Why, after so many English versions, a new translation of the Hebrew Bible? There is, as I shall explain in detail, something seriously wrong with all the familiar English translations, traditional and recent, of the Hebrew Bible. Broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew. The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English. I shall presently give a more specific account of the kind of English I have aimed for and of the features of the Hebrew that have prompted my choices, but I think it will be helpful for me to say something first about why English translations of the Bible have been problematic—more problematic, perhaps, than most readers may realize.
It is an old and in some ways unfair cliché to say that translation is always a betrayal, but modern English versions of the Bible provide unfortunately persuasive evidence for that uncompromising generalization. At first thought, it is rather puzzling that this should be the case. In purely quantitative terms, we live in a great age of Bible translation. Several integral translations of the Bible have been done since the middle of the twentieth century, and a spate of English versions of individual biblical books has appeared. This period, moreover, is one in which our understanding of ancient Hebrew has become considerably more nuanced and precise than it once was, thanks to comparative Semitic philology aided by archaeology, and also thanks to the careful reanalysis of the formal structures—syntax, grammar, morphology, verb tenses—of biblical Hebrew. One might have expected that this recent flurry of translation activity, informed by the newly focused awareness of the meanings of biblical Hebrew, would have produced at least some English versions that would be both vividly precise and closer to the feel of the original than any of the older translations. Instead, the modern English versions—especially in their treatment of Hebrew narrative prose—have placed readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language. As a consequence, the King James Version, as Gerald Hammond, an eminent British authority on Bible translations, has convincingly argued, remains the closest approach for English readers to the original—despite its frequent and at times embarrassing inaccuracies, despite its archaisms, and despite its insistent substitution of Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones.
Some observers have sought to explain the inadequacy of modern Bible translations in terms of the general decline of the English language. It is certainly true that there are far fewer people these days with a cultivated sensitivity to the expressive resources of the language, the nuances of lexical values, the force of metaphor and rhythm; and one is certainly much less likely to find such people on a committee of ecclesiastical or scholarly experts than one would have in the first decade of the seventeenth century. There are, nevertheless, still some brilliant stylists among English prose writers; and if our age has been graced with remarkable translations of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante, why not of the Bible?
Part of the explanation, I suspect, is in the conjunction of philological scholarship and translation. I intend no churlish disrespect to philology. On the contrary, without it, our reading of the Bible, or indeed of any older text, is no better than walking through a great museum on a very gloomy day with all the lights turned out. To read the Bible over the shoulder of a great philological critic, like Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167), one of the earliest and still eminently worth studying, is to see many important things in fine focus for the first time. There is, however, a crucial difference between philology as a tool for understanding literary texts and philology as an end in itself, for literature and philology work with extremely different conceptions of what constitutes knowledge. To be fair to the broad enterprise of philology, which has included some great literary critics, I use the term here as shorthand for “biblical philology,” a discipline that, especially in its Anglo-American applications, has often come down to lexicography and the analysis of grammar.
For the philologist, the great goal is the achievement of clarity. It is scarcely necessary to say that in all sorts of important, but also delimited, ways clarity is indispensable in a translator’s wrestling with the original text. The simplest case, but a pervasive one, consists of getting a handle on the meaning of particular terms. It is truly helpful, for example, to know that biblical naḥal most commonly indicates not any sort of brook, creek, or stream but the kind of freshet, called a wadi in both Arabic and modern Hebrew, that floods a dry desert gulch during the rainy months and vanishes in the heat of the summer. Suddenly, Job’s “my brothers betrayed like a naḥal” (Job 6:14) becomes a striking poetic image, where before it might have been a minor puzzlement. But philological clarity in literary texts can quickly turn into too much of a good thing. Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is—here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity—“to disambiguate” the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible. These unfortunate consequences are all the more pronounced when the philologist, however acutely trained in that discipline, has an underdeveloped sense of literary diction, rhythm, and the uses of figurative language; and that, alas, is often the case in an era in which literary culture is not widely disseminated even among the technically educated.
The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible. This impulse may be attributed not only to a rather reduced sense of the philological enterprise but also to a feeling that the Bible, because of its canonical status, has to be made accessible—indeed, transparent—to all. (The one signal exception to all these generalizations is Everett Fox’s 1995 American version of the Torah. Emulating the model of the German translation by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig [begun in 1925, completed in 1961], which flaunts Hebrew etymologies, preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German words, Fox goes to the opposite extreme of other modern versions: his English has the great virtue of reminding us verse after verse of the strangeness of the Hebrew original, but it does so at the cost of often being not quite English and consequently of becoming a text for study rather than a fluently readable version that conveys the stylistic poise and power of the Hebrew.) Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings—the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision.
One of the most salient characteristics of biblical Hebrew is its extraordinary concreteness, manifested especially in a fondness for images rooted in the human body. The general predisposition of modern translators is to convert most of this concrete language into more abstract terms that have the purported advantage of clarity but turn the pungency of the original into stale paraphrase. A good deal of this concrete biblical language based on the body is what a linguist would call lexicalized metaphor—imagery, here taken from body parts and bodily functions, that is made to stand for some general concept as a fixed item in the vocabulary of the language (as “eye” in English can be used to mean “perceptiveness” or “connoisseur’s understanding”). Dead metaphors, however, are the one persuasive instance of the resurrection of the dead—for at least the ghosts of the old concrete meanings float over the supposedly abstract acceptations of the terms, and this is something the philologically driven translators do not appear to understand. “Many modern versions,” Gerald Hammond tartly observes, “eschew anything which smacks of imagery or metaphor—based on the curious assumption, I guess, that modern English is an image-free language.” The price paid for this avoidance of the metaphorical will become evident by considering two characteristic and recurrent Hebrew terms and the role they play in representing the world in the biblical story.
The Hebrew noun zeraʿ* has the general meaning of “seed,” which can be applied either in the agricultural sense or to human beings, as the term for semen. By metaphorical extension, semen becomes the established designation for what it produces, progeny. Modern translators, evidently unwilling to trust the ability of adult readers to understand that “seed”—as regularly in the King James Version—may mean progeny, repeatedly render it as offspring, descendants, heirs, progeny, posterity. But I think there is convincing evidence in the texts themselves that the biblical writers never entirely forgot that their term for offspring also meant semen and had a precise equivalent in the vegetable world. To cite a distinctly physical example, when Onan “knew that the seed would not be his,” that is, the progeny of his brother’s widow should he impregnate her, “he would waste his seed on the ground, so to give no seed to his brother” (Genesis 38:9). Modern translators, despite their discomfort with body terms, can scarcely avoid the wasted “seed” here because without it the representation of spilling semen on the ground in coitus interruptus becomes unintelligible. E. A. Speiser substitutes “offspring” for “seed” at the end of the verse, however, and the Revised English Bible goes him one better by putting “offspring” at the beginning as well (“Onan knew that the offspring would not count as his”) and introducing “seed” in the middle as object of the verb “to spill” and scuttling back to the decorousness of “offspring” at the end—a prime instance of explanation under the guise of translation. But the biblical writer is referring to “seed” as much at the end of the verse as at the beginning. Onan adopts the stratagem of coitus interruptus in order not to “give seed”—that is, semen—to Tamar, and, as a necessary consequence of this contraceptive act, he avoids providing her with offspring. The thematic point of this moment, anchored in sexual practice, law, and human interaction, is blunted by not preserving “seed” throughout.
Even in contexts not directly related to sexuality, the concreteness of this term often amplifies the meaning of the utterance. When, for example, at the end of the story of the binding of Isaac, God reiterates His promise to Abraham, the multiplication of seed is strongly linked with cosmic imagery—harking back to the Creation story—of heaven and earth: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea” (Genesis 22:17). If “seed” here is rendered as “offspring” or “descendants,” what we get are two essentially mathematical similes of numerical increase. That is, in fact, the primary burden of the language God addresses to Abraham, but as figurative language it also imposes itself visually on the retina of the imagination, and so underlying the idea of a single late-born son whose progeny will be countless millions is an image of human seed (perhaps reinforced by the shared white color of semen and stars) scattered across the vast expanses of the starry skies and through the innumerable particles of sand on the shore of the sea. To substitute “offspring” for “seed” here may not fundamentally alter the meaning but it diminishes the vividness of the statement, making it just a little harder for readers to sense why these ancient texts have been so compelling down through the ages.
The most metaphorically extended body part in biblical Hebrew is the hand, though head and foot are also abundantly represented in figurative senses. Now it is obvious enough, given the equivalent usages in modern Western languages, that “hand” can be employed figuratively to express such notions as power, control, responsibility, and trust—to which biblical Hebrew adds one meaning peculiar to itself, commemorative monument. But most modern translators substitute one or another of these abstract terms, introducing supposed clarity where things were perfectly clear to begin with and subverting the literary integrity of the story. In the two sequential episodes that end with Joseph’s being cast into a pit—the first is a dry cistern, the second an Egyptian prison, but the two are explicitly linked by the use of the term bor for both—the recurrently invoked “hand” is a focusing device that both defines and complicates the moral themes of the story. Reuben, hearing his brothers’ murderous intentions, seeks to rescue Joseph “from their hands.” He implores his brothers, “Lay not a hand upon him,” just as, in the other strand of the story, Judah says, “Let not our hand be against him.” E. A. Speiser, faithful to the clarifying impulse of the modern Bible scholar’s philological imagination, renders both these phrases as “do away with,” explaining that it would be illogical to have Reuben, or Judah, say “Don’t lay a hand on him,” since in fact the counsel proffered involves seizing him, stripping him, and throwing him into the pit. But in fact this alleged illogic is the luminous logic of the writer’s moral critique. Reuben pleads with his brothers not to lay a hand on Joseph, that is, not to shed his blood (this is the phrase he uses at the beginning of his speech), but neither his plea nor Judah’s proposal is an entirely innocent one: although each urges that the brothers lay no hand on Joseph, there is a violent laying on of hands necessitated by the course of action each proposes. Even more pointedly, once Joseph is headed south with the caravan, those same fraternal hands will take his ornamented tunic (the King James Version’s “coat of many colors”), slaughter a kid, dip the garment in the blood, and send it off to Jacob.
