I meant to blog about this last week but didn’t, so here goes.
Did y’all notice how tin-eared the translation of the Old Testament reading was at last week’s Sunday Mass?
Wow, it was awful!
The passage was the sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22. The very first part of the reading revealed the tin ear of the translators of the New American Bible. Here’s the first verse:
Some time after these events, God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, "Abraham!" "Ready!" he replied.
There are so many problems here. First, the text needlessly puts a quotation from God ("Abraham!") right up against a quotation from Abraham ("Ready!"), making the text "unproclaimable." A lector is going to have to be really on his toes to distinguish these two quotations in a way that the congregation will be able to distinguish between who is talking. (This juxtaposition of the two quotations is NOT present in the Hebrew word order of the passage. It’s something that’s been foisted on the text by the translators.)
Worse, what’s with this "Ready!" business? That’s certainly not what it says in the Hebrew. The word in Hebrew is hinneni, which is just hen (pronounced "hain") with a first person singular ("I") pronoun suffix stuck on it. Hen can mean either "lo!/behold!" or it can mean "here" or "there." So you’d either want to translate hinneni literally along the lines of "Behold! It is I!" or "Behold me!" or (more likely) "Here I am!"
In no case does hinneni mean "Ready!"
If "Ready!" isn’t defensible as a literal translation, is it defensible as a dynamic translation? Heck no! If an English-speaker hears God call his name, the English-speaker is certainly not going to respond by saying "Ready!" That’s not part of English style in such situations.
The translation is thus defensible neither as a literal nor as a dynamic translation based on ordinary English style.
It’s simply TIN EARED–the kind of thing that a FIRST YEAR Hebrew student ought to have MARKED WRONG on his homework.
But that wasn’t what first leapt out at me when I listened to this passage at Mass. What leapt out was this part:
But the LORD’S messenger called to him from heaven, "Abraham, Abraham!" "Yes, Lord," he answered.
"Do not lay your hand on the boy," said the messenger. "Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son."
What’s with all this "messenger" business?
Yes, it’s true that in the biblical languages the word for "angel" and the word for "messenger" are the same word, but in English we have two different words, and if we’re clearly talking about a heavenly messenger rather than one sent by an earthly king (as in this case) then "angel" is the appropriate translation–at least for a translation that is to be used in the liturgy.
I’d have no objection if a non-liturgical translation wanted to consistently render malak or angelos as "messenger" in order to help the reader see a little more how the text would have sounded to its original readers, but that kind of translation would let you put in a note that explains that this is the same word as "angel" in the original.
But liturgical translations don’t come with footnotes when you hear them proclaimed, and it’s just going to confuse the listeners, who probably won’t know that malak means both "messenger" and "angel." The listener may wonder why "messenger" is used in this passage where other translations have "angel."
He may even think that there’s a difference between this kind of divine messenger and an angel. After all, if he’s been paying attention then he knows that other Mass readings do use the word "angel," and so to find "messenger" in this passage could suggest a difference between the two.
What an amateurish, tin-eared translation we’re stuck with.
I agree with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus:
Conservative priest Richard John Neuhaus complained in First Things magazine that the NAB remains "a wretched translation. It succeeds in being, at the same time, loose, stilted, breezy, vulgar, opaque and relentlessly averse to literary grace."
Fortunately, there’s a new 8-translation edition of the New Testament for Catholics that will at least let Catholics compare the disasters that we’re hearing at Mass with how the same passage reads in other translations.
GET THE STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
Unfortunately, this New Testament still won’t help folks baffled by readings from Genesis.
Anyone wanting to compare among 33 different English translations might want to check out the Crosswire Bible Society libraries, which are downloadable and compatible with a lot of different bible software for different operating systems. Most of you have probably heard of it before, but just in case you didn’t: http://www.crosswire.org/index.jsp Downloads are free. There are many other languages available. There are even five “ancient Greek” bibles, but it doesn’t say whether they mean Koine Greek–I’ll look into it, as I only today just downloaded a couple. I downloaded four bibles so far and am finding it REALLY handy to be able to search for words and exact phrases in those, “Darn, where have I seen that before, I can’t remember!” situations.
