Bible Translations

8 babel

Babel

The Hebrew Bible and Translation

The Bible is the single most important and most translated text in Western history and culture. Seen as a unifying work and functioning as the basis of organized religion in the West, its translation has often manifested cultural and ideological diversity. The very idea of translating the Bible, ‘the Word of God’, from the source languages into the vernacular languages has of course led to extensive even deadly controversy. The translation into Latin by St Jerome, known as the Vulgate, was for centuries the oYcial text of the Catholic Church and continued often to be the preferred source for Catholic translators, taking precedence even over the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek). The ongoing translation of the Bible, whether directly from the source languages or from the Vulgate— later, Luther’s German translation served virtually as an ‘original’ for some Bible translators—inevitably reXected cultural and linguistic diversity.

The story of this process is, in a sense, contained within the Bible itself, in the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9). This may be regarded as, perhaps, the key myth of translation; clearly, if there were only one human language, there would be no need for translation to facilitate communication between human beings variously located. Of course, since it is God who divides humanity by creating a multiplicity of languages, the attempt to overcome the resulting divisions through translation is evidence of an understandable but sacrilegious desire to return to a condition in which it is practical to consider building a tower! Hence the sense of taboo-breaking that, according to some writers on the subject, is attendant on any act of translation, and hence also the sense of unifying humanity, even in its rich diversity, through the act of translation.

The Babel story is a kind of leitmotif of this volume, and it seems Wtting to present it in several translations. The source text, in Hebrew, is given below with an interlinear translation into English (Hebrew, it should be remembered, is read from right to left and the interlinear version, of course, is also to be so read). This is followed by an ancient Greek version, which is part of the Wrst and very important translation, into Greek, of the Jewish Bible, a translation known as the Septuagint. Our readers, thus thrown headlong into the world of translation, are also given two English renderings of the Septuagint Babel story; a mid-nineteenth-century one by Sir Lancelot Brenton, and a new, previously unpublished one by Stavros Deligiorgis, who has also written an introductory note to his translation.

An account of the Septuagint, according to which seventy-two scholars produced identical versions, certain indication of divine intervention, can be found in the entry on Philo Iudaeus (p. 23–4). The Vulgate (Latin) version of the Babel story may be found on p. 113–14, along with the Catholic Douay-Reims translation, which is to a large extent based on the Latin. Other versions may be found on pp. 43–6, 66–7, 72, 119–20, 321–2, 351, and 568.