The language of the KING JAMES BIBLE – so often described as “difficult” or “outdated” – once helped its readers to imagine and understand what we imagine and understand less of today. I’m talking about things like the soul, the afterlife, sin, spirits, and holiness. And it helped to frame ordinary ways that people once envisioned God: in the clouds, in a military victory, in the sunrise, as a baby lying in a cow’s feeding trough, or as a shepherd who cares for his sheep. These are lasting metaphors that often still make sense to me.
Many translators today insist that the old images and metaphors in the KJB should be discarded, or else, how are we to really understand what the text is trying to say? For example, translation theory today suggests that for a word such as the one for “shepherd,” ro’eh, as it is transliterated in Hebrew, we find an English equivalent that makes more sense in our culture and experience. If you have lived your life in the West and Global North, when was the last time that you actually saw a shepherd? Do you know what shepherds really do? Probably not. That’s the point, as one translator (Joel M. Hoffman, in his recent book, And God Said) suggests:
Our first warning sign that something has gone wrong in the translation is that a common, familiar word like ro’eh has been translated as a rare, unfamiliar one. While “ro’eh” was common in Hebrew, “shepherd” is uncommon in English. We know that this is always a mistake.
Really? I cannot understand something profound about God in Psalm 23 through the image of a shepherd? This particular translator—one of today’s best from Hebrew to English—goes on to suggest that English words such as Marine, fireman, lawyer, cowboy, lumberjack, and farmer would all be better than sticking with shepherd. The reasoning is that a shepherd is a protector or some sort of strong man, so I’m supposed to relate better to a cowboy or a lumberjack than a shepherd. Does that also mean that the baby Jesus should have been born in a portable crib instead of a manger? Let it never be so!
On the contrary, I believe that the very strangeness, slight foreignness, of the KJB—much more pronounced today than it was in the seventeenth century—is precisely what sometimes makes reading the Bible meaningful, beautiful, and memorable.
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There is a result of this kind of approach to translating that I think is worth pointing out. If the translator decides to change the metaphor, or remove the metaphor in an attempt to translate the meaning, the result will differ from translator to translator. This will lead to a destabilized text such that each translation becomes subject to the translator's preferences. This has already happened in modern translations that use the approach Hoffman advocates. In contrast, if one translates the words of the text, it is more likely that different translations will share a recognizable common origin and comparison between them would be less confusing.
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