The New English Bible Old Testament

The Oxford and Cambridge University Presses are to be congratulated for selecting the staff and setting up the procedures that have produced a completely new—and in general fine—translation of the Bible into modern English.

The editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY have invited me to evaluate the accuracy of the Old Testament version in relation to the Hebrew. The essential task of Old Testament scholarship is to understand the original Hebrew within the setting of what is known from the texts and monuments of the Bible world. This is not always easy, because many whole historic eras and whole topical categories, as well as innumerable details, are being elucidated by a flood of new evidence. Both the most erudite scholar and the most amateurish layman should try to approach the subject with openmindedness and flexibility, since biblical studies are now so dynamic.

A test case is provided by Second Kings 14:28, dealing with the achievements of Jeroboam II of the northern Kingdom of Israel. The biblical author tells us that his source is the (now lost) “Book of Chronicles of the Kings of Israel,” whose dialect and viewpoint were Samarian, not Jerusalemite. It happens that there were then two states of “Judah”: the familiar one, and another in the far northwest part of ancient Syria, which we may call “Jaudi” for the sake of differentiation. The Judean author of Kings excerpted those Israelite Chronicles, without concern for future generations of Jews and Christians reared in the normative Judean tradition and ill informed on north Israelite affairs. Thanks to the light shed by Ugaritic on the functions of prepositions, and thanks to what we know of Syrian politics from Assyrian and Northwest Semitic inscriptions, we can now understand Second Kings 14:28, which the NEB (New English Bible) more or less correctly renders “he [Jeroboam] recovered Damascus and Hamath in Jaudi for Israel.” (Actually the prepositions call for: “restored Damascus and Hamath from Jaudi into Israel.”) This illustrates how new discoveries enable us to understand the ancient biblical text as it stands. The other way of coping with difficulties is to change the text. Thus the Kittel edition of the Hebrew Bible (about which we shall have more to say), by deleting “Judah,” does away with the problem.

Just as there were two “Judahs,” there were also two “Egypts”: one the Land of the Nile, the other a state in far northern Syria near Cilicia. Both are called Misrayim in Hebrew; the northern one is called Musur by Assyriologists and historians. Only context can tell us which is meant. The NEB translates First Kings 10:28: “Horses were imported from Egypt and Coa for Solomon; the royal merchants obtained them from Coa by purchase.” But since Coa is Cilicia, Misrayim here refers to northern Musur, and not to Egypt. This point, like every other item raised in this discussion, has been published in scholarly books or articles.

The Hebrew original of Proverbs 26:23 opens with the consonants KSPSGM. The interpretation of the passage requires that we divide them into K-SPSGM, “like glaze,” and not into the familiar but erroneous KSP SGM, “silver of dross.” It was Ugaritic that clarified this passage as is correctly reflected in the NEB: “Glib speech that covers a spiteful heart is like glaze spread on earthware.” The verse thus warns us against being taken in by superficial appearances.

Unfortunately, Sir Godfrey Driver, the supervisor of the Old Testament translation, has never fully understood how much the discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affect our understanding of Scripture. In his introduction to the NEB translation of the Old Testament he devotes less than four lines to those discoveries. The translation reflects this underestimation.

In Psalm 68, many obscurities have been explained by Ugaritic literature, which is close to Hebrew poetry dialectically and stylistically. God’s epithet “He who rides on the clouds,” now clear from Ugaritic, is a poetic description of God as Lord of heaven and the storm. To the Hebrews and their neighbors, clouds were not merely vapor in the atmosphere but chariots on which God could ride. This is lost in the NEB version, “who rides over the desert plains” (Ps. 68:5). Just as polished authors of the West can draw on our Greco-Roman classical background, the elegant psalmists of Israel could draw on the rich literary heritage of the Bible world outlined in Genesis 10. In Psalm 68:7 the Hebrew text states that God “brings prisoners out with the Kosharot.” The latter word occurs (like so many others) only once in the Bible. However, it appears in Ugaritic to designate the songstresses that gladden happy occasions. The phrase before us means that God releases prisoners, not into a cold world, but into one of joyous song. The plain sense is lost in the NEB version, “brings out the prisoners safe and sound.”

The NEB has omitted the original Hebrew “headings—prefixed to many of the Psalms” because “all are of doubtful value” (p. xiv). This attitude reflects a negative facet of higher criticism that has less and less to recommend it as our sources from the Bible world increase in number and importance. As illustrated above, Psalm 68 (ascribed to David in the Hebrew heading) is replete with pre-Davidic material. It is not up to the translator to omit parts of the original text because he leans toward a school that deprecates them as spurious. The whole tenor of the discoveries is to vindicate the original sources against the theories that would downgrade them.

The NEB characteristically omits the first two verses of Psalm 60, which tell about its instrumental accompaniment, its use by David “for teaching,” and its specific historic setting in the wars of David. The martial psalms were indeed used by David “for teaching,” i.e., for training troops. Like Tyrtaeus of Sparta at a later date, David employed his various talents as poet, musician, general, and inspired leader to liberate his people from the foe and to lead them to victory. David, at the same time a psalmist and general, is not the creation of some hypothetical ancient editor, nor was he schizophrenic—as a great poet wearing a general’s uniform in the Pentagon would be today. In the Bible world around 1000 B.C., all David’s varied talents—esthetic, spiritual, and military—equipped him to become the saviour of Israel, who rescued his people from the Philistine oppressor and established the United Kingdom with an empire from the border of Egypt to the Euphrates River.

