Coarse Language In The Bible?

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In an article I recently wrote in Bible Review^a on the problems of Bible translating, I distinguished two styles of translation: reader-centered (covert) and text-centered (overt). The first style of translation tries to convey to the reader the impression of an original author in the language of the translation. The second style of translation retains linguistic and cultural elements of the original; therefore, the reader in the new language may feel like a stranger looking in from the outside. A reader’s letter to the editor of BR picks up on this distinction to raise some other interesting issues. Here is the letter:

“‘Overt’ and ‘covert,’ as Harvey Minkoff uses them, are well chosen when applied to the changes made by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Study Edition of the New English Bible with Apocrypha.

“The predecessor of the Oxford Study Edition, the NEB with Apocrypha printed by Oxford and Cambridge University Presses in 1970, lists Judges 1:14 as: ‘As she sat on the ass, she broke wind, and Caleb said, “What do you mean by that?”’ In the newer Study Edition, the ‘same’ NEB (printed in New York by the Oxford University Press) has: ‘As she sat on the ass, she made a noise, and Caleb said, “What did you mean by that?”’

“When I spoke with Oxford in New York, an editor explained to me that, while the ‘break wind’ translation continues in the English printed NEB, the ‘covert’ translation (Minkoff’s word) is used in the American edition. ‘That sounds like scholarship knuckling under to political pressure,’ I responded. Some American Christian groups objected to the wording, he explained—to his credit, a bit sheepishly. The editor went on to explain that there is a good deal of language in the OT which is ‘coarse’ and for which audiences are not ready. When I asked whether there had been other changes made as a result of political pressure, he assured me there had been none.

“Bible Review could do us all a service and get Minkoff and Oxford to discuss this particular passage, as well as to air other areas where we delicate American mortals are being protected from the coarse language of scripture, and where we might expect such protection in the future.”

Because I wanted to show the pervasive significance of the distinction between reader-centered (covert) translations and text-centered (overt) translations, I concentrated in my article on normal vocabulary, word order and repetition. But, of course, where the culture and language themselves are central to the text, as with taboo and euphemism, the problems of translation are multiplied by an additional set of conflicting demands and considerations. And this is the key to the problem raised by Professor Reeves.

Let us look first at the instance Reeves cites. The books of Joshua and Judges recount the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan. A short episode repeated in both books concerns the conquest of the city of Kiriath-Sepher, the old name 023of Debir, a site about eight miles southwest of Hebron and now identified as Tell Rabud.^b In the British edition of the New English Bible (NEB), this episode (Joshua 15:15–19 = Judges 1:12–15) reads as follows:^c

“From there they marched against the inhabitants of Debir, formerly called Kiriath-Sepher. Caleb said, ‘Whoever attacks Kiriath-Sepher and captures it, to him I will give my daughter Achsah in marriage.’ Othniel, son of Caleb’s younger brother Kenaz, captured it, and Caleb gave him his daughter Achsah. When she came to him, he incited her to ask her father for a piece of land. As she sat on the ass, she broke wind, and Caleb said, ‘What did you mean by that?’ She replied, ‘I want to ask a favor of you. You have put me in this dry Negeb; you must give me pools of water as well,’ So Caleb gave her the upper pool and the lower pool.”

What happened here—at least according to the British edition of the NEB—is that Othniel, the hero of Kiriath-Sepher, was unhappy with the dowry that came with his bride Achsah—some waterless land in the Negev desert. So Othniel complained to his new wife. She, in turn, complained— in a particularly gross way, according to the British edition of the NEB—to her father, Caleb, so he gave her some additional land containing springs.

In his letter to the editor, Reeves notes that the Oxford Study Edition of the NEB, which was written for an American audience, changes a critical verse from “As she sat on the ass, she broke wind” to “As she sat on the ass, she made a noise.” Reeves wonders where else “we delicate American mortals are being protected from the coarse language of scripture.”

The ironic reference to “delicate Americans” and “coarse language of scripture” captures an important point. But it is by no means a simple one. The issue can be divided into two parts— first, the problems specific to this passage and, second, the role of euphemism in general.

The meaning of this passage is uncertain at several places, as we can readily see by comparing the latter half of the NEB translation to the same passage in the new Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation:

“His younger kinsman, Othniel the Kenizzite, captured it; and Caleb gave him his daughter Achsah in marriage. When she came [to him], she induced him to ask her father for some property. She dismounted from her donkey, and Caleb asked her, ‘What is the matter?’ She replied, ‘Give me a present, for you have given me away as Negeb-land; give me springs of water.’ And Caleb gave her Upper and Lower Gulloth.”

