert or Julia Evelina Smith or Ruth Behar or Mary Douglas), you don't really have to change. You don't really have to go from the outside in because you're already an insider. (I'm running out of time to say more, or motivation to make this clear just yet. So Part III is coming soon enough. I suppose I may say something about Rahab, who had to learn [not acquire] the language of men, including the Hebrew of some of them. I do think Ker's on to something useful; more then soon enough.)

Women Count in Bible Translation

UPDATEs:

• I've added links to personal websites of the women translators listed here.
  
• Linda L. Belleville; Joyce Baldwin Caine; Marianne Meye Thompson; added to the list below (thanks to Suzanne McCarthy's directing us to Tremper Longman III's blogpost "Who cares who translated my Bible?" where he asks "So why does the NLT list the names of its ninety translators?" These translators are the 3 women woman of the team of 90).
• Phyllis A. Bird; J. Cheryl Exum; Mary Lucetta Mowry; Katharine D. Sakenfeld all added (thanks to Paul Larson, commenting at BBB. These translators are the 4 women on the NRSV team of 30.)
  
• And as any of you give recognition to other women translators of the Bible, I'll update further.

Just a quick post here for a few reasons:
1) Women who've translated the Bible are getting recognition by several bloggers;
2) Some men are saying that women "seriously" lessen the "merits" of their Bible translations when they identify themselves as women translators (or are identified by others as women);
3) The whole of Julia E. Smith's translation is freely available online for you to read and study.

1) Here are women translators of the Bible and where bloggers are discussing them:

• Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Suzanne McCarthy has offered comments on or excerpts from Sidney here, here, and here. (And I've mentioned Sidney here, here, and here.)
• Jane Aitken. McCarthy notes here that Aitken "is not a woman bible translator but" facilitates Bible translation as "[o]ne of the first American female printers. . . [and] also a bookseller, bookbinder, businesswoman, and employer during the early nineteenth century, a time when the independence of women was actively discouraged."
  
• Julia Evelina Smith. McCarthy's post is here. (My notes on Smith are here).
• Helen Spurrell. Rick Mansfield at ElShaddai Edward's blog inspires McCarthy's post here.
• Helen Barrett Montgomery. Mansfield mentions Montgomery, and McCarthy add this post here.
• Annie Cressman. McCarthy writes here, here, and here.
• Frances Siewert. Edwards posts here.
• Ann Nyland. Edwards offers a bit of a round up of some of the posts I'm mentioning here, and he points to a couple of posts on Nyland's translation. McCarthy posts here and here, comments here, and refers to an article by Nyland here. Wayne Leman posts here, and he offers an interview with Nyland here. Peter Kirk posts here. (I say a few things here, and give an excerpt of Nyland's translation here.)
  
• Karen H. Jobes. Leman posts here and here. John F. Hobbins here and here; Kirk here; and James Getz here. (I've remarked here.)
• Beth Shepperd. (I've linked here to the site listing Shepperd, the only woman on a translation team of men).
• Linda Belleville. Some time back, Michael Kruse republished here four paragraphs from Belleville's “Teaching and Usurping Authority” an essay in Discovering Biblical Equality. Andreas J. Köstenberger critiques Belleville's work here. TC Robinson compares Belleville's views with certain mens' here. McCarthy posts here.
• Joyce Baldwin Caine. Valerie Griffith writes on the late Baldwin Caine.
• Marianne Meye Thompson. Chris Tilling posts here. Wes Kendall says she and her husband "helped guide me through my final years of seminary and helped prepare me for pastoral ministry." Nijay K. Gupta says that Marianne Meye Thompson is most qualified to contribute to Greg Beale’s and D.A. Carson’s (eds) Commentary on the NT Use of the Old Testament; Gupta also wishes Karen Jobes and Linda Belleville were in the book but notes "no women" are in the work.
  
• Phyllis Bird. Mindawati Peranginganging posts some here (in English). Shawna R. B. Attenbury posts here sentences from Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities (Overtures to Biblical Theology).
  
• J. Cheryl Exum. Ivoy mentions one of her theories here. Steve R. McEnvoy finds her doing something wonderful here. Karl Möller highlights Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)Versions of Biblical Narratives here.
• Lucetta Mowry. Will no one blog on Mowry and her Poetry in the Synoptic Gospels and Revelation: A Study of Methods and Materials and her The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church?
• Katharine D. Sakenfeld. Larry Corbett took sermon notes from Sakenfeld, but is no one blogging about her works these days?
  
