Torah translations: Red-Stuff

OK, Bible-critics, which of these two approaches to Bible translation do you prefer (Genesis 25:30–31)?

Esav said to Yaakov:
Pray give me a gulp of the red-stuff, that red-stuff,
for I am so weary!
Therefore they called his name: Edom/Red-One.
Yaakov said:
Sell me your firstborn-right here-and-now.

Esau said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!” (Therefore he was called Edom.) Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”

The second is the NRSV that we all know and love — but where is the first from? Is it even English? But it is distinctive — and compelling — and surprisingly tough (“Sell me your firstborn-right here-and-now!”)

The first translation is from Everett Fox’s translation of the Torah (Pentateuch), and this post is the first in a mini-series of three guest posts from “Anonymous” looking at three unconventional Jewish translations. The first two are formal translations, the third is an attempt to translate a “Rabbinic Bible.” Perhaps you will like or dislike these translations, but I think you’ll agree that they raise interesting questions about translations:

I’ll consider three translations in this mini-series:

• Everett Fox, Five Books of Moses (Schocken 1995)


• Robert Alter, Five Books of Moses (Norton 2004)


• Michael Carasik, Commentator’s Bible: Exodus (JPS 2005)

All of Scripture may be inspired, but certain portions of Scripture are held in especially high regard. Jesus and his Apostles would certainly have been familiar with the traditional belief that God directly transmitted the Torah to Moses, and even today the Torah (or “teaching”) were given directly by God to Moses. Jews today hold the Torah to be the core of the Bible, and it is hardly surprising that it has received the greatest attention of translators. (The earliest writings [Letter of Aristeas, Josephus]of the “70 translators” who translated the bible into Greek — the Septuagint — mention that it was the Torah that was translated by the “70 translators”; the origin of the rest of the Septuagint remains murky.)

But at the same time, the Torah is the most ancient part of the Bible, and its language is the strangest. When one listens to the Hebrew of the Torah (it is chanted in the morning on holidays, Saturdays, Mondays, and Thursdays in the synagogue) one can’t but help notice the strong cadences in the Hebrew. And when one reads the Hebrew, one is struck by certain characteristics: word-play, repetition, constant use of “and” (in the form of the v’ prefix), portmanteau words, alliteration, and unusual grammar. These characteristics transform the quality of the spoken Hebrew from pedestrian to sublime.

By and large, conventional modern translations ignore these issues (although they usually point out some of the word-play in footnotes.) They focus their attention on what the meaning of the text (although, it must be said, in many cases the meaning of the Hebrew is elusive.)

But earlier translators felt obliged to capture it in their translations. The Tyndale tradition, culminating in the King James Version, was written in a Hebraic-English that was different than the English used by contemporaries. As is often pointed on this blog, the King James Version is strange — not only because it uses archaic language — but the sentence structure is different than conventional English, the idiom is different than conventional English. At the same time, one can’t but help be struck how good the King James Version sounds when it is recited — perhaps we may not always understand the language, but the rhythm and consonance is clear to all.

In this mini-series, I’ll consider the efforts of Fox, Alter, and Carasik to capture important Hebrew characteristics:

• Fox was influenced by an important pair of German Bible translators (Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig) and attempts to provide a highly literal translation of the Hebrew at the level of words — and produces text that seems to stretch the English language in the way that poetry stretches the English.


• Alter was influenced by the KJV translators and attempts to provide a translation that follows closely the rhythm and sound-effects of Hebrew while still being recognizable as English.


• Carasik attempts to capture the cacophony of arguments found on a page of the “Rabbinic Bible” with medieval commentators arguing amongst themselves in terse, highly connected and cross-referenced annotations.

Buber and Rosenzweig

To understand Fox’s approach, it is necessary to step back and understand a bit about German Bible translation. Two German philosopher, Martin Buber (of “I and Thou” fame) and Franz Roseznweig felt it necessary to translate the Bible in a way that reflected its origins in an ancient society. They reasoned that a Bible that was millennia-old and read like a 20th century piece of literature could hardly transmit the feel of the original text. Their goal was to produce a translation that read just as the original text did — capturing the many literary and theological elements often lost in translation. This went far beyond a mere interlinear translation — Buber and Rosenzweig aimed to capture the entire experience of reading the text in the original Hebrew, in all its strangeness. They felt free to make up new neologisms and take German to its furtherest limits. Their work began in before the First World War, but it was not completed until after the Second World War — and the loss of most German Jews. Still their translation Die Schrift remains influential among (primarily Gentile) German readers and remains in print both in paper and electronically.

Everett Fox, who teaches at Clark University, was deeply influenced by Buber and Rosenzweig’s approach and has translated the Torah and Samuel into English in an approach that mirrors in English what Buber and Rosenzweig achieved in German. Fox writes:

The premise of almost all Bible translations, past and present, is that the “meaning” of the text should be conveyed in as clear and comfortable a manner as possible in one’s own language. Yet the truth is that the Bible was not written in English in the twentieth or even the seventeenth century; it is ancient, sometimes obscure, and speaks in a way quite different from ours. Accordingly, I have sought here primarily to echo the style of the original, believing that the Bible is best approached, at least at the beginning, on its own terms. So I have presented the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice.

