Grammar often evaporates in translation. Sometimes punctuation can change the entire meaning of a passage, since there is a big difference between a declarative sentence and a question.Ħ. Ditto for exclamation marks, periods, and colons. ![]() There are no question marks in the Hebrew scroll, but there are plenty of them in English translation. So too is yerech Ya’akov, literally the thigh of Jacob, and other evocative bodily moments.ĥ. Looking for Moses saying that he is arel sfatayim, or literally uncircumcised of lips, and figuratively not up to the speaking aspect of leadership, in English translation? Good luck. Body parts are sometimes erased or flattened. So an English reader can’t hear a tie between Eve and life, or Adam and earth.Ĥ. One strangeness of reading the Bible in English is realizing that names mean nothing in translation, because they are generally transliterated, not translated. In Hebrew, names are a big thing - laughter is part of the name Yitzchak (Isaac), and holding on to a heel is the source of the name Yaakov (Jacob). ![]() Names Often Mean Nothing in Translation. Similarly, it’s strange to be told in a heading what a psalm is about.ģ. For Jewish readers who may have spent hours poring over rabbinic commentary on which commandments count in the Ten Commandments, or what is commandment one, this heading can be jarring. Reading the King James Bible, a Jewish reader might be surprised to encounter the heading “The Tenne Commandments.” Similar headings occur in other older influential translations, like The Geneva Bible and Tyndale’s Bible. Headings, Titles, and Other Unexpected Explanatory Info. The change in versification affects tone, but it also makes it hard to understand a lot of the commentators’ writing on the importance of adjacent words and ideas - because the location has been changed.Ģ. One verse in Hebrew becomes four in The King James. But this really hit home with the Ten Commandments. I first realized this when reading Job a verse I was looking for was literally in a different chapter in English. The verses, or psukim, are not always the same as they are in Hebrew. On many occasions, I did not recognize passages I knew by heart in Hebrew. It was an entirely new world, and I was often lost in it. And the translations I was reading obsessively weren’t just in English they were also Christian. In that graduate course and in the community church class I attended, I encountered the Bible in English translation for the first time. There, I took a Bible course with the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Then I drove a thousand miles, across the Mississippi River and through miles and miles of corn, and enrolled at the University of Iowa’s MFA program in creative writing. I didn’t think I could be surprised by anything Biblical. I memorized many passages, and was quizzed on others. At yeshiva day school, which I attended six days a week, the Torah and its commentaries were taught for hours each day. At home, we often discussed the Torah around the dining-room table - its language, its humor, its grammar, and its tendency to contradict itself. My mother is Israeli, and so my first language was Hebrew naturally, I read the Torah in Hebrew. In Monsey, New York, the religious Jewish community where I grew up, no one was reading The King James Bible. She is the author of The Grammar of God and is blogging here all week for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribe series on The Prose nPeople. Earlier this week, Aviya Kushner wrote about the “smashing, positively dashing spectacle” of modern theater performed in Hebrew.
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