• Joann Haugarud.  Here, I quote Louise Von Flowtow-Evans, who mentions and quotes Haugarud's The Word for Us: The Gospels of John and Mark, Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, Restated in Inclusive Language.

2) In the conversation after Edward's post on Siewart, there is the suggestion that a Bible translation is diminished when the translator is shown to be a woman.

Kirk says, "I think Ann would be unhappy to have The Source [i.e., her translation] listed as a translation by a woman because she wants it to be taken seriously on its own merits."

Edwards replies, "I agree that we shouldn’t qualify any translation work as by 'a woman', though I find it ironic that many translation committees seem to be under pressure from some quarters to include a wide sample of minority voices, including women and non-white ethnicities. It’s hugely ironic to me that on one hand we want a meritocracy that recognizes superior work as such, regardless of who did it, while on the other we want to give equal weighting to work from a diversity of backgrounds, regardless of quality."

Makes us wonder whether these two men have read (and believe) what Nyland writes in her More Than Meets The Eye: THE CAMPAIGN TO CONTROL GENDER TRANSLATION BIBLES.

Makes us listen more closely to how Julia E. Smith begins the Preface to her translation of the Bible:

"It may seem presumptious for an ordinary woman with no particular advantages of education to translate and publish alone, the most wonderful book that has ever appeared in the world, and thought to be the most difficult to translate. . . . Over twenty years ago, when I had four sisters, a friend met with us weekly, to search the Scriptures, we being desirous to learn . . . . We saw by the margin that the text [of the King James's forty-seven translators] had not been . . . . I had studied Latin and Greek at school, and began by translating the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint. . . . I soon gave my attention to the Hebrew, and studied it thoroughly. . . "

Makes us wonder a little more at why Francis Ellen Burr and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women in The Women’s Bible make such a big deal out of being women, translators.

3) The whole of Julia E. Smith's translation is freely available online for you to read and study. Here it is!

Man Stuff: After Mother's Day 2008 AD

Throughout church history the traditional interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:14 has been that women are more easily deceived than men. . . The only problem with the traditional interpretation is that most Western Christians today, patriarchalists included, recognize that this perspective is factually incorrect. Women are not inherently (by virtue of their gender alone) more easily deceived than men. It is not only politically incorrect to say so today, it simply does not square with the hard data.
--William J. Webb
Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals:
Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis
2001 AD

Could Paul have looked down to the nineteenth century with clairvoyant vision and beheld the good works of a Lucretia Mott, a Florence Nightingale, a Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, not to mention a host of faithful mothers, he might, perhaps, have been less anxious about the apparel and the manners of his converts. Could he have foreseen a Margaret Fuller, a Maria Mitchell, or an Emma Willard, possibly he might have suspected that sex does not determine the capacity of the individual. Or, could he have had a vision of the public school system of this Republic [i.e., the U.S.A.], and witnessed the fact that a large proportion of the teachers are women, it is possible that he might have hesitated to utter so tyrannical an edict:
“But I permit not a woman to teach.”
--Lucinda B. Chandler
The Woman’s Bible:
A Classic Feminist Perspective
1895 AD

“It sounds like Aristotle,” says Suzanne McCarthy to John Hobbins in a conversation, she with him and with others, in 2008 AD. The “It” is the “argument,” or the logic, “that men have the courage of command and women the virtue of subordination.” It is the logical argument in order “to put women in the role of ‘responder’ to men as ‘leaders’.”

Now, I’m suggesting we all respond. You respond, and I respond, regardless of our sex. But let me warn the men among us who cannot be taught by a woman: Do not read Suzanne’s blog. She has something to say, something to teach, to men and to women as well. Aristotle absolutely could not listen. Maybe Paul and Timothy would not either. If you, a man, believe Aristotle and Paul (perhaps), then you should not be womanly by responding, and by responding to a woman or her blog.

The point I want to make is that men who are honest will listen, and will learn from a woman.

