The Bible in Translation

Ancient and English Versions

Metzger, Bruce M.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781585583492
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Bible has been translated more than any other piece of literature and is currently available in over two thousand languages, with several languages having numerous versions. Outlined here is the development of biblical translation, including a careful analysis of more than fifty versions of the Bible. One of the most respected living biblical scholars, Bruce Metzger begins this engaging survey with the earliest translations of the Old and New Testaments before proceeding to English versions dating from the eleventh century to the present. Metzger explores the circumstances under which each translation was produced and offers insight into its underlying objectives, characteristics, and strengths. Having served on a number of modern translation committees, his insights into the evolution of Bible translation flow not only from careful research, but also from personal experience. Students, pastors, and interested readers will discover the history of the written Word and gain useful insight into which modern translations best serve their own needs.

PART 1

Ancient Versions

one

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Ancient Versions of the
Old Testament Made
for the Use of Jews

The Septuagint

The Septuagint is the traditional term for the Old Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The word means “seventy” and is often abbreviated by using the Roman numeral LXX, referring (with some rounding off of the figure) to the seventy-two translators reputed to have produced the version in the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 B.C.). The translation is not only the earliest but also one of the most valuable of ancient biblical versions. Whether one considers its general fidelity to the original, its influence over the Jews for whom it was prepared, its relationship to the Greek New Testament, or its place in the Christian church, the Septuagint stands preeminent in the light it casts on the study of the Scriptures.

The story of the origin of the Septuagint is given in a document of uncertain date called the Letter of Aristeas.[1] The letter purports to be a contemporary record by a certain Aristeas, an official at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who claims to have personal knowledge as an eyewitness of the following details.

Being of a literary disposition, Ptolemy wished to make a collection of the world’s best literature. His librarian, Demetrius of Phalerum, called his attention to the Hebrew Scriptures as being worthy of a place “in your library since the law which they contain . . . is full of wisdom and free from all blemish” (§31). At once the king sent ambassadors to Eleazar, the Jewish high priest at Jerusalem, loading them with gold and jewels and royal salutations (§33), and requested him to send a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, with learned men who could translate the text into Greek.

From each of the twelve tribes, Eleazar selected six elders who were well versed in the Jewish law (§46) and, with presents for the king, put in their hands a sumptuous copy of the Scriptures written in letters of gold in Jewish characters (§176). Upon their arrival in Alexandria, the seventy-two translators were conducted to a quiet house on the island of Pharos (not mentioned by name) in the harbor of Alexandria, where every provision was made for their needs. So they set to work; as they completed their several tasks, they would reach an agreement on each by comparing versions. Whatever was agreed upon was suitably copied out under the direction of Demetrius (§302). By happy coincidence, the task of translation was completed in seventy-two days (§307). Demetrius then called together a number of the leading Jews of the city and read the translation to them. It was at once approved as an accurate rendering (§310), and a curse was invoked on any who would alter the text by any addition, transposition, or deletion (§311).

The apologetic interest of Aristeas is revealed in a lengthy vindication of the purpose and function of the Jewish law (§§128–71), as well as in a still longer section that describes a banquet and the table talk between Philadelphus and each of the seventy-two translators, designed to exemplify the wisdom, moral insight, intellectual ability, and philosophical acumen of the Jewish people (§§187–300). The writer, however, is aware that he has overdone the encomium on Jewish wisdom, for he adds: “I suppose it will seem incredible to those who read my narrative in the future” (§296).

Most scholars who have analyzed the letter have concluded that the author cannot have been the man he represented himself to be but was a Jew who wrote a fictitious account in order to enhance the importance of the Hebrew Scriptures by suggesting that a pagan king had recognized their significance and therefore arranged for their translation into Greek. The actual motive for undertaking the work, it is now generally agreed, arose from the liturgical and educational needs of the large Jewish community in Alexandria. Many members of this community had forgotten their Hebrew or let it grow rusty and spoke only the common Greek of the Mediterranean world. But they remained Jews and wanted to understand the ancient Scriptures, on which their faith and life depended. This, then, was the real reason for making the Greek Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

From internal considerations, the date of the letter may be assigned to about 150–110 B.C. It was known to Josephus, who paraphrased portions in his Antiquities of the Jews (12.12–118). Philo’s account of the origin of the Septuagint (On Moses 2.25–44) reproduces certain features of Aristeas, but there are also divergences. For example, Aristeas (§302) represents the translators as comparing their work as they wrote it and producing an agreed-on version, whereas according to Philo each of the translators, working under divine inspiration, arrived at identical phraseology as though dictated by an invisible prompter.

