Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Dear Bill,

> There is a review of Alter's translation of the Torah at:-
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1419595,00.html
>
> Those who like paraphrases like the New Living "Translation"
> you will probably dislike this review. I haven't purchased Alter's
> translation yet, I expect when I buy my next batch of statistics
> textbooks in February from Amazon I'll add a copy to my list then.
>
> It seems to me, from what I've read about Alter's work, it is a welcome
> counter-balance to the excesses of paraphrases posing as translations
> which are striving for originality and novelty in English. In the words
> of the reviewer:-
>
> > There is nothing worse than a religious translation that reaches down to
> > its intended audience with modernisms and colloquialisms; for one thing,
> > modernisms and colloquialisms date so quickly.
>
> I heartily agree.

HH: Thanks for the review. I received this book as a Christmas 
present and am still reading the introduction. Robert Alter basically 
accepts the JEDP hypothesis, which substantially diminishes my trust 
in him. He also takes a big swipe at translations that try to do 
something with words like YD, rendering the idea rather than the 
literal "hand." While there is something to be said for stylistic 
authenticity that may be preserved through literal translation, I 
personally was not impressed with Alter's handling of the issue. He 
makes it seem that modern translations do the reader a great 
disservice by giving functional translations rather than a literal 
"hand" every time YD appears. Yet the lexicons say that the meaning 
varies. He tries to argue that this is a deeply literary feature of 
biblical writer's style that draws all sorts of necessary connections 
that should not be broken. There is validity in preserving for the 
readers connections that the writer intended, but it seems to me that 
the word "hand" appears so much in Hebrew because the language had a 
limited vocabulary. They used one word to serve purposes for which we 
in English have dozens. Biblical Hebrew uses a tiny vocabulary for 
the most part. It takes almost no special ability to uniformly 
translate YD as hand, and it may not do the reader any special 
service. It is certainly debatable and no new achievement, since, as 
Alter admits, the KJV did this, for the most part. I'll have to see 
how the translation actually reads.

                                Yours,
                                Harold Holmyard