The Torah, The Prophets and The Writings—A New Jewish Translation

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The publication of the third section of the Hebrew Bible, The Writings (Kethubim), marks the completion of the new Jewish Publication Society Bible translation, abbreviated NJPS.^a This is the first Bible translation executed by a panel of Jewish scholars since the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible completed in Alexandria, Egypt, two millennia ago.

Like the Septuagint, the new translation was not translated at one time by one group of scholars. The Torah (the five books of Moses) was first published in 1963. The Five Megilloth^b and Jonah was published in 1969. The Prophets was published in 1978, and The Writings appeared in 1982.

Because each volume represents the viewpoint of one committee or individual, it is impossible to speak of “the” NJPS translation as one work. The Torah bears the stamp largely of Harry Orlinsky, who prepared the original draft of the translation for the committee consisting of himself, E. A. Speiser and H. L. Ginsberg. The Prophets reflects the influence of Ginsberg. The Writings was completed by an entirely different committee, including BAR Advisory Board members Jonas Greenfield and Nahum Sarna. The third member of the committee for The Writings was Moshe Greenberg. Unlike the earlier volumes, The Writings does not bear the stamp of any individual member of the committee. Any translation of an ancient work is a major undertaking. The translator must attempt to enter the mind of the original author and sense the environment in which he or she worked. The translator must master the languages and styles used in antiquity. Finally, he or she must be able to transfer this understanding of an ancient culture into a modern language, culturally foreign from the original.

The translation of the Hebrew Bible presents its own unique problems. First, it is unclear which text should be the basis of a translation. The first complete, vocalized Hebrew Bible texts date only from the early eleventh century A.D. This is between 13 and 22 centuries later than the original Hebrew text. The complete vocalized Hebrew Bibles from the eleventh century and later are relatively uniform and represent one text tradition. These texts are called Masoretic texts after the Masoretes, Jewish scribes and scholars who flourished in the second part of the first millennium. These Masoretes preserved the reading traditions of the consonantal Hebrew text current in their own communities. The Masoretes did this by inserting vowel points, as well as accent marks and cantillation notes, to indicate the proper liturgical reading.

The tradition preserved in the Masoretic text, abbreviated MT by scholars, is not, however, the only extant textual tradition of the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the late third century B.C. to the first century A.D., preserve many readings which vary from the MT. The early translations of the Bible into Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac, completed in the late centuries B.C. and in the early centuries A.D., sometimes contain a text different from the MT. Sometimes early rabbinic midrashim (expositions of the Biblical text) quote Hebrew texts which also differ from the MT.

Although the MT is the earliest complete vocalized Hebrew text of the Bible, and it incorporates the efforts of Jewish scholars over the centuries to preserve the correct reading tradition of their sacred text, it does contain readings that are inaccurate. 064Sometimes, better readings are contained in the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls or in the ancient translations. This presents the Bible translator with a fundamental problem in every verse rendered—which text, the Masoretic text, the Dead Sea Scroll text, or the text of an ancient translation, should serve as the basis for translation and interpretation?

The new Jewish Publication Society translation is based on the MT, the Jewish textus receptus. The implications of this are best understood from a comparison of the NJPS to, for example, the New English Bible (NEB), completed under the guidance of the late British Semitist, Sir G. R. Driver. Psalm 116:8, for example, reads in the NJPS, “You (God) have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.” This is a straightforward rendition of the Hebrew MT. NEB translates, however, “He has rescued me from death, and my feet from stumbling.” This translation is partially based on the Greek Septuagint. Where the MT reads “You,” the Septuagint translates “He.” In this, the NEB follows the Septuagint. The NEB also relies on the Peshitta, a Syriac (Aramaic) translation which omits “my eyes from tears,” while the MT contains these words. It is uncertain if these variants in the ancient translations originate with the translators from Hebrew to Greek or Syriac, or were actually found in an old Hebrew manuscript from which the translators worked. Furthermore, even if we could prove that the ancient Hebrew text used by the ancient translators was different from the MT, should we assume that that Hebrew text is superior to the MT? Such issues are very difficult to evaluate, and no standard procedure either steadfastly adhering to the MT, or consistently following the divergent ancient translations or the Dead Sea Scrolls, is sound. Each variant presents its own problems.

In many cases the text of the MT cannot be original; another ancient version may preserve a correct reading, or a sound alternate reading may be reconstructed, without the help of the versions, by conjectural emendation. Nevertheless, the NJPS translators have decided to translate one Hebrew text, the MT, rather than combining ancient texts to create an eclectic original text (Urtext), which might never have existed. Conflate texts, such as the NEB translation of Psalm 116, which is based one-third on the Hebrew text, one-third on the Greek translation and one-third on the Syriac translation, are not found in the NJPS.