The image of hands holding a garment belonging to Joseph that is turned into false evidence brilliantly returns at the climactic moment of the next episode involving him, in Genesis 39. When Joseph flees from the lust of his master’s wife, “he left his garment in her hand” because she has virtually torn it off his back in trying to effect her reiterated “Lie with me” by seizing him. In her accusation of Joseph, she alters the narrator’s twice-stated “in her hand” to “by me,” implying that he disrobed deliberately before attempting to rape her. But the narrator’s cunning deployment of repeated terms has conditioned us to zero in on these two pivotal words, wayaʿazov beyad, “he left in the hand of,” for in the six initial framing verses of the story, “hand” appears four times, with the last, most significant occurrence being this summary of the comprehensiveness of Joseph’s stewardship: “And he left all that he had in Joseph’s hands” (39:6). (Hebrew idiom allows the writer to use “hand” in the singular, thus creating an exact phrasal identity between the figurative reference to the hand in which the trust of stewardship is left and the literal reference to the hand in which the garment belonging to the object of sexual desire is left.) The invocation of “hand” in chapters 37 and 39—the story of Judah and Tamar lies between them—forms an elegant A B A B pattern: in chapter 37 hands are laid on Joseph, an action carried forward in the resumptive repetition at the very beginning of chapter 39 when he is bought “from the hands of the Ishmaelites”; then we have the supremely competent hand, or hands, of Joseph, into which everything is placed, or left, and by which everything succeeds; then again a violent hand is laid on Joseph, involving the stripping of his garment, as in the episode with the brothers; and at the end of the chapter, Joseph in prison again has everything entrusted to his dependable hands, with this key term twice stated in the three and a half verses of the closing frame. A kind of dialectic is created in the thematic unfolding of the story between hand as the agency of violent impulse and hand as the instrument of scrupulous management. Although the concrete term is probably used with more formal precision in this particular sequence than is usually the case elsewhere, the hands of Joseph and the hands upon Joseph provide a fine object lesson about how biblical narrative is misrepresented when translators tamper with the purposeful and insistent physicality of its language, as here when “hand” is transmuted into “trust” or “care.” Such substitutions offer explanations or interpretations instead of translations and thus betray the original.
There are, alas, more pervasive ways than the choice of terms in which nearly all the modern English versions commit the heresy of explanation. The most global of these is the prevalent modern strategy of repackaging biblical syntax for an audience whose reading experience is assumed to be limited to Time, Newsweek, the New York Times or the Times of London, and the internet. Now, it is often asserted, with seemingly self-evident justice, that the fundamental difference between biblical syntax and modern English syntax is between a system in which parallel clauses linked by “and” predominate (what linguists call “parataxis”) and one in which the use of subordinate clauses and complex sentences predominates (what linguists call “hypotaxis”). Modern English has a broad array of modal and temporal discriminations in its system of verbs and a whole armament of subordinate conjunctions to stipulate different relations among clauses. Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, has only two aspects† (they are probably not tenses in our sense) of verbs, together with one indication of a jussive mode—when a verb is used to express a desire or exhortation to perform the action in question—and a modest number of subordinate conjunctions. Although there are certainly instances of significant syntactic subordination, the characteristic biblical syntax is additive, working with parallel clauses linked by “and”—which in the Hebrew is not even a separate word but rather a particle, waw‡ (it means “hook”), that is prefixed to the first word of the clause.
The assumption of most modern translators has been that this sort of syntax will be either unintelligible or at least alienating to modern readers, and so should be entirely rearranged as modern English. There are two basic problems with this procedure. First, it ignores the fact that parataxis is the essential literary vehicle of biblical narrative: it is the way the ancient Hebrew writers saw the world, linked events in it, artfully ordered it, and narrated it, and one gets a very different world if their syntax is jettisoned. Second, rejection of biblical parataxis presupposes a very simplistic notion of what constitutes modern literary English. The implicit model seems to be, as I have suggested, the popular press, as well as perhaps high-school textbooks, bureaucratic directives, and ordinary conversation. But serious writers almost never accept such leveling limitation to a bland norm of popular usage. If one thinks of the great English stylists among twentieth-century novelists—writers like Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf—there is not one among them whose use of language, including the deployment of syntax, even vaguely resembles the workaday simplicity and patly consistent orderliness that recent translators of the Bible have posited as the norm of modern English. It is also well to keep in mind that literary style, like many other aspects of literature, is constantly self-recapitulative, invoking recollections of its near and distant literary antecedents, so that modernists like Joyce and Faulkner sometimes echo biblical language and cadences, and a mannered stylist like Hemingway, in making “and” his most prominent connective, surely has the King James Version of the Bible in mind. And in any event, the broad history of both Semitic and European languages and literatures evinces a strong differentiation in most periods between everyday language and the language of literature.
The assumption of biblical philologists that parallel syntax is alien to modern literary English is belied by the persistent presence of highly wrought paratactic prose even at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. A variety of self-conscious English stylists in the modern era, from Gertrude Stein to Cormac McCarthy, have exhibited a fondness for chains of parallel utterances linked by “and” in which the basic sentence-type is the same structurally as that used again and again in biblical prose. What such a style makes manifest in a narrative is a series of more or less discrete events, or micro-events, in a chain, not unlike the biblical names of begetters and begotten that are strung one after another in the chains of the genealogical lists. The biblical writers generally chose not to order these events in ramified networks of causal, conceptual, or temporal subordination, not because hypotaxis was an unavailable option, as the opening verses of the second Creation story (Genesis 2:4–5) clearly demonstrate. The continuing appeal, moreover, for writers in our own age of this syntax dominated by “and,” which highlights the discrete event, suggests that parallel syntax may still be a perfectly viable way to represent in English the studied parallelism of verbs and clauses of ancient Hebrew narrative.
Since a literary style is composed of very small elements as well as larger structural features, an English translator must confront the pesky question of whether the ubiquitous Hebrew particle that means “and” should be represented at all in translation. This is obviously not a problem when the waw simply connects two nouns—as in “the heavens and the earth”—but what of its constant use at the beginning of sentences and clauses prefixed to verbs? The argument against translating it in these cases is that the primary function of the waw appended to a verb is not to signify “and” but to indicate that the Hebrew prefix conjugation, which otherwise is used for actions yet to be completed, is reporting past events (hence its designation in the terminology of classical Hebrew grammar as “the waw of conversion”). It is far from clear, as modern Bible scholars tend to assume, that the fulfillment of one linguistic function by a particle of speech automatically excludes any others; on the contrary, it is entirely likely that for the ancient audience the waw appended to the verb both converted its temporal aspect and continued to signify “and.” But, semantics aside, the general practice of modern English translators of suppressing the “and” when it is attached to a verb has the effect of changing the tempo, rhythm, and construction of events in biblical narrative. Let me illustrate by quoting a narrative sequence from Genesis 24 first in my own version, which reproduces every “and” and every element of parataxis, and then in the version of the Revised English Bible. The Revised English Bible is in general one of the most compulsive repackagers of biblical language, though in this instance the reordering of the Hebrew is relatively minor. Its rendering of these sentences is roughly interchangeable with any of the other modern versions—the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jewish Publication Society, Speiser—one might choose. I begin in the middle of verse 16, where Rebekah becomes the subject of a series of actions.
And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, “Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, “For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.” And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.
And this is how the Revised English Bible, in keeping with the prevailing assumptions of most recent translations, renders these verses in what is presumed to be sensible modern English:
She went down to the spring, filled her jar, and came up again. Abraham’s servant hurried to meet her and said, “Will you give me a little water from your jar?” “Please drink, sir,” she answered, and at once lowered her jar on her hand to let him drink. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, “I shall draw water also for your camels until they have had enough.” She quickly emptied her jar into the water trough, and then hurrying again to the well she drew water and watered all the camels.
There is, as one would expect, some modification of biblical parataxis, though it is not so extreme here as elsewhere in the Revised English Bible: “And she let him drink his fill” is converted into an introductory adverbial clause, “When she had finished giving him a drink” (actually in consonance with the otherwise paratactic King James Version): “and she hurried” is compressed into “quickly”; “and she ran again” becomes the participial “hurrying again.” (Moves of this sort, it should be said, push translation to the verge of paraphrase—recasting and interpreting the original instead of representing it.) The most striking divergence between these two versions is that mine has fifteen “and’s,” corresponding precisely to fifteen occurrences of the particle waw in the Hebrew, whereas the Revised English Bible manages with just five. What difference does this make? To begin with, it should be observed that the waw, whatever is claimed about its linguistic function, is by no means an inaudible element in the phonetics of the Hebrew text: we must keep constantly in mind that these narratives were composed to be heard, not merely to be decoded by a reader’s eye. The reiterated “and,” then, plays an important role in creating the rhythm of the story, in phonetically punctuating the forward-driving movement of the prose. The elimination of the “and” in the Revised English Bible and in all its modern cousins produces—certainly to my ear—an abrupt, awkward effect in the sound pattern of the language, or to put it more strictly, a kind of narrative arrhythmia.
More is at stake here than pleasing sounds, for the heroine of the repeated actions is in fact subtly but significantly reduced in all the rhythmically deficient versions. She of course performs roughly the same acts in the different versions—politely offering water to the stranger, lowering her jug so that he can drink, rapidly going back and forth to the spring to bring water for the camels. But in the compressions, syntactical reorderings, and stop-and-start movements of the modernizing version, the encounter at the well and Rebekah’s actions are made to seem rather matter-of-fact, however exemplary her impulse of hospitality. This tends to obscure what the Hebrew highlights, which is that she is doing something quite extraordinary. Rebekah at the well presents one of the rare biblical instances of the performance of an act of “Homeric” heroism. The servant begins by asking modestly to “sip a bit of water,” as though all he wanted were to wet his lips. But we need to remember, as the ancient audience surely did, that a camel after a long desert journey can drink as much as twenty-five gallons of water, and there are ten camels here whom Rebekah offers to water “until they drink their fill.” The chain of verbs tightly linked by all the “and’s” does an admirable job in conveying this sense of the young woman’s hurling herself with prodigious speed into the sequence of required actions. Even her dialogue is scarcely a pause in the narrative momentum, but is integrated syntactically and rhythmically into the chain: “And she said, ‘Drink, my lord,’ and she hurried and tipped down her jug… . And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.” The parallel syntax and the barrage of “and’s,” far from being the reflex of a “primitive” language, are as artfully effective in furthering the ends of the narrative as any device one could find in a sophisticated modern novelist.
Beyond these issues of syntax and local word choice lies a fundamental question that no modern translator I know of has really confronted: What level, or perhaps levels, of style is represented in biblical Hebrew? There is no reason, I believe, to be awestruck by the sheer antiquity of the text. If biblical Hebrew could be shown to reflect a pungent colloquial usage in the ancient setting, or a free commingling of colloquial and formal language, it would be only logical to render it with equivalent levels of diction in modern English. As a matter of fact, all the modern translators—from Speiser to Fox to the sundry ecclesiastical committees in both America and England—have shown a deaf ear to diction, acting as though the only important considerations in rendering a literary text were lexical values and grammatical structures, while the English terms chosen could be promiscuously borrowed from boardroom or bedroom or scholar’s word hoard, with little regard to the tonality and connotation the words carried with them from their native linguistic habitat.
