Notes on Translations

When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes.   Genesis21:15  NIV

Put – Most of us are captive to our mother tongue.  As a result, we read the Scriptures in languages other than the original.  As everyone knows, translations leave things on the table, especially nuances, idioms, jokes, and other forms of communication that require an intimate fluency in the original language.  Living in Italy, I experience this nearly every day when a phrase I commonly use in English is completely misunderstood by Italians, and vise versa, of course.  When it comes to reading the Bible, this issue with translations must be constantly kept in mind.  Robert Alter notes:

“ . . . the Bible itself does not generally exhibit the clarity to which its modern translators aspire: the Hebrew writers reveled in the proliferation of meanings, the cultivation of ambiguities, the playing of one sense of a term against another, and this richness is erased in the deceptive antiseptic clarity of the modern versions.”[1]

“One manifestation of this tendency . . . is the practice of repeatedly assigning the same Hebrew term different English equivalents . . . Another consequence of the impulse for clarification is to represent legal, medical, architectural, and other terms from specific realms of experience in purportedly precise modern technical language when the Hebrew by and large hews to general terms . . .”[2]

“ . . . translators consequently proceed as if the Bible had no [literary] style at all, as if a translator were entitled to represent it in a hodgepodge of modern English styles.”[3]

“ . . . you cannot determine the meanings of biblical words without taking into consideration their narrative or poetic contexts.”[4]

As an example, Alter looks at Genesis 21:15, and notices that English translators modify the text because of its implicit affront to Western decency.  He comments on the translation of the Hebrew verb šālak (conjugated in the text as hishlikh).  Šālak means “to cast, to hurl, to throw.”  It is certainly much stronger than “put” or “place” or “left” (NASB).

“Sometimes the translation errors occur not because the translators have misunderstood the Hebrew but because they are unwilling to convey what it actually means, their own imagination being more timid than that of the ancient writer. . . But the Hebrew verb hishlikh means only one thing, ‘to fling.’  It is the very verb Pharoah [sic] uses when he says, ‘Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile’ (Exodus 1:22).  What this jolting verb suggests is the terrible violence of Hagar’s emotions at this moment of crisis.  She is convinced that her only son is on the point of dying, and so in a paroxysm of maternal despair, she does not set him down under a bush but flings him down, and then runs off.  The startling effect of this moment is blunted by the translators’ choice of these verbs that in effect bowdlerize it.”[5]

Furthermore, the verb is a vav-consecutive, imperfect.  She didn’t just throw him down.  She did so in a manner that was left unfinished.  She abandoned him!  Our sensitivities are affronted by this act, so much so that the translators can’t bring themselves to communicate the violence Hagar displays.  But without that nuance, we are left with a picture of helpless tragedy rather than a scene of enraged blame.  Ishmael is the source of her despair, her helplessness, and her rejection.  What she thought to be an avenue to security and prosperity has become a death sentence.  What the translators remove is the anger.  And we are left with an entirely different picture.

Topical Index:  Robert Alter, translation, šālak, throw, Genesis 21:15

[1] Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 10.

[2] Ibid., p. 11.

[3] Ibid., p. 12.

[4] Ibid., p. 13.

[5] Ibid., p. 50.