HOW ACCURATE IS YOUR BIBLE TRANSLATION?: DEUTERONOMY 32:43

This is a companion post to one I wrote on the New Testament. But moving from the Greek to the Hebrew presents different problems in translation. In one respect, it is easier since the scribes who preserved the OT text over the centuries had such a high regard for the letter of the holy Word, that they took special care to ensure that every letter was copied accurately. This is in contrast to those who prepared copies of the NT. They often were not well trained and made careless “typos.” And even if some of them were skilled at the trade, they often felt free to add their own comments in the margins, which sometimes ended up in the text itself when others subsequently copied their manuscripts.

But working in the opposite direction, there are certain factors actually adding to the difficulty of producing an accurate OT text compared to the NT. For one thing, whereas the earliest manuscripts we possess of the NT date from decades to a few hundred years after the original writings, the gap in time for the OT is much longer. “In fact, we do not have any Hebrew manuscripts of the entire Old Testament written earlier than the tenth century [AD].” (Wurthwein) This is millennia after the time of the original writings. In addition, since the Hebrew writings are so ancient, in a number of cases we do not really know what some of the words mean and have to guess from the context or by comparing the Hebrew with similar sounding words in other ancient Near East languages.

I chose Deuteronomy 32:43 from the Song of Moses as a typical example to discuss. A word-for-word translation of the Hebrew text reads as follows:

“Rejoice, O His peoples of nations for the blood of His servants he shall avenge and vengeance shall render to His adversaries, and will atone for His land, His people.”

Compare this with the King James Version:

“Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: or he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.”

The italics were used to indicate that those particular words do not appear in the original, as you can see by comparing it with the literal rendering above. They therefore indicate one possible way that you can make sense out of the Hebrew text according to the KJV translators.

Another point to note is that being “merciful to” appears to be quite at odds with “atone for.” And in fact, a quick look at any analytical concordance will show that even in the KJV the Hebrew word in question, kaphar, is translated as “be merciful” only one other time and as “make atonement” or an equivalent phrase almost 100 times. Thus, it is not surprising that later translations, such as RSV below, use the more accurate rendering:

“Praise his people, O you nations; for he avenges the blood of his servants, and takes vengeance on his adversaries, and makes expiation for the land of his people.”

You can also see that the translators of the RSV made two other changes in the KJV. In the first place they eliminated the need to add the word “with” in order to make sense of the verse. And they rendered the final phrase a little differently by adding the word “and” instead of KJV's “of.” The reason for this particular understanding of the text becomes apparent from the textual footnote to that final phrase in the Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. It reads, “Gk Vg: Heb his land his people.” Deciphering that shorthand notation, it explains that their rendering of the last words is based on the reading found in the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate versions in contrast to the Hebrew manuscripts.

The Septuagint is felt to be a valuable witness in many cases to an earlier Hebrew variation than is preserved in the standard MT (Masoretic text). The Septuagint is actually a family of translations produced during the few centuries preceding NT times, and the translation of the Pentateuch appears to have been completed by around the first half of the 3^rd century BC. The earliest complete, or almost complete, copies of the Septuagint that we possess date from the 4th-7^th centuries AD. Early versions of the OT such as the Septuagint, the Syriac (Aramaic), or the Latin Vulgate, etc. are especially valuable in translating passages where the Hebrew text does not appear to make sense as it is written.

Keeping within the same tradition of translations, we next have the NRSV, quoted below. You will see that it reads quite differently from its predecessors.

“Praise, O heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods! For he will avenge the blood of his children, and take vengeance on his adversaries; he will repay those who hate him and cleanse the land for his people.”

The major departures from the Hebrew text are primarily due to rejecting a portion of it in favor of the readings found in the Dead Sea documents, the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate. All of these early witnesses to the text possess a line missing from the MT. And the Dead Sea manuscripts are especially valuable since they were written in Hebrew and dated to about the time of Christ, 1,000 years earlier than the MT.

But why should these two Hebrew versions read so differently? Wurthwein explains that the MT is a demythologized version of the original. Levinson agrees that the standard Hebrew text probably removed all you gods “because of the conflict with monotheism” even though the phrase no doubt refers to the angelic council of Psalm 29:1. But all the early versions quoted above happened to preserve the original wording, and so it has now been used as the basis of other recent translations.

So one can see that The New English Bible reads very much like NRSV. And whereas NIV obviously utilizes the MT exclusively for its translation, it does provide a footnote giving the alternative reading from the Dead Sea scrolls. Finally, the Jerusalem Bible follows the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, but strikes out in a fresh direction to give an entirely different and rather loose rendering of the text:

“Heavens, rejoice with him, let the sons of God pay him homage! Nations, rejoice with his people, let God's envoys tell of his power! For he will avenge the blood of his servants, he will give his foes as good again, he will repay those who hate him and purify the land of his people.”

One should expect to see these ancient translations of the OT to be employed by scholars more and more in the future alongside the MT in preparing future translations, although I am sure that interpretative trend will remain controversial in the eyes of some more conservative Christians.