Recurring issues

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The process of updating a translation has many interesting features, but some of the work is less interesting. One of the less interesting aspects of a project like this is in the simple updating of archaic expressions. Now, many times, there is something worth commenting on in the process of updating language, but sometimes the replacement of archaisms is almost a mechanical process. I am thinking here of the use of thee for you, behold for see, even unto for as far as, forth for out, hearken for listen, slay for kill, thence for from there, or thereof for its. In many cases, I will not note the simpler cases of updating archaic language.

At times, the ASV and WEB will differ on issues of capitalization, as in Genesis 1:5, where the ASV reads Day where WEB reads “day”. There is no capitalization in Hebrew, and capitalization in English is governed by considerations of style and convention. I do not intend to comment on every difference of capitalization between the ASV and WEB.

Among the many times choices one can make about capitalizations, two issues will surely stand out. First, there is the matter of capitalizing pronouns and nouns referring to God. Neither the KJV, ASV, or WEB engages in this form of ‘reverential capitalization’, and I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to introduce the practice, in part because it serves as a layer of additional commentary to the text. More controversial is the matter of when “God” or “god” should be capitalized. My practice will be to capitalize “God” wherever the term is used as a proper noun, and the leave it in lower case whenever it is used as a common noun. See the entry God in the appendix "Recurring Words".

The WEB, in an attempt to showcase the ‘informal style’ of the Bible, frequently sprinkles in contractions. The idea that someone could work on the Hebrew Bible for a long time and come out thinking it is characterized by informality seems like a pretty major misreading to me. My general practice is not to use contractions in translating the Hebrew Bible, which in my opinion is largely written in various sorts of formal register.

At times, the Hebrew Bible will record dialogue in a very sparse, repetitive style: And he said ... And he said ... And he said, etc. Take, for example, the "And he said" and "And he said" of Genesis 47:30, 31. The WEB supplies subjects here and reads "Joseph said" ... "Israel said". In general, I prefer not to supply subjects or objects to sentences where the Hebrew does not.

The ASV, following the lead of the KJV, frequently uses italics to indicate the presence of words not directly found in the original-language texts. In some cases this is simply the unjustified symptom of an overly-literal philosophy of translation. But in other cases, it is sometimes useful to show where the translator has supplied words. The problem now is that italics are used in today’s writing for emphasis, which is in some ways the opposite of what the KJV used them for. Where it is useful to show the reader that words have been supplied, it seems to me that the best route is to use the more contemporary convention of using brackets [ ] .

In Genesis 34:21, where the ASV reads "peaceable", the WEB reads "peaceful" and I read "at peace". All the translations give the same essential idea, but I think that "at peace" does just a slightly better job at putting the intent of the text into English. Cases like this one, which often come down to a slight difference of tone or emphasis, are so often guided by a subjective feeling about what sounds right in English that any attempt to exhaustively document these sorts of decisions would needlessly try the patience of both writer and reader.

Hebrew tends to express numbers in a somewhat different format than English. In Genesis 5:3, for example, we read, if we translate hyper-literally, that “Adam lived thirty and [a] hundred year[s].” In Genesis 7:11 we encounter an even clunkier example: “In the year of six hundred year of Noah’s life …” Or in Numbers 2:32, we find, “All those who were counted of the encampments by their armies [were] six hundred thousand and thirty thousand and five hundred and fifty.”

In my opinion, there is nothing to be gained in an ordinary tranlsation by attempting to reproduce the exact format in which Hebrew gives its numbers, nor is there anything to be gained by attempting to reproduce the exact format of the ASV or any archaic English translation. If we are reading Genesis 16:16, we do not benefit from being told that Abram “was a son of eighty year and six years”, as we might learn from an overly literal translation from Hebrew. Nor do we benefit from being told that Abram was “fourscore and six years old”, as the ASV puts it. Instead, we may as well speak plain contemporary English and say that Abram was “eighty-six years old”.