Whatever conclusions we may draw about the stylistic level of biblical Hebrew are a little precarious because we of course have no record of the ancient spoken language, and if, as seems likely, there were extracanonical varieties or genres of Hebrew writing in the ancient world, the vestiges have long since crumbled into dust. Did, for example, the citizens of Judah in the time of Jeremiah speak in a parallel syntax, using the waw consecutive, and employing roughly the same vocabulary that we find in his prophecies, or in Deuteronomy and Genesis? Although there is no proof, my guess is that vernacular syntax and grammar probably differed in some ways from their literary counterparts. In regard to vocabulary, there is evidence that what we see in the canonical books would not have been identical with everyday usage. First, there is the problem of the relative paucity of vocabulary in biblical literature. As the Spanish Hebrew scholar Angel Sáenz-Badillos has observed in his History of the Hebrew Language (1993), the biblical lexicon is so restricted that it is hard to believe it could have served all the purposes of quotidian existence in a highly developed society. The instance of the poetry of Job, with its unusual number of words not found elsewhere in Scripture, is instructive in this regard: the Job-poet, in his powerful impulse to forge a poetic imagery that would represent humankind, God, and nature in a new and even startling light, draws on highly specific language from manufacturing processes, food preparation, commercial and legal institutions, which would never be used in biblical narrative. The plausible conclusion is that the Hebrew of the Bible is a conventionally delimited language, roughly analagous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theater: it was understood by writers and their audiences, at least in the case of narrative, that only certain words were appropriate for the literary rendering of events.
There is evidence, moreover, that people in everyday life may have had different words for many of the basic concepts and entities that are mentioned in the Bible. This argument was persuasively made by the Israeli linguist Abba ben David in his still indispensable 1967 study, available only in Hebrew, The Language of the Bible and the Language of the Sages. Ben David offers a fascinating explanation for one of the great mysteries of the Hebrew language—the emergence, toward the end of the pre-Christian era, of a new kind of Hebrew, which became the language of the early rabbis. Now, it is widely recognized that this new Hebrew reflected the influence of the Aramaic vernacular in morphology, in grammar, and in some of its vocabulary, and that, understandably, it also incorporated a vast number of Greek and Latin loanwords. But what is puzzling is that rabbinic Hebrew also uses a good many indigenous Hebrew terms that are absent from the biblical corpus, or reflected only in rare and marginal biblical cognates. The standard terms in rabbinical Hebrew for sun and moon, and some of its frequently used verbs like to look, to take, to enter, to clean, are entirely different from their biblical counterparts, without visible influence from any of the languages impinging on Hebrew. Where did these words come from? Ben David, observing, as have others before him, that there are incipient signs of an emergent rabbinic Hebrew in late biblical books like Jonah and the Song of Songs, makes the bold and, to my mind, convincing proposal that rabbinic Hebrew was built upon an ancient vernacular that for the most part had been excluded from the literary language used for the canonical texts. This makes particular sense if one keeps in mind that the early rabbis were anxious to draw a line between their own “Oral Torah” and the written Torah they were expounding. For the purposes of legal and homiletic exegesis, they naturally would have used a vernacular Hebrew rather than the literary language, and when their discourse was first given written formulation in the Mishnah in the early third century C.E., that text would have recorded this vernacular, which probably had a long prehistory in the biblical period. It is distinctly possible that when a ninth-century B.C.E. Israelite farmer mopped his brow under the blazing sun, he did not point to it and say shemesh, as it is invariably called in biblical prose texts, but rather ḥamah, as it is regularly designated in the Mishnah.
There is, of course, no way of plotting a clear chronology of the evolution of rabbinic Hebrew from an older vernacular, no way of determining how far back into the biblical period various elements of rabbinic language may go. It is sufficient for our effort to gauge the level of style of the Bible’s literary prose merely to grant the very high likelihood that the language of the canonical texts was not identical with the vernacular, that it reflected a specialized or elevated vocabulary, and perhaps even a distinct grammar and syntax. Let me cite a momentary exception to the rule of biblical usage that may give us a glimpse into this excluded vernacular background of a more formal literary language. It is well-known that in biblical dialogue all the characters speak proper literary Hebrew, with no intimations of slang, dialect, or idiolect. The single striking exception is impatient Esau’s first speech to Jacob in Genesis 25: “Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff.” Inarticulate with hunger, he cannot come up with the ordinary Hebrew term for “stew,” and so he makes do with haʾadom haʾadom hazeh—literally “this red red.” But what is more interesting for our purpose is the verb Esau uses for “feeding,” halʿiteini. This is the sole occurrence of this verb in the biblical corpus, but in the Talmud it is a commonly used term with the specific meaning of stuffing food into the mouth of an animal. One cannot be certain this was its precise meaning in the biblical period because words do, after all, undergo semantic shifts in a period of considerably more than a thousand years. But it seems safe to assume, minimally, that even a millennium before the rabbis halʿit would have been a cruder term for feeding than the standard biblical ha’akhil. What I think happened at this point in Genesis is that the author, in the writerly zest with which he sought to characterize Esau’s crudeness, allowed himself, quite exceptionally, to introduce a vernacular term for coarse eating or animal feeding into the dialogue that would jibe nicely with his phrase “this red red stuff.” After the close of the biblical era, this otherwise excluded term would surface in the legal pronouncements of the rabbis on animal husbandry, together with a host of vernacular words used in the ancient period but never permitted to enter the canonical texts.
All this strongly suggests that the language of biblical narrative in its own time was stylized, decorous, dignified, and readily identified by its audiences as a language of literature, in certain ways distinct from the language of quotidian reality. The tricky complication, however, is that in most respects it also was not a lofty style, and was certainly neither ornate nor euphemistic. If some of its vocabulary may have reflected a specialized literary lexicon, the language of biblical narrative also makes abundant use of ordinary Hebrew words that must have been in everyone’s mouth from day to day. Just to mention the few recurrent terms on which I have commented, “hand,” “house,” “all,” and “seed” are primary words in every phase of the history of Hebrew, and they continue to appear as such in the rabbinic language, where so much else is altered. Biblical prose, then, is a formal literary language but also, paradoxically, a plainspoken one, and, moreover, a language that evinces a strong commitment to using a limited set of terms again and again, making an aesthetic virtue out of the repetition. It should be added that the language of the Bible reflects not one level of diction but a certain range of dictions, as I shall explain presently.
What is the implication of this analysis for an appropriate modern English equivalent to ancient Hebrew style? The right direction, I think, was hit on by the King James Version, following the great model of Tyndale a century before it. There is no good reason to render biblical Hebrew as contemporary English, either lexically or syntactically. This is not to suggest that the Bible should be represented as fussily old-fashioned English, but a limited degree of archaizing coloration is entirely appropriate, employed with other strategies for creating a language that is stylized yet simple and direct, free of the overtones of contemporary colloquial usage but with a certain timeless homespun quality. An adequate English version should be able to indicate the small but significant modulations in diction in the biblical language—something the stylistically uniform King James Version, however, entirely fails to do. A suitable English version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the Bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation. Similarly, the translation of terms on the basis of immediate context—except when it becomes grotesque to do otherwise—is to be resisted as another instance of the heresy of explanation. Finally, the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories will scarcely be conveyed if they are not rendered in cadenced English prose that at least in some ways corresponds to the powerful cadences of the Hebrew. Let me now comment more particularly on the distinctive biblical treatment of diction, word choice, syntax, and rhythm and what it implies for translation.
The biblical prose writers favor what we may think of as a primary vocabulary. They revel in repetition, sometimes of a stately, refrainlike sort, sometimes deployed in ingenious patterns through which different meanings of the same term are played against one another. Elegant synonymity is alien to biblical prose, and it is only rarely that a highly specialized term is used instead of the more general word. Here is a characteristic biblical way of putting things: “And God made the two great lights, the great light for dominion of day and the small light for dominion of night, and the stars” (Genesis 1:16). In addition to the poised emphasis of the internal repetitions in the sentence, one should note that the primary term for a source of light—maʾor, transparently cognate with ʾor, the light that is divided from the darkness in 1:4—is placed in the foreground. In fact, there are half a dozen biblical synonyms for “light,” suggesting a range roughly equivalent to English terms like “illumination,” “effulgence,” “brilliance,” and “splendor,” but these are all reserved for the more elaborate vocabulary of poetry, whereas in prose the writer sticks to the simplicity of ʾor and maʾor, and everywhere it behooves a translator to do the same with English equivalents.
Some biblical scholars might object that my example is skewed because it is taken from the so-called Priestly source (P), which has a stylistic predilection for high decorousness and cadenced repetitions. But the stylistic difference in this regard between P and the two other conjectured source documents of the Pentateuch, designated J and E, is one of degree, not kind. Thus, when the second version of the Creation story, commonly identified as J’s, begins in Genesis 2:4, we do get some greater degree of specification in the language, in keeping with the way creation is here imagined. Instead of the verbs “to create” (baraʾ) and “to make” (ʿasah) that accompany God’s speaking the world into being in chapter 1 we are given the potter’s term “to fashion” (yatsar) and the architectural term “to build” (banah). These remain, however, within the limits of a primary vocabulary. The nuanced and specialized lexicon of manufacturing processes one encounters in the poetry of Job and of Deutero-Isaiah is firmly excluded from the stylistic horizon of this narrative prose, though the subject might have invited it.
The translator’s task, then, is to mirror the repetitions as much as is feasible. Let me cite one small example, where I learned from my own mistake. When Joseph’s brothers recount to Jacob what happened on their first trip to Egypt, they say, in the English of my first draft, “The man who is lord of the land spoke harshly to us and accused us of being spies in the land” (Genesis 42:30). (The verb “accused” is also used in the New Jewish Publication Society translation.) On rereading, I realized that I had violated the cardinal principle, not to translate according to context. The Hebrew says, very literally, “gave us as spies,” “give” in biblical usage being one of those all-purpose verbs that variously means “to set,” “to place,” “to grant,” “to deem.” I hastened to change the last clause to “made us out to be spies” because “to make,” with or without an accompanying preposition, is precisely such a primary term that serves many purposes and so is very much in keeping with biblical stylistic practice.
What is surprising about the biblical writers’ use of this deliberately limited vocabulary is that it can be so precise and even nuanced. Our own cultural preconceptions of writers scrupulously devoted to finding exactly the right word are associated with figures like Flaubert and Joyce, who meticulously choose the terms of their narratives from a large repertory of finely discriminated lexical items. Biblical prose often exhibits an analogous precision within the severe limits of its primary vocabulary. There are, for example, two paired terms, masculine and feminine, in biblical Hebrew to designate young people: naʿar/naʿarah (in this translation, “lad” and “young woman”) and yeled/yaldah (in this translation, “child” and “girl”). The first pair is somewhat asymmetrical because naʿar often also means “servant” or anyone in a subaltern position, and sometimes means “elite soldier,” whereas naʿarah usually refers to a nubile young woman, and only occasionally to a servant girl. Though there are rare biblical occurrences of yeled in the sense of “young man,” it generally designates someone younger than a naʿar—etymologically, it means “the one who is born,” reflecting a development parallel to the French enfant.