I prefer to have a paper bible in my hands if I just want to sit down and read a bible. But for some of the apologetics work I’m doing (I have Jehovah’s Witnesses visiting here in full force, once a week sometimes–I’ve never heard of anyone being visited this fiercely), the ability to search and find things quickly has been indispensable. Cheers!
A common sense “take” on Genesis is that the stories are myths written by well meaning priests/scribes some 3000 years after the “creation” account.
Anyone wanting to compare among 33 different English translations might want to check out the Crosswire Bible Society libraries, which are downloadable and compatible with a lot of different bible software for different operating systems.
I checked the site. I didn’t see where it lists the 33 English translations. Is the list availabe for previewing?
Does anyone know if OUP plans on doing a 7 translation volume of the OT?
At my monastery, we read all the readings for the Easter Vigil Mass. In the Easter Vigil Mass there are several readings in which an angel appears, but the odd thing about the NAB is that sometimes it chooses the word “messenger” and sometimes it chooses the word “angel”. You’ll hear both words at the Vigil.
The NAB is an odd beast at the moment. The whole thing was produced in a mad rush after the Mass went English, but then the New Testament was more carefully revised in later years. So now we have the mad-rush OT in the same volume with the somewhat better NT.
After years of labor, the more carefully revised NAB Old Testament is in the final stages of preparation for publication–last I heard, the translation itself is done but needs to be approved by the USCCB. It will be interesting to see how it differs from our current version.
The inconsistency between “messenger” and “angel” is probably due to the fact that one translator works on one book and another translator on another book, and a single book may even be divided among translators. Each group of translators has a project overseer, and it is that person’s job to make sure the final product is smoothed out. That obviously didn’t happen in the original OT.
My all-time favorite tin-eared NAB OT reading is Isaiah 9:5:
Yes, it’s the exciting adventures of GOD-HERO and his youthful sidekick, WONDER-COUNSELOR! Sent to earth by Father-Forever, this dynamic duo battles the evil enemies of Prince of Peace!
(Not to mention the evisceration of the poetic quality of the word order traditionally used in translating this passage — “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” — in favor of the much more pedestrian “For a child is born to us, a son is given us.”)
A common sense “take” on Genesis is that the stories are myths written by well meaning priests/scribes some 3000 years after the “creation” account.
While the oral traditions may very well have been written down years later (but certainly not 3,000 years later!!!), they are not “myths.” Anyone who thinks so has never studied the genre of “myth” nor other creation accounts. The two creation accounts in Genesis are completely, utterly different in every way from other creation stories and in fact function as POLEMICS AGAINST CREATION MYTHS. I not only learned this in seminary, but Pope Benedict XVI has a wonderful book, I believe called “In the Beginning,” that explains this. Just one minor example: the creation myths of the surrounding people, who see humans as an afterthought created out of vioence and blood to be slaves to the gods, included the dreaded Chaos monster, the sun and moon as gods, the Leviathan, and much more. The first Genesis story turns ALL those things into things subject to the true God; makes the sun and moon mere creations rather than gods to be feared; etc. This can all be understood by language and text exegesis. It is a sort of “turning on the light” in the darkness of the surrounding terrors of the creation myths.
I repeat – a study of the genre of myth and how myth operates, shows that these stories are something new in the world, not like myths at all. “Common sense” is dead wrong here.
My favorite NAB verse is the beginning of Gal. 3:1
“Oh, stupid Galatians….”
Now, I could imagine Paul calling the Galatians, ignorant, unwise, foolish, or even senseless, but not stupid. It sounds so banal.
Exodus 32:24–Aaron’s lame excuse for making the golden calf:
“So I told them, ‘Let anyone who has gold jewelry take it off.’ They gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and THIS CALF CAME OUT.”
If “Ready!” isn’t defensible as a literal translation, is it defensible as a dynamic translation?
I remember reading an expert somewhere saying that the word, “literal”, really means “in the sense of” not as a precise word to word translation.
