Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Since Joel Hoffman was once a member of B-Hebrew, I thought that the
following might be of interest.

Yigal Levin

>From <http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Books/Article.aspx?id=168442>:
=======================================================

The Jerusalem Post Online Edition
Books
February 12, 2010 (12/02/2010 16:43)

Interpreting the interpreted
Joel Hoffman's book raises our expectations of how we read the Bible.
By JEROME E. COPULSKY


   Dr. Joel M. Hoffman
   Thomas Dunne Books, February 2010
   ISBN: 978-0-312-56558-9, ISBN10: 0-312-56558-5
   5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 272 pages, 2 tables,
   <http://us.macmillan.com/andgodsaid>
   [Already googled at:
<http://books.google.com/books?id=Vr7foyFEC9wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=And+Go
d+Said:+How+Translations+Conceal+the+Bible%27s+Original+Meaning&source=bl&ot
s=d7hfkJNoIq&sig=rco8BtoHR-l2GGKq6BDNa-5Z2Tw&hl=en&ei=9nx3S6fKBs6UtgfA39yjCg
&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
>]

Traduttore, traditore; translator, traitor, goes the old saw. And if
there is any book that has especially suffered the treachery of
translators over the years, it is the Hebrew Bible.

>From the Greek Septuagint to the Latin Vulgate, from King James
Version to The Message, translators of the Bible have obscured,
distorted and fundamentally altered the meaning of the Hebrew text. A
virgin birth, a horned Moses, a vocal turtle - these are just some of
the changes that translators have made as they converted the Hebrew
into their own languages.

Joel M. Hoffman's new book, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the
Bible's Original Meaning, may interest readers concerned with the
difficulties involved in the translation of Scripture.

Hoffman begins with a brief consideration of the most influential
translation (arguably the most influential book) in English, the King
James Version. Hoffman briskly details some of the KJV's more
egregious errors, suggesting that the committee commissioned to render
the Bible into English misunderstood "some of the Hebrew" and did not
have a sophisticated understanding of the task of the translator and
method of translation.

While modern English translations have improved upon some of the KJV's
shortcomings, they, too, Hoffman suggests, shaped by theological or
ideological prejudices, all too often fail to capture the nuances of
the original Hebrew text. (And God Said includes a handy appendix
detailing the advantages and drawbacks of a number of popular English
translations of the Bible.)

Despite the shortcomings of such translations, Hoffman believes it is
possible to "recover the original meaning of the Bible," and strives
to demonstrate "how linguistics and translation theory combine to make
the Bible clearer than it has been since the days it was first
penned." Such a recovery is, of course, no easy task. To undertake an
accurate translation, one must first figure out what the original
Hebrew text means, which requires not only a thorough knowledge of
biblical Hebrew, but also an ability to get behind the Bible that we
think we know through previous translations. It also means bracketing
out one's religious presuppositions of what the Bible says, removing
the lens of a tradition through which the text has been encountered.

Hoffman, a linguist by training who has previously written In the
Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, provides a
sensitive, sometimes fairly technical, discussion of the structure of
languages in general and of biblical Hebrew in particular, and the
difficulties of translating concepts and ideas from one language into
another. He argues that attention to internal word structure,
commentary, etymology and cognates often lead translators astray. In
his view, context-based analysis provides the key to deciphering the
meaning of the ancient words, and thereby the passage at hand. (This
approach is almost purely linguistic; Hoffman does not discuss what
historians, archeologists and scholars of religion can bring to bear
to this process.)

He correctly explains that the art of translation is not simply a
matter of figuring out the meaning of the source text but of finding a
way of rendering it into the target tongue. This task is much more
difficult and complex than it at first seems, and Hoffman is adept in
explaining its mechanics and exposing the many paradoxes and
compromises inherent in the project of translation. "[I]n addition to
being accurate," he writes, "the ideal translation will work at every
level - from sounds, through words, and up to concepts and affect."

Hoffman, of course, realizes that such an ideal is most likely
impossible to achieve, and that sometimes a literal translation will
fail to convey the meaning of the original. Throughout this discussion
he is a clear and affable guide, though his prose is sometimes
tarnished by a condescending tone (a recurring joke about learning
technical linguistic terms to use at cocktail parties grows stale
quickly).

In the second part, Hoffman utilizes his method to develop his
readings of some of the most well-known (and poorly translated)
biblical texts (Deuteronomy 6:5, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, Song
of Songs and Isaiah 7:14). He takes a micro-view, focusing in on how
the translation of a particular word or phrase can distort the
reading. For example, does the word "shepherd" express in English what
the psalmist was getting at? Or, does the use of "my sister" in Song
of Songs mean that it is a celebration of incest? Do the Ten
Commandments forbid "coveting"?

In a sense, Hoffman is an "originalist" in his approach, to borrow a
term from American constitutional debates, optimistic that the
original meaning of the biblical text, that is, what was intended by
the author, can be accessed and excavated and, if not perfectly
translated into another language, at least adequately explained.

Yet, the idea of accessing the "original meaning" was problematic
enough even in antiquity, leading to the emergence of a vast
literature of commentary (what Hoffman calls "the derived" or
"interpretative, religious meaning"). Sometimes even the medieval
commentators - who knew Hebrew quite well - were perplexed as to what
the plain sense of the text was. One wonders if anyone ever read the
texts of the Bible the way Hoffman wants to read them.

The very act of reading is already interpretative; there is no
recovery of meaning that is innocent of an act of interpretation. It
is not surprising, then, that Hoffman's analyses of these biblical
texts result in a kind of modern midrash; the original meaning he
uncovers is sometimes surprisingly, perhaps comfortingly, contemporary
(the Song of Songs is about the equality of lovers in a romantic
relationship), or oddly banal (Isaiah 7:14 is not prophesying a virgin
birth but proposing that "life itself can be miraculous," an analysis
divorced completely from the historical and political context of that
chapter, the Near East during the eighth century BCE). Such readings
tend to be more homiletic than scientific, and would appear to be
proffering the very kind of "derived, religious meaning" the author
had previously argued preclude us from understanding the original.

Despite his book's title, Hoffman does not make clear what he thinks
the Bible is. He seems to assume that the Bible has an intrinsic
semantic consistency, and that the educated reader has absolute access
to the meaning of the text, the pshat, if you will. While Hoffman
tells us how the Hebrew language works, he is silent on what kind of
book (or better, collection of books) the Bible is, sidestepping such
issues as the authorship of biblical texts, their authority and their
redaction and transmission. This is unfortunate, as one's conception
of the "original meaning" of the text will be quite different if it is
understood as the "revealed word of God," a divinely inspired book or
a work of purely human imagination.

Further, most contemporary biblical scholars agree that the text that
we have is derived from many ancient manuscripts. Indeed, the
fragments that have been discovered at Qumran often enrich and
complicate our understanding of the Bible and its origins. Compounding
the question of the original meaning of the text is the question of
determining what was the "original" text!

In the end, the virtue of Hoffman's book is that it raises our
expectations of what we read and how we read. Maybe the reader has to
commit to come closer to the Bible, in all of its strangeness and
foreignness, than to demand that it come closer to him. Hoffman
documents the complex decisions that go into the work of translating
and demonstrates that even a careful translation can achieve only so
much. (There is wisdom in the Islamic claim that the Koran cannot be
translated from Arabic, but only interpreted into a different tongue.)

To engage a work like the Bible with seriousness and commitment, not
only translation, but also commentary, the accumulated wisdom of
generations of readers, is called for. As a great sage once said, "Go
and study."

The writer is assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at
Goucher College.