Pious nonsense about translating the Bible: Why David Ker and Jim West are all wet

Summer is here. I want to spray someone from the hose, feel the cold shiver across my back, hear my girls giggle as they douse their Dad. But they’re in Italy right now, on the Riviera near Savona, so I’ll have to settle for a squirt-gun fight across cyberspace.

David Ker and I have been going at it here, here, and especially here (be sure to check the comments). You decide who has been hit by more cream pies and water balloons. Jim West, that nincompoop, put in his two cents, but was careful not to link to the ongoing discussion, for fear of getting beat up in hand-to-hand combat. Didn’t work. Once in a long while, Jim, I read your blog. You got unlucky. Time to smack you up a bit.

David Ker stands at one end of the continuum. He doesn’t want to read a Bible that has words in it like “buckler” or “teat,” because he doesn’t know what “buckler” means, and is too lazy to look the word up in a dictionary. As for “teat,” he likes that word, I wonder why, but he won’t find it in any of the Bibles he reads. He prefers pious Bibles, sad Bibles, like almost all Bibles in translation are. As for Jim West, what a cur. He stands at the other end of the continuum. He recommends people read the Bible in the ASV. But that translation is completely outdated and unreliable. It’s as if new finds and the work of scholars in the last one hundred years are meaningless to Jim West. We’ve learned a few things about the lexicon of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, even that of Hellenistic Greek, since those days. Wake up, Rip van Winkle!

A case in point: Isaiah 66:11. Its sense is crystal-clear to anyone who has studied ancient Hebrew in the context of the study of the languages and literature of the broader ancient Near East. Not David’s case, but I bet he could decipher a dictionary entry, like this one from HALOT, in a pinch:

II זִיז cf. דַּד and שַׁד; Ug. ḏd, zd, ṯd (UTGl. 722, 818, 2653, §5:3; Aistleitner 880); Akk. zīzu teat of a cow giving milk (Holma 48); Arb. zīzat, BedArb. dēd udder, τιθός: nipple; metaph. זִ׳ כָּבוֹד    in 11QPs^a; DJD 4 p. 86:5) full breast (|| שֹׁד תַּנְחֻמִים) Is 66₁₁. †

Here’s Isaiah 66:11 in Hebrew:

לְמַעַן תִּינְקוּ וּשְׂבַעְתֶּם        מִשֹּׁד תַּנְחֻמֶיהָ

לְמַעַן תָּמֹצּוּ וְהִתְעַנַּגְתֶּם      מִזִּיז כְּבוֹדָהּ

Here is NJB’s translation, the only brave English translation of this verse on the market:

So that you may be suckled and satisfied from her consoling breast,
     so that you may drink deep with delight from her generous nipple.

  By the way, David: nothing Biblish about this translation. It’s not wooden and stilted enough for crotchety Jim West, but that’s his problem. (En passant, everyone knows that מצץ means ‘lap, slurp’ [for Duane Smith and Jim Getz’s sake, I note 1.15 II 27 – HALOT nails the meaning, but overlooks the Ugaritic] - but no one has yet had the guts to translate accordingly.)

It’s fun to compare the available alternatives. The sweet Southern B’s responsible for HCSB knew that zīz means ‘teat, nipple,’ which is why they translated:

so that you may nurse and be satisfied from her comforting breast
     and drink deeply and delight yourselves from her glorious breasts.

But you know, southern B’s don’t say the word ‘nipple’ or ‘teat’ in church, so they had to fudge it, and repeat the same word, ‘breast,’ twice. Peinlich. The politically correct liberals responsible for NRSV and NJPSV fudged even more. Schade. Here is NRSV:

that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast;
     that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom.

'Drink from her glorious bosom': gotta love it. It has a nice ring to it, but boy does it miss the point. At least NJPSV adds a footnote: [‘bosom’:] Cf. Akkadian zīzu, Arabic zīzat, “udder.”

The preachers of DE (dynamic equivalence) are big on field-testing. So am I. But it’s necessary to make a distinction between Gestalt understanding of a passage, and understanding the exact meaning of every element of the whole. Gestalt understanding is essential. If that is missing, the communication has failed. But it is profoundly misguided to take a patch of English prose or poetry and weed out words and syntactic figures which, based on field-testing, are not understood by your average 5^th grader, 8^th grader, or what have you. No one actually speaks or writes that way. Be honest for a change.

Instead, we are used to comprehending what someone says without understanding every single word or phrase. The Bible was written in exactly the same way. Ah, but we can’t let the Bible be itself. If it were up to the DE language police, I’m sure they would have us read Shakespeare and Milton in simplified English as well.

I am thankful, however, that David Ker does not police his own language. It makes him a joy to read. This post was set off by a very good English expression he used: “suckle at the teat of ancient languages.” That’s beautiful English. I might add that he might learn a few things if he took the time to suck there, rather than his own thumb.

However, a self-consistent DE man should not use the word “teat” when speaking out loud. The average 8^th grader doesn’t know what it means. Not to mention ESLers. Out with it, therefore, along with “atone,” “justify,” and “sanctify,” as Peter Kirk suggests. It would be a shame if, in reading the Bible, you had to learn new words and concepts along the way.

I remember the day I learned what “teat” means. I still get red thinking about it. I was in a Comp Lit class at the University of Wisconsin, 16 years old (I went to a lab high school, which allowed us to take college courses). Prof. Cohen had us reading Shakespeare and stuff, and there were plenty of words I didn’t know. It was a nuisance, too, because there were notes on the bottom of each page with explanations of the words and phrases I already knew, but not the ones I didn’t. Plus, I was half-asleep in class because I had studied Hebrew and Greek through the night, which I cared about more. My bleary eyes looked at this on the page:

An honour! were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat (Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. Act I, Scene 3)

 I turned to the coed to my right, who seemed very glad that I finally noticed her. I asked her, “Do you know what a teat is?” She smiled and proudly pointed to hers, which were plainly visible.

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.  I'm sorry, but not really, if I offended anyone by explicit language and puns and stuff. If you go back and read Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 3, you will note that I have been tame in comparison.

UPDATE: Eric Sowell says it all: John Hobbins Is Winning. [Curtsy.] Thank you, Eric. I didn’t even know you had a blog. An excellent one it is.

UPDATE: Duane Smith goes tit for tat.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

LOL - I am glad someone has a sense of humour!

[Robert R. Cargill]

the best 'bible' to have:

1. buy a mac
2. buy accordance
3. layout the greek, hebrew, and all desired modern translations within multiple panes on a single frame.
4. setup alternate frames with the dss, mishna, nw semitic inscriptions, lxx, targumim, syriac, bdb, kb, etc. etc.
5. read them all

then, when someone says 'nice set you've got there,' you can rest assured that they are talking about your accordance setup, and not your zizim. :)

[JohnFH]

Robert,

I do the same with Logos, which also has Ugaritic.

But Accordance people have the mishnah and the talmudim on the same platform? No fair! C'mon Logos, get with it.

[David Ker]

Hey, I grew up on the farm. I know lots of interesting vocabulary.

"rather than his own thumb" I burst out laughing at that one.

How am I supposed to explain this to my wife?
"How did your trip go, sweetie?"
"Great. I spent the weekend thinking about teats..."

[JohnFH]

You might want to emphasize that we began by thinking about buckles.

[Duane]

John,

Fun post. Thanks for letting me know about it. The Ugaritic example is relevant but I actual think the Akkadian is more definitive. I'm more than a little confused about this whole translation issue. At one level, I can't figure out why it's so darn important. There are a couple of quite useful, even brilliant, translations Homer where contact with the original Greek is only occasionally clear. There are sections in Butler's classic translation where it is possible to image that he read the Greek one day and got around to writing down his translation about a week later. Not that I think he actually did this. To me the whole issue is one of purpose rather than principle. If one desires a close reading, then a close, perhaps wooded, translation is required. If one wants to address a broad audience than contemporary idiom is required. I place the exact issue you are addressing in this post under the category of "pulpitizing," attempting to make the translation fit for the pulpit. For most congregations I'd guess that "breast" is more acceptable than "nipple." I do worry that many translations of the Bible want to make it seem harder to read and understand, make it "holy" by strange language, than is helpful to the general/casual reader. In so doing, the translation actually causes a distance between the reader and the text that does not serve such a reader well but does serve those whose employment depends in part on bridging that distance. One of the problems, of course, is that some of those who make a living bridging that distance have trouble imaging anyone casually reading the Bible in the same way they might read Homer or Shakespeare.

[Peter Kirk]

John, I can't help imagining what might have happened if you, age 16, had first come across "teat" in a version of Isaiah 66:11 being read out in church. Would you have asked the girl, or older woman, next door to you what it meant? What would the reaction have been, of her and of anyone else who observed the exchange?

Of course this is a good argument why words like "teat", and for that matter also "buckler" and "justify", should not be used in texts being read out in church where some of the congregation are not yet educated enough to understand them. After all, would it really be a good idea if all the 16-year-olds and younger started asking one another what words mean in the middle of the service?

[JohnFH]

Duane,

that's kind of you to back up, from a disinterested point of view, the sweet B's choice to translate 'nipple' with 'breast.'

And you are right: if I read my translation of Ezekiel 16 from the pulpit, I might lose my job. Actually, I have read it from the pulpit, and I didn't lose my job. You couldn't hear a pin drop after I read it. It's amazing what you can get away with from the pulpit.

[JohnFH]

Peter,

you are supposed to keep questions like that for afterwards. My God, have you not read I Corinthians? These are old problems. The way you wish to solve them, by removing words the authors used, like "buckler," "teat," and "justify," is a depressingly anti-intellectual road to go down.

[Eric]

Thanks for the compliment and the link.

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

One "suckles," intransitively, the connoted teat. One suckles, transitively, whoever's suckling. Or one "sucks at the teat." "Suckles at the teat" just doesn't work.

We should know our English as well as we know our Hebrew (etc) if we're to translate well.

[JohnFH]

Kevin,

It is however, true, that if you google "suckle at," you will discover that "suckle at" the public teat, or the teat of big business, has become a standard phrase in English. Consciously or unconsciously, I see David playing off of phrases like that when he coined his "suckle at the teat of ancient languages."

"Suckle" may actually be a euphemism for "suck" in these instances.

Language is fun. Rich in Vitamin D. Can't get enough of it.

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

Oh sure, I know people use it that way, but that doesn't make it right. It's as illiterate as "predominately" and any number of modern day screwups and other oddities.

[JohnFH]

"Predominately" is wrong, I knew that, or at least, I think I did.

[Ros]

Surely teat has rather more of an agricultural nuance to it than Isaiah 66 intends? Or maybe that's just my farm girl side coming out. I don't remember ever having heard it apply to women, though I sympathise with your fellow student who found herself having to explain the word to you in class and took the most expedient route. She's probably still telling that story, too.

It does seem odd to me that bible translators are worried about references to breastfeeding. Nipples are one of the first things that babies learn to appreciate - nothing to be ashamed of there.

[JohnFH]

Hi Ros,

I concur: 'teat' probably had a wider semantic range in the days of Shakespeare. NJB's 'generous nipple' is a defensible translation.