Among the questions raised by these two renderings are: Is Othniel the son of Caleb’s younger brother Kenaz, or is he a Kenizzite and Caleb’s younger kinsman? Did Othniel incite Achsah, or did Achsah induce Othniel? Was 024Achsah given land in the Negeb, or was she given away like Negeb-land, that is, without a dowry? Did Caleb give her pools, or a place named Gulloth, which by coincidence happens to mean “pools”? Finally, did Achsah break wind to express her dissatisfaction, or did she get down from her donkey?

As for what Achsah did before she asked her father for land with water, the Hebrew word at the crux is tisnah (jnxt).

Like the NJPS, most other translations understand tisnah as “descend.” Thus, at Judges 1:14 and Joshua 15:18 the King James Version (KJV) has “she lighted from off her ass” and the Jerusalem Bible (JB) has “she jumped down from her donkey.”

The verbal root of tisnah is S|NH| (the ti– is the prefix for third-person-singular feminine). No other words based on this root occur in the Hebrew Bible. But tisnah itself does occur in one other passage, Judges 4:21. This is the story of how Jael kills the sleeping Sisera with a tent spike. The KJV has “[she] smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it [tisnah] into the ground” and the NJPS has “[she] drove the pin through his temple till it went down [tisnah] to the ground.” Though they differ as to whether the implied subject of tisnah is Jael or the spike (a feminine noun in Hebrew), both translations understand the verb as carrying the idea of descent.¹

In contrast, the NEB reads: “[she] drove the peg into his skull as he lay sound asleep. His brains oozed out [tisnah] on the ground.” Here, tisnah is rendered “oozed” and the subject “brains” is added, presumably being required by the context.

Because the root S|NH| is rare and obscure, the traditional translation is, in fact, a scholarly hypothesis. The 1894 translation of Wilhelm Gesenius’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures gives the definition “to descend, to let oneself down, e.g., from an ass.”² But the later A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, also based on Gesenius’s monumental German work, adds “meaning inferred fr[om] context.”³ And Georg Fohrer’s Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary of the Old Testament, citing Joshua 15:18 and Judges 1:14, says: “clap the hands ?, bend down ?”⁴

The innovation in the NEB that relates this root to breaking wind reflects in large part the scholarship of Godfrey Driver, an eminent Semiticist and Arabic specialist who served as chairman of the NEB’s Old Testament Translation Panel. Driver’s argument is as follows:

“the LXX [the Septuagint, a third-century B.C.E. Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible] says [in this passage] ‘and she murmured and cried out’ and the Vulg[ate, a fourth-century C.E. Latin translation] says ‘and she sighed,’ both renderings implying that she expressed her displeasure by making some sort of noise. … What snh really means is ‘belched’ or ‘broke wind.’”⁵

And he then gives examples from Akkadian, Arabic and Greek to show that “breaking wind was an extremely common expression in the ancient world for indicating disgust or contempt.”

But this suggestion has not found general acceptance among Bible scholars and translators. Arthur Gibson notes that the translators of the Septuagint rendered the two identical occurrences of tisnah at Judges 1:14 and Joshua 15:18 with three different Greek words implying, significantly, an oral sound— and at Judges 4:21 added a fourth meaning, “it descended.” He concludes that “they were confused, or guessing” and therefore cannot be invoked as support for Driver’s innovation.⁶

Roger A. Bullard, one of the translators of Today’s English Version of the Bible, characterizes the NEB’s rendering of tisnah at Judges 1:14 as “teased out of Arabic.”⁷ And F. F. Bruce complains that in the NEB “conjecture has been resorted to much more freely than in most of the older English versions—or even in others of more recent date.”⁸

I asked Donald Kraus, senior editor of the Bible Department of Oxford University Press in New York, why the translation “she broke wind” in the British edition of the NEB was changed to “she made a noise” in the Oxford Study Edition. He suggested that it may have been motivated by the scholarly objections to the British edition’s translation, combined with the feeling that an American audience might not be comfortable with the British version.⁹

His own preference, Kraus said, is for translations to be as accurate as possible. But he acknowledged that in the case of the Bible, which is used for public readings and in liturgical contexts, other considerations come into play.

And this brings us to the larger issue—euphemisms in the Bible and in Bible translations.

Euphemism is the substitution of a less charged word for one that may be taboo, offensive or disagreeable. As such, euphemisms appear in the original text of the Bible itself.

