CRITIQUES OF BIBLICAL TRANSLATION
Excerpt
from the End Notes of the The Electric Mirror on the Pharos
Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting. by Larry Radka
Hebrew
Language
In regard
to the Old Testament, the Hebrew language, as anciently written,
was the most difficult of all languages to translate, wrote
Bible scholar John E. Remsburg in his work entitled The Bible.
In one of thirty weekly installments collected in his book,
which had begun to appear in The Truth Seeker at the
beginning of January in 1901, he went on to explain that:
It was written from right to left; the words contained no
[written] vowels; there were no intervening spaces between words,
and no punctuation marks. Even with the introduction of vowel
points (dots or marks below the words that indicate vowel sounds)
many words in Hebrew, as in English, have more than one meaning.
Without these points, as originally written, the number is increased
a hundred fold. The five English words, bag, beg, big, bog,
and buy, are quite unlike and easily distinguished. Omit the
vowels, as the ancient Jews did, and we have five words exactly
alike, or rather, one word with five different meanings. The
Hebrew language was thus largely composed of words with several
mean¬ings. As there were no spaces between words, it was
sometimes hard to tell where a word began or where it ended;
and as there were no punctuation marks, and no spaces between
sentences, paragraphs, or even sections, it was often difficult
to determine the meaning of a writer after the words had been
deciphered.
Here is the best known passage in the Bible printed in English
as the Jews would have written it in Hebrew:
bllwhtmcmdgnkhtmnhtbdllhnvhntrhchwrhtfR
vgrfwsstbdrsvgrfdndrbldrdshtsvgnvhnstshtrnnd
nkhtsnhtrflvmrfsrvldtbnttpmttntnsdldnsrtbdrn
nmrvrfrlghtdnrphtdnmdg
Its no wonder
Saint Jerome (340?-420), who published the Latin Vulgate version
of the Bible, admitted: When we translate the Hebrew into
Latin, we are sometimes guided by conjecture. Furthermore,
Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736), a Swiss Protestant theologian and
scholar, even went so far as to maintain that: The learned
merely guess at the sense of the Old Testament in an infinity
of places. This is in large part because of the ancient
Hebrews' failure to write down their vowels and of the language
subsequently falling into disuse. The adding of the relatively
modern vowel points, by a few belated Dark-Age rabbis, in order
to make up for this deficit, naturally casts very great suspicion
and doubts on how the Hebrew vowels were originally sounded
and used.
Verifying
the recent appearance of these vowel points, the renowned J.
Paterson Smyth, B.D., LL.D., Litt.D., an author of several books
on the Bible, maintained that:
These
marks are of comparatively modern date, certainly not older
than about 500 or 600 AD. He added; We can imagine then what
a sensation was produced when Elias Levita, a very famous Hebrew
scholar, about the year 1540, proved to the world that these
vowel marks were not in existence for hundreds of years after
the time of our Lord ! Of course this caused some controversy
at the time, but Dr. Smyth concluded that: No scholar now thinks
of doubting the comparatively recent origin of the Hebrew vowel
points.
Nobody today knows for sure how the original Hebrew was pronounced,
regardless of the tales commonly propagated about the Jewish
rabbis carrying on an accurate oral tradition for thousands
of years. Our knowledge of the evolution of languages would
almost certainly deny the likely possibility of such. If old
King Solomon were to walk through Jerusalem today and hear the
Hebrew spoken there now, he would probably stop in astonishment,
listen in amazement, shake his head in bewilderment, and finally
conclude that he must be in a foreign country.
God Singular
or Gods Plural
Page 119 - It is noteworthy to point here that the Old
Testament is a misleading authority in regards to the existence
of the “gods” of the Hebrews. In fact, the Hebrew
gods (elohim) are mentioned about 2,000 times in the
Bible, but nearly all translators and biblical commentators
- from about the time of Christ - have mistakenly, or intentionally,
chosen, in almost every instance, to convert them into a singular
“God” or combination of so-called “divine names”
that implies that one Hebrew god rules the universe. You can
verify the plurality of the Hebrew god by checking any Strong's
Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, or The Higher Criticism
and the Verdict of the Monuments - where Oxford professor
of Assyriology A. H. Sayce also verifies their plurality. In
his learned and courageous declaration, he openly maintains:
Elohim is a plural noun, and its employment in the Old Testament
as a singular has given rise to a large amount of learned discussion,
and, it must also be added, of a learned want of common sense.
Grammarians have been in the habit of evading the difficulty
by describing it as a “pluralis majestatis,” “a
plural of majesty,” or something similar, as if a term
in common use which was grammatically a plural could ever have
come to be treated as a singular, unless this singular had once
been a plural. We can construe the word “means” with
a singular verb, but nevertheless there was once a time when
“means” was a plural noun.
We may take
it for granted, therefore, that if the Hebrew word Elohim
had not once signified the plural “gods,” it would
never have been given a plural form, and the best proof of this
is the fact that in several passages of the Old Testament the
word is still used in a plural sense. Indeed there are one or
two passages, as for example Gen. I. 26, where the word, although
referring to the God of Israel, is yet employed with a plural
verb, much to the bewilderment of the Jewish rabbis and the
Christian commentators who followed them. It is strange how
preconceived theories will cause the best scholars to close
their eyes to obvious facts.
The Israelites
were a Semitic people, and their history down to the age of
the Exile is the history of a perpetual tendency toward polytheism.
Priest and prophet might exhort and denounce, and kings might
attempt to reform, but the mass of the people remained wedded
to a belief in many gods. Even the most devoted adherents of
the supreme God of Israel sometimes admitted that he was but
supreme among other gods, and David himself, the friend of seers
and prophets, complains that he had been driven out of “the
inheritance of Yahveh” and told to go and “serve other
gods” (1 Sam. xxvi. 19). What can be plainer than the existence
of a persistent polytheism among the bulk of the people, and
the inevitable traces of polytheism that were left upon the
language and possibly the thoughts of the enlightened few ?
Page 119 -Yahweh, or Yahveh, was one of only several
gods - as Sayce has just pointed out-that the ancient Hebrews
believed in. Exodus 34:14 even specifically names one of their
gods, “whose name is jealous,” and says he “is
a jealous God.” Of what he is jealous, we do not know.
Nevertheless, in opposition to the popular monotheistic notion
that Jews and Christians entertain today - of one almighty God
of Israel always ruling everything - then and now - stands adequate
historical evidence that shows this notion originally emerged
from an earlier age ruled by