One detail where I will insist on aping the Hebrew, however, is that numbers in the text will all be spelled out in this English translation as they are in the Hebrew. We will read that Abraham is “eighty-six years old”, not “86 years old”. In addition just to the principled satisfaction of knowing that the English will spell out words as the Hebrew does, this will also help to distinguish numbers in the text (spelled out) from numbers like verse and chapter numbers in the paratext (given in Arabic numerals).

Both the ASV and WEB contain paragraph divisions, and sometimes the two differ from each other. Probably the most common source of this difference is that in cases of direct quotation the WEB tends to follow the contemporary practice of dividing each new speaker’s statements into a separate paragraph. Thus, for example, where in the ASV Genesis 3:1-8 constitute a single paragraph, the WEB has four (1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8).

Although the Masoretic Text does have section breaks which are somewhat analogous to paragraphs, this translation does not attempt to reproduce the Masoretic breaks in English, nor does it concern itself too extensively with the issue of paragraph breaks in general, as the paragraph breaks of English Bibles are mostly a matter of convenience and do not directly reflect any clear feature of the Hebrew text. I may, however, discuss differences in paragraphing where they hold some special relevance for how a passage is understood.

In the three-column tables in which the ASV, WEB, and my own revision are shown in parallel, I the text is generally arranged in such a way as to facilitate easy comparison of individual words and phrases, and this formatting is done at the expense of the paragraph divisions originall in the ASV and WEB. So, except in cases where I explicitly comment on the paragraph breaks, the text layout in the three-column sections should not be relied upon to give the original paragraph structure for the ASV or the WEB.

Genesis 1:2, in the ASV, begins with the words ‘And the earth’, while the WEB starts with simply ‘The earth’. This is the beginning of a long-running trend – the ASV uses the word ‘and’ far more often than the WEB does. The underlying issue is that in Hebrew there is a particle w-, which is roughly equivalent in meaning to the English ‘and’, which is used in biblical Hebrew far more often than the word ‘and’ appears in most formal English writing of today. The WEB, like many translations, simply omits many instances of the Hebrew ‘and’. Other translations, including the KJV and Robert Alter’s work, tend to translate w- as ‘and’ much more frequently.

I have been influenced by Robert Alter’s arguments in favor of retaining the Hebrew construction, and so, as a general rule, I intend to keep ‘and’ where it exists in the ASV, while reserving the right to exclude it when that seems better.

It is worth noting that the WEB’s desire to minimize Hebrew parataxis extends beyond cases involving the English word ‘and’, to situations in which the compound wᵉ-lo (‘and not’) is translated by ‘neither’ or ‘nor’. For example, in Genesis 3:3, a wᵉ-lo appears as ‘neither’ in the ASV’s “neither shall ye touch it”. In the WEB, this disappears, and we read simply, “You shall not touch it”. I restore wᵉ-lo to the English text, though in the somewhat modified form of ‘nor’. As with ‘and’, I intend to sprinkle in ‘nor’ or ‘neither’, whichever seems appropriate, in places where the WEB has stripped out the parataxis of the ASV.

Another way in which the WEB moves away from the paratactic style is to replace the simple conjuction ‘and’ with words that more explicitly describe the relationship of two clauses. So, for example, in Genesis 3:10, the man says, “and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself”. Although explicitly the Hebrew text does not say why the man hid, the context makes it clear that the man hid because he was afraid. The WEB makes this explicit: “and I was afraid, because I was naked; so I hid myself”. In places where the context already makes the reasons involved crystal clear, I see no need to deviate from the Hebrew structure by adding in a word like ‘so’.

Another attempt to break up the repetitive syntax of the Hebrew can be found in Genesis 9:29, where the Hebrew reads wayyamot (‘and he died’). Perhaps in an attempt to break up the ‘this and this and this and this’ structure of the story, WEB inserts a ‘then’, reading ‘and then he died.’ As in most cases, I don’t see the compelling interest in rephrasing, and so stick with the simple ‘and he died’.

