Footnotes

2.

See “Where Is Biblical Debir?” BAR 01:01.

3.

There are some insignificant differences in the two passages. We will be using the text of Judges in this article.

4.

The Mishnah (from the Hebrew, “to repeat”) is a body of Jewish oral law, specifically, the collection of oral laws compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince in the second century C.E.

Endnotes

1.

In medieval liturgical Hebrew S|NH| meant “descend”; modern Israeli Hebrew has added the sense “parachute.” See Avraham Even-Shoshan, Ha-milon Ha-hadaás (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1979), vol. 5, p. 2245. But these usages are based on the traditional interpretation of the biblical verses and are therefore not independent evidence.

2.

Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, transl. S.P. Tregelles (London: Samuel Bagster, 1894).

3.

Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: University Press, 1951 [1906]), p. 856. This edition was overseen by Godfrey Driver, Samuel R. Driver’s son.

4.

Georg Fohrer, Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary of the Old Testament, transl. W. Johnson (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973).

5.

Godfrey R. Driver, “Problems of Interpretation in the Heptateuch,” Mélanges Bibliques: Rédigés en l’Honneur de André Robert, Travaux de l’Institute Catholique de Paris 4, (Paris: L’Institute Catholique de Paris, 1957), pp. 73–75. I am grateful to Suzanne Siegel of the Hunter College library for help in tracking down Driver’s far-flung publications.

6.

Arthur Gibson, “S|NH| in Judges I 14: NEB and AV Translations,” Vetus Testamentum, 26 (1976), pp. 275–283. Solomon Mandelkern (Qonqordansiah le-Tanakh [Concordance on the Bible] [Leipzig, 1896; rev. ed., New York: Shulsinger, 1955], p. 999, s.v. S|NH|) attributes the Septuagint renderings at Judges 1:14 and Joshua 15:18 to a reading tisrah rather than tisnah; but the NEB translation assumes the traditional reading tisnah See L.H. Brockington, The Hebrew Text of the Old Testament: The Readings Adopted by the Translators of the New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge, UK: University Presses, 1973), pp. 32, 35.

7.

Roger A. Bullard, “The New English Bible,” in The word of God: A Guide to English Versions of the Bible, ed. Lloyd R. Bailey (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), pp. 55–56. And he says of “oozed” at 4:21: “the translators have apparently given it a different meaning. (I don’t know this; they may well be letting the hypothetical root-meaning of the Arabic root color this rendering as well.) In the first place, it is not clear how they have determined the subject of this verb, since it is not expressed. … What the panel has done with this word is a mystery to me.”

8.

F.F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations from the Earliest English Versions to the New English Bible (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 248.

9.

I wish to thank Donald Kraus for his graciousness in searching Oxford’s files and library in order to answer my questions.

10.

John Beekman and John Callow, Translating the Word of God (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1986), p. 105.

11.

Peter Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” in Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism, ed. D.J. Enright, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 164–165. In later editions, the Jerusalem Bible replaced “happy” with “blessed.”

12.

Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” p. 160. So, too, p. 164: “There is a great deal of this polite drawing-room chat in most new translations of the Bible, as if sin were not bad but only bad form.”

13.

Brown et al. (A Hebrew and English Lexicon, p. 116) give the etymology as a compound of beli “without” and ya‘al “worth, use, profit.” See also Mandelkern, Concordance, p. 202; Theodor H. Gaster, “Belial,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, columns 428–429.

14.

G. Driver, “Colloquialisms in the Old Testament,” in Mélanges Marcel Cohen: Études de Linguistique, Ethnographie et Sciences Connexes, ed. David Cohen (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), p. 232.

15.

David Daiches, “Translating the Bible,” Commentary (May 1970), p. 63.

16.

Richard Elliott Friedman, “Sacred History/Sacred Literature,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature: Composition and Redaction of the Biblical Text, ed. Friedman, Near Eastern Studies 22 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 1.

17.

Following the NJPS translation. See Genesis Rabbah 36:8: “R. Yudan said, … ‘and they read in the book of the Law of God’ refers to miqra’ [the Hebrew text]; meporasû refers to targum [a translation].” Similar statements are found in Babylonian Talmud Megillah 3a and Nedarim 37b, and Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 28b. For “targum” as “translation” rather than “translation into Aramaic,” see Genesis Rabbah, ed. H. Freedman, pp. 293–294, vol. 1 in Midrash Rabbah, ed. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1939).

18.

See Megillah, ed. Simon, pp. 151–154, in The Babylonian Talmud, ed. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1938).

19.

Simon, Megillah, pp. 151–154.

20.

See “H|iddushei Halakhot ve-Aggadot,” by Samuel Eliezar Edels (“Maharsha”), in Tractate Megillah (New York: Pardes, 1944), appendix, p. 10, col. 1. See also Adin Steinsaltz’s marginalia to Megillah 25b (p. 109) in his edition of Talmud Bavli (Jerusalem: Israel Institute for Talmudic Publications, 1983). I am indebted to my father, Rabbi Michael Minkoff, for these references.

21.

Katharine Barnwell, “Towards Acceptable Translations,” Notes on Translation 95 (1983), pp. 19–26.

22.

John Banker, “How Can We Improve Translations Stylistically?” Notes on Translation 94 (1983), pp. 16–21.

23.

Bruce Hollenbach, “Translating Without Offense,” Notes on Translation 119 (1987), pp. 50–54.

24.

David Crystal and Derek Davy, Investigating English Style (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 149–150.