It’s Not for Everyone

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.  Hebrews 4:12 NIV

Word of God – I’ve just read again the excellent introduction to the Hebrew Bible found as the opening to each of the three volume translation by Robert Alter.  Here are some salient citations with significant implications for us.

“The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible.  This impulse may be attributed not only to a rather reduced sense of the philological enterprise but also to a feeling that the Bible, because of its canonical status, had to be made accessible—indeed, transparent—to all.”[1]

“Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound  and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, love to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution.”[2]

“ . . . we must keep constantly in mind that these narratives were composed to be heard, not merely to be decoded by a reader’s eye.”[3]

“There is no good reason to render biblical Hebrew as contemporary English, either lexically or syntactically . . . a limited degree of archaizing coloration is entirely appropriate . . . free of the overtones of contemporary colloquial usage . . . A suitable English version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the Bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation.”[4]

“Elegant synonymity is alien to biblical prose, . .”[5]

“Biblical Hebrew, in sum, has a distinctive music, a lovely precision of lexical voice, a meaningful concreteness, and a suppleness of expressive syntax that by and large have been given short shrift by translators with their eyes on other goals.”[6]

“The biblical conception of a book was clearly far more open-ended than any notion current in our own culture, with its assumptions of known authorship and legal copyright.  The very difference in the technology of bookmaking is emblematic.  For us, a book is a printed object boxed in between two covers, with title and author emblazoned on the front cover and the year of publication indicated on the copyright page.  The biblical term that comes closest to ‘book’ is sefer.  Etymologically, it means ‘something recounted,’ but its primary sense is ‘scroll,’ and it can refer to anything written on a scroll—a letter, a relatively brief unit within a longer composition or a book more or less in our sense.  A scroll is not a text shut in between covers, and additional swathes of scroll can be stitched onto it, which seems to have been a very common biblical practice.  A book in the biblical sphere was assumed to be a product of anonymous tradition.  The only ones in the biblical corpus that stipulate the names of their authors, in superscriptions at the beginning, are the prophetic books, but even in this case, later prophecies by different prophet-poets could be tacked onto the earlier scrolls, and the earlier scrolls perhaps might even be edited to fit better into a continuous book with the later accretions.”[7]

Do you understand what Alter is suggesting?  Our contemporary view of the Bible—and the way we read it in translation—obscures or ignores its powerful intricacies, leaving us with a denuded message.  If we really want to know what God said and intended for His people, we’ll have to change the way we think about, read, and study this “book.” If the “word of God” is really going to active and alive for us, maybe we need to adjust how we understand it.

Topical Index: Bible, Robert Alter, translation, word of God, Hebrews 4:12

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary: The Writings (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible,” p. xv.

[2] Ibid., p. xv.

[3] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2, Prophets, Nevi’im: A Translation with Commentary (W. W. Norton & Company, New York: 2019), p. xxiii.

[4] Ibid., p. xxvii.

[5] Ibid., p. xxviii.

[6] Ibid., p. xxxix.

[7] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 1, p. 3.