And don’t we all believe that Aristotle and Paul and Timothy all listened, at least, to their mothers, once upon a time? Their mothers taught them very many important things. So why must these men stop listening to a woman when they as boys pass through puberty or something else towards manhood? Does the progymnasmata or the Bar Mitzvah or one latter day circumcision for Christ help them make the argument that they really do have the courage of command while women really do have the virtue of subordination? Why must these authoritative men silence women? Are women really that naïve, that much more sin-prone, that much lesser than men spiritually or psychologically or biologically?

What, really, is the evidence if Suzanne presents it? What are the facts? In 2008, are we repeating the cycles of history? Do you have manly courage enough to ask yourself whether you are perpetuating the cycles of history? Do you really think you are not responding?

Here are men who did not think they needed to respond to what a woman taught:

In 66 AD or so, Paul writes and Timothy reads this:

διδάσκειν δὲ γυναικὶ οὐκ ἐπιτρέπω οὐδὲ αὐθεντεῖν ἀνδρός
ἀλλ' εἶναι ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ
Ἀδὰμ γὰρ πρῶτος ἐπλάσθη εἶτα Εὕα
καὶ Ἀδὰμ οὐκ ἠπατήθη
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἐξαπατηθεῖσα ἐν παραβάσει γέγονεν

Now do you think that young “Timothy” [“Honorer of Gods”] took the letter to his father and his mother? What did Mama “Eunice” [“Blessed Victor”] married to the Greek Pappa say to what Paul had written to their son?

So fast forward to the 1870s AD. Three teams of 101 men, and no women, began work in England and America on the “Revised Version” of the English Bible. In 1881, the men insisted on translating Paul’s Greek, and published it, as follows:

12 But I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man,
but to be in quietness.
13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve;
14 and Adam was not beguiled,
but the woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression:

These men, authorized by the Church of England, practiced what they translated. The men notably viewed Julia Evelina Smith Parker as beguiled. And as infamously, they refused to include her in their translation project. She was absolutely excluded from involvement or consideration. Equally ignored was her complete translation of the Bible into English from the Hebrew, the Greek (including the Septuagint), and the Latin (particularly the Vulgate). They especially did not want to consult Smith or her work as to how she translated Paul’s letter to Timothy.

Women and men who were reading Smith’s translation did notice the silencing. Thus, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucinda B. Chandler, and twenty three other women from around the world, decided to publish a commentary, which they entitled, The Woman’s Bible. Francis Ellen Burr wrote the Appendix in which she gives a biography of Smith and praises her work: “Julia Smith’s translation of the Bible stands out unique among all translations.” Burr notes:

Frequently her wording is an improvement, or brings one closer to the original than the common translation. Thus in I. Corinthians viii, I, of the King James translation, we have: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” Julia Smith version: “Knowledge puffs up and love builds the house.” She uses “love” in place of “charity” every time. And her translation was made nearly forty years before the revised version of our day, which also does the same. . . This word “charity” was one of the words that Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of English, charged Tyndale with mistranslating. The other two words were “priest” and “church,” Tyndale calling priests “seniors,” and church “congregation.” Both Julia Smith and the revised version call them priest and church. And she gives the word “Life” for “Eve:” “And Adam will call his wife’s name Life, for she was the mother of all living.” . . . Her work has had the endorsement of various learned men. A Hebrew professor of Harvard College (Prof. Young) . . . examined it. He was much astonished that she had translated so correctly without consulting some learned man. . . She received many letters from scholars, all speaking of the exact, or literal translation. Some people have criticised this feature, which is the great merit of the book.

That was 1895 AD.

So again we fast forward, to seven years ago. Then, in 2001, there was another “publishing team [that] includes more than 100 people.” But again, not even one of those “people” is a woman. Their statement is this: “The team is 100-member team, which is international and represents many denominations, shares a commitment to historic evangelical orthodoxy, and to the authority and sufficiency of the inerrant Scriptures.” You may recognize the team as the “ESV [English Standard Version] publishing team.”

Here’s how they translate Paul’s letter to Timothy:

12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man;
rather, she is to remain quiet.
13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve;
14and Adam was not deceived,
But the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

Wouldn’t we all like to read how Julia Evelina Smith Parker translates Paul’s Greek? No? The Revised Version teams of the 1870s want her to remain silent. Likewise, the ESV team seems not interested in the facts of Smith’s translation either. Alas, neither I nor my university’s library nor any bookstore I can find has a copy of Smith’s work. It’s not online. History silences her and it. If we listen to Suzanne McCarthy, who brings herself to listen both to men and women, then we know, “It sounds like Aristotle.”