🙂
The translations for the Liturgy of the Hours leave a little something to be desired.
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.
My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
All generations shall call me blessed.
The Almighty has done great things for me and holy is His name,” etc.
Not exactly what I read in the RSV translation.
Another HUGE problem is that high school and college students miss the jillions of literary references in Shakespeare and lots of other literature. There are phrases like “fought the good fight,” Suffer the little children,” and an untold number of others that appear in literature, and even their PhD professors don’t recognize them. This effectively cuts them off from a rich tradition, and they become even more susceptible to lies such as those that say the modern world gained nothing from Christianity (I am thinking about how much the Church gave law, human rights, etc. ad infinitum, which people already don’t know, and now the addition of not recognizing themes, phrases, allusions, etc. in literature justmakes it worse. To say nothing of the fact they understand the literature itself in a truncated manner….).
The LORD called him from heaven, “Abe! Abe!”
“Yo!” he answered.
“Hands off the boy!” said the Lord.
“Don’t even think about it.
I know we’re tight,
since you’d even do your son for me.”
Actually, “Yo!” is a pretty good modern translation for Hebrew “Hinnei.”
Be happy with the translation you have.
It could be worse.
“A common sense “take” on Genesis is that the stories are myths written by well meaning priests/scribes some 3000 years after the “creation” account.”
Oh, c’mon, Realist.
This anonymous drive-by commenting is beneath you.
Or maybe it isn’t.
A common sense take? More like a nonsense take.
Please refrain from posts that have no bearing on the question at hand (translations). It leaves more room for us Catholics.
As a first year (second semester) Hebrew student, I take offense! ::shakes fist::
Seriously though, that is a horrible translation.
Another HUGE problem is that high school and college students miss the jillions of literary references in Shakespeare and lots of other literature.
What’s the joke about the kid who commented that Shakespeare was full of cliches?
Comments about the Sword project (Crosswire is the ‘organization’ that works on the Sword project.)
A) To respond to Barbara, after you’ve downloaded some of their software, you have to download each version of the bible as a module that you want to have on your computer.
B) I’ve noticed that their modules can contain many errors. It was either the Douay-Rheims or Clementine Latin Vulgate that had some particularly nasty errors like ‘transfer error—!!!’ or some such, along with other more common copyist type of errors (misspelled words, etc..) Many of those may have been fixed by now, but buyer beware. I do recommend the Sword project’s PalmBible+ reader for Palm Pilots over Olive Tree’s, though I haven’t checked either out recently (it would help if I had a Palm Pilot that lasted longer than 6months to a year.)
C) It mildly bugs me that they use the phrase Apocrypha to refer to the Deuterocanocials, but at least they started putting them into the API (maybe to appease that other 2/3’s or so of Christianity that refers to them as actual canon.) And I’d personally refuse to use C++ namespaces, every time something new is added to C++ it usually makes the language worse. These are just things that things that, as a programmer, bother me, but probably nobody else.
Oops, sorry about that!!! I was out of town for a few days and the PC I was using did not have an auto-fill in for my name.
My point is that translations of myths will not change the mythical character of the story.
And I believe most Catholics will admit they have always had trouble with Abe almost “frying” his son in any translated version. IMHO, this gives credence to taking a common sense approach.
Actually, the story pales with respect to the Greek and other myths and also real human sacrifices in the same time period. http://web.uvic.ca/grs/bowman/myth/info/timeline.html and http://www.answers.com/topic/human-sacrifice
I didn’t notice “Ready!” But I did find “the Lord’s messenger” to be quite… well… gauche.
If “Ready!” isn’t defensible as a literal translation, is it defensible as a dynamic translation? Heck no! If an English-speaker hears God call his name, the English-speaker is certainly not going to respond by saying “Ready!” That’s not part of English style in such situations.
Unless the speaker is a computer. 🙂
I checked the site. I didn’t see where it lists the 33 English translations. Is the list availabe for previewing?