For example, the Hebrew text itself sometimes uses the word “bless,” rather than “curse” to avoid the phrase “cursing God” —which would, of course, constitute blasphemy. One such occurrence is in the famous story of Naboth’s vineyard. King Ahab of Israel has everything royalty could want— except the vineyard of his neighbor Naboth. Ahab’s Phoenician wife Jezebel hatches a plan whereby Naboth will be killed; Ahab can then seize Naboth’s vineyard. (This actually happens, and the prophet Elijah confronts the king with the famous line “Hast thou killed and also taken possession?”) Jezebel’s plan to have Naboth killed involves getting two scoundrels to accuse Naboth, falsely, of cursing God. For this crime, the unjustly accused Naboth is stoned to death. But in the two relevant passages the Hebrew text says that the scoundrels charged Naboth with blessing God, not cursing him (1 Kings 21:10, 13). Obviously, the text recoils from using blasphemous words like “cursing God.” Almost all English translations, however, translate “bless” (barak, ûrb) as “curse,” “revile” or “blaspheme” God:

NEB: charge him with cursing God and the king.

NJPS: You have reviled God and the king.

JB: You have cursed God and the king.

KJV: Thou didst blaspheme God and the king.

Elsewhere in the Bible, to avoid a disagreeable thought, death is presented through various metaphors: “sleep an endless sleep” (Jeremiah 51:39), “go the way of all the earth” (1 Kings 2:2), “be gathered to his people” (Genesis 49:33). And bodily functions frequently receive veiled reference: “Adam knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1), “the manner of women” (Genesis 18:11), “that which comes out of you” (Deuteronomy 23:13 [verse 14 in the Hebrew]).

Since what is 025taboo, offensive or disagreeable varies from culture to culture, translating a text containing euphemisms presents a special problem. What requires a euphemism in the original language may not warrant one in the translation; and what the original author had no qualms about saying explicitly may require circumlocution in the culture of the translation. As I have already noted, English translations of 1 Kings 21:10 do not show the same fear of blasphemy as the Hebrew original did. And some modern translations boldly proclaim their liberation in matters of sex and personal hygiene. Another example appears in Deuteronomy 23:12–13 (in Hebrew, verses 13–14) with the Hebrew se’ateka (ûtax):

NEB: You shall have a sign outside the camp showing where you can withdraw. With your equipment you will have a trowel, and when you squat outside, you shall scrape a hole with it and then turn and cover your excrement.

NJPS: Further, there shall be an area for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself. With your gear you shall have a spike, and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement.

JB: You must have a latrine outside the camp, and go out to this; and you must have a mattock among your equipment, and with this mattock, when you go outside to ease yourself, you must dig a hole and cover your excrement.

KJV: Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad: And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.

In contrast, John Beekman and John Callow note that many cultures mention adultery euphemistically rather than directly: in Chinantee, Otomi, Trique, Mixtec and Chol of Mexico, the required locution is “talk to another woman/man”; among the Colorado of Ecuador it is “walk with others”; and the Tagabili of the Philippines speak of “stepping on his/her partner.”¹⁰

As for things that the authors of the Bible were willing to say but modern English translators find embarrassing, Peter Mullen, a vicar in the diocese of York, suggests that sin, the devil and the hereafter make us moderns uncomfortable, so some translations try to avoid these subjects. For example, in the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes are customarily translated “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” etc. (Matthew 5:3–11), but the Jerusalem Bible substitutes “happy” for “blessed.” 026Mullen calls this “a failure of nerve”:

“Reward in heaven is being played down here, one suspects, in deference to modern man’s famous doubts about the reality of the world to come. But these beatitudes speak of a more enduring benediction than anything conveyed by the word ‘happy.’ … They are so bland, these translators. Everything must be inoffensive, bland.”¹¹

Mullen also suspects “a typical piece of the NEB’s daintiness” in the use of “good-for-nothing” in 1 Samuel 25:25 where the KJV has “man of Belial” (see the comparisons above). “The characterization of evil,” he writes, “has indeed suffered the debilitating effect of the friendly euphemism if the Devil’s son is only good-for-nothing.”¹²

Mullen is on less firm ground here, since Hebrew beliya‘al (l[ylb) may very well originally have meant “worthless” and become a name for the devil only after the period of the Hebrew Bible.¹³ But the charge of daintiness merits consideration.

Taboo or offensive expressions, in contrast to euphemisms, function, in large part, to shock. Especially for a person who is known to avoid such language, using it can carry great force.

The Hebrew Bible regularly uses the root SðKB (bk) “lie (with)” as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. But on four occasions the more direct verb SðGL (lg) occurs. Scholars agree that SðGL was a word for sexual intercourse, but it may or may not have been vulgar (therefore, we cannot supply an exact English translation). In each of the four instances, SðGL appears as part of a threat or condemnation, and always with the clear intention of shocking the audience:

Deuteronomy 28:28–30: The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness and dismay. … You will be betrothed to a woman, but a stranger will SðGL her.

