THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA

ARTICLE I.

THE LATEST TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.

BY HENRY M. WHITNEY.

I. PROBLEMS AND DIFFICULTIES.

THE difficulties of translating the Bible into English lie in three languages,-the Hebrew, the Hellenistic Greek, and our mother-tongue.

Hebrew is probably as different from English as any other language, living or dead. It is dead, and dead in a far distant past. It is so different from English that it may have had an entirely independent origin, as it certainly had an entirely independent development. What little resemblance there is between Hebrew and English is wholly external, the result of the influence of Hebrew upon the English vocabulary and idiom through the text of the Bible itself. Imagine a language having no present tense, no perfect, no imperfect, no pluperfect, no futureperfect, no subjunctive, no optative, no infinitive! We are ready to think that a human being might about as well exist without three or four of his five senses,-until we remember what beauty and majesty and eloquence are to be found in the English Bible, and remember, also, that those VOL. LIX. No. 234. I

wonderful things came directly from this same stiff and impossible Hebrew speech. The Hebrew noun has almost no range of cases, and what cases it has seem a curious antipode to the cases of any Indo-European tongue. It has no neuter gender. Its prepositions often put one into painful perplexity as to which, among the delicately differentiated English prepositions, is the one that ought to be used. Such things as intricate structure, the play of might, could, should, and would, the difference between would have been and were, and especially between will and shall, and pretty much all nice distinction, all subtle shading, have to be detected, if they are to be detected, chiefly through the sympathy of the translator with the Semitic frame of mind.

Hence the cases are frequent where there is a wide range of possible translation: many of these are noted in the margin of the English Revision (that of 1885), and still more in that of the recent American Revision, but a still larger proportion are left unmarked. It should seem that, if intelligibility is so much to be desired that the American version has been supplied with thousands of references to parallel passages, the margin should carry also all possible renderings that the translators themselves considered.1

The Hebrew language has been so long dead that some of the words in the Hebrew Bible are still of very doubtful significance, and some have come to be understood in an entirely different sense. Both these assertions are especially true of animals and plants: the "great owl" of King James's version became in 1885 the "arrowsnake," a creature unknown to zoology, and in 1901 the "dartsnake," a creature that we know. In Ezra iv. 17, “Peace, and at such a time," has become (E. R. and A. R.), "Peace, and so forth." It is no small part of the task of the translator to weigh the probabilities connected with the differ1E.g., Isa. liii. 1: Over whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed?

ent senses and to decide which shall stand in the text, which shall go into the margin, and which shall be denied appearance upon the printed page.

And the text itself is well known to have been strangely abused: it was an easy and a pious task for a copyist to highten the glory of the chosen people by adding one jot to the text or one tittle to a round-cornered letter, if thereby the number that fell in battle with the chosen people was immensely increased. It is believed by many that a zealous copyist inserted an n into the name of Moses in Judg. xviii. 30, that Moses might not lose sanctity by being charged with an especially unworthy descendant, while Manasseh, to whom the man was thus neatly transferred, had no especial sanctity to be maintained. Smith's Bible Dictionary, with all its conservatism, thinks that certain verses must be interpolations. It is well known that in each Testament the first great task of the revisers of 1885 was to decide upon the text.

The Greek of the New Testament has its own difficulties, appreciable only by him who studies it long and deeply. It is not Attic Greek; it is not the Greek of any great or standard author; it has no poetry, no drama. The works of Josephus, the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, and the New Testament, are its most notable content. It was to some degree a demoralized dialect, not held up to literary standards by great authors, or by rhetorical or oratorical schools. It abounded with Latin, Hebrew, and other words, not only as nouns but as verbs. It was full of Hebraisms, not only in vocabulary, but in phrases and turns of thought; such as going "before the face" of God,1 "walking" in ordinances," and "tasting" of death. There is a striking example of this in the beginning of the Gospel according to Luke: the author opens with four stately and elaborate verses, making one long, carefully-balanced