The Consistency Rule

For He sates the thirsting throat and the hungry throat He fills with good.  Psalm 107:9  Robert Alter

Throat – Robert Alter stresses the need to translate Hebrew terms consistently.  His point is simple.  Hebrew has a rather sparse vocabulary.  Often a single Hebrew word has many different potential English translations.  Since English style tends to favor synonyms rather than repetitions, most English Bibles use multiple English words for the same Hebrew word.  As readers of the English Bible, we aren’t aware that “heart” is the same word as “soul,” and “breath,” and “wind.”  Alter asserts that it is much better to translate the Hebrew consistently with the same English word so that the reader will see the connection.  But even Alter seems to violate his own rule.

The Hebrew word translated “throat” by Alter is nepeš.  As you know, nepeš certainly does not mean “soul,” as it is translated in the KJV and other English Bibles.  The concept of “soul” comes from Greek philosophy, adopted by the Church via the Greek-thinking Fathers.  It does not belong in the Hebrew world.  Instead, nepeš is about life, appetite, created beings, and person.  It is the whole of the animated creature, not some artificial, Platonic segment.  Alter uses “throat” because, “The Ugaritic and Akkadian have cognates with somewhat similar breadth of meaning but both include the meaning ‘throat.’”^[1]  You will notice, however, that Alter translates the same Hebrew word found in 2 Samuel 3:21 as “heart.”  Context has more to do with the choice than linguistic consistency.  So, the cardinal rule isn’t always the rule.  In this case, because the context is about thirst and hunger, Alter has decided to use a more concrete term, and Hebrew is a concrete language.  Many of its idioms and ideas find their basic expression in tangible experiences.  But I think that using “throat” misses some of the emphasis.  The poet isn’t writing simply about physical thirst and physical hunger.  He is intimating that God provides what we truly need for living, and that’s more than food and drink.  God’s provision is for the whole person, the nepeš, all of who I am.

What we learn is this: we need to investigate every Hebrew term in the original if we are going to make the connections that the Hebrew-speaking audience would have made.  We need to avail ourselves of all the resources we have today to accomplish this task.  That’s more than just finding another good translation.  We want to know that “soul,” and “heart,” and “throat,” and “breath” are all connected so that we don’t think of these ideas in separate Greek-based categories.  Of course, this means that the text will be bloated with our notes and references, but that’s the inevitable consequence of not being a native speaker of the original language.  It means that we may succumb to an “academic” view of the text and lose the intimacy of the connection to God.  We have to guard against that, so we’ll probably have an English Bible for study and another one for worship and comfort.  Or two, or three.  What we want is to hear God, as He spoke to the Israelites and as He speaks to us.  Not either-or, but both.

Topical Index:  translation, nepeš, soul, person, throat, Psalm 107:9

^[1] Waltke, B. K. (1999). 1395 נָפַשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 588). Chicago: Moody Press.