easy to decide which manuscript reading of a given section to translate. Nevertheless, such decisions must be made, for each verse and chapter, in order to even begin the process of producing the translation you now have.
More on Method: Textual Criticism
“Textual criticism” is not general study of a text. Instead, textual criticism studies the diverse ancient manuscript copies of biblical texts, analyzing their development and providing data that can be used to choose which reading of a biblical text to follow. Over the centuries, scribes have introduced tens of thousands of minor changes into biblical texts as they have copied them by hand. Some changes were introduced by accident, as when a scribe might accidentally copy a given line twice. Other changes seem more intentional, where a scribe seems to have added a clarification of a place name or a theological correction or expansion. The ancient copies are often termed manuscript witnesses because they “witness” to diverse forms of these hand‐copied texts.
FIGURE 0.1 Scholarly edition of the same text as in Figure 0.2, below. In contrast to that early manuscript this edition has chapter and verse numbers along with scholarly notes at the bottom about alternative Hebrew readings to the ones given in the body of the text.
In search of the best reading
A translator or translation committee often needs to decide word by word whether to follow a reading in one manuscript tradition or another. To do this, most scholars use “critical editions” prepared by textual critics that gather and compare the readings found in ancient biblical manuscripts (see Figure 0.1). For the Hebrew Bible, the usual comparison point is the Masoretic text (MT), the authoritative version of the Hebrew text that was produced by Jewish scribes in the medieval period. Most critical editions feature a high quality version of the Masoretic text as the main section of each page. Notes in the critical edition then provide an overview of variant readings from other important manuscript witnesses for the Hebrew Bible, such as the biblical manuscripts found at the Dead Sea (Qumran), the Pentateuch preserved by the Samaritan community (around Samaria in the north), and very early translations of early Hebrew manuscripts, especially the Septuagint (LXX), an ancient set of translations of various biblical books into Greek. Drawing on this data, a translator then must decide on which ancient manuscript reading to follow and translate, often determining that some ancient readings are errors, while other manuscripts witness to an earlier, better reading, at least for a given verse or phrase.
On occasion, a biblical scholar may judge that all of the manuscript witnesses preserve an error. In such cases, that scholar may propose a reading that is not preserved in any manuscript. This second method of correction is called conjectural emendation.
Second, each contemporary translation must build on its translators’ philological knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, or (in a few cases) Aramaic. None of these languages is spoken today in the form in which it is found in the Bible, and scholars often must depend on comparisons of biblical expressions with similar expressions in related languages. For example, medieval Jewish scholars such as Ibn Ezra made much progress in understanding certain aspects of Hebrew through comparing rare Hebrew expressions with similar words and grammatical formations in Arabic. Then, in the past one hundred fifty years, scholars of biblical Hebrew began benefiting from analysis of more ancient languages similar to Hebrew, such as Akkadian and Ugaritic, as texts in these languages were discovered, deciphered, and analyzed. Insights from comparison with these latter languages are not reflected in older translations, but they are incorporated to varying extents in many recent ones.
These advances in knowledge about the text and language of the Bible mean that academic study of the Bible requires use of an up‐to‐date biblical translation. The King James Version (also known as the KJV or “Authorized Version”), though beautiful and cherished by many, is not up to date. It was completed four hundred years ago. Scholars then knew far less about Hebrew and Greek than they do now. Moreover, the KJV translation is based on unusually corrupt manuscripts with more errors and expansions than the higher quality manuscripts used for translations today. This is why you need to acquire and use a more recent translation of the Bible for this introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, rather than the King James Version.
Translations also vary in religious perspective. The New Jewish Publication Society translation (NJPS) obviously comes out of a tradition of Jewish interpretation of the Tanakh. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) and New American Bible (NAB) were produced by Catholic scholars. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV; preceded by the Revised Standard Version – RSV) aims to be an ecumenical translation, but it is part of a line of Protestant revisions of the King James Version. The New International Version (NIV; now available in updated form as Today’s New International Version) is also Protestant and was conceived as an evangelical alternative to the RSV/NRSV.
Translations also vary in style: whether they aim to stay as close to the biblical languages as possible or whether they aim for maximum readability. Formal correspondence translations, while still containing interpretation on the part of translators, aim to stay as close as possible to word‐for‐word translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek text. This can make them good tools for study, but it also makes them more difficult to understand. Translations that tend toward formal correspondence include the NRSV, NIV, and the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Other translations tend toward dynamic equivalence, which aims for equivalent meaning but not a word‐for‐word translation. This results in translations that are more readable but also may contain some more interpretation on the part of translators. Examples of translations that tend toward dynamic equivalence include the NJB, NAB, and several other translations produced by Protestant groups, such as the Good News Translation (GNT; also known as the “Good News Bible” and as TEV – Today’s English Version) and the Contemporary English Version (CEV). These translations should be distinguished from resources such as the Living Bible or the Amplified Bible. The latter are not direct translations of the Hebrew and Greek texts, but paraphrases or expansions of other translations. For example, the Living Bible is a paraphrase of the nineteenth‐century American Standard Version. Such paraphrase subtly adds yet another level of interpretation between the reader and the Hebrew text and is not helpful for academic work on the Bible. This becomes evident, for example, in cases like the one given at the end of this chapter in Appendix 1, where the Living Bible adds a long section to Isa 52:15 (anticipating Jesus) that has no parallel in the Hebrew text.
One more way that contemporary Bible translations vary is in the extent to which they aim to use gender‐neutral language, such as “humanity” instead of “mankind.” Though older writing conventions endorsed the use of “man” for “human” or “he” for “he or she,” many now argue that general use of such male‐focused language reinforces male domination of women. This has led to two levels of revision of older translations that used such male‐specific language. In some cases, past English translators had used male‐specific words to translate Hebrew or Greek expressions that were gender neutral. The recent revision of the NIV translation, Today’s New International Version (TNIV), aims to correct such mistranslations to what is termed “gender‐accurate” English expressions. For example, where the King James Version and some other versions render the first part of Gen 1:26 as “Let us make man in