In Genesis 4:22, the ASV informs us that “the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah”. The WEB, on the other hand, tells us that “Tubal Cain’s sister was Naamah”. Hebrew does not distinguish between possessive constructions of the form “X’s Y” and “Y of X”, so which way to go in translation is strictly a stylistic matter. I will simply do whatever seems good in each situation, with no particular policy.

The archaic pronouns thee, thou, ye will be replaced with the modern you, and thy with your. Admittedly, the loss of the old pronouns is a loss, insofar as it is sometimes useful to distinguish between a singular thou and a plural ye. But despite my occasional fondness for dated language, preserving obsolete pronouns would be a step too far.

More broadly speaking, this issue concerns not just totally obsolete pronouns, like thee, but also pronouns which are not themselves obsolete but where some uses are dated. For example, in Genesis 7:23 (ASV) we find “they that were with him”, where of course today’s English demands “those who were with him”. Those sorts of trivial changes I will generally make without comment.

In Genesis 1:1, the ASV has only one mark of punctuation: the period at the end of the verse:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The WEB, on the other hand, adds a comma:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

In this case, there is no change to the overall meaning of the sentence: the punctuation is merely a stylistic issue, concerning how the sentence is best expressed in English. In some cases, the difference has occurred as the rules of punctuation have changed over time. This is especially clear in the case of the ASV’s frequent use of colons in places where modern English would not. For example, Genesis 1:2 –

And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

In any case, it seems unnecessary to clutter the notes with mentions of every one of these sorts of punctation difference. Usually they make no material difference, though of course I reserve the right to comment on particularly interesting cases.

The WEB, like many modern translations of the Bible, uses quotation marks to indicate direct speech.

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

On the other hand, the ASV, following the lead of the RV and KJV, does not.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Hebrew does not use quotation marks. In Hebrew, as in English, the beginning of a quotation is usually obvious from context, and can easily be indicated in English by capitalizing the first letter of the quotation. The exact end of the quotation is not always quite so obvious, and will at times reflect a judgment call on the part of the translator. Although it is perhaps excessive conservatism on my part, perhaps it would be best to leave quotation marks out altogether. While many instances of quotation are fairly straightforward, there are passages where the Hebrew text seems to slide from speaker to speaker, especially in cases of prophetic language, and where it nests quotations in a manner that a regular English writer used to quotation marks would never allow.

My proposed text will follow the ASV’s lead and leave out quotation marks.

In Genesis 3:22, the ASV uses the expression “live for ever”. This is exactly equivalent in meaning to the more current expression “live forever”. In cases like this, I will side with contemporary American usage, and do so often without comment.

Where the ASV uses old verbal forms, like moveth, hath, canst, the WEB systematically replaces those with the equivalent contemporary forms, like moves, has, can. Other forms of the same sort of phenomenon occurs in passages like Genesis 3:3, where ASV reads “I did eat” instead of “I ate”; or Genesis 3:22, where ASV reads “is become” instead of “has become”. I will side with the WEB on this and not note every place where it happens.

Choices about word order are frequently complex, but sometimes the ASV, due to its reliance on the word choices of the KJV, uses words in an order that is simply not allowed in any form of contemporary English. Consider ‘called he’, as found in Genesis 1:10 and 41:52, and in Jeremiah 42:8. In all three of these cases, today’s English style recommends the order ‘he called’. I will not always note each individual situation in which I adopt a more contemporary word order without substantially changing the meaning of a sentence.

On the other hand, there are many places where the ASV closely follows the Hebrew word order, even at the cost of producing an unusual English sentence. The WEB much more often tries to follow the default word order of typical English, and sometimes it even deviates from the Hebrew word order for reasons that are not clear to me. I will try to balance an interest in preserving the particular emphases of the Hebrew word order with the need for English that is intelligible, but in many cases where I revert to a word order closer to the Hebrew, I will not explicitly note the occasion.

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