Possessions and Positions of the Translator

In this post, I want to do three things: 1. to recognize a few outstanding people who are translators. 2. to rank order the best English translations of a short Greek passage. 3. to offer a bit of Bible translation by a feminist method.

1.

It’s one thing to evaluate translations; it’s quite another thing actually to translate. And there’s more: it takes great courage and skill to do both. Great coaches are not the world-class athletes; and the competitors are not always doing what they intend to do, even at their peak, as the coaches’ video tapes later prove. Nonetheless, there are rare individuals who, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “play both sides of the net.” That is, people who translate not only do something but they also can reflect on what they’ve done and what they must do. I’m thinking now of exceptional persons, some of whom are well known and others less so. I’m thinking of Willis Barnstone who translates into English from Greek, from Chinese, from Hebrew, from Spanish, from the classics, from the Bible, from poetry, from novels, both as a talented individual and as a skilled collaborator; and of the same Barnstone who writes translation theory, history, and practice, and related histories of cultures and language, and related literary criticism. I’m thinking of Anne Carson who translates and speaks of theory of translation, and who writes poetry and essays on the classics and on comparative literature. I’m thinking of Karen H. Jobes who has translated books of the Bible both individually and in collaboration; and who is theorizing textual translation by analogies with oral translation. I’m thinking of Kenneth L. Pike, the maker of a theory of language that has had wide application in more than twenty different disciplines, that insists on “person above logic,” that is demonstrable monolingually, that is constantly aware of whether the person is an outsider going in or is already some sort of an insider; Pike’s a poet, a polyglot, and a practitioner of his translation theory. I’m thinking of Carolyn Custis James, Suzanne McCarthy, John F. Hobbins, Michael Pakaluk, Tyson Hausdoerffer, Bob MacDonald, and April DeConick, who not only blog and dialog with other theorists about translation but who also actually do translating, sometimes translation that is a bit different, that makes a good bit of difference. Pakaluk actually invites others in through his challenges.

Today, I want especially to recognize Wayne Leman, Peter Kirk, and one blogger named Nathan. They’ve responded to a translation challenge of mine of a previous post:

What’s the best English translation of the following Greek phrase? What’s your method of translation? How and why is your translation one of the best?

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

Wayne, at his Better Bibles Blog, has been outlining a method of translation he’s calling “translation equivalence” (aka a new phrase for “dynamic equivalence” or DE). Lately, he’s focused readers on “possession” or “possessives” marked in English, Hebrew, and Greek. (Wayne’s post actually inspired my challenge.) When he stepped up to my challenge, Wayne has admitted that neither “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence are particularly relevant concepts here.” (We’ll come back in a moment to why there’s particular distancing from DE and why there’s no mention of Kenneth Pike’s methods.) He then gives us two brilliant translations:

“‘James, God and Jesus Christ's servant.’ Or for those who prefer to include the possessive suffix on both possessors, ‘James, God's and Jesus Christ's servant.’”

Peter likewise offers us the following wonderful translation, and an explanation:

“James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Peter does not label explicitly his methods for the translation. (He does begin parenthetically by noting that “Wayne omitted ‘the Lord’ presumably by mistake,” which would make Wayne’s translation “James, God's and the Lord Jesus Christ's servant”). In contrast to Wayne, then, Peter gives three reasons to explain why he does not “use the English possessive here” (i.e., possessive marked by apostrophe). First, such a possessive punctuation in English “makes this sentence unwieldy.” Second, “and more importantly, the rendering with the possessive suggests a definiteness not in the original or in the context, as if James is the only servant/slave or some special servant/slave of God and Jesus rather than one of a large number. Thus ‘Millie is Mr Smith's servant’ suggests that she is the only one, in a way ‘Millie is a servant of Mr Smith’ does not.”

Finally Peter appeals to, but almost only hints at, another reason, the reason I think is his most important of all: “this may be partly a matter of my English dialect.” Such an appeal forms a more implicit contrast to Wayne’s explicit statements on method. Peter is, rightly I say, personally constrained by how his own English sounds to him. Peter is as astutely attuned to how “James”’s own Greek may sound to the original writer. As understated and apologetic as Peter’s appeal to his own lect is, the constraint of his own subjective position frees him (1) to embrace the longer prepositional phrases instead of punctuated apostrophes for possession, and (2) to leave indefinite the personal possessiveness. The most important aspect of this subtle appeal to personal lect is that it leaves both to the original author and to the translator’s readers a kind of invitation to subjectivity. That is, Peter’s using his own English admittedly allows “James” to use his own Greek, and this allows readers to supply “more importantly” the indefiniteness which the context suggests. But Peter’s method is not far in approach from Wayne’s. Both are pragmatic.