In the following centuries, Christian authors further embellished the narrative of Aristeas. According to Justin Martyr at the middle of the second Christian century, the scope of the translators’ work embraced not just the Law but the entire Old Testament.[2] Later that century, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, stated that Ptolemy, fearing that the Jewish translators might conspire to conceal the truth found in their sacred books, put them in separate cubicles and commanded them each to write a translation. They did so, and when their translations were read before the king, they were found to give the same words and the same names from beginning to end, “so that even the pagans who were present recognized that the scriptures had been translated through the inspiration of God.”[3]

It is significant that the translators, whether working as a group or as individuals, and in spite of natural tendencies to literalism or to the use of Hebraisms, here and there avoided literalistic renderings of phrases congenial to another age and another language. The Almighty is not called a “Rock”; “Lord” is substituted for the Sacred Name; anthropomorphisms are toned down—God does not repent, is not seen, has not a hand.

Such modifications were not uniformly introduced, but still the changes are too frequent and remarkable to be ascribed merely to chance. A few examples will be sufficient. In Genesis 6:6–7 the statement that God “repented” for having made humankind is softened into the milder expression “He took it to heart.” In Exodus 24:9–10 we are told that Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. In the LXX this becomes “They saw the place where the God of Israel stood.” In Joshua 4:24 “the power” is substituted for “the hand” of the Lord; and in Isaiah 6:1, though visual perception of God is allowed to stand, “the train of his robe” is converted into “his glory.” In Exodus 15:3 “The Lord is a warrior” becomes “The Lord is one who crushes wars.” Changes like these indicate a disinclination to ascribe the human form or human passions to the Divine Being.

Underneath the accretions and behind the story as told by Aristeas, modern scholars are generally in agreement on the following points: (1) The Pentateuch was translated first as a whole, and it has a certain unity of style that distinguishes it from the later translations of the Prophets and the Writings. (2) The homogeneity of the translation makes it improbable that so large a number as seventy were at work on the Pentateuch. (3) The Hebrew scrolls were possibly imported from Palestine. (4) The language of the version is similar to the Greek used in vernacular papyri found in Egypt and contains Egyptian words.[4]

It was a difficult task for the first translators to form and partly invent a vocabulary that would express the content of the Pentateuch. There is no explicit evidence that they possessed either dictionaries or word lists. Thus, when attempting to determine the meaning of a word, they drew upon the context, etymology, and exegetical traditions. For the translation of the later books, translators were sometimes guided by that of the Pentateuch. In spite of these sources of information, sometimes the renderings must be described as guesswork—especially in the case of Hebrew words occurring nowhere else in the Bible.

The various books in the Septuagint vary as to literal and free translation. Examples of free (or even sometime paraphrastic) translations are Job, Proverbs, Isaiah, Daniel, and Esther; literal translations are the books of Judges (the B text), Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The Septuagint differs from the Hebrew Scriptures both in the order of the biblical books and in the number of books included. The traditional division into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings is abandoned, and the books are arranged according to their literary character: (1) Pentateuch and historical books, (2) poetical and sapiential books, (3) prophetical books. Within each group, the sequence does not correspond to that of the Hebrew canon.

Some of the books not included in the Hebrew Scriptures are Greek translations of Hebrew originals (Tobit, 1 Maccabees, and Ecclesiasticus, also known as the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach); others are of Greek composition (Wisdom of Solomon; 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees; and others).

Apart from possessing additional books, the Septuagint also differs from the Hebrew Bible in the supplemental matter contained in certain books that are common to both. The Greek form of the Book of Esther, which in Hebrew contains 167 verses, has six extra sections, an additional 107 verses. The Book of Daniel receives three supplements; in the English Apocrypha of the King James Version, these are called the History of Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three Holy Children.

On the other hand, the Book of Job is about one-sixth shorter in the Septuagint than in the Hebrew text, and the Book of Jeremiah (besides extensive transposition) lacks about one-eighth of the material present in the Hebrew text. In both cases, it may well be that the translators were working with a Hebrew text sharply different from that which later became the traditional Masoretic text. The translation of the Book of Daniel was so deficient that it was wholly rejected by the early Christian church, and a translation made in the second century A.D. by Theodotion was used from the fourth century onward in its place.

The importance of the Septuagint as a translation is obvious. Besides being the first translation ever made of the Hebrew Scriptures, it was the medium through which the religious ideas of the Hebrews were brought to the attention of the world.[5] It was the Bible of the early Christian church, and when the Bible is quoted in the New Testament, it is almost always from the Septuagint version. Furthermore, even when not directly quoted in the New Testament, many of the terms used and partly created by the Septuagint translators became part and parcel of the language of the New Testament.

By the end of the first century of the Christian era, more and more Jews ceased using the Septuagint because the early Christians had adopted it as their own translation. At an early stage, the belief developed that this translation had been divinely inspired, and hence the way was open for several church fathers to claim that the Septuagint presented the words of God more accurately than the Hebrew Bible. The fact that after the first century very, very few Christians had any knowledge of the Hebrew language meant that the Septuagint was not only the church’s main source of the Old Testament but was, in fact, its only source.

The earliest copies of the Septuagint, being made by hand, would soon come to differ among themselves, according to the judgment and accuracy of the scribe making them. This danger had been anticipated in the curse invoked in the Letter of Aristeas upon anyone who altered the rendering of the Seventy.

