What register is the Bible written in?

    When I asked my 8 year old daughter Anna what “register” means, she peevishly replied, “I don’t know; cash register?” But she does know what register is, because she asks for advice about register in her adventures as a budding writer. She knows how important register is. What would happen if Bible translators paid attention to the registers in which the Bible is written, and sought to be faithful to them in the task of translation?

    It’s not easy to pick a register and stick to it. Still, we all have an inkling of registers in languages we understand. For example, King James English, motherese, and legalese are distinguishable by most speakers/readers of English. Most people can compare samples of prose and place them correctly on a formality scale, with “literary” and “formal” on one end and “casual” and “intimate” on the other end of the scale.

    My Anna is writing a book entitled “My Adventures in Italy.” Here is an excerpt from the first chapter.

My family goes to Italy pretty often. We go in the summer normally in July or the end of June and once in awhile in the winter (December-Janurary). The reason why we go so often is because my Mom was born in L’aquila, Italy and my Nonna and Nonno (that’s what we call my mom’s mom and dad) still live in Italy but now are in Vallecrosia. In this book you’ll learn where they move and how they do it. They have a bunch of junk they won’t get rid of. They just put all of it in cabnets cabinet’s. It’s really hard to get them to throw even one thing away! And to add to that Nonno has like a 1,0000 books, but seriously I’m not kidding exaggerating. We would have to unpack a 100 boxes and clean all the books – BY HAND!!!!!!!!! This is how we do it: First …

    The cross-outs are the result of questions she posed to me. “How do you spell ‘cabinets’?” she asks. “I knew there was an ‘i,’” she replies. “What’s another way to say ‘kidding’? I’m writing a book after all.” “How do you spell that? … that’s the word I was looking for.”

    Anna is struggling, with mixed success, to write in a literary register. Her Dad, because he loves language, is fascinated by the errors, hypercorrections, and lack of a consistent register in the text.

    I bring the same fascination with language to my reading of the Bible in the original tongues: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As an aside I would note that there are hypercorrections in the spelling of some words in biblical Hebrew. A class of them is discussed by Stephen A. Kaufman in a classic article treated here.

    Back to the question this post began with. What register is the Bible written in? Obviously, it is written in more than one register. Still, as a general rule, it is safe to say that it is written in registers on the left side of the formality scale, the literary side. This is so in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, the prose of which conforms, except when the banter of conversation is reported, to a number of literary conventions; the poetry of which is regulated by a number of formal conventions; the law of which is written in legalese of more than one sort; and so on. It is also so in the diatribe style adopted by Paul in his letters; the aphoristic style adopted by Jesus in his sayings; the Septuagintalizing style adopted by Luke in parts of his narrative; and so on.

    It is also the case, as Erich Auerbach argued in an essay entitled "Fortunata" and another entitled "Adam and Eve," that the synoptic gospels introduce a style into Greco-Roman literature that literati of the day would characterize as rude and crude. It is also the case that Hebrew narrative, as Auerbach demonstrated in another essay, has strategies of representation that differ dramatically from those of Homeric prose. These observations complicate but do not overturn the conclusion already noted: the Bible adheres, in most of its parts, to conventions typical of prose and poetry on the literary side of the formality scale.

    In what register then should we read the Bible in translation? If the goal is to make a first approach to its content without being overwhelmed, a translation on the casual and intimate side of the formality side may be helpful. Anna loves to read the Bible in three principal ways. First of all, she has read all four volumes of the Manga Bible, a cartoon-based presentation which transfers and reduces biblical narrative to a casual, intimate register in which familiarity and immediacy are privileged. Secondly, she reads from a devotional for kids, which offers innocuous lessons loosely tied to a Bible verse presented in a translation on the right side of the formality scale: NLT or CEV for example. She loves to ask me to identify the chapter and verse from which the biblical motto of the day derives. I often struggle because the wording of NLT and CEV tends to simplify away detail such that a given verse lacks the hard edges as it were of a more formal translation. Finally, she pays careful attention to Bible lessons in Sunday school, the point of departure of which is, most often, NIV 1984. She also listens raptly when I preach; the point of departure is then RSV.