Isaiah 13:16: Their infants will be smashed on the ground, their houses ransacked, and their wives SðGL[ed].

Jeremiah 3:1–2: You have played the harlot with many lovers. … Where haven’t you been SðGL[ed]?

Zechariah 14:2: “The city shall be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women SðGL[ed].

Obviously, the authors of these lines deliberately chose strong language—if not actual vulgarity—in order to horrify, upset and rattle their audience. Everything they love, the audience is told, will be abused, debased, destroyed. What have English translations done? Taking the first example, Deuteronomy 28:30, as a representative case, we find that, except for the NEB, the English translations miss the tone entirely. The Hebrew word is gritty and down-to-earth. The original audience hearing these threats and condemnations gasped at the language and shuddered at the image. “Enjoy her” and “have her” simply do not deliver the required emotional punch. And even “ravish” does not fit in Jeremiah 3:2, where the woman is being accused of seeking lovers to SðGL. Yet the NEB uses “ravished” there as well.

In addition, modern English translations, unfortunately, do not usually distinguish the voice of the biblical narrator from the voices of the characters in the stories. All speak the same homogenized language. In the original Hebrew, the characters in the stories sometimes speak a more colloquial, “spoken” language, the quality of which is often lost in translation. Thus, for example, Godfrey Driver of the NEB, wanted Exodus 2:9 to read “Hey, you! The child—get it suckled for me,” instead of “Here is the child. Suckle him for me.”¹⁴ So, too, David Daiches proposed “Hey! Listen to this dream I’ve had” (Genesis 37:6) for KJV’s “Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed.”¹⁵

On occasion, the characters in the stories even use language some would consider too coarse for the Bible. Take the story of how David got his wife Abigail (1 Samuel 25). Abigail, a beautiful, intelligent woman is married to a wealthy man named Nabal. Nabal’s shepherds tend their flocks near David’s band of outlaws, who treat them kindly and even protect them. When David’s young men later seek hospitality from Nabal, they are ungratefully turned away. For this, the Lord strikes down Nabal, and Abigail becomes David’s wife. But this gets ahead of the story. When it is reported to David that his young men are unceremoniously turned away by Nabal, David becomes furious. He sets out with his band to massacre Nabal and the men of his family. David swears (1 Samuel 25:22): “May God curse me if I leave alive masûtin beqir (ryqb ÷ytm).” While the Hebrew words are not vulgar, this is a coarse way to refer to men. It is used here by an angry David about to murder Nabal and the men of his family. The King James Version translates it as “any 027that pisseth against the wall.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says that piss was borrowed from French as a euphemism and was not impolite at the time of the KJV. The situation is now different, of course, and this fact accounts for our surprise at Job 18:11 in the NEB: “The terrors of death suddenly beset him and make him piss over his feet.”

To see what modern English translations do with this coarse expression for “any male” in the story about David and Nabal in 1 Samuel, see the comparisons. The NJPS translates the relevant phrase “a single male,” but it also indicates in a footnote: “Lit[erally,] ‘one who pees against a wall.’” Only the NEB’s “a single mother’s son” even attempts to capture the original tone through a parallel English idiom.

A similar problem arises in 2 Kings 18:27 where the emissary of the Assyrians who are besieging Jerusalem calls to the Israelite soldiers on the city walls to surrender. All hope is lost, he tells them. Their allies have fallen, their gods have abandoned them, and they will soon be reduced to eating their own—and drinking their own—.

The Hebrew words in those two slots are quite explicit soldier-talk: µhyrj and µhyny. A footnote to this passage in the Jerusalem Bible calls our attention to the “graphic description of the straits to which a beleaguered city is reduced.” Yet, JB’s translation, like other modern English versions, sanitizes the horror by having the angry Assyrian soldier threaten to make his enemies “eat their own dung and drink their own urine.”

But what can a modern translation do? This is, after all, the Bible. And that is the crux.

The original authors did not sit down with the intention of writing “The Bible.” But what they wrote became the Bible. As Richard Elliott Friedman says:

“One confronts questions of conception. What did the author of any given portion of the book perceive his work to be? Did he see himself as a historian, a narrator, an artist; in the service of history, God, the king, the people of Israel? One must then apply the same questions to the redactors [editors]. … Are the conceptions of author and author, or author and redactor, at odds?”¹⁶

And then one must add the conceptions of the audience, the translator and history.