The result looks and sounds very different from what we are accustomed to encountering as the Bible, whether in the much-loved grandeur of the King James Version or the clarity and easy fluency of the many recent attempts. There are no old friends here; Eve will not, as in old paintings, give Adam an apple (nor will she be called “Eve”), nor will Moses speak of himself as “a stranger in a strange land,” as beautiful as that sounds. Instead, the reader will encounter a text which challenges him or her to rethink what these ancient books are and what they mean, and will hopefully be encouraged to become an active listener rather than a passive receiver.

For Everett Fox, to read is to read aloud. Most literature in Greek and Roman times was read aloud — and even in the last decade of the fourth century, Augustine himself was surprised when he one day he came across a sage who read silently. Thus, the Bible is an oral (or aural) document.

Fox and Hebrew

Consider Genesis 32:21–22 (in Hebrew numbering; English number 32:20–21)

For he thought, “I will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me.” So Jacob’s gifts went on ahead of him . . . . [TNIV]

It looks like an unremarkable passage in English. But in the Hebrew, something special is going on. The word panim is constantly repeated (note that in Hebrew, the p sound sometimes is pronounced as ph). Panim means face, although it appears in multiple idioms. Fox translates it thus (Hebrew added in brackets):

For he said to himself:
I will wipe (the anger from) his face [phanav]
with the gift that goes ahead of my face; [le-phanai]
afterward, when I see his face, [phanav]
perhaps he will lift up my face! [phanai]
The gift crossed over ahead of his face . . . . [al panav]

Now arguably, such an interpretation pushes into the unnatural side of English, but it also illuminates an aspect of the Hebrew that is otherwise lost to the reader. Fox’s translation proves to be one that repays careful study — it is tricky reading, to be sure, but so is the Hebrew. Translations such as the TNIV capture the idea of the the text, but translate away the oral/aural aspect of the text.

And why does this matter? Well, let’s read a bit further (32:31) when Jacob wrestles with mysterious stranger:

Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel/Face of God,
for: I have seen God,
face to face,
and my life has been saved.

We see a thematic link with the previous text. And it foreshadows his success in the dramatic human confrontation that is to come (33:10), when Jacob meets Esau:

For I have, after all, seen your face, as one sees the face of God,
and you have been gracious to me.

Fox writes: “It could be said that in a psychological sense the meetings with divine and human adversaries are a unity, the representation of one human process in two narrative episodes. This is accomplished by the repetition of the word panim in the text. The above interpretation depends entirely on sound. Once that focus is dropped, either through the silent reading of the text or a standard translation, the inner connections are simply lost and the reader is robbed of the opportunity to make these connections for himself. Clearly there is a difference between translating what the text means and translating what it says.”

Fox’s English

Return to the quote which began this post:

Esav said to Yaakov:
Pray give me a gulp of the red-stuff, that red-stuff,
for I am so weary!
Therefore they called his name: Edom/Red-One.
Yaakov said:
Sell me your firstborn-right here-and-now.

This passage illustrates a number of features of Fox’s translation. First, note that names are presented in transliterated Hebrew rather than traditional English rendering — Yaakov and Esav, not Jacob and Esau (Fox does indicate traditional English names in his notes). Second, single Hebrew words that require multiple English words are indicated by a dash: red-stuff, Red-One, firstborn-right, here-and-now. Third, repetitions in the Hebrew are indicated in the English: the red-stuff, that red-stuff. Fourth, word play is indicated directly in the text: Edom/Red-One.

The familiar text of the Bible thus explodes with puns

Is that why his name was called Yaakov/Heel-Sneak? For he has now sneaked against me twice. [Genesis 27:36]

She [Rahel] became pregnant and bore a son.
She said:
God has removed/?asaf
my reproach!
So she called his name: Yosef,
saying:
May [GOD*] add/?yosef another son to me! [Genesis 30:23–24]

(NB: where I write [GOD*] Fox writes out the Tetragrammaton in English initials) although at times one wonders why only some meanings are translated:

As they returned, they came to En Mishpat/Judgment Spring—
that is now Kadesh,
and struck all the territory of the Amalekites and also the Amorites, who were settled in Hatzatzon-Tamar. [Genesis 14:7]

Kadesh and Hatzatzon-Tamar have interesting meanings — why not translate them?

The text is also full of interesting repetitions

The man [Yosef] warned, yes, warned us
saying: You shall not see my face unless your brother is with you [Genesis 43:3]

(NB: Note the reappearance here of the face/confrontation motif)

But he [Pharaoh] said:
Lax you are, lax, [Exodus 5:17]

Fox’s translation is not without faults. His notes sometimes contain errors and he sometimes introduces anachronisms in his translation (e.g., his use of half-coin in weight in Genesis 24:22 — of course, coins would not be introduced for another millennium). Moreover, Fox’s line breaks introduce a characteristic not found in the original text and he generally does not attempt to reproduce Biblical cadence or alliteration.

More specifically, it can be argued that Fox’s translation has gone outside the reaches of English, and produced a text that is too alien to the modern reader. The strangeness of the text perhaps interferes with the simple understanding of the text. Still, Fox’s work is a tour-de-force on its own grounds — giving the English reader the closest taste to Hebrew that she is likely to encounter without learning the language. He allows the reader to discover connections that otherwise would be hidden, and unveils aspects of the original text that have not previously been shown in English translation.

Fox’s work is not a translation for beginners and maybe not even a translation for intermediate students of the Bible. I could not recommend to a reader who only was willing to consult a single translation. But for the serious student, Fox gives something that is not available anywhere else.

In my next installment, I’ll consider how UC Berkeley literature professor Robert Alter used a quite different approach — more subtle but also radical — to make his own translation of the Pentateuch.