Wayne is all for “simply matching the meaning of the Greek form to an English form that has the same meaning”; in contrast to Peter, Wayne assumes and works from a much more general, abstract, and universal “Greek” albeit a Greek full of “the meaning.” Wayne’s method also assumes a universally normal, native “English”: “How do native English speakers normally express the meaning of the Greek?” He muses whether his method, therefore, is to be classified a “literary translation,” and he wants to “assume so, since it is how native English speakers would say and write that English.” What general English “possessive syntax [is there] for that same possessive relationship” in Greek? He explains that such questions “would be an example of simultaneous translation and translation equivalence, at a minimum. I forget what bilingual quotation is, so it might be that also.” The thing is, he’s already said very clearly that he is not employing either “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence,” which are two debated methods among Bible translators. Such translators have been distancing themselves from Eugene Nida’s DE, and have abandoned Pike’s monolingual demonstration and tagmemics. The pragmatics of the day is “relevance theory” as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and applied to Bible translation by Ernst-August Gutt. Karen H. Jobes's invocation of simultaneous interpretation and bilingual quotation is much in contrast to relevance theory. Nonetheless, it’s the distancing from Nida and the absence of Pike that are most interesting. Pragmatics seems to allow Bible translators not to have to be accountable to formal equivalence or to literary issues or to theological constraints. (For all you non-linguistic rhetoricians, “relevance theory” and pragmatics are analogous to Aristotle’s “enthymeme” as a “rhetorical syllogism.” Sperber and Wilson are interested in “how what is only implied in a statement contributes to determining the meaning of what is explicitly said.”) But I’m digressing.

Before we move on to our third translator, let me just say this. The world class athletes may review the video tapes after they get the gold medals; they don’t always use the exact methods they’ve intended but look at what they’ve done! Bravo Wayne and Peter!

Nathan takes two days and works through four translations. They are these:

“James, slave to god and master Jesus the anointed one;”

“Yakob, slave to god and master Yehoshua the anointed one;”

“From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah;” [from the Complete Jewish Bible (Stern), to compare with Nathan’s previous two]

“Jacob, slave to god and master Joshua the Anointed;”

By way of method, Nathan wants to “offer something out of the norm.” And he likes to “label it ‘contextual translation’ or something along those lines.” Now his truly is a “literary translation”; Nathan is after both the “Jewish context” of names and also the Greek “word-play of master/slave; and perhaps theos [a]s not implying Father and Son but rather that Jesus is master/god.” The final translation Nathan provides is to avoid “a transliteration from either language” and to offer “purely English terminology” only. I have to say I really like Nathan’s English (non-transliteration) translation of Jacob’s Hebraic Greek; and I’ll say a bit more on that when I offer my own translation at the end of this post.

2.

In addition to Wayne’s, Peter’s, and Nathan’s translations, I list below here some 48 other translations all published at one point or another. (Does anyone have a copy of Julia Evelina Smith Parker’s translation, the first complete translation of the Bible by a woman ever--in 1855, in the United States?) The other translations below are listed in rank order of my preference.

My first and most important criterion for a translation is that it makes and keeps as many personal connections as possible. The connections may be between the writer and the reader, between the translator and the new readers; between the denotations and connotations that make for word play (i.e., playfulness and wiggle room). The best translations are presented with both languages side by side for a trans-translation, or an “interlation” in the “stereotext” as Mikhail Epstein coins it. But I also think any “shock” (as Richard A. Rhodes and I both are very much for) must not just be the shock of the text (either original or translated) but must also be the shock beyond the text (as something the text or its author or translator cannot easily predict or precisely intend); now I’m talking about the subjective effect that a parable-heard has; or that an inside joke involuntarily laughed-at has; or that a hyperbolic statement makes; or that a miracle in nature effects. In section 3. here, I’ll say just a bit more about methods.