Despite their decision to follow the MT, there are several places where NJPS translators do not do so; this is particularly so in The Prophets. The changes to the MT are indicated by notes that state, “Emendation yields … ,” or, “so 1QIs^a [the large Isaiah scroll found near the Dead Sea],” or, “These words are supplied in some of the ancient versions.” Thus, each reader is told that the ancient version presents a “better” reading than the MT, and he or she may decide if the editors’ opinion is correct. For example, Ezekiel 3:12, an important text in the liturgy, is translated, “Blessed is the presence of the LORD in His place.” However, the careful reader will note that this phrase is contextually odd and syntactically difficult. Thus, a note indicates “Emendation yields: ‘as the Presence of the LORD rose from where it stood.’” This emendation is very plausible because it explains all of the difficulties in the verse and involves only one change in the text—the word brwk (blessed) is changed to brwm (as … rose), based on the assumption that an ancient m () could have easily accidentally changed to the graphically similar k (). Although this change is very likely, the editors have nevertheless refrained from inserting it into the text, since they are translating a particular, extant textual tradition—the MT. The editors have, however, rendered us a double favor—they have given us a translation of the text as it exists in the MT and have indicated the more likely text in a note.

Another difficulty in translating the Hebrew Bible, perhaps the most serious of all, is in understanding the meaning of the original text. Unlike the New Testament, whose language, Koiné Greek, is known from many contemporaneous inscriptions, contemporaneous Hebrew inscriptions outside the Bible are sparse. Thus, the main sources for understanding the meaning of a word contained in the Hebrew Bible are not its usages outside the Bible, but its uses elsewhere within the Bible and its uses in related Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Ugaritic or Arabic. Methodological difficulties abound since defining a Biblical word by its use in the Bible may result in circular reasoning, and defining a word by its use in a related language may give the Hebrew word a meaning it never had. Imagine trying to interpret the sentence, “Read 065this book,” if the only way to reconstruct the meaning of the English “read” were to compare it to the etymologically related German, “rater,” “to advise”!

The Bible is also difficult to translate because many parts of it are recognized as literary masterpieces. A translation must thus attempt to capture this beauty. Reviewers of the early volumes of the NJPS have noted their clarity of expression and their literary beauty. This is certainly continued in The Writings, where the editors have been particularly careful to use a particular English word for each Hebrew word, whenever possible. This one-to-one correspondence allows much of the structure of the original text, which is often based on subtle repetitions of words or roots, to shine through. For example, in Psalm 121 the psalmist expresses his belief in God’s perpetual watchfulness, and therefore helpfulness, through a six-fold repetition of the root sûmr (“keep,” “guard”), through the use of yanum (“slumber”) twice in consecutive verses, and by a double repetition of God’s name (YHWH) in the proclamation ending the psalm. Any translation that attempts to convey the power, and thus the full meaning of the original, must reflect this structure.

All of these repetitions are reflected in NJPS. Though NEB translates the root sûmr as “guard” or “guardian,” it translates yanum as “sleep” in verse 3 and as “slumber” in verse 4. Thus, the reader of this translation would not realize that verse 4 picks up on the idea of verse 3, emphasizing and expanding it. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) consistently translates each of these terms but uses the weak “keep/keeper” to render sûmr. Certainly “guardian” as in “the LORD is your guardian,” which is used in NJPS and in many other translations, more accurately captures the strength of the Hebrew sûmr than the RSV’s “The LORD is your keeper.” Finally, the Jerusalem Bible fails to capture the power of the Psalm’s ending, by rendering the final YHWH as “He.” (Perhaps the Jerusalem Bible is deviating from the traditional Hebrew text, but this is not noted, and is methodologically unsound in this instance.) Thus, NJPS here comes closest the capturing the eloquent power of the psalm, both by consistently following the patterns of the Hebrew and by carefully choosing the appropriate translation equivalents.

In the NJPS translation this one-to-one correspondence between English and Hebrew terms often extends beyond individual psalms or chapters, encompassing entire books and sometimes the entire Hebrew Bible. But occasional mistakes are inevitable. Proverbs 7:27 describes the wiles of dangerous “alien women.” In their zeal to be picturesque, the NJPS translation tells us that “Her house is a highway to Sheol.” The Hebrew word rendered “highway” is derek. But derek is translated differently (as “ways”) two verses earlier. Thus, the editors have inadvertently broken the literary connection between verses 25 and 27. Similarly, for no obvious reason, the kesil«, always a “dullard” in Proverbs, appears as “the foolish” in Psalm 49:10. Such inconsistencies are more glaring between the volumes edited by different committees. Ma’al baherem is translated “proscription” in Joshua 22:20 and “committed a trespass against the proscribed thing” in 1 Chronicles 2:7. These inconsistencies should eventually be corrected.