Hi Barbara, I installed the software first. (I don’t think the software is produced by Crosswire; I just think they’re kind enough to list software compatible with their libraries, on their site.)
In my case I got Bibletime, since I have Linux. Then I opened up Bibletime and added the crosswire “library”, and then I could browse their library for bibles, from within the software. How exactly it will work for you will depend on which program you choose to install from the list. Among the 33 English bibles, they have the Douay Rheims, and the KJV.
At the end of the passage in the NAB, we have God blessing Abraham’s “decendents” (plural), rather than “seed” (singular), which destroys the foreshadowing given here to Christ the Seed of Abraham blessing all the nations.
Sir Realist,
“And I believe most Catholics will admit they have always had trouble with Abe almost “frying” his son in any translated version. IMHO, this gives credence to taking a common sense approach.”
Most Catholics take a Catholic approach and read the Sacred Scriptures with the guidance of the Church.
Abraham was prepared to do but not made to do what God the Father would do. See John 3:16.
Christ gave us an example of obedience you should spend the season of Lent contemplating His example.
Take care and God bless,
Inocencio
J+M+J
The best way around this problem is probably to use “offspring,” which is less archaic than “seed” but preserves the ambiguity of number (many or one) and allows for the allegorical reference to Christ.
The Gospel for tomorrow (Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent) is Matthew 18:21-35.
The lectionary has the line, “a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.”
The “literal” translation would have been “ten thousand talents” rather than “a huge amount.”
Ten thousand talents was the salary for ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS.
The sense that the debtor’s offer to pay it back is preposterous is entirely lost by the lectionary’s choice of words.
Furthermore, the lectionary describes another servant as owing the first debtor “a much smaller amount.” The literal would have been: “a hundred denarii”–the salary for one hundred days.
The lectionary limps badly.
Although I didn’t read at that Mass, I looked at both my materials and the USCCB website, and neither has “Ready.” Both show “Here I am.” Do some dioceses use different translations? Or did a particular lector take liberties with the reading?
(The “messenger” translation is there, though.)
Fr. Stephanos– you are right about the ten thousand talents being essential to the understanding of the parable. Until I knew what a talent was, I used to sort of shrug, and say– “Eh… Ten thousand talents… Ten thousand dollars… Yeah, it’s a lot of money, but…”
Once I learned the ridiculous size of the sum of money, though, it made perfect sense. It was an UNPAYABLE debt. It could only be written off, since it could never be paid back, clearly an essential point to be grasped in view of our salvation in Christ.
How ’bout
“Those people are blessed who live in peace among their people and who do not want to start any fights, or court cases, by their own deeds.”
?
To be sure, the original translator of that did have to deal with people who had just been baptized. . . .
G. Ronald Murphy translated a Dark Ages translation of the Gospels into modern English in The Heliand: The Saxon Gospels. He also wrote The Saxon Savior : The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand
I think some people who read this blog might find it interesting.
“sometimes it chooses the word “messenger” and sometimes it chooses the word “angel”. You’ll hear both words at the Vigil.”
In our community, quite a few people mispronounce the ‘R’ as an ‘L’, and we end up with the best of both: “Messangel”
Tridentine don’t play that. If you want a refreshing change, visit a Latin Mass for kicks. Make sure it is not schismatic — and come with a handy way to end conversation with the conspiracy buffs (they seem to be in greater numbers there).
Shame on you Mary! How dare you recommend a book by a Jesuit 😉 I’ve had to disinfect my screen and mouse thanks to you 🙂 I feel dirty!)
0:)
Well, the books will wait until you’re done disinfecting. I’m not recommending them as more than interesting. (I picked them up to learn more about Dark Ages rhetoric to refer to God, for writing purposes.)
This is a very old post, so I’m not sure anyone will see this, but I have something to say. I read at Mass for the Sunday this post mentions. I had “Here I am!” instead of “Ready!” I agree that “ready” is horrible translating. I had enough trouble differentiating between speakers. If I’d run into “ready” while I was reading, I might have started laughing out loud–which would have been terrible because I was reading for TV (EWTN’s televised Mass for the homebound).
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