    In my judgment, translations in the King James tradition, especially RSV, ESV, and, to a lesser extent, NRSV, but not the King James anymore; and the new NAB American Catholics have produced, offer the Bible in a register that is relatively faithful to the registers of biblical literature itself. These translations have the further advantage of being attentive to the fact that biblical literature as such is meant to be the resource sine qua non of a community of faith that spans generations upon generations. A translation of the Bible which has relatively little in common with precedent translations is a contradiction in terms. Another translation of great interest from this point of view: the NJPSV of the Tanakh. REB, NJB, and the old NAB, on the other hand, shoot too high in terms of register and are unnecessarily innovative on several fronts. NIV in its various iterations shoots a little too low. Translations like GNB, NLT, CEV, and now CEB shoot much too low. To be sure, the choice to produce a translation at a 5^th or 6^th grade reading level is also a marketing strategy in which a missional purpose trumps faithfulness to the stylistic choices of the original. The missional purpose is to make the truth clear and make it sound familiar. But it is possible to make the truth more familiar than it actually is.

    Beyond the need for a “churchy” translation insofar as we are called to make the church our mother in the faith (I have purposely chosen diction designed to rankle Protestants; Prots need to be rankled); beyond the need for a translation that is faithful to the stylistic choices the source texts instantiate, the still greater need is for a translation that does not tame the wildness of the biblical God, a God who scorns the commonplaces humanity loves to coddle itself with. With these three needs in view, NJPSV, ESV, and the new NAB score higher than their competitors on the market.

Comments

[Steve Pable]

Hi John! A few thoughts:

1) "Septuagintalizing"? I think I learned a new word today! ;)

2) I don't think the term "register" came up during the course of our English-speaking Catholic transition to updated Mass texts, but it may have been helpful if it had. I don't know if you heard much about this, but the entire Roman Missal was re-translated from Latin to English, and rolled out with the first Sunday of Advent in 2011. One obvious change has been what you would term a more formal or literary "register" in the prayers. Personally, I am more partial to it, but you risk in some places incredibly awkward and drawn-out phrases that try to emulate the original Latin syntax. It's far from perfect!

3) You mention that the Greek of the synoptic Gospels was considered "rude & crude"; I seem to recall that some of the earliest Church Fathers (Justin Martyr or Irenaeus or Origen, perhaps?) found this rather a stumbling block initially. But I think it may have been Irenaeus who cleverly employed it as an example of the divine pedagogy, that God's words in unpolished language is a sort of analog to the Incarnation. Is there evidence that you know of to indicate that the Biblical text ultimately shaped the literature? (In style, I mean-- of course it shaped the substance of writing and preaching.)

[JohnFH]

Hi Steve,

Great comments. A few responses.

(1) In composing a prose narrative in Koine Greek, an author normally wrote in long, complex sentences whose parts were tied together by an array of syntactic markers. Narrative prose in the Septuagint on the other hand, since it hews to the structure of the underlying Hebrew, has a paratactic style ("and ... and ... and ...," plus an occasional "and it came to pass"). It has a peculiar flavor, like that of King James narrative prose of the same text blocs (Gen-2 Kgs including Ruth; 1-2 Chronicles). Luke begins his Gospel in good literary Greek (1:1-4) then abruptly shifts and imitates that of the Septuagint (1:5-2:52). Style shifting also occurs within 3:1-2. Insofar as Luke follows his sources, on the other hand, the Greek he employs is unadorned, rude and crude as I have termed it.

(2) I am in general agreement with what the Catholic Church is attempting to do in the shift, both in Bible translation and liturgy, to greater formal equivalence. It is the kind of thing one is likely to do if one believes in the communion of saints. It is an excellent way to foster intelligibility across time and space and multiple languages, of the grammar and vocabulary of the faith. Still, I think that stilted syntax should be avoided.

(3) I realize now how helpful it would be if Auerbach's entire Mimesis was available online. My original comments thereto, now revised, still cry out for explanation. In the Wikipedia entry for Mimesis, it is correctly stated that the thesis of chapter 7, "Adam and Eve," is that:

The Bible will ultimately be responsible for the "mixed style" of Christian rhetoric, a style that is described by Auerbach in chapter seven as the "antithetical fusion" or "merging" of the high and low style. The model is Christ's Incarnation as both sublimitas and humilitas.

End quote.

I don't remember offhand which early Christian writers turned what looked like a negative to literate people of their time into a positive. But you are right that they did so. The subject matter is also taken up by Jerome with respect to Latin and "Hebrew truth" - Old Testament scripture.

[Tim Bulkeley]

Isn't it too simple to speak of the register of the Bible, or even of a book or section? Surely the question before translators is what is the relative register of this chunk relative to the overall impression of the whole corpus? And that is what no translators seem to do consistently... but as you note the opening of Luke should sound "literary" much of the rest "biblical" and so on...

[JohnFH]

Hi Tim,

That's right, you see my drift. Take an example from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Ruth. It instantiates a careful adherence to the classic idioms of prose narrative. The frame narrative has none of the jerkiness and incompleteness associated with oral narrative. Thus the frame narrative of Ruth 2:6-7, v. 6a, is verbose and precise at the same time. The oral narrative, vv.6b-7, is on the other hand, the second element in an adjacency pair. Its grammar reflects that. As is typical of a short oral report, the speaker shoots off one observation after another in short order. Moreover, as has often been noted, the elders in the book of Ruth speak elderese when quoted. It would be worth the effort to capture the style switching in translation.

Up to the present, virtually all translations have leveled these differences, but in different directions on the formality scale. The generalization I offer still stands, for what generalizations are worth, that is, the Bible as a whole is situated on the left side of the formality scale.

[Derrick Tate]

Here are some links relevant to the question of the register of the Roman Missal.

(They are written from a perspective critical of the new missal. Since the posts present multiple translations for comparison, however, one can decide for his/herself.)

http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/tag/gabe-huck/

http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2011/07/05/xavier-rindfleisch-reprise/

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Derrick.

I haven't thought about the Missal changes in detail, except for the change from "with you" to "with your spirit." I can think of many reasons why the "your spirit" is best retained.

[Gary Simmons]

It's good to see you posting again, John -- and what a wonderful topic it is!

I still can't turn my linguistic instincts off in situations to observe others' (and my own) register, either.

Instances in which my employer and his wife would normally speak to one another in Chinese, for instance. If he begins with an English loanword, he may continue the sentence in English even if it is a situation in which he would normally speak in Chinese.

Things like that. Or how I tend to use "uhh" before sentences when trying to communicate in pidgin with the kitchen chef, who himself has that habit.

Not completely relevant, but my point is that register is worth noting and discussing. I feel frustrated with most English translations today for shooting too low, with a few for shooting too high, and with just about all of them for evening it out, simplifying, sanitizing, correcting (wayyiqtol "had formed", anyone?) and having unhelpful and sparse footnotes (NET excepted).

[JohnFH]

Good to hear from you, Gary.

We are definitely in agreement.

[Angela Erisman]

"But it is possible to make the truth more familiar than it actually is."

A provocative (because challengingly true) thought, John. It also strikes me that there is a danger in doing this, though I can't yet quite articulate it. I think it has something to do with cultivating the impression that the truth is easy, when in fact it is usually understood only after much thought, serious critical engagement, and life experience and our ability to articulate it is always evolving.

[batzi]

"But it is possible to make the truth more familiar than it actually is."

What exactly do you mean by that?

[John Hobbins]

Hi Batzion,

Translations tend to omit elements in the diction of the original that sound strange in the target language. For example, Russian names feature patterns that seem strange to non-Russians: why not alter the names to accommodate patterns in the target language. Some translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky novels do this very thing; others require the reader of the novel in translation to learn a new set of conventions. Concepts which are no longer understandable to many are sometimes omitted in translation. For example, Some translations of the Bible leave to one side references to expiation, atonement, and forensic justification because these are means or metaphors of salvation that are unfamiliar to many. But what if the truth the passage is trying to convey *is* unfamiliar, and requires unfamiliar concepts and idioms to come to expression?

Such is the case more often than many realize. Simplifying translations make the truth the text seeks to convey more familiar than it actually is.