Articles
Critical Thinking Skills - 9
Another breakdown in critical thinking is the failure to appreciate the various genres of Scripture along with the translation difficulties they present. In fact, this difference from Western literature can be so off-putting that many completely lose interest in reading the Bible. So the first thing to recognize is that the Scriptures are the very thoughts of God, but those thoughts were originally directed toward people very different from ourselves. All languages have similarities in how thoughts are expressed, but there are also very different cultural features of literature – idioms, colloquialisms, similes, metaphors and the like – that can confuse non-native readers.
So, the job of Bible translators is to first learn the original words in their cultural setting/usage/idiom/syntax, etc. and then choose appropriate vocabulary, sentence structure, idiomatic equivalence, verbal tenses, etc. to convey that meaning into the target language as accurately as possible. This is far more difficult than most laymen can appreciate.
Consider this observation from the book, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture, by Alister McGrath: “Hebrew possesses some characteristics that can cause difficulties for translators, and appear to have done so for the King James translators. It must be remembered that our understanding of the Hebrew language has developed considerably since 1600 for a number of reasons. A wealth of knowledge has been accumulated on other languages of the Ancient Near East, such as Akkadian and Ugaritic, which often cast light on the meaning of a Hebrew root. This means that modern translators often have a better understanding of the distinctives of Hebrew, and are able to see that the King James translators have, at times, made errors (231).”
McGrath continues: “One of the most important features of the Hebrew language is its idioms – that is, distinctive ways of speaking which do not mean what they literally suggest ... two English idioms may illustrate this point. ‘To be hot under the collar,’ if taken literally, would imply a sudden rise in temperature at the base of the neck. In fact, it is an idiomatic way of speaking, which means something like ‘to get angry.’ The French express something like the same idea in the idiomatic expression ‘to have mustard up the nose.’ ‘To be in the soup’ is not to be taken literally, but is an idiomatic way of saying ‘to be in trouble.’ German expresses a similar idea with the idiom ‘to sit in the ink.’ The King James translators had to wrestle with the question of which Hebrew expressions were to be taken literally, and which were to be seen as idiomatic. Some illustrations will make this point clearer.
“The First Oxford Company was assigned to translate the major prophets, including the prophet Jeremiah. At eleven points during this work, Jeremiah uses the Hebrew idiom ‘to rise up early to do something.’ The Oxford Company chose to translate this literally, giving the following translation: Jeremiah 7:13: ‘And now, because you have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not.’
The difficulty is that this does not really make sense … What has … ‘rising up early’ got to do with the point at issue? Here we have an example of a Hebrew idiom that the translators interpreted literally, and so failed to appreciate the general drift of the text. The idiom ‘to rise up early to do something’ actually means ‘to do something continually’ ...” (231-232).
McGrath points to similar challenges in translating the Greek of the NT and highlights the limitations of the translators of the 1611 KJV: “As late as 1853, the form of Greek found in the New Testament continued to puzzle scholars. Lecturing at … Cambridge in 1853, the great New Testament scholar J.B. Lightfoot remarked: ‘If we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the understanding of the language of the New Testament generally.’ It was an interesting – and in some ways, prophetic – comment [for] in the late nineteenth century … significant advances were made in understanding the everyday Greek of the eastern Mediterranean world into which Christianity was born. The German scholar Adolf Deissmann noticed remarkable similarities between the Greek of the New Testament and a series of vernacular papyri and other documents of the period. The type of Greek in question is often referred to as koine – an everyday Greek of the first century, which has developed considerably from the more formal classical Greek of writers such as Thucydides or Plato …
“It has become clear that the Greek spoken at the time of the New Testament has moved on considerably from that of the classical period, four or five hundred years earlier – in much the same way as English has moved on considerably since 1611 … This raises an important point concerning the companies of translators assembled by King James. There is no doubt that these included some of the finest classical scholars of the period, well used to dealing with questions of translation of classical Greek. Yet the Greek they were being asked to translate dates from much later, and seems to follow more fluid grammatical rules. To translate it on the basis of an earlier form of Greek would cause difficulties. Words change their meaning over time, alongside other shifts in use” (ibid 236-237).
So what does all this mean for the average Bible reader today? First, simply surface-skimming reading is not enough; the text must be carefully studied in order to gain an accurate and consistent understanding.
Second, while we don’t have to be a Greek scholar to learn the basics of God’s word, there are a variety of tools available to the English reader to help gain a more nuanced understanding of the original language.
Third, the Bible should not be approached as a “coffee table” book; i.e., something that occasionally spikes our curiosity or is casually perused for poetic or meditative value. Rather, we must plumb the depths of Scripture, for it is, as we noted earlier, the very revelation of God’s thoughts to us. There are no other thoughts more valuable, foundational, insightful, inspiring, self-revealing, corrective, instructive, wise or hopeful than God’s. As Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Mt 5:6). The only way to satisfy that hunger is to turn to the source of righteousness – the word of God.