Without further ado then, here’s the list:

translation	translator	my ranking
From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah	NJPS	1
From Jacob, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Hackett	2
Ya`akov, a servant of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah,	HNV	3
JAMES, SLAVE OF GOD AND OF THE LORD Jesus Christ	Lattimore	4
From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ,	NET Bible	5
From: James, a slave servant of God and of the Lord Jesus the Anointed One.	TSNT	6
This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NLT	7
I, James, am a slave of God and the Master Jesus,	TM	8
James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	HCSB	9
JAMES, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Moffatt	9
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah,	ISV	10
From James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NJB	11
From James, a servant of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ.	CEV	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	GNT	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	GW	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NCV	12
FROM James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	REB	13
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NAB	15
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NASB	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NKJV	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Weymouth	15
James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ	JB Philip's	16
James, of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ a servant,	Young	17
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	21st Cent	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ASB	18
JAMES, A servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Amplified	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	BEB	18
Iames a seruaunt of God, and of the lorde Iesus Christ,	Bishop's	18
Iames the seruaunt of God and of the LORDE Iesus Christ	Coverdale	18
James the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	D-R	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ERV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ESV	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	Geneva	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	KJV	18
James a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Mace's	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NIV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NRSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	RSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Third Mill	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	TNIV	18
Iames the seruaut of God and of the Lorde Iesus Christ	Tyndale	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	WEB	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Webster's	18
This letter is from James. I am a servant owned by God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	New Life	19
James, bondman of God and of [the] Lord Jesus Christ,	Darby	20
James, the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	Wycliffe	21
I, James, am writing this letter. I serve God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	NIrV	22
One of Jesus’ followers named James wrote the following letter	BLB	23

3.

Now just a bit more about the feminist method of translation. (Then a translation is offered.) I’m just going to refer readers to other places in this blog, to Nancy Mairs’ statements on women’s discourse. Or find Mairs’s books, or Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s or Cheryl Glenn’s or Andrea Lunsford’s or Sonja K. Foss's or Patricia Bizzell’s. They’ve all written much very well on the personal, even sometime physical, nature of rhetoric that women employ. (And I think I’ll add, since half of us are men, that I’ve written here in this blog elsewhere a bit on how Jesus, C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Pike, Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. have used such rhetoric in contrast to cold logic and objectivity). Personal position in and during and after translation cannot be avoided.

Now, when we’re talking about possession, we think also of the possession of one human by another. Slavery is one label for that. And when we talk about God, we think of a being who is over us earthlings, a person who created us even. Again, position, ours and the others’, is not unimportant.

And when we talk about James, we think of several in the New Testament who might have written the Greek words we’re translating into English. There’s great ambiguity here. Not only is this a human being who’s not claiming to be in the position of master; not only is he not God; but he’s also one of possibly many different men. In the gospels, if he’s not Jesus’s brother, then maybe he’s John’s brother, one of the two sons of Zebedee who’s wife brings them to Jesus to talk about being his right hand and his left hand men, to which Jesus replies something about being slaves. But whichever one in the New Testament he is (or is he Josephus’s scribe? Anyway!); anyway, whichever first century man he is, his namesake is also one of many Jacobs. And Josephus the historian does not distinguish between the Jewish patriarch and this letter writer, by name anyway: and so there’s this literary connection to twelve tribes (both from the heel wounded wrestler of God and from this letter writer). And just to be clear, A. T. Robertson, John Painter, and other contemporary scholars of the church writings agree that Ἰάκωβος and Ἰάκωβ (as a Greek transliteration without the later Greeky inflection) are variants of the same name. (Thanks to so Michael Kruse for bringing our attention to Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story by Kenneth E. Bailey. I also like Gary Amirault's observations on Jacob for James).

So since we’re rambling a bit about Greek: the Jewish writer of this letter knows his Greek. Many theologians say he’s arguing with Paul over faith. But rhetoricians could just as easily contend he’s arguing with Aristotle over belief, a central concern of Greek rhetoric. Thus, blogger Nathan who claims his Greek and Hebrew aren’t very good does himself make very important, very personal connections, between the people who are Greek and Hebrew speakers and their God and his anointed one. Enough. Here’s an attempt at another translation, by a feminist method of humility, ambiguity, and personal positions of subjectivity and equal inclusivity:

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

FROM: Jacob, slave, of God, and of Master Anointed Joshua

TO: