Birthing Eternity

Why Language Is Important I once had the privilege of witnessing the completion of a Sefer Torah, or Torah scroll, an event I will never forget. The room at the synagogue was hushed in awe as the Israeli scribe lovingly unwrapped the scroll from its protective cloth and laid it on a specially prepared worktable. The scribe, a professional trained in the ancient art of writing and preserving scrolls, had handwritten the Sefer Torah, a scroll containing the fi ve books of Moses. At that point, after more than a year of painstaking labor, the scroll was ready for the last phase in its creation: to be mounted on the wooden housing, called the aitz chaiim (���� ח ����, or Tree of Life), which would enable readers to open the scroll without touching it. Only the sounds of the scribe opening the scroll and lashing its edge to the spindle that formed the core of the Tree of Life punctuated the silence. He unrolled the mounted scroll and revealed the fi nal section of its contents for all to see. The parchment glowed amber. The inked letters that formed perfect rows of Hebrew calligraphy caught the light as they rose slightly from the page. The writing was exquisite, the perfect blend of ornament—the tops of most of the letters were adorned with taggin, crown-like embellishments—and meticulous clarity, making it highly readable even for a child versed in the aleph-bet.1 xiv The Art of the Scribe The Jews did an outstanding job of preserving the Tanakh, which roughly corresponds to what Christians refer to as the Old Testament and contains the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. Over the centuries, highly trained scribes spent their lives copying scrolls of sacred writings in highly standardized calligraphy, all without errors. However, this was only part of the story. The art of the scribe included processing the skins of kosher animals into parchment, which remained fl exible far longer than paper. It also involved carving quill tips from prescribed feathers at just the right angle for transcribing calligraphy with the precision of a printing press and preparing ink that would remain black without fading for untold years. These exacting standards of production combined with a ritualized code regarding the proper storage and handling of scrolls have allowed them to remain intact for as long as 800 years.2 The Dead Sea Scrolls, created using similar technology, survived more than 2,000 years under extraordinary conditions. These ancient scrolls are testimony that the Jewish scribes have done an equally good job at preserving the words of Scripture over the centuries, ensuring each copy was perfect, without error. Once complete, a scroll was checked for mistakes by three rabbis; today’s scribes can do an additional check of their work using computerized scanning.3 The Art of the Translator Most of us don’t read the Bible in its original languages, the Old Testament in Hebrew with a smattering of Aramaic, and the New Testament in an ancient dialect of Greek. We diligently pore over our favorite English translation—or translations—assuming the scholars who made them accurately preserved their meaning. Indeed, the art of the translator is as important as that of the scribe. The careful work of the scribes minimized several common pitfalls in document translation: text that is diffi cult to read or even illegible, words that are misspelled or miscopied, and source documents that are incomplete. In many ways, the problems faced by Bible translators are more challenging than those of the scribes. Anyone who has studied a xv foreign language knows the source of diffi culties: languages are not the same. Years ago, when I took my fi rst foreign language class, I was frustrated by the fact that translation was not like math, that it was not simply a case of deciphering the French or Hebrew “code” into English. Worldwide Translation, a school for translators, explains the challenge this way: There are some particular problems in the translation process: problems of ambiguity, problems that originate from structural and lexical differences between languages and multiword units like idioms and collocations. Another problem would be the grammar because there are several constructions of grammar poorly understood, in the sense that it isn’t clear how they should be represented, or what rules should be used to describe them.4 Sometimes a single word could be translated correctly into any of a dozen English words, each with its own nuance. For example, the Hebrew word halak ( הלד ) has been translated as “go, went, walk, followed, come, depart, gone, continually, enter, go forth, conversant, waxed, wrought, exercise, travail, run, move, pass away, traverse” and fi guratively refers to a manner of living. Which is the correct one? Which best expresses the author’s intent? The writers of the Authorized King James Version chose to translate halak as “go” 217 times, “walk” 156 times, “come” 16 times and a variety of other words more than a hundred times.5 Similarly, half a dozen Hebrew words, each with its own inference, are translated as “go” in Genesis alone. The English word “praise” was used to translate nearly a dozen Hebrew words!6 Compounding the problem is the fact that English has undergone signifi cant changes since Tyndale and the King James translators worked. A quick review of Shakespeare, a contemporary of these scholars, should dispel any doubts on this score. Today, the word “keep” has a rather anemic meaning, and actually appears on a list of “weak” verbs best avoided. However, the word once referred to a castle keep, the most secure, most easily defended place in a fortress, used to store items of high value or essential for survival. In this xvi context, the command to “keep” something is a command to guard it with every fi ber of your being as if your very life depended on it. Hebrew and Greek have grammatical structures very different from English, most clearly demonstrated by their sentence structure. In Hebrew, each verse is a sentence, and many would be marked incomplete in English. The preciseness of Greek, on the other hand, allows a complexity unthinkable in English. A Greek sentence can be pages long, functioning more like an English paragraph or chapter. A sentence is meant to convey a complete idea, with every detail and nuance woven together in an intricate web of dependent and independent clauses, prepositional phrases, and compound sections. This forces the translator to carve up these grammatical behemoths into more-manageable pieces, often losing sight of the meaning or intent of the original sentence. As a result, a verse that appears to be a complete sentence in English may actually be a subordinate clause of a subordinate clause and convey only a small portion of the whole idea being expressed. Greek and Hebrew contain verb tenses that English can only approximate. For example, Hebrew includes a causative verb tense (hiphil) which refers to the subject causing action of the verb: instead of “he ate,” it means “he caused to eat.”7 Greek often uses the aorist tense, which conveys the concept of a verb without regard for the timing of the action, past, present, or future.8 When the original language uses a tense or phrase with no clear English translation or when the literal meaning is awkward in English, the translator often resorts to “ironing out” the cumbersome differences between the languages, sometimes inadvertently watering down the meaning. Despite the numerous challenges in translating Scripture, those who took on the task were dedicated to giving others the Bible in their own languages.