Eventually, the text became so unreliable that in the third century Origen made a heroic attempt to purify it. His first step was to collect all existing Greek versions of the Old Testament. He then proceeded to transcribe the several versions in parallel columns and to indicate in the column devoted to the Septuagint the relation in which its wording stood to the current Hebrew text. This huge work, called the Hexapla, presented in six narrow columns (1) the Hebrew text; (2) the Hebrew text transliterated into Greek characters (to facilitate the reading of the unvocalized first column); (3) the severely literalistic Greek rendering made about A.D. 140 by a proselyte, Aquila, who attempted to reproduce individual Hebrew words exactly; (4) the Greek rendering of Symmachus (probably later second century), which explained the content in a readable style; (5) the Septuagint, which by means of Origen’s critical symbols provided detailed information concerning the differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text; and (6) a Greek rendering ascribed to Theodotion that has much in common with the Septuagint, so much so that it is often regarded as a free revision rather than an independent rendering. According to Eusebius, Jerome, and other fathers, the last four columns (Aquila, Symmachus, Septuagint, and Theodotion) also existed in a separate form known as the Tetrapla.

The descriptions of the Hexapla given by several church fathers have been confirmed by the discovery of copies of continuous fragments of leaves of the Hexapla. These help us to understand what an enormous task it must have been to arrange the whole Old Testament in a series of codices so gigantic as the Hexapla. Since each horizontal line displayed only one or two Hebrew words, with the corresponding renderings into Greek, it is improbable that any attempt was made to reproduce the Hexapla (or even the Tetrapla) as a whole. The originals, however, were long preserved at Caesarea in Palestine, where they were deposited, perhaps by Origen himself, in the library of Pamphilus. There they were consulted by writers and owners of biblical manuscripts. But in 638 Caesarea fell into the hands of the Saracens, and from that time the library was heard of no more.

Near the beginning of the fourth century, the idea occurred to Pamphilus and his friend Eusebius to publish copies of the fifth column, for they believed that Origen had succeeded in restoring the Old Greek version to its primitive purity. Other Christian recensions of the Greek Old Testament date from the fourth century. These are attributed to Lucian, a presbyter at Antioch, and to Hesychius, an Egyptian bishop martyred in A.D. 312, and were primarily stylistic in character.

Over the centuries, the Septuagint has had a wide influence. It became the basis for daughter versions of the Old Testament in many languages, including Old Latin, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac (in Paul of Tella’s translation around 616 of Origen’s Hexaplaric text), Arabic, and Slavonic. Finally, the importance of the Septuagint can be judged from the fact that it remains to this day the authoritative biblical text of the Old Testament for the Greek Orthodox Church.

Eventually, the Septuagint was repudiated and execrated by Talmudic scholars, who declared that the day on which the Law was translated into Greek was as unfortunate for the Jews as that on which the golden calf was made. A fast day was appointed to mark the calamity. Subsequently, manuscript copies of the Septuagint were made only by Christian scribes.[6]

The Jewish Targums

The Targums are interpretive renderings of all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures (with the exception of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel) into Aramaic. Such versions were needed when Hebrew ceased to be the normal medium of communication among Jews. Consequently, it became necessary at the public reading of Scripture in the synagogue to present also an oral translation into the Aramaic vernacular of the populace. For a reading from the Pentateuch, the Aramaic translation followed each verse of the Hebrew; for a reading from the Prophets, three verses were followed by the Aramaic rendering.

At first the oral Targum was a simple paraphrase in Aramaic, but eventually it became more elaborate and incorporated explanatory details inserted here and there into the translation of the Hebrew text. The functions of such glosses were various, including (1) to resolve textual difficulties by interpreting obscure words or simplifying syntax, (2) to harmonize conflicting texts, (3) to reconcile the biblical text with accepted tradition, (4) to incorporate specifics of Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism into the text, (5) to provide specificity to historical, juridical, or religious allusions, and (6) to either strengthen or mitigate the force of a scriptural passage.

For a long time, there was strong prejudice against writing the Targums, and when they did come to be written down, they represented the labors of many minds, even though the actual fixing of the form may have been the work of one individual. Two officially sanctioned Targums, both produced first in Palestine and later revised in Babylonia, are the Targum of Onkelos on the Pentateuch and the Targum of Jonathan on the Prophets, both of which were in use in the third century of the Christian era.

During the same period, the Targum tradition continued to flourish in Palestine. In addition to fragments and citations that have been collected, the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch is found, primarily, in three forms. The two that have been the most studied are Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the Fragmentary Targum, the latter of which contains renderings of only approximately 850 biblical verses, phrases, or words. In the mid–twentieth century, a neglected manuscript in the Vatican library, identified as Neofiti 1, was discovered to be a nearly complete copy of the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch. Though copied in the sixteenth century, its text has the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Ancient Versions
• Part 2: English Versions
• Postscript
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes