Translating any document from one language to another is fraught with problems. And the difficulties multiply when the original text has been written millennia of years earlier in another culture. Then the difficulties increase when, such as in this case, the original is in a form of poetry foreign to any present type of poetic structures. This random example taken from the Book of Proverbs serves as a test case to demonstrate what approaches different translators and commentators have taken to render the text so that it becomes more understandable to the readers.
Let me start with a wooden, word-for-word translation of this passage into English from The Interlinear Bible:
“My son, keep my words, and my commands treasure with you. Keep with my commands and live, and my teaching as the pupil of your eyes. Tie on them your fingers write them on your heart's tablet. Say to wisdom my sister you and a kinsman to understanding call. To keep you from the woman strange from the foreigner her words smooth. For at the window of my house through my lattice looked down and I saw among simple ones I observed. Among the sons of youth lacking heart. Passing through the street beside her corner and to the way her house he walked, in the twilight, at the evening of day in the black of night and darkness.”
Textual Issues
Besides the obvious differences in word order than we would use in English, there are other issues to deal with. Fortunately, in this case, one of those problems is not establishing the Hebrew text itself since almost all ancient manuscripts are in agreement as to the original wording. However, one need go no further to the very next verse to see such an example. The NRSV translators' footnote to the last phrase in verse 10 reads, “Meaning of Heb[rew] uncertain.” In such a situation, it is then prudent for the reader to compare several English translations to see how they interpret the verse. The result is shown below:
“prostitute, full of wiles” (NEB)
“harlot, wily of heart (RSV)
“decked out like a prostitute, wily of heart” (NRSV)
“dressed to seduce him” (The Message)
“dressed like a prostitute, and making plans” (TEV)
“dressed like a prostitute with crafty intent” (NIV)
“saucy and pert, and dressed seductively (Living Bible)
“dressed like a harlot, wrapped in a veil” (with an appended note stating that “veil” is conjectured) (JB)
Scott in the Anchor Bible goes further in explaining the nature of the conjecture. Thus, the standard Hebrew text contains the words unesurat leb (“with secret plans in mind”). But “veil” comes from proposing instead that the Hebrew originally read unesorat lot, meaning “heavily veiled.”
Flow of Thought and Paragraph Divisions
Getting back to our specific verses under consideration, the first thing one needs to understand is that in the Book of Proverbs we are not reading a document written in prose, but in poetry instead. Hebrew poetry is not characterized by its rhythm and rhyme like the poetry to which we are accustomed. Instead, its hallmark is the use of repeated ideas. You can see this best by looking at Figure 1, in which the repeated words and phrases are lined up underneath one another.
Figure 1: Poetic Parallelism in Proverbs 7:1-9
1. My son, keep my words and
treasure my commandments with you
2. keep my commandments and live
keep my teachings as the apple of your eye
3. bind them on your fingers
write them on the tablet of your heart.
4. Say to wisdom, 'You are my sister,' and
call insight your intimate friend
5. to preserve you from the loose woman
from the adventuress with her smooth words.
6. For at the window of my house
I have looked out through my lattice and
7. I have seen among the simple
I have perceived among the youths
8. a young man without sense
passing along the street near her corner
taking the road to her house
9. in the twilight,
in the evening
at the time of night and darkness
Determining Paragraph Breaks
Such a visual way of picturing what the author is trying to convey in this passage causes one fact to leap to mind immediately. We can see that behind all the backtracking and duplication, there is definite sort of progression of motion as one goes from verses 1 to 5 and then again from 6 to 9. Thus the passage naturally falls into two halves. In addition, verses 1-5 hang together in that there are eight verbs instructing the “son” what he should do in order to live a wise life. By contrast, verses 6-9 give the reason why the person giving the advice is concerned based on what he or she has observed personally. In this latter half, we see a roughly chronological progression of events, which will be continued in verses 10-23 of the chapter before reverting back to advice such as found in the first verses. The overall organization of the whole chapter can be seen as the ABA arrangement shown below:
Figure 2: Tripartite Arrangement of Proverbs 7
A. Wise Advice (Proverbs 7:1-5)
B. Personal Observations (Proverbs 7:6-23)
A'. Wise Advice (Proverbs 7:24-27)
Thus, if I had been wiser, it appears that I really should instead have only discussed the first five verses by themselves before moving on to verses which belong to a different paragraph. It is that sort of consideration which often guides translators in deciding where to make breaks in the text. Keep in mind that the Hebrew text does not have paragraph breaks in it to use as a guide.
In this case, it is of interest that the RSV does start new paragraphs at verses 6 and 24, in line with the above reasoning, even though the translators additionally see a natural break after verse 20 which I personally feel is not needed. By contrast, NEB sticks with the three-part arrangement of Figure 2.
However, NRSV sees natural breaks which give rise to a slightly different understanding of the text based on the flow of the action, as seen in the diagram below:
Figure 3: Four-Part Arrangement of Proverbs 7
A. Wise Advice (Proverbs 7:1-5)
B. Actions of the Youth (Proverbs 7:6-9)
B'. Actions of the Woman (Proverbs 7:10-23)
A'. Wise Advice (Proverbs 7:24-27)
The difference between figures 3 and 4 would seem to be so minor as to not even be worth mentioning, but there is a actually a considerable difference in meaning to the passage depending on which option you choose. Let me explain. In biblical thinking, a symmetrical structure with an odd number of elements such as ABA' reflected in Figure 2 means that the natural stress of the whole falls on the center unit, the example upon which the speaker's advice is based. However, an even-number structure such as ABB'A' in Figure 3 has no center point, and so the natural emphasis then falls on the first and last units – the advice itself.
Notice that this seemingly minor consideration as to how a translator chooses to divide his chapters up can have a profound effect on how we understand the words themselves. So the text itself is the next challenge the translator has to tackle.
Poetry into Prose
Attempting to render such (in our minds) needless repetition as we see in Figure 1 into English can be a daunting challenge, especially if the translator attempts to transform it into simple prose at the same time. In The Living Bible, which is more accurately a paraphrase rather than a translation, we can see what Kenneth Taylor had to do in order to simplify the text for modern readers who are not used to the repetitions of the sort found in Figure 1, which are typical of much Hebrew writing, both poetry and prose.
a. The two lines of verse 3 are taken as referring to separate actions, rather than just one.
b. He eliminated the duplicate descriptions of the loose woman in v. 5.
c. He only mentions one lad in v. 7 instead of one among others.
d. All the wording in verses 8-9 is collapsed into one simple sentence, with only “twilight” remaining from the four designations of time in the original Hebrew.
Such well-meaning efforts do result in a text which is much easier for the modern mind to follow. However, often such simplifications are accompanied by a loss of appreciation for how the author has ordered his text and how he chooses to present his ideas. And such tampering with the text may completely eliminate the literary device explained above which helps to identify the comment(s) the author wishes to stress the most.
Identity of the Speaker
There is an ambiguous point in these verses which most translations skirt around. That is the purported identity of the speaker who addresses these words to “my son.” If you start at the beginning of Proverbs in the NRSV and read forward to Chapter 7, you will see in 1:8 a reference to both a father's and mother's instruction. Next in 1:20 we are obviously being treated to the words of advice from the personified Lady Wisdom. Then Chapter 4 begins with a call for children to listen to their father's advice with an editor's note that these words are spoken by the author of Proverbs. After many paragraphs addressed to “my child,” 6:20 again urges the child to listen to both his mother's and father's advice. Finally, in Chapter 8 the direct words of Wisdom are obviously being given for the second time in the book. But all of this begs the question of whom is speaking in Chapter 7. Most scholars assume, probably correctly, that it is the author speaking as a father figure.
Dealing with Idioms
We started out considering my perhaps ill-advised choice of Proverbs 7:1-9 as a discrete passage to study. But contrary to the indications given above that I should instead have widened my scope of investigation a bit, there is one hidden fact not made obvious in any English translations of which I am aware. And it yields the reverse indication that perhaps I was correct after all and verses 1-9 are to be taken as a separate sub-section of chapter 7. But to explain that will take the combined comments of a couple of Bible scholars:
Hulst offers this translation note to verse 9: “The word 'ilson (diminutive of 'is 'man') occurs in v. 2, where, combined with 'ayin, it means 'apple of the eye' or 'pupil'. Thus, in 7:9, the phrase 'in the pupil of the night' means 'in the dead of night'.” The origin of this strange Hebrew idiom “little man of your eye” is explained by Whybray: “This refers to the pupil of the eye: The phrase is derived from the fact that when we look into someone else's eye we see a 'little man', the reflection of ourselves. The point of the simile is that the teacher's words are as precious as one's eyesight.”
Since that comment may have been a little hard to follow, here is somewhat alternative explanation from Robert Alter. He begins by exposing the often faulty methodology employed by those liberal scholars who detect all sorts of “errors” in the Hebrew text and then go about “correcting” them. As an example, he posits such a scholar reading Proverbs 7:9 and coming across what he or she discerns as an error in copying perpetrated by an ancient scribe. Thus, his hypothetical scholar asks, “How can it be both twilight and pitch-black night at the same time?” So the solution is to look at the 'ishon (“dark, or apple, of the eye”) and propose that a scribe accidentally copied this word from v. 2 into v. 9 instead. This mistake was then followed by another scribe adding “in darkness” in order to make sense of the resulting text.
But the far more likely explanation, according to Alter, is as follows: In the first place, the so-called leap from twilight to night should be treated as a “temporal jump between verses [which] may even be grounded in a mimesis of nature, for sunsets in the eastern Mediterranean seem to happen very quickly.” In addition, he notes that the use of the same or similar verbiage at the start and conclusion of a passage of Scripture is a well-known literary device (called by scholars an inclusio) to draw a boundary around a discrete section within the Bible (verses 1-9 in this case). If that is its function here, most English translations do not at all do justice to the original, because almost no reader could pick up on the subtle fact that “apple of the eye” and “pitch-black” are related linguistically without an extensive footnote being appended.
The above example also demonstrates what happens when a figurative phrase in Hebrew cannot be translated directly without totally losing the reader (i.e. literally translating the phrase in v. 2 as “little man of the eye.”) We tend to think that the common idiomatic phrases we use in English must be common to all cultures, which is not at all the case.
And there is added confirmation that Figure 3 best reflects the original divisions of the author. If the scholars above are correct in detecting that the first half of the chapter (verses 1-9) has built-in boundaries by the repeated word in vv. 2 and 9, then what about the second half? In fact, the identical Hebrew word meaning “her house” appears in both verses 11 and 27, forming a similar boundary for this last sections. But if one reads a translation such as NRSV, it renders the first occurrence as “at home” while verses 27 reads “her house” instead. Thus, that particular translation leaves little clue for the reader to appreciate what the author was trying to accomplish.
Proposed Emendations
It seems as if some Bible scholars just can't leave the Hebrew text alone, but must always be speculating in the total absence of any evidence on which parts of a passage they feel were original and which ones were added at a later date. For example Whybray states, “The original Instruction consisted of verses 1-3, 5, 25-7, which resemble the original Instructions in chapters 2, 5 and 6 very closely in style, vocabulary and length. Into this has been inserted a long self-contained poem consisting of verses 6-23. There are also two other intrusive verses: verse 4 has been introduced for the same reason as 2:2-4, 10-15; 4:6-9,13 to identify the words of the teacher with wisdom.” Of course this scenario is highly speculative and actually runs counter to the cohesive flow of the text as reflected in Figures 1-3 above.
Part 2 of this post will next consider each verse in the passage separately
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