We have mentioned the difficulty in uncovering the true meaning of an ancient Hebrew word. The NJPS makes judicious use of comparative Semitics study for this purpose. The editors have carefully weighed the many innovative suggestions for new meanings of Hebrew words and roots based on ancient and modern Semitic languages, but they have often retained the more traditional meaning of the Hebrew word. This contrasts sharply with the NEB which makes free use of cognate languages, even when it is unlikely that a Hebrew word has the same meaning as an equivalent Semitic word, or in cases where an innovative suggestion is contextually impossible.

I will give only one example to illustrate 066how the NJPS uses comparative linguistics to elucidate a Biblical text. The difficult word mimsak appears twice in the Bible, in Isaiah 65:11 and in Proverbs 23:30. Neither context is specific enough to define the word clearly. This root is traditionally understood from the root msk “to mix” as “mixed/spiced/well-blended wine.” NJPS, however, translates “the cups.” This likely rendering is based in part on an Ugaritic tablet which includes a list of vessels. Mmsk is listed immediately after spl, “a bowl,” suggesting that they might be related items. In Isaiah 65:11 the mimsak is being “filled”; thus a vessel, such as a cup, seems a more appropriate translation than a mixed drink. In Proverbs 23:30, excessive drinkers are depicted as “investigating” or “probing” a mimsak. Here too, a vessel whose bottom is being searched as its contents are drained is appropriate. Thus the NJPS translates Proverbs 23:30: “Those whom wine keeps till the small hours. Those who gather to drain the cups.” This translation, not found in the other major English translations, probably comes closest to the original Hebrew.

On the other hand, many new translations in the NJPS are based on a (re)discovery of what a Hebrew word means through internal Hebrew linguistics, rather than the discovery of a new relationship between a Hebrew word and its Semitic relative. This is unique to the NJPS, and is fostered by the editors’ constant consultation of the medieval Jewish commentators. These commentators, working without concordances, had an unrivalled mastery of the text and often saw interrelationships between Hebrew words in different places in the Bible which have eluded modern scholarship. In Job 18:12, Job’s “friend” Bildad describes the evildoer. RSV translates the difficult Hebrew into nearly unintelligible English: “His strength (‘on) is hunger-bitten, and calamity is ready for his standing (sela>).” NEB translates, “For all his vigor (‘on), he is paralyzed with fear; strong as he is, disaster awaits him (sela>).‘This is certainly a clear image, but it has little relation to the extant Hebrew text as traditionally understood using classical Hebrew grammar. NJPS translates, “His progeny (‘on) hunger, disaster awaits his wife (sela>).”

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This translation is based largely on the (Jewish) Aramaic Targum, an early translation of the Bible with a long and complex history and on the comments of Rashi, the noted eleventh-century Jewish French exegete. The Targum and Rashi must have sensitized the translators to texts such as Psalm 78:51 and 105:36, where ‘on is parallel to “firstborn,” and thus may connote “progeny,” and to Genesis 2, where a sela>, literally a “rib,” is used for the creation of the first woman This is one of the many cases in the NJPS where the translators have carefully sifted through the vast body of Jewish exegesis to rediscover a translation often different from, and superior to, the standard translations.

The preceding comments have suggested how difficult, and often subjective, the translation of the Bible is. A final virtue of the NJPS is the editors’ frequent acknowledgement of these difficulties. Instead of indicating that a text is obscure or very difficult, many modern translations simply venture a guess at its meaning without indicating that their translation is guesswork. The NJPS often notes, “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain.” Such notes may enclose one or two words, a chapter, such as Psalm 68 (“The coherence of this psalm and the meaning of many of its passages are uncertain.”), or the entire poetic section of Job. These frequent notes remind the reader of the many difficulties of the Hebrew Bible, and should caution him or her against drawing far reaching historical or theological conclusions about particular texts whose meanings remain unclear.

Nothing can convey the qualities of the NJPS translation as well as a comparison of this translation to three commonly used translations. I have chosen Psalm 121 for this comparison, since it is particularly beautiful and well-known. Readers who know Hebrew are encouraged to compare these translations to the original, to see how the NJPS most closely approaches the Hebrew’s meaning. A careful comparison uncovers the substantial differences among the translations and suggests that the NJPS is unrivalled as a precise and elegant rendering of the Hebrew text.

The literary clarity, philological precision and humble attitude toward our ability to understand the Bible make the NJPS translation invaluable for both casual Bible readers and serious Bible students. I hope that the contradictions and inaccuracies in the three separate volumes of The Torah, The Prophets and The Writings will be resolved and that the Jewish Publication Society will soon publish a one-volume English edition for the lay reader, and a Hebrew-English edition for the student of the Hebrew Bible.