Whatever the biblical authors and editors thought they were doing, they didn’t conceive of the Bible as we do, as history has interpreted it. Whether they were prophets calling on a specific population to repent or historians illustrating God’s hand in Israel’s destiny, these authors clearly did not picture themselves writing pericopes for sermons and noble sentiments for use in the liturgy. In other words, their purpose was not to produce a Bible for public reading in houses of worship.

However, once the Bible became “sacred”—as distinct from inspired—it did enter the liturgy. And then the sometimes coarse language became a problem.

When the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile, many of them spoke Aramaic, the official language of the Babylonian and Persian empires; many did not even understand Hebrew (as witness, for example, Nehemiah 13:23–27). Therefore when Ezra read aloud to the people from the Torah in Hebrew, his assistants were “translating and giving the sense, so they [the people] understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8).¹⁷ This practice of having a translator for public readings of the Bible lasted for hundreds of years.

By the second century C.E. the Mishnah^d (Megillah 4:10) codified the following rules for public readings:

“The incident of Reuben [in which he sleeps with his father’s concubine, Genesis 35:22] is read in the synagogue but not translated. … The stories of David [how he desired Bathsheba and killed her husband, 2 Samuel 11:2–17] and Amnon [who raped his half-sister Tamar, 2 Samuel 13:1–14] are read but not translated.”¹⁸

And the later talmudic commentary adds (Megillah 25b):

“The rabbis taught: Wherever an indelicate expression is written in the text, we substitute a more polite one in reading. For yisûgalenah [hnlgy from SðGL, Deuteronomy 28:30, as I have already illustrated earlier in this article] read yµisûkabenah [hnbky from SðKB, ‘lie down with’] … For horehem … sûinehem [µhyny … µhyrj, ‘excrement … urine,’ 2 Kings 18:27] read soÕatam … meme raglehem [µhylgr ymym … µtawx ‘deposit … feet-water’].”¹⁹

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Why did the rabbis feel that they had to be more polite than the text of the Bible itself? The 17th-century commentator Rabbi Samuel Eliezer Edels explains that a distinction must be made between private study and public worship: Since the written text was not amended, anyone who took the trouble to study Hebrew could read the original, but the dignity of communal worship required the substitution of less explicit language during public readings. And comments by other Hebrew scholars raise the intriguing possibility that even when the Hebrew word itself was not coarse, the cognate word in the everyday colloquial Aramaic or Arabic of the masses might be vulgar. In this case, the unlearned, catching a familiar word or two in the Hebrew, would be misled or shocked.²⁰

This concern for the sensibilities of the unlearned and unsophisticated remains high in translators’ priorities, cropping up time and again, for example, in Notes on Translation, a forum for the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators. In one article, Katharine Barnwell warns us to “remember that the meaning of a translation is not what the translator wants or aims to communicate, but what the hearer actually understands.” She thus argues that a translation of the Bible “must be such that it is acceptable to the church.”²¹ John Banker in the same publication believes that “the translator needs to study receptor language figures of speech to find out how they can be used to produce naturalness and proper style in the translation.” But he realizes that “first, the translator must determine whether a particular stylistic feature is appropriate to scripture in general” and he admits that “if the church leaders are against using the feature … it would seem wise in most cases to forgo the use of [it].”²²

Bruce Hollenbach urges translators to respect the varied religious feelings of the target community. Noting that many denominations look to the Bible, he writes, “We want everyone who might possibly be willing and able to read these translated Scriptures to do so and be exposed more richly to the Word of God by doing so.” So it follows that “we should be careful to exclude from our translation any doctrinal bias that could unnecessarily offend people.”²³ While Hollenbach’s major concern is doctrine, his point applies equally well to offense raised by language. Significantly, just when reformers were updating the language of biblical translations and liturgy, David Crystal and Derek Davy, two pioneers in the study of linguistic style, warned against introducing “a variety of English which is too colloquial or informal,” since it would blur “the distinctive purpose of religious language.”²⁴

To a large extent, then, a translator must decide whether the intended audience is scholars or the general public, whether the use will be silent reading or liturgy and whether the milieu is the home or the house of worship. Optimally, both members of each pair will be accommodated. But in practice one or the other must be favored whenever incompatibility occurs. And, as I was constantly aware while writing this article, the only certainty is that whatever the decision, it will offend someone.

22 In an article I recently wrote in Bible Reviewa on the problems of Bible translating, I distinguished two styles of translation: reader-centered (covert) and text-centered (overt). The first style of translation tries to convey to the reader the impression of an original author in the language of the translation. The second style of translation retains linguistic and cultural elements of the original; therefore, the reader in the new language may feel like a stranger looking in from the outside. A reader’s letter to the editor of BR picks up on this distinction to raise some other interesting issues. […]