Translating the Bible [Portion of Article]

The Hebrew text of the Old Testament now in use is a highly standardized text that was consolidated, fine-tuned, and faithfully transmitted by Jewish scholars and scribes of the Middle Ages, called the Masoretes. Using as their guide the oral and written traditions that had been handed down from the ancient rabbis, the Masoretes worked to preserve and safeguard what they believed to be the definitive text of the Hebrew Bible. The same pious motives led them to suppress all competing textual traditions. In addition to conservation, they were responsible for an exceptionally important innovation. Up to the time of the Masoretes the Hebrew language had been written with consonants only. Hebrew, like Arabic, can be written pretty adequately using only consonants, but on occasion this creates ambiguity. A passive verb may be misconstrued as active, an attached preposition can be mistaken for part of a verbal root, and so on. The Masoretes, to ensure that the sacred words of Scripture would be understood and also pronounced correctly, employed vowel signs in the form of tiny strokes and dots, and added these to the consonantal text. They even added accents and cantillation symbols to guarantee the proper chanting of biblical passages in worship services. The resultant text, known today as the Masoretic text, exhibits only the most minute, semantically inconsequential variations from one manuscript to another.

The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic text, upon which all modern editions of the Hebrew Biblc are based, date from the ninth to the eleventh century A.D. -- more than a thousand years after the latest book of the Old Testament was written. As a rule, ancient and medieval scribes felt obliged to copy the received text as accurately as possible, without making any changes or adjustments. Yet virtually every scribe who ever copied a biblical manuscript perpetuated the errors of others and introduced a few of his own. Imagine this process being repeated for one to two thousand years, and you have some idea of the vicissitudes that the Hebrew biblical text has endured. Compounding the problem was the occasional scribe who made a conscious alteration in the text, either for ideological reasons or because he sincerely thought he was correcting someone else's mistake.

Until 1947 the only direct evidence for the pre-Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament was a lone papyrus leaf dating from about 100 B.C.; this preserves the text of the Ten Commandments. But in 1947 the study of the Old Testament text was suddenly revolutionized by the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in a cave at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade another ten caves in the immediate area yielded additional manuscript treasures. Among the finds (which also included an assortment of nonbiblical texts) were a complete Hebrew scroll of the book of Isaiah, a verse- by- verse commentary incorporating most of.the Hebrew text of chapters one and two of Habakkuk, and leather and papyrus fragments of the Hebrew text of every other Old Testament book, with the sole exception of Esther. Although the age of the manuscripts was initially in question, scholars now generally agree that they date from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D.; a few may go back to the third century B.C.

When the high antiquity of the scrolls was realized, some scholars anticipated that the biblical text preserved in them would differ substantially from the medieval Masoretic text, thereby demonstrating that the Old Testament's journey through the hands of generations of Jewish copyists had left its text in a most imperfect state. However, although the scrolls furnish numerous readings at variance with the Masoretic tradition, the Dead Sea and Masoretic texts of the Old Testament are strikingly alike.

The most important ancient version of the Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, originally produced for Greek- speaking Jews in Egypt. Parts of it date from as early as the third and second centuries B.C. As a translation, it is uneven in quality. In some cases where the Septuagint and the Masoretic text disagree, the Septuagint passage is clearly a bad translation of an underlying Hebrew text that was identical to the version of the passage found in Masoretic manuscripts. But in other instances the discrepancies are too marked to have been caused by poor translation. Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars had guessed that in cases where the ancient translator did not appear to be at fault, the Greek text actually reflected a Hebrew original appreciably different from what survives in the Masoretic text. This theory was dramatically confirmed by the Dead Sea copies of the books of Samuel. The text contained in these ancient Hebrew biblical manuscripts corresponds much more closely to the Septuagint Greek version of Samuel than to the Hebrew text found in Masoretic manuscripts of the Middle Ages. This creates a dilemma for the translator: which text does one translate? The easy response is that one translates the reading that in one's opinion is most nearly identical to the presumed original, the prototype. But on what grounds does one arrive at such an opinion? What if there is no convincing basis for preferring one reading to another? What if the biblical book in question, being a collection of traditions that circulated widely and in a diversity of forms before ever being committed to writing, seems to have crystallized from the very outset in a number of equally "original" written versions? Often the methodology that lies behind textual choices is unclear or inconsistent.

For those who imagine that the "Hebrew Bible" was mistranslated into Greek, and translated from Greek into English--some food for thought.


50,000 people go to a baseball game, but the game was rained out. A refund is then due. The team is about to mail refunds when the Congressional Democrats stopps them and decrees that they send out refund amounts based on the Democrat National Committee's interpretation of fairness. After all,if the refunds are made based on the price each person paid for the tickets, most of the money would go to the wealthiest ticket holders. That would be unconscionable!
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2 posted on 07/12/2003 2:04:04 AM PDT by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)

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