How We Got the Bible Part 5: Jewish Bible Translations

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"How We Got the Bible: Transmission and Translation" with Pastor Sean Finnegan.
Session 5: Jewish Bible Translations

The six main English-language Jewish Bible translations are:
1. Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917
2. Koren Jerusalem Bible of 1961
3. New Jewish Publication Society translation of 1961
4. Artscroll’s Stone Tanach of 1996
5. Schocken Bible of Everett Fox, 1995 edition and 2014 edition
6. Robert Alter’s translation of 2018

The Jews have stewarded the text of the Hebrew Bible for thousands of years, and know the Hebrew language extremely well. Christians should consider reading a Jewish translation of the Old Testament in order to gain a more Hebraic understanding of the text.

When the Jewish Publication Society translated the Hebrew Bible into English, due weight was given to ancient translations as establishing a tradition of interpretation, notably the Septuagint and its revisions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian; the Aramaic Targums; the Syriac Peshitta; the Latin Vulgate; and the Arabic version of Saadya.

Despite this scholarship, the 1918 Jewish Publication Society translation is very unpopular with Jews today, because it is based on a Christian translation of the text: the Revised Standard Version (RSV) which is itself an updated form of the King James Version (KJV).

After World War II, when the Jewish Publication Society began to consider a new edition of the Bible, the idea of a modest revision of the 1917 translation was met with resistance, and the concept of a completely new translation gradually took hold. The proposed translation would reproduce the Hebrew idiomatically and reflect contemporary scholarship, thus laying emphasis upon intelligibility and correctness. It would make critical use of the early rabbinic and medieval Jewish commentators, grammarians, and philologians and would rely on the traditional Hebrew text, avoiding emendations.

The result of this effort was the New Jewish Publication Society translation of 1961. The text differs from the original Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917 in several important ways. The translators avoided obsolete words and phrases and, whenever possible, rendered Hebrew idioms by means of their normal English equivalents. For the second person singular, the modern “you” was used instead of the archaic “thou” even when referring to the Deity. A further obvious difference between this translation and most of the older ones is in the rendering of the Hebrew particle “waw” which is usually translated as “and”. Biblical Hebrew demanded the frequent use of the waw, but in that style it had the force not only of “and” but also of “however”, “but”, “yet”, “when”, and any number of other such words and particles, or none at all that can be translated into English. Always to render it as “and” is to misrepresent the Hebrew rather than be faithful to it. Consequently, the committee translated the particle as the sense required, or left it untranslated.

The purpose of the Shocken Bible of Everett Fox is to draw the reader into the world of the Hebrew Bible through the power of its language. While this sounds simple enough, it is not usually possible in translation. Indeed, 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, Everett Fox sought to echo the style of the Hebrew, and present the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice, believing that the Bible is best approached on its own terms.