It’s an Idiom, Idiot! (1)
Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying, Genesis 9:8 NASB
Saying – Note the same verse translated by Aryeh Kaplan:
“God said to Noah and his sons with him.” [The Living Torah]
And by Robert Alter:
“And God said to Noah and to his sons with him.” [The Hebrew Bible]
The first thing we notice is that the NASB has an added dependent phrase, i.e., “saying.” Both Kaplan and Alter leave this out. But the Hebrew text contains the word, le ʾmōr, exactly where the NASB translates it. Have Kaplan and Alter made a mistake?
Consider these comments:
“One who translates a verse literally is misrepresenting the text. But one who adds anything of his own is a blasphemer.”[1]
“ . . . one who translates literally will often find himself translating idiomatic language, and to do so literally is the cardinal sin of translation. . . However, one may not add anything of his own. Any such judgment must be based firmly on tradition.”[2]
The NASB translates the text literally. How do we know this? Because the word le ʾmōr really acts like quotation marks, which, of course, Hebrew does not have because there is no punctuation in Hebrew. Instead, direct speech in indicated by the word le ʾmōr. So, Kaplan and Alter translate the text idiomatically, treating le ʾmōr as quotation marks.
It seems like a trivial thing, doesn’t it? Who cares if the NASB translates a word that really means this: “ ”? Maybe it doesn’t matter a great deal with le ʾmōr but it hints at something far more serious. English translations that ignore idiomatic expressions in the native language misrepresent the text. A quick review of English Bibles shows that the NIV, ESV and RSV treat le ʾmōr as punctuation, while the KJV, NASB, ASV and even the JPS translate the word literally. As an English reader, you wouldn’t know the difference, but if you are trying to understand the text from a Hebraic point of view, then it matters. And if these popular English translations ignore le ʾmōr as a Hebraic idiom, what other idioms do they miss? Translation is an art form, not a computer program. If you want to hear God’s word as it was heard by the original audience, you will need an artful translation.
Topical Index: le ʾmōr, saying, translation, idiom, Genesis 9:8
[1] Kiddushin 49a, Tosefta, Megillah 3:21
[2] Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah: The Five Books of Moses and the Haftarot (Moznaim Publishing Corporation, 1981), p, vi.
We are reading the Tanakh in a year and using Alter’s translation. We read the CJB last “year” (we began on Simchat Torah 2020), and Alter has a footnote you didn’t cite, (perhaps in part 2?) which acknowledges le’mor.
But now that I can move about without waking spouse and puppies, I looked at it and it was on v12, not v8, on the wayomer formula
“… every prophecy of scripture does not come about from one’s own (ἴδιος) interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” (2 Peter 1:20-21)
The Biblical text often render’s God’s enactments performed in conditions consistent with a modern philosophy of language and speech— in which the action that the sentence describes is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself. Such acts are termed “performative speech acts”. Yahweh’s speech is peculiar in that it often coveys the substantive enactment of reality itself, and is the very foundation of all that is…spoken into existence. Moreover, God’s speech often finds it enactment is directed toward particular people.
“For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one tiny letter or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all takes place.” (Matthew 5:18)
Can there be any wonder, then, that rabbinic instruction is so careful to warn against misrepresenting the text?