I’m teaching again today. The topic was Genesis (the book, not the band, although I have been practicing the keyboard solo from Cinema Show) with particular focus on the creation stories.
One particular point I’ve emphasized more in recent years at this point in the class is the role of translations in interpreting the text for us. If one reads Genesis 2:18-19 in the NRSV, it says:
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
Here’s the same passage in the NIV:
The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
The differences are subtle and could easily be missed by a casual reader. But the simple past/imperfect in the NRSV and the pluperfect of the NIV give very different impressions, as does the “Now” after a break in the NIV compared with the lack of break and “so” in the NRSV.
It is not, I should emphasize, that one or the other is “interpreting” the text, while the other is merely “translating” it. There’s no such distinction. All translation involves interpretation. Words in Hebrew or Greek don’t “mean” words in English. Words in any language have meaning within the context of that language, and any “equivalent” in another language is likely to have at least some slightly different shade of nuance or usage. In the example from Genesis 2, both translations are interpreting the text in linguistically possible but nevertheless different ways, based on different assumptions. The translators of the NRSV assume the source-critical results of the Documentary Hypothesis and that the account in chs.2-3 is not merely a continuation of Genesis 1. The NIV translators have a very different view on this matter. But neither “so” nor “now” is impossible as a translation of the Hebrew conjunction, and since Hebrew has no separate pluperfect tense, the question of what past tense to use in English cannot be decided simply by checking what the tense is in Hebrew.
The main point I want to make is about how this impacts the attempts we make as scholars to elevate discussions of religion in general or the Biblical literature in particular. Faithful readers of the Bible, if they catch wind of the scholarly idea that there might be more than one creation story in Genesis composed by more than one author, and they take a look in the NIV, they will have the impression that scholars are reading things into the text. If they read the NRSV, they might instead say “Wow, I never noticed that before”. And the fact that certain groups of Christians tend to exclusively read this or that translation makes it all the harder to discuss issues of interpretation which the translators of their particular Bible have already decided on their behalf. But that’s inevitable. The key, it seems to me, is to make people aware of the nature of translation, and the benefit of reading more than one translation if one isn’t reading the text in the original languages. If you consider it important that you read the Bible for yourself, then you should also consider it important to become aware of the ways in which the translators have interpreted the meaning of the text before it ever reaches you in readable English.
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