The key text for David’s role in training troops by means of poetry and song is Second Samuel 1:17 ff., containing the dirge that David composed for Saul and Jonathan, who had been slain by the Philistines in the battle on Mount Gilboa. Verse 18 tells us that David’s aim in this dirge was “to teach the sons of Judah the bow,” i.e., to train the Judeans in bowmanship. There is no doubt as to the text and its meaning, for every word is well known and unambiguous. The NEB changes this clear statement into “[the dirge] should be taught to the people of Judah.” The Kittel edition of the Hebrew Bible, whose editors did not understand the passage, tells us to delete the word for “bow.” No Bible scholar can pretend with a straight face to understand everything in Scripture from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse of Revelation. But this particular passage has been elucidated in learned literature for ten years, and, even if it had not been, there is no reason to play fast and loose with a verbally clear text.

The principle followed here by the NEB is stated in Sir Godfrey’s introduction (p. xiii): “the third edition of R. Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (Stuttgart, 1937)—is the basis of the present translation,” which consequently reflects a host of “emendations proposed by modern scholars.” (The Kittel Bible, however, relegates the emendations to the footnotes without tampering with the text itself; the NEB unfortunately embodies the emendations in the text itself.) Emendations are the easiest way out of a problem in the text. Naturally, as soon as we understand a difficulty, it is no longer obscure. In the case of Second Samuel 1:17 ff., as so often in Scripture, the plain meaning is correct. Moreover, the text before us happens to be no mere detail but the key to the personality and role of David.

If any era of the Old Testament has been clarified during the last quarter of a century, it is the Heroic Age, from Joshua’s Conquest to the establishment of the United Monarchy. Good chronological and historical reasons account for the close similarities between the Heroic Ages of Israel and Greece. Just as the Homeric Epic depicts the Heroic Age during military campaigns in the Iliad but between wars in the Odyssey, so the Bible describes the age during campaigns in Judges but between wars in Ruth.

The Scroll of Ruth (1:1) tells us that it deals with events that happened “in the time of the Judges.” After the Trojan War, Odysseus went back to Ithaca to enjoy the fruits of peace at home on his plantation. Boaz was a member of the same kind of landed, military aristocracy. In the Scroll of Ruth he is portrayed as running his plantation during a peaceful interlude. He is called a gibbor hayil (Ruth 2:1), which means a mighty hero and not “a well-to-do man,” as the NEB would have it. It is hard to find a perfect translation, especially since “warlord” has a pejorative connotation in modern English. But inasmuch as Boaz belonged to the ruling class, the simplest English rendition of his title gibbor hayil is “lord.” Now the feminine of gibbor hayil is eshet hayil, which is what Ruth is called in 3:11 and which the NEB mistranslates as “a capable woman.” That this title designates an aristocratic woman of the ruling class is clear from Proverbs 31, where the eshet hayil (v. 10) is the wife of a dignitary who “sits with the elders of the land” (v. 23) and therefore is a “lady” belonging to the “senatorial” or ruling class. In modern Hebrew, eshet hayil can mean a virtuous or capable woman; but that is not the meaning in the Bible. Although Ruth was a foreigner from Moab, she belonged to the same international aristocracy as Boaz; she was a lady socially fit to be the wife of a lord. Boaz and Ruth, as members of the ruling class in the Heroic Age, were qualified by birth and station to be the grandparents of King David (Matt. 1:5, 6).

On page xv of the introduction, Sir Godfrey properly notes that in the Song of Songs “ ‘he says’ or the like” is added to the translation “when the sense seems to be obscured by the absence of such indications.” But Jeremiah 3:1 begins with the infinitive “to say” to introduce (as in Judges 16:2 and very commonly in Egyptian) a direct quotation. There are different ways of translating this infinitive into English, such as “they say” or “it is said” or “it was said.” Jeremiah 3:1 should be rendered: “They say: ‘If a man puts away his wife and she leaves him.…’ ” The NEB omits “they say,” for the Kittel Bible tells us to delete it; and an NEB footnote goes on to inform us that the Greek translation is to be followed because the Hebrew “prefixes Saying.” The impression is thus given that our Hebrew original has mistakenly added a meaningless word. Yet the same idiom in Judges 16:2 shows that the Hebrew is correct in both verses. Failing to understand the construction of “It was said to the people of Gaza: ‘Samson has come here’ ” in Judges 16:2, the NEB translates it “The people of Gaza heard that Samson had come,” with a completely unnecessary footnote telling the reader irrelevancies about the Greek and Hebrew that simply show the NEB translators do not know the idiom.

These and many other details are open to criticism, but the fact remains that the NEB is in essence an excellent translation that bids fair to become a modern English classic. The NEB New Testament is already in a second edition, and it is safe to predict that the Old Testament will follow suit. The translators and editors have scored an outstanding success, and should not take amiss the suggestion that a scholar attuned to the achievements of contemporary biblical studies be entrusted with correcting the erroneous details of the first edition.

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