With this little to work with, it is remarkable how much the biblical writers accomplish in their deployment of the terms. In the first part of the story of the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis 21), Ishmael is referred to consistently as “the child,” as was his infant half brother Isaac at the beginning of this chapter. The grief-stricken mother in the wilderness says to herself, “Let me not see when the child dies.” From the moment God speaks in the story (verse 17), Ishmael is invariably referred to as “the lad”—evidently with an intimation of tenderness but also with the suggestion that he is a young man, naʿar, who will go on to have a future. In the elaborately parallel episode in the next chapter that features Abraham and Isaac in the wilderness, Isaac is referred to by man and God as “the lad,” and the term is played off against “the lads” who are Abraham’s servants accompanying him on his journey, and not his flesh and blood (“And Abraham said to his lads, ‘Sit you here with the donkey and let me and the lad walk ahead’”).
In the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), she is first referred to as “Leah’s daughter”—and not Jacob’s daughter, for it is Leah’s sons, Simeon and Levi, who will exact vengeance for her. The initial designation of “daughter” aligns her with both “the daughters of the land” among whom she goes out to see, and Shechem, Hamor’s son (“son” and “daughter” are cognates in Hebrew), who sees her, takes her, and rapes her. After the act of violation, Shechem is overcome with love for Dinah, and he implores his father, “Take me this girl [yaldah] as wife.” Speaking to his father, then, he identifies—tenderly?—the victim of his own lust as a girl-child. When he parleys with Dinah’s brothers, asking permission to marry her, he says, “Give me the young woman [naʿarah] as wife,” now using the term for a nubile woman that is strictly appropriate to betrothal negotiations. After the brothers stipulate their surgical precondition for the betrothal, the narrator reports, “And the lad [naʿar] lost no time in doing the thing, for he wanted Jacob’s daughter.” Suddenly, as the catastrophe of this gruesome tale becomes imminent, we learn that the sexually impulsive man is only a lad, probably an adolescent like Dinah—a discovery that is bound to complicate our task of moral judgment. And now Dinah is called Jacob’s daughter, not Leah’s, probably because that is how Shechem sees her, not realizing that the significant relationship is through her mother to her two full brothers who are plotting a terrible retribution for her violation.
It should be clear from all this that a translation that respects the literary precision of the biblical story must strive to reproduce its nice discrimination of terms, and cannot be free to translate a word here one way and there another, for the sake of variety or for the sake of context. It must be admitted, however, that some compromises are inevitable because modern English clearly does not coincide semantically with ancient Hebrew in many respects. The stuff from which the first human is fashioned, for example, ʾadamah, manifestly means “soil,” and it continues to have that meaning as it recurs at crucial junctures in the story of the Garden and the primordial banishment. But, alas, ʾadamah also means “land,” “farmland,” “country,” and even “earth,” and to translate it invariably as “soil” for the sake of terminological consistency (as Everett Fox does) leads to local confusions and conspicuous peculiarities. To take a more extreme example, a term that has no semantic analogue in English, the Hebrew nefesh, which the King James Version, following the Vulgate, often translates as “soul,” refers to the breath of life in the nostrils of a living creature and, by extension, “lifeblood” or simply “life,” and by another slide of association, “person”; and it is also used as an intensifying form of the personal pronoun, having roughly the sense of “very self.” In the face of this bewildering diversity of meaning, one is compelled to abandon the admirable principle of lexical consistency and to translate, regretfully, according to immediate context.
Finally, though many recurring biblical terms have serviceable English equivalents (like “lad” for naʿar), there are instances in which a translation must make another kind of compromise because, given the differences between modern and biblical culture, the social, moral, and ideological connotations of terms in the two languages do not adequately correspond. Consider the tricky case of verbs for sexual intercourse. In English, these tend to be either clinical and technical, or rude, or bawdy, or euphemistic, and absolutely none of this is true of the verbs used for sex in the Bible. In Genesis, three different terms occur: “to know,” “to lie with,” and “to come into.” “To know,” with one striking antithetical exception, indicates sexual possession by a man of his legitimate spouse. Modern solutions such as “to be intimate with,” “to cohabit with,” “to sleep with,” are all egregiously wrong in tone and implication. Fortunately the King James Version has established a strong precedent in English by translating the verb literally, and “carnal knowledge” is part of our language, so it is feasible to preserve the literal Hebrew usage in translation. (There is, I think, a good deal to be said for the general procedure of Tyndale and the King James Version in imitating many Hebrew idioms and thus giving the English a certain Hebraic coloration.) “Lie with” is a literal equivalent of the Hebrew, though in English it is vaguely euphemistic, whereas in Hebrew it is a more brutally direct or carnally explicit idiom for sexual intercourse, without, however, any suggestion of obscenity.
The most intractable of the three expressions is “to come into” or “to enter.” In nonsexual contexts, this is the ordinary biblical verb for entering, or arriving. “To enter,” or “to come into,” however, is a misleading translation because the term clearly refers not merely to sexual penetration but to the whole act of sexual consummation. It is used with great precision—not registered by biblical scholarship—to indicate a man’s having intercourse with a woman he has not yet had as a sexual partner, whether she is his wife, his concubine, or a whore. The underlying spatial imagery of the term, I think, is of the man’s entering the woman’s sphere for the first time through a series of concentric circles: her tent or chamber, her bed, her body. A translator, then, ought not surrender the image of coming into, but “come into” by itself doesn’t quite do it. My own solution, in keeping with the slight strangeness of Hebraizing idioms of the translation as a whole, was to stretch an English idiom to cover the biblical usage: this translation consistently renders the Hebrew expression in question as “come to bed with,” an idiom that in accepted usage a woman could plausibly use to a man referring to herself (“come to bed with me”) but that in my translation is extended to a woman’s reference to another woman (“come to bed with my slavegirl”) and to a reference in the third person by the narrator or a male character to sexual consummation (“Give me my wife,” Jacob says to Laban, “and let me come to bed with her”).
Biblical syntax, beyond the basic pattern of parallel clauses, provides another occasion for what I have called a slight strangeness. The word order in biblical narrative is very often as finely expressive as the lexical choices. In many instances, the significant sequence of terms can be reproduced effortlessly and idiomatically in English, and it is a testament to the literary insensitivity of modern translators that they so often neglect to do so. Here, for example, is how the narrator reports Abimelech’s discovery of the conjugal connection between Isaac and the woman Isaac had claimed was his sister: “Abimelech … looked out the window and saw—and there was Isaac playing with Rebekah his wife” (Genesis 26:8). The move into the character’s point of view after the verbs of seeing is signaled by the so-called presentative, wehineh (rather like voici in French), which in this case I have represented by “there” but usually render as “look” (following the King James Version’s “behold” and so deliberately coining an English idiom because the biblical term is so crucial for indicating shifts in narrative perspective). What follows “and there” is the precise sequence of Abimelech’s perception as he looks out through the window: first Isaac, then the act of sexual play or fondling, then the identity of the female partner in the dalliance, and at the very end, the conclusion that Rebekah must be Isaac’s wife. All this is perfectly fluent as English, and modern translations like the Revised English Bible, the New Jewish Publication Society, and Speiser that place “wife” before Rebekah spoil a nice narrative effect in the original.
But biblical syntax is also more flexible than modern English syntax, and there are hundreds of instances in the Hebrew Bible of significant syntactical inversions and, especially, emphatic first positioning of weighted terms. Syntactical inversion, however, is familiar enough in the more traditional strata of literary English, and if one adopts a general norm of decorous stylization for the prose of the translation, as I have done on the grounds I explained earlier, it becomes feasible to reproduce most of the Hebrew reconfigurations of syntax, preserving the thematic or psychological emphases they are meant to convey. The present translation does this, I think, to a greater degree than all previous English versions.
God repeatedly promises the patriarchs, “To your seed I will give this land” (e.g., Genesis 12:7), pointedly putting “your seed” at the beginning of the statement. Less rhetorically, more dramatically, when Hagar is asked by the divine messenger in the wilderness where she is going, she responds, “From Sarai my mistress I am fleeing” (Genesis 16:8), placing Sarai, the implacable source of her misery, at the beginning of the sentence. Still more strikingly, when Jacob is told by his sons that Simeon has been detained as a hostage in Egypt and that the Egyptian regent insists Benjamin be brought down to him, the old man begins his lament by saying, “Me you have bereaved” (Genesis 42:36). It is profoundly revelatory of Jacob’s psychological posture that he should place himself as the object of suffering at the very beginning of his utterance (and again at the end, in a little formal symmetry). Normally, biblical Hebrew indicates a pronominal object of a verb by attaching a suffix to the verb itself. Here, however, instead of the usual accusative suffix we get an accusative first-person pronoun—ʾoti—placed before the verb, a procedure that beautifully expresses Jacob’s self-dramatization as anguished and resentful father continually at the mercy of his sons. The “me” urgently needs to be thrust into the ear of the listener. Many translations simply suppress the inversion, but to put it decorously as “It is I” (Everett Fox) or paraphrastically as “It is always me” (New Jewish Publication Society) is to dilute the dramatic force of the original.
The sharpness and vividness of biblical style are also diluted when it is represented in English, as virtually all the versions do, by a single, indifferent level of diction. As I noted earlier, there seems to be nothing genuinely colloquial in the prose used by the narrator; but there is a palpable variation between passages that are more cadenced, more inclined to balanced structures of terms and elevated language, like the narrative of the Flood, and looser, more stylistically flexible passages. There are many instances, moreover, of single word choices that pointedly break with the stylistic decorum of the surrounding narrative, and for the most part these are fudged by the sundry English translations. When Hagar and Ishmael use up their supply of water in the wilderness, the despairing mother “flung the child under one of the bushes” (Genesis 21:15). The verb here, hishlikh, always means “to throw,” usually abruptly or violently. This is somewhat softened by the King James Version and Fox, who use “cast.” The Revised English Bible is uncomfortable with the idea of throwing a child and so translates “thrust.” Speiser and the New Jewish Publication Society Bible altogether disapprove of spasmodic maternal gestures and hence dissolve “flung” into a gentler “left.” In all such manipulation, the violence of Hagar’s action and feelings disappears. When Laban berates Jacob for running off with his daughters, he says, “What have you done, … driving my daughters like captives of the sword?” (Genesis 31:26). All the English versions represent the verb here as “carrying away” or some approximation thereof, but nahag is a term for driving animals, and is used precisely in that sense earlier in this very chapter (verse 18). To translate it otherwise is to lose the edge of brutal exaggeration in Laban’s angry words. In the throes of the great famine, the destitute Egyptians say to Joseph, “Nothing is left for our lord but our carcasses and our farmland” (Genesis 47:18). Most English versions use “bodies” instead of “carcasses,” with a couple of modern translations flattening the language even more by rendering the term as “persons.” But the Hebrew gewiyah, with the sole exception of one famous mythopoeic text in Ezekiel, invariably means “corpse” or “carcass.” What the miserable Egyptians are saying to their great overlord is that they have been reduced to little more than walking corpses, and he might as well have those. This sort of pungency can be conveyed if the translator recognizes that the Hebrew does not operate at a single bland level and that literary expression is not inevitably bound to decorous “logic.”
These last two examples were taken from dialogue, and it is chiefly in dialogue that we get small but vivid intimations of the colloquial. Again, these are eliminated in the flat regularity of conventional Bible translation. When God rebukes Abimelech for taking Sarah into his harem, the king vehemently protests that he has acted in good conscience: “Did not he say to me, ‘She is my sister’? and she, she, too, said, ‘He is my brother’” (Genesis 20:5). The repetition of “she, she, too” is a stammer or splutter of indignation clearly indicated in the Hebrew. In some English versions, it disappears altogether. The King James Version turns it into a rhetorical flourish: “she, even she herself.” Everett Fox, because of his commitment to literalism, comes closer but without quite the requisite feeling of colloquial mimesis: “and also she, she said.” The seventeen-year-old Joseph reports the first of his dreams to his brothers in the following manner: “And, look, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, look, my sheaf arose and actually [wegam] stood up, and, look, your sheaves drew round and bowed to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). The language here is surely crafted mimetically to capture the gee-gosh wonderment of this naïve adolescent who blithely assumes his brothers will share his sense of amazement at his dream. The presentative hineh (“look”) is the conventional term dreamers use to report the visual images of their dreams, perhaps partly because it readily introduces a surprising new perception, but here Joseph repeats the term three times in one breathless sentence, and the effect of naïve astonishment is equally expressed in his redundant “arose and actually stood up” (the Hebrew adverb gam most often means “also” but fairly frequently serves as well as a term of emphasis or intensification). The point is that the adolescent Joseph speaking to his brothers does not at all sound like the adult Joseph addressing Pharaoh, and a translation should not reduce either dialogue or narrator’s language to a single dead level.
In the range of diction of the biblical text, the complementary opposite to these moments of colloquial mimesis occurs in the poetic insets. Most of these in the Torah are only a line or two of verse, though Genesis and Deuteronomy conclude with relatively long poems, and Exodus incorporates the Song of the Sea as Numbers does Balaam’s oracles. Now, it has long been recognized by scholarship that biblical poetry reflects a stratum of Hebrew older than biblical prose: some of the grammatical forms are different, and there is a distinctive poetic vocabulary, a good deal of it archaic. No previous English translation has made a serious effort to represent the elevated and archaic nature of the poetic language in contradistinction to the prose, though that is clearly part of the intended literary effect of biblical narrative. The present translation tries to suggest this contrast in levels of style—through a more liberal use of syntactic inversion in the poetry, through a selective invocation of slightly archaic terms, and through the occasional deployment of rhetorical gestures broadly associated with older English poetry (like the ejaculation “O”). I wish I could have gone further in this direction, but there is a manifest danger in sounding merely quaint instead of eloquently archaic, and so the stylistic baggage of “anent” and “forsooth” had to be firmly excluded.
Two minute examples will illustrate how these discriminations of stylistic level are made in the Hebrew and how they might be conveyed in English. The enigmatic notice about the Nephilim, the human-divine hybrids of the primeval age, concludes with these words: “They are the heroes of yore, the men of renown” (Genesis 6:4). This line could conceivably be a fragment from an old mythological poem; more probably, it reads in the original as a kind of stylistic citation of the epic genre. The clearest clue to this in the Hebrew is the word “they,” which here is hemah rather than the standard hem. This variant with the extra syllable is in all likelihood an older form: it occurs four times more often in poetry than in prose, and even in prose is often reserved for rather ceremonial gestures. There is no English variant of “they” that is similarly marked as poetic diction, and my translation compensates by using “of yore” instead of the phrase “of old” adopted by the King James Version and by most later English versions. In the next chapter, the unleashing of the Deluge is reported in this line of verse, with emphatic semantic parallelism and four Hebrew accents against three in the two halves of the line: “All the wellsprings of the great deep burst, / and the casements of the heavens opened” (7:11). In order to convey a sense that this is poetry, beyond the mechanics of typography, a translator of course has to create a good deal of rhythmic regularity, but there remains a problem of diction. The Hebrew word represented by “casements” is ʾarubot. It is a rare term, occurring only a few times elsewhere in the Bible, and it clearly means “window” or “window-like niche.” The decision of several different modern translators to render it as “sluices” or “floodgates” has no philological warrant and is a conspicuous instance of translation by context. “Windows” in the King James Version is on target semantically but not stylistically. The occurrence of a cognate of ʾarubot in Ugaritic poetry, several centuries before the composition of Genesis, is further indication that the term is poetic and probably somewhat archaic for the later Hebrew audience. “Casements,” with its echoes of Keats and of Shakespeare behind Keats, seemed like a happy solution to the problem of diction. Though not all shifts in stylistic level in the Hebrew can be so readily represented by English equivalents, a translation that tries to do justice to the richness of the Hebrew must aim for some approximation of the nuances of diction in the original.
The most pervasive aspect of the magic of biblical style that has been neglected by English translators is its beautiful rhythms. An important reason for the magnetic appeal of these stories when you read them in the Hebrew is the rhythmic power of the words that convey the story. The British critic A. Alvarez has aptly described the crucial role of rhythm in all literary art: “the rhythm—the way the sounds move, combine, separate, recombine—is the vehicle for the feeling… . And without that inner movement or disturbance, the words, no matter how fetching, remain inert. In this way at least, the dynamics of poetry—and probably of all the arts—are the same as the dynamics of dreaming.” I know of no modern English translation of the Bible that is not blotted by constant patches of arrhythmia, and the result is precisely the sense of inertness of which Alvarez speaks. The King James Version, of course, has its grand rhythmic movements—cultivated people around 1611 clearly had a much firmer sense of expressive sound in language than has been true of recent generations. But these rhythms are more orotund, less powerfully compact, than those of the Hebrew, and in fact there are far more local lapses in rhythm than nostalgic readers of the King James Version may recall.
The final arbiter of rhythmic effectiveness must be the inner ear of the sensitive reader, but I would like to show that there is a vital dimension of biblical prose that translation has to engage by quoting a couple of verses in transliteration and then in three English versions, together with my own. In regard to the transliteration, it should be kept in mind that we have an approximate notion, not an exact one, of how biblical Hebrew was originally pronounced. There is some question about vowels in particular because vowel-points were added to the consonantal texts by the Masoretes—the Hebrew scholars of sixth- to tenth-century Tiberias who fixed the text of the Bible, with full punctuation, standard since then—more than a millennium after the texts were composed. There was, however, a continuous tradition for recitation of the texts on which the Masoretes drew, and anyone who has listened to the Masoretic Text read out loud can attest to its strong rhythmic integrity, which argues that its system of pronunciation was by no means an arbitrary imposition. Here is the narrative report of Noah’s entering the ark as the Deluge is unleashed (Genesis 7:13–14). (Acute accents are used to indicate accented syllables. W is used for the letter waw [pronounced as v in modern Hebrew but as w in biblical times], especially to distinguish it from bet without dagesh, pronounced as v. Ḥ indicates a light fricative [something like Spanish j]; kh represents a heavier fricative, like the German ch in Bach.)
13. Beʿétsem hayóm hazéh baʾ nóaḥ weshém-weḥám wayéfet benei-nóaḥ nóaḥ we’éshet nóaḥ ushlóshet neshéi-vanáw ʾitám ʾel hateváh. 14. Hémah wekhol-haḥayáh lemináh wekhol-habehemáh lemináh wekhol-harémes haromés ʿal-haʾárets leminéhu wekhol-haʿóf leminéhu kól tsipór kol-kanáf.
The Hebrew rhythm unfolds in groupings of three or four words marked by three or four stresses, usually with no more than one or two unstressed syllables between the stressed ones, and the sense of the words invites a slight pause between one grouping and the next. The overall effect is that of a grand solemn sweep, a sort of epic march, and that effect is reinforced in the diction by the use of hémah instead of hem for “they” at the beginning of the second verse.
Here is the King James Version:
13. In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; 14. they, and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
The first of the two verses (up to “into the ark”) is nearly perfect. I envy the freedom of the King James Version to follow the Hebrew syntax and write “entered Noah,” an inversion feasible at the beginning of the seventeenth century but a little too odd, I am afraid, at the beginning of the twenty-first. But in the second verse rhythmic difficulties emerge. The repeated “after its kind,” with its sequencing of a trochee and an iamb and its two stresses, is an ungainly equivalent of the Hebrew lemináh; “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a whole mouthful of syllables in exchange for the compactness of the Hebrew; and “every bird of every sort” falls flat as a final cadence (apart from being inaccurate as a translation).
Here is E. A. Speiser’s version of these two verses—a version, to be sure, intended to be accompanied by a philological commentary, but one that helped set a norm for recent Bible translations:
13. On the aforesaid day, Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons had entered the ark—14. they as well as every kind of beast, every kind of creature that creeps on earth, and every kind of bird, every winged thing.
The initial phrase, “on the aforesaid day,” is an ill-starred beginning in regard to diction as well as to rhythm. Something as mechanical as the list of the passengers of the ark is divided up in a way that undercuts its rhythmic momentum: at best, one can say that this version has intermittent moments of escape into rhythm.
Everett Fox, the most boldly literal of modern Bible translators, does a little better, but his attention to rhythm is by no means unflagging.
13. On that very day came Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Yefet, Noah’s sons, Noah’s wife and his three sons’ wives with them, into the Ark, 14. they and all wildlife after their kind, all herd-animals after their kind, all crawling things that crawl upon the earth after their kind, all fowl after their kind, all chirping-things, all winged-things.
The first short clause, with the courageous inversion of verb and subject, rings nicely in the ear. But the simple deletion of the “and” between Shem and Ham collapses the rhythm, and Fox’s grouping of the list is not much better rhythmically than Speiser’s. As in the King James Version, the decision to use “after” four times introduces a series of unwelcome extra syllables, and rhythm is virtually lost in “all herd-animals after their kind, all crawling things that crawl upon the earth after their kind.”
Here is my own version, far from perfect, but meant to preserve more of the phonetic compactness of the Hebrew and to avoid such glaring lapses into arrhythmia:
13. That very day, Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons together with them, came into the ark, 14. they as well as beasts of each kind and cattle of each kind and each kind of crawling thing that crawls on the earth and each kind of bird, each winged thing.
Biblical Hebrew, in sum, has a distinctive music, a lovely precision of lexical choice, a meaningful concreteness, and a suppleness of expressive syntax that by and large have been given short shrift by translators with their eyes on other goals. The present translation, whatever its imperfections, seeks to do fuller justice to all these aspects of biblical style in the hope of making the rich literary experience of the Hebrew more accessible to readers of English.
The God of Israel is referred to through a variety of names in these texts, and it is by no means self-evident how to render the names in English. The most difficult of them is the Tetragrammaton, YHWH. Modern biblical scholarship has agreed to represent this as “Yahweh,” but there are problems with using that form in translation. The original Hebrew texts of the Bible were entirely consonantal, vowel-points having been added well over a millennium after the original composition of the texts. Because by then the Tetragrammaton was deemed ineffable by Jewish tradition, it was revocalized to be pronounced as though it read ʾadonai, LORD. The confidence of biblical scholarship that the original pronunciation was in fact Yahweh may not be entirely warranted. (See the comment on Exodus 3:14.) In any case, “Yahweh” would have given the English version a certain academic-archaeological coloration that I preferred to avoid, and it would also have introduced a certain discomfort at least for some Jewish readers of the translation. I rejected the option of using “YHWH” because it cannot be pronounced whereas the dimension of sound seemed to me vital to the translation. I have therefore followed the precedent of the King James Version in representing YHWH as the LORD, the last three letters in small uppercase to indicate that, like ʾadonai, it is an anomaly, a substitution for another name.
The other most common designation of the deity is ʾelohim, a word that is plural in form (perhaps, though this is far from certain, a plural of “majesty”) but that is generally treated grammatically as a singular. “God” is the natural English equivalent, but in some contexts, where the generic character of the name seems prominent, I have rendered it with a lowercase g as “god,” and when the name is treated as a plural, especially when the narrative context involves polytheism, I have translated it as “gods.” Three other names for the deity, all borrowed from the Canaanite pantheon, occur in these books—El, Elyon, and Shaddai. Especially in poetry and at narrative moments of high solemnity, the writers appear to play on the archaic resonances of these names, and so for the most part I have given them in their Hebrew form, for in the particular contexts in which they typically appear a touch of linguistic archaeology seemed to me entirely appropriate.
Admittedly, any of the choices I have described may be debatable, but in all of them my aim has been to name the deity in English in ways that would be in keeping with the overall concert of literary effects that the translation strives to create.
III. ABOUT THE COMMENTARY
My original intention when I set out to translate Genesis in the mid-1990s had been simply to provide brief translator’s notes. Puns, wordplay in the sundry naming-speeches, and other untranslatable maneuvers of the Hebrew needed to be glossed. The reader also had to be informed, I felt, of the occasional junctures where I adopted a reading that varied from the Masoretic Text, the received Hebrew text of the Bible. Similarly, it seemed proper to offer some explanation for translation choices that were likely to surprise either the general reader or the scholarly reader, or both. In some instances, such a choice reflects a proposed new solution to a crux in the Hebrew text. More often, it is an effort to represent a more precise understanding of the Hebrew than previous translations have shown (e.g., the tree of knowledge is “lovely to look at,” not “lovely to impart wisdom”; Pharaoh puts a “golden collar” around Joseph’s neck, not a “gold chain”). And most pervasively, the little surprises in the translation are attempts to find English equivalents for the nuances of implication and the significant changes of diction in the Hebrew that have not been much regarded by previous translators. Finally, since this translation is, within the limits of readable English style, quite literal—not out of fundamentalist principle but in an effort to reproduce some of the distinctive literary effects of the original—when the interests of English intelligibility compelled me to diverge from a literal translation, I have alerted readers to the divergence and given the literal sense of the Hebrew words in a note. And beyond all such considerations of word choice and level of style, I thought it necessary to offer succinct explanations of some of the ancient Near Eastern cultural practices and social institutions that are presupposed by the narratives, for without an understanding of them it is sometimes hard to see exactly what is going on in the story.
This last category of explanation is, of course, standard fare in modern Bible commentaries, where it is sometimes dished out in very large portions, and it is admittedly intended here as an aid for the relatively uninitiated. But as I got caught up once again in this endlessly fascinating text, it struck me that there were important features that by and large had been given short shrift in the modern commentaries. In fact, a good many of my observations on stylistic choices already shaded into a discussion of the literary vehicle of the biblical narratives, and this was the point at which the tightly cinched annotation I had originally intended began to loosen its bonds and reach out to commentary. There were whole orders of questions, it seemed to me, that had been neglected or addressed only intermittently and impressionistically by the modern commentators. Where are there detectible shifts of stylistic level in the Hebrew, and why do they occur? What are the reasons for the small poetic insets in the prose narratives? What are the principles on which dialogue is organized, and how are the speakers differentiated? Where and why are there shifts from the narrator’s point of view to that of one of the characters? What are the devices of analogy, recurrent motifs, and key words that invite us to link and contrast one episode with another? How is the poetry formally constructed? And do these books, granted their composite origins, exhibit overarching thematic and structural unities or lines of development?
On all these challenging questions I have surely not said the last word. Rather I have aspired to say some helpful first words in a commentary that I have sought to hold to modest proportions. Clearly, there is no way of separating a literary illumination of the biblical text from a confrontation with philological issues, on the one side, and, perhaps more indirectly, with historical issues, on the other. In any case, the exploration of the Bible as literary expression is the central focus of this commentary, and I would hope it would be of interest to everyone, from reader at large to scholar, who is drawn to the imaginative liveliness, the complexities, the stylistic vigor, and the sheer inventiveness of these splendid ancient stories and poems and legal and moral discourses.
* The symbol ʿ represents the Hebrew consonant ayin, a glottal stop that might sound something like the Cockney pronunciation of the middle consonant of “bottle,” in which the dentalized t is replaced by a gulping sound produced from the larynx.
† Instead of a clear-cut expression of the temporal frame in which actions occur—past, present, future, past perfect, and so forth—aspects indicate chiefly whether the action has been completed or is to be completed.
‡The modern Hebrew pronunciation is vav, with the vowel sounding like the short a in a French word like bave, with which it would rhyme.
The rabbinic sage Resh Lakish once wondered why the Hebrew text in Genesis used a seemingly superfluous definite article in the phrase “And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.” (The definite article is not used for the preceding five days.) He took this to be a hidden reference to the sixth day of the month of Sivan, when according to tradition the Torah was given to Israel: “to teach us that the Holy One made a condition with all created things, saying to them, ‘If Israel accepts the Torah, you will continue to exist. If not, I shall return you to welter and waste’” (Babylonian Talmud: Shabbat 88A). This is surely an extraordinary notion to entertain about the cosmic status of a book, imagining that the very existence of the world depends on it and on Israel’s embrace of it.
Jewish tradition abounds in such extravagant celebrations of the supreme importance of this book. What is it about this text that led to such a vision of its unique standing? Are the five literary units it comprises in fact one book or five? How were they brought together? What are we to call them?
Let us begin with the question of the name for the whole. The fluctuations of the title reflect something of the oscillation of the text itself between multiplicity and unity. The Five Books of Moses does not translate any of the circulating Hebrew titles, though it does register the traditional attribution of authorship to Moses. The more compact English title, the Pentateuch, derives from a Greek equivalent for one popular Hebrew designation, the Ḥumash.* Both names simply mean the Five Books (though the “book” element is merely implied in the Hebrew term). “Pentateuch” was once the prevalent English title but has come to enjoy less currency, perhaps because faintly forbidding polysyllabic Greek terms are now less in favor. It does sound a little ponderous to the contemporary ear, and on those grounds it has not been adopted for this volume.
The fuller Hebrew designation is Ḥamishah ḥumshey torah, literally, the five fifths of the Torah. More simply, these five books are very often referred to in Hebrew and by Jews using other languages as the Torah. Torah means “teaching,” or in biblical contexts involving specific laws, something like “regulation” or “protocol,” i.e., that which is to be taught as proper procedure for a given topic. Of the Five Books, it is Deuteronomy that most often uses the term torah, sometimes joining it with sefer, “book” (as in “this book of teaching”), so that the reference widens at points from a specific teaching to all of Deuteronomy as a book. After Deuteronomy was brought together editorially with the four previous books, the designation Torah came to be extended to all five. In the traditional Hebrew division, the Torah then constituted the first, foundational unit of the three large units that make up the Hebrew Bible, which is called acronymically the Tanakh—that is, Torah, Neviʾim† (the Prophets, Former and Latter), and Ketuvim (the Writings, which is to say, everything else).
Scholarship for more than two centuries has agreed that the Five Books are drawn together from different literary sources, though there have been shifting debates about the particular identification of sources in the text and fierce differences of opinion about the dating of the sundry sources. Some extremists in recent decades have contended that the entire Torah was composed in the Persian period, beginning the late sixth century B.C.E., or even later, in Hellenistic times, but there is abundant evidence that argues against that view. Perhaps the most decisive consideration is that the Hebrew language visibly evolves over the nine centuries of biblical literary activity, with many demonstrable differences between the language current in the First Commonwealth—approximately 1000 B.C.E. to 586 B.C.E.—and the language as it was written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There is very little in the Hebrew of the Torah that could have been written in this later era. (Ronald Hendel provides a concise and trenchant marshaling of the linguistic evidence against late dating in the appendix to his Remembering Abraham.) A recent revisionist approach, purportedly based on archaeological evidence, places the composition of our texts as well as most of the Former Prophets in the seventh century B.C.E., during the reign of King Josiah, the period when, according to scholarly consensus, most of Deuteronomy was written. This contention, however, flatly ignores the philological evidence that Deuteronomy was responding to, and revising, a long-standing written legal tradition, and that the editors of the so-called Deuteronomistic History (the national chronicle that runs from Deuteronomy to the end of 2 Kings) were manifestly incorporating much older texts often strikingly different from their own writing both in style and in outlook.
The standard account offered by modern scholars of the Torah identifies four principal literary strands (together with a number of lesser ones): J, the Yahwistic strand (the divine name Yahweh is spelled with a J in German); E, the Elohistic strand; P, the Priestly strand; and D, for Deuteronomy. The first three are unevenly intertwined through Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers; P predominates in Leviticus; and all of Deuteronomy is D. J and E are so designated because of the name for the deity each characteristically uses, respectively, Yahweh and Elohim. J is sometimes thought to be the oldest of these strands, though J and E might have been approximately contemporary, the former a product of the southern kingdom of Judah, the latter deriving from literary activity in the northern kingdom of Israel. The composition of J and E, or at least of J, was once often dated to the tenth century B.C.E., perhaps even to the time of Solomon, and this is a view that still cannot be entirely dismissed. It is more common now, however, to put both a little later, perhaps in the ninth or eighth century. P, like everything else a bone of contention, seems to be both relatively early and late: some of it may have been written as early as the eighth century B.C.E., though the principal stratum is in all likelihood a product of the sixth century B.C.E., when these same Priestly writers were also drawing together editorially all the previous sources with their own work into a single text. Deuteronomy, or at any rate the bulk of Deuteronomy, is usually identified with the book purportedly discovered during the Temple renovations in the reign of Josiah in 621 B.C.E. The book presumably would have been written quite close to that date, though it might conceivably have utilized some literary materials going back as far as a century, to the reign of Hezekiah.
These sundry literary sources were probably edited and fashioned into a single book—the first properly canonical book with binding authority on the national community—sometime in the sixth century B.C.E., in the Babylonian exile. It has been proposed—not without challenge—that Ezra the Scribe, who instituted public readings of the Torah for the Judahites returned from the Babylonian exile, perhaps soon after 458 B.C.E., may have overseen the final redaction of the Torah. The finished product, as one might expect, exhibits a good many duplications, contradictions, and inconsistencies, which have been abundantly analyzed by modern scholarship. But it also possesses a degree of cohesiveness as a book, and I would like to sketch out here the general literary design, which will then receive more specific attention in the commentary and in the introductions to the individual books.
Genesis is the only one of the Five Books that is more or less continuous narrative from beginning to end, the only recurrent but limited exception being the genealogies (the “begats”), which, as I shall try to indicate in the commentary, have a function as structural and thematic markers. If this were the work of a single writer, one would say he begins at the top of his form, not slowly and circuitously, like the late Henry James, but with a tour de force, like Proust in the initial pages of In Search of Lost Time. Genesis opens with a narrative of origins—Creation and the Garden story—that is compelling in its archetypal character, its adaptation of myth to monotheistic ends, and that has set the terms, not scientifically but symbolically, for much of the way we have thought about human nature and culture ever since.
This legendary sequence, which moves from Eden at the beginning to the Tower of Babel in chapter 11, is followed by a different kind of narrative in the Patriarchal Tales that begin with Abraham in chapter 12. Nowhere else in ancient literature have the quirkiness and unpredictability of individual character and the frictions and tensions of family life—sibling rivalry, the jealousy of co-wives, the extravagance of parental favoritism—been registered with such subtlety and insight. These stories were of course written more than half a millennium after the time of the purported events, and many details reflect political considerations of a later era involving power relations among the tribes and Israel’s posture toward neighboring peoples. Yet the literary miracle of the stories is that the chief personages are nevertheless imagined with remarkable integrity and complexity as individual characters—Tamar fiercely resolved to take into her own hands her personal cause of justice; Jacob, relentlessly calculating yet also imprudently loving, who as an old man becomes a histrionic, tragically weakened father of the clan; Joseph, evolving from spoiled brat to mature and shrewd administrator; Judah, at first impetuous, in the end, penitent and lovingly devoted to his father in all his weaknesses. Only the David story would equal the Patriarchal Tales in psychological insight and in the representation of character growing and changing through long stretches of life-experience.
Genesis ends with the death of Joseph, and Exodus begins with an Egyptian king who “knew not Joseph” and with a flurry of allusions to early Genesis, so the two are clearly meant to be read in succession as a continuous narrative. The focus of the narrative, however, shifts from the emotionally fraught lives of the founding fathers and mothers to the story of the origins of the nation. The account of the enslavement in Egypt, the liberation from slavery through God’s great signs and wonders wrought against Egypt, and the march of the people led by Moses to the foot of Mount Sinai, is a kind of national epic, narrated in a cadenced prose, punctuated with refrainlike rhetorical flourishes, deploying a grand sweeping style only occasionally evidenced in Genesis. This imposing narrative has been shaped to show forth God’s overwhelming power in history, exerted against one of the great ancient kingdoms, and the forging of the nation through a spectacular chain of divine interventions that culminates in the spectacle of the revelation on the mountain of God’s imperatives to Israel.
After the Sinai epiphany, Exodus takes a turn that may seem perplexing to modern readers. Narrative is dropped—to return briefly with the arresting episode of the Golden Calf in chapters 32–34—and is replaced first by the articulation of a code of civil and criminal law and then by elaborate instructions for the erection of that Tabernacle that will be implemented in the closing chapters of the book with word-for-word repetition. Narrative continues to be set aside for almost all of the next book, Leviticus, which is devoted to a complex body of legal injunctions, mainly but not exclusively cultic. Structurally, Leviticus is the capstone of the Five Books, balancing Genesis and Exodus on one side and Numbers and Deuteronomy on the other. It will strike many as an odd sort of capstone, given its concentration on sacrificial procedure, and one is inclined to suspect that the Priestly editors of the Torah are furthering the interests of their own guild in the central placement of this book.
It should be said, however, that if these Five Books are chiefly an account of the origins and definition of the nation from its first forebears who accepted a covenant with God to the moment when the people stands on the brink of entering the Promised Land, the ancient writers conceived three major constituents of national identity and cohesion. The first, and the one that we can most readily understand, is the trajectory of the collective and of its principal figures through the medium of history. In the tracing of this trajectory, the narrative shows us how historical events shape the people, how the people achieves a sense of its identity and purpose through the pressure of events. This, in essence, is the grand narrative arc from Genesis 12 to Exodus 20. But the biblical writers assumed that Israel’s covenant with God had to be realized through institutional arrangements as well as through historical acts; and so the account of national origins and destiny required a body of cultic regulations, in which the people’s relationship with God would be enacted regularly, repeatedly, through ritual, and a body of general law governing persons, property, acts of violence of man against man, social obligations, and ethical behavior. Although it is not clear whether all of these laws were actually implemented in ancient Israel, the effect of the lengthy legal passages, both cultic and civil or criminal, is to bridge the distance of the epic illud tempus, the time-back-when, of the narrative and bring the text into the institutional present of its audience.
The Book of Numbers begins with a long roll call of the tribes, what might be regarded as a statistically buttressed realization of the imposing extent of the Israelite hosts in the wilderness before the conquest of the land. After some intervening chapters of cultic and other laws, we at last return, with a few further interruptions, to narrative—a sequence of episodes in which the recalcitrant Israelites “murmur” against Moses and Aaron, the story of the twelve spies with its disastrous outcome, and, late in the book, a series of encounters between Israel and various hostile peoples of the trans-Jordan region that block their approach to Canaan. The excitements, the grave dangers, and the grand hopes of swimming in the tide of history are all powerfully at play here, and these are vividly brought forth in the evocative poetry of Balaam’s oracles that take up chapters 23 and 24.
Although Deuteronomy, as we have already noted, was originally composed quite independently of the preceding four books and actually before a good many of the Priestly passages they contain were even written, in the place it has been given in the process of redaction, it comes to serve as a grand summary of the themes and story we have read up to this point. To be sure, this last book was intended as a fundamental revision of much earlier law, with the emphasis on one exclusive national sanctuary the principal item of revision. Nevertheless, read in sequence with the other four books, it comes across as a strong recapitulation and conclusion. Moses, standing across the Jordan from the land he will never enter and on the verge of his own death, speaks the message of the book as a long valedictory address or, perhaps more precisely, a series of addresses. He picks up, in first-person singular or plural report, some of the principal narrative elements of the preceding three books (the Genesis stories are not much involved), usually abridging them, sometimes subjecting them to revision according to the overall ideological aims of Deuteronomy. Because these speeches are represented as spoken words addressed to the people as audience, rhetoric is spectacularly prominent here in ways that have no counterparts in the first four books with their narrative and legal interests. The rhetoric itself makes this appropriate as a concluding book: after the narrative and the legislation of Genesis through Numbers, Moses on the rostrum in trans-Jordan delivers a tremendous peroration in which all the themes of liberation, revelation, and theological and ethical imperative of the previous books are deeply impressed on the imagination of the people.
All that I have said here of course does not constitute a claim that the Five Books from “When God began to create …” to “before the eyes of all Israel” form one continuous text. The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together. What we have, then, in the Five Books is a work assembled by many hands, reflecting several different viewpoints, and representing literary activity that spanned several centuries. The redacted whole nevertheless creates some sense of continuity and development, and it allows itself to be read as a forward-moving process through time and theme from book to book, yielding an overarching literary structure we can call, in the singular version of the title, the Torah. The Torah exhibits seams, fissures, and inner tensions that cannot be ignored, but it has also been artfully assembled through the ancient editorial process to cohere strongly as the foundational text of Israelite life and the cornerstone of the biblical canon.
*The symbol ḥ represents the Hebrew consonant ḥet, a light fricative that sounds something like j in Spanish.
†The symbol ʾ designates the Hebrew letter aleph, perhaps once a lightly aspirated sound but now a “silent” letter.
The first step of this large project, the draft of my translation of Genesis, was scrupulously read by my dear friend Amos Funkenstein in what proved to be, alas, the last year of his life. His acute understanding of Hebrew philology and his rare gift for coming up with unexpected solutions to familiar problems were a model that I have striven to internalize in the subsequent volumes. My amiable friend and colleague Ron Hendel read many of the books in draft, and I have palpably benefited from his good sense and his commanding knowledge of biblical scholarship. Because I write by hand and am dependent on transcribers to convert my scrawl into an electronic text, I am grateful to Janet Livingstone, who did a large part of the whole and then had to withdraw for reasons of health, and to Jenna Scarpelli and Stefan Gutermuth, who in turn took over for the last two phases of the project. I am grateful to my copyeditor, Trent Duffy, who patiently and scrupulously went through these many pages, detecting inconsistencies, spotting typos, correcting inaccurate cross-references, and much more. Over the years, support for this assistance and for other research expenses was provided by funds from the Class of 1937 Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. After my retirement, I benefited from a research grant for emeriti professors from the Mellon Foundation and then from a generous three-year grant provided by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.
Much of what I have to say in my commentary about the details of the narrative presupposes that Genesis is a coherent book, what we moderns would think of as a work of literature. But, as many readers may be aware, two centuries of biblical scholarship have generally assumed that Genesis—and indeed each of the Five Books of Moses as well as most other biblical texts—is not strictly speaking a book but rather an accretion of sundry traditions, shot through with disjunctions and contradictions, and accumulated in an uneven editorial process over several centuries. There are knotty issues of the dating and the evolution of the text that have been debated by generations of scholars and that I shall not pretend to resolve, but I do think that the historical and textual criticism of the Bible is not so damaging to a literary reading of the text as is often assumed.
The biblical conception of a book was clearly far more open-ended than any notion current in our own culture, with its assumptions of known authorship and legal copyright. The very difference in the technology of bookmaking is emblematic. For us, a book is a printed object boxed in between two covers, with title and author emblazoned on the front cover and the year of publication indicated on the copyright page. The biblical term that comes closest to “book” is sefer. Etymologically, it means “something recounted,” but its primary sense is “scroll,” and it can refer to anything written on a scroll—a letter, a relatively brief unit within a longer composition, or a book more or less in our sense. A scroll is not a text shut in between covers, and additional swathes of scroll can be stitched onto it, which seems to have been a very common biblical practice. A book in the biblical sphere was assumed to be a product of anonymous tradition. The only ones in the biblical corpus that stipulate the names of their authors, in superscriptions at the beginning, are the prophetic books, but even in this case, later prophecies by different prophet-poets could be tacked onto the earlier scrolls, and the earlier scrolls perhaps might even be edited to fit better into a continuous book with the later accretions.
Let me say just a few words about the different strands that are detectable in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, and then I shall explain why I make very little of them in my commentary. Since well back into the nineteenth century, it has been the consensus of biblical scholarship that Genesis, together with two of the next three books of the Pentateuch, is woven together from three distinct literary sources or “documents”—the Yahwistic document (spelled with an initial capital J in German and hence designated J), the Elohistic document (E), and the Priestly document (P). Most scholars have concluded that J and E are considerably earlier than P, which could be as late as the sixth century B.C.E. (the period after the return from the Babylonian exile). According to one older view, J would be a product of the tenth century B.C.E. (early in the Davidic dynasty) and E perhaps a century later, though many would make both at least several generations later; another common position is that J and E are roughly contemporary, the latter having been composed in the northern kingdom, Israel, the former in the southern kingdom, Judah. Scholars identify the different sources on the basis of different names used for the deity (emblematically, YHWH in J and Elohim in E), on the basis of certain stylistic features, and by virtue of what are claimed to be different ideological and historical assumptions. It is generally thought that the three sources were redacted into a single text quite early in the period of the Return to Zion, probably in Priestly circles.
This rapid summary may make matters sound pat, but in fact all the details of the Documentary Hypothesis are continually, and often quite vehemently, debated. There are strong differences of opinion about the dating of the various sources, especially J and E. Serious questions have been raised as to whether either J or E is the work of a single writer or school, and various scholars have contended that in fact there is a J1, J2, J3, and so forth. Enormous energy has been invested in discriminating the precise boundaries between one document and the next, but disagreement on minute identifications continues to abound: one scholar will break down a particular text into an alternation between J and E, with an occasional conflation of the two and perhaps a brief intrusion from P, seeking to refine the documentary categories phrase by phrase, while another will call the whole passage “an authentic production of J.” (I should add that efforts to distinguish between J and E on stylistic grounds have been quite unconvincing.) It is small wonder that the Documentary Hypothesis, whatever its general validity, has begun to look as though it has reached a point of diminishing returns, and many younger scholars, showing signs of restlessness with source criticism, have been exploring other approaches—literary, anthropological, sociological, and so forth—to the Bible.
The informing assumption of my translation and commentary is that the edited version of Genesis—the so-called redacted text—which has come down to us, though not without certain limited contradictions and disparate elements, has powerful coherence as a literary work, and that this coherence is above all what we need to address as readers. One need not claim that Genesis is a unitary artwork, like, say, a novel by Henry James, in order to grant it integrity as a book. There are other instances of works of art that evolve over the centuries, like the cathedrals of medieval Europe, and are the product of many hands, involving an elaborate process of editing, like some of the greatest Hollywood films. From where we stand, it is difficult to know to what extent the biblical redactors felt free to modify or reshape their inherited sources and to what extent they felt obliged to reproduce them integrally, permitting themselves only an occasional editorial bridge or brief gloss. What seems quite clear, however, is that the redactors had a strong and often subtle sense of thematic and narrative purposefulness in the way they wove together the inherited literary strands, and the notion of some scholars that they were actuated by a mechanical compulsion to incorporate old traditions at all costs is not sustained by a scrutiny of the text, with only a few marginal exceptions.
It is quite apparent that a concept of composite artistry, of literary composition through a collage of textual materials, was generally assumed to be normal procedure in ancient Israelite culture. The technique of collage could come into play at two stages. A writer in the first instance might feel free to introduce into his own narrative, as an integral textual unit, a genealogy, an etiological tale, an ethnographic table, or a vestige of a mythological story, or perhaps to re-create one of the aforementioned without an explicit textual source. Then the redactor, in shaping the final version of the text, could place disparate textual materials at junctures that would give the completed text the thematic definition or the large formal punctuation he sought. I am deeply convinced that conventional biblical scholarship has been trigger-happy in using the arsenal of text-critical categories, proclaiming contradiction wherever there is the slightest internal tension in the text, seeing every repetition as evidence of a duplication of sources, everywhere tuning in to the static of transmission, not to the complex music of the redacted story.
The reader will consequently discover that this commentary refers only occasionally and obliquely to the source analysis of Genesis. For even where such analysis may be convincing, it seems to me a good deal less interesting than the subtle workings of the literary whole represented by the redacted text. As an attentive reader of other works of narrative literature, I have kept in mind that there are many kinds of ambiguity and contradiction, and abundant varieties of repetition, that are entirely purposeful, and that are essential features of the distinctive vehicle of literary experience. I have constantly sought, in both the translation and the commentary, to make this biblical text accessible as a book to be read, which is surely what was intended by its authors and redactors. To that end, I discovered that some of the medieval Hebrew commentators were often more helpful than nearly all the modern ones, with their predominantly text-critical and historical concerns. Rashi (acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Itsḥaqi, 1040–1105, France) and Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167, traveled from Spain to Italy, France, and England) are the most often cited here; they are two of the great readers of the Middle Ages, and there is still much we can learn from them.
A few brief remarks about the structure of Genesis as a book are in order. Genesis comprises two large literary units—the Primeval History (chapters 1–11) and the Patriarchal Tales (chapters 12–50). The two differ not only in subject but to some extent in style and perspective. The approach to the history of Israel and Israel’s relationship with God that will be the material of the rest of the Hebrew Bible is undertaken through gradually narrowing concentric circles: first an account of the origins of the world, of the vegetable and animal kingdom and of humankind, then a narrative explanation of the origins of all the known peoples, from Greece to Africa to Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and of the primary institutions of civilization, including the memorable fable about the source of linguistic division. The Mesopotamian family of Terah is introduced at the end of this universal history in chapter 11, and then when God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees at the beginning of chapter 12 we move on to the story of the beginnings of the Israelite nation, though the national focus of the narrative is given moral depth because the universal perspective of the first part of Genesis is never really forgotten. Some critics have plausibly imagined this whole large process of biblical literature as a divine experiment with the quirky and unpredictable stuff of human freedom, an experiment plagued by repeated failure and dedicated to renewed attempts: first Adam and Eve, then the generation of Noah, then the builders of the Tower of Babel, and finally Abraham and his seed.
Although the Creation story with which the Primeval History begins does look forward to the proliferation of humanity and the human conquest of the natural world, by and large the first eleven chapters of Genesis are concerned with origins, not eventualities—with the past, not the future: “he was the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe” (4:21), the narrator says of Jubal, one of the antediluvians. The literal phrasing of the Hebrew here, as in a series of analogous verses, is “he was the father of… .” That idiom is emblematic of the Primeval History, which is really a record of the archetypal fathers, a genealogy of human institutions and of ethnic and linguistic identity. Although the Patriarchal Tales are in one obvious way also the story of a chain of fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the horizon these tales constantly invoke is the future, not the past. God repeatedly tells Abraham what He intends to do with and for the offspring of Abraham in time to come, both in the impending near future of Egyptian enslavement and in the long-term future of national greatness. It is perfectly apt that the Patriarchal Tales should conclude with Jacob’s deathbed poem envisaging the destiny of the future tribes of Israel, which he prefaces with the words “Gather round, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the days to come” (49:1).
The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is fablelike or legendary, and sometimes residually mythic. The human actors in these stories are kept at a certain distance, and seem more generalized types than individual characters with distinctive personal histories. The style tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences. As everywhere in biblical narrative, dialogue is an important vehicle, but in the Primeval History it does not have the central role it will play later, and one finds few of the touches of vivid mimesis that make dialogue in the Patriarchal Tales so brilliant an instrument for the representation of human—and human and divine—interactions. In sum, this rapid report of the distant early stages of the human story adopts something of a distancing procedure in the style and the narrative modes with which it tells the story.
God’s very first words to Abraham at the beginning of chapter 12 enjoin him to abandon land, birthplace, and father’s house. These very terms, or at least this very sphere, will become the arena of the narrative to the end of Genesis. The human creature is now to be represented not against the background of the heavens and the earth and civilization as such but rather within the tense and constricted theater of the paternal domain, in tent and wheat field and sheepfold, in the minute rhythms of quotidian existence, working out all hopes of grand destiny in the coil of familial relationships, the internecine, sometimes deadly, warring of brothers and fathers and sons and wives. In keeping with this major shift in focus from the Primeval History to the Patriarchal Tales, style and narrative mode shift as well. The studied formality of the first eleven chapters—epitomized in the symmetries and the intricate repetition of word and sound in the story of the Tower of Babel—gives way to a more flexible and varied prose. Dialogue is accorded more prominence and embodies a more lively realism. When, for example, Sarai gives Abram her slavegirl Hagar as a concubine, and the proudly pregnant Hagar then treats her with disdain, the matriarch berates her husband in the following fashion: “This outrage against me is because of you! I myself put my slavegirl in your embrace and when she saw she had conceived, I became slight in her eyes” (16:5). Sarai’s first sentence here has an explosive compactness in the Hebrew, being only two words, ḥamasi ʿalekha, that resists translation. In any case, these lines smoldering with the fires of female resentment convey a sense of living speech and complexity of feeling and relationship one does not encounter before the Patriarchal Tales: the frustrated long-barren wife at cross-purposes with herself and with her husband, first aspiring to maternity through the surrogate of her slavegirl, then after the fact of her new co-wife’s pregnancy, tasting a new humiliation, indignant at the slave’s presumption, ready to blame her husband, who has been only the instrument of her will. Such vivid immediacy in the representation of the densely problematic nature of individual lives in everyday settings is an innovation not only in comparison with the Primeval History but also in comparison with virtually all of ancient literature.
What nevertheless strongly binds the two large units of the Book of Genesis is both outlook and theme. The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen, as I have suggested, as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history. The very peregrinations of the family back and forth between Mesopotamia and Canaan and down to Egypt intimate that its scope involves not just the land Israel has been promised but the wider reach of known cultures. National existence, moreover, is emphatically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation. The Creation story repeatedly highlights the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, while the Patriarchal Tales, in the very process of frequently echoing this language of fertility from the opening chapters, make clear that procreation, far from being an automatic biological process, is fraught with dangers, is constantly under the threat of being deflected or cut off. Abraham must live long years with the seeming mockery of a divine promise of numberless offspring as he and his wife advance childless into hoary old age. Near the end of the book, Jacob’s whole family fears it may perish in the great famine, and Joseph must assure his brothers that God has sent him ahead of them to Egypt in order to sustain life. Genesis begins with the making of heaven and earth and all life, and ends with the image of a mummy—Joseph’s—in a coffin. But implicit in the end is a promise of more life to come, of irrepressible procreation, and that renewal of creation will be manifested, even under the weight of oppression, at the beginning of Exodus. Genesis, then, works with disparate materials, puts together its story with two large and very different building blocks, but nevertheless achieves the cohesiveness, the continuity of theme and motif, and the sense of completion of an architectonically conceived book. Although it looks forward to its sequel, it stands as a book, inviting our attention as an audience that follows the tale from beginning to end.
