Then the Lord God said, \u2018It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.\u2019 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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here\u2019s the same passage in the NIV<\/a>:<\/p>\n
The LORD God said, \u201cIt is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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 \u201cNow\u201d after a break in the NIV compared with the lack of break and \u201cso\u201d in the NRSV.<\/p>\n
It is not, I should emphasize, that one or the other is \u201cinterpreting\u201d the text, while the other is merely \u201ctranslating\u201d it. There\u2019s no such distinction. All translation involves interpretation<\/a>. Words in Hebrew or Greek don\u2019t \u201cmean\u201d words in English<\/a>. Words in any language have meaning within the context of that language, and any \u201cequivalent\u201d 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 \u201cso\u201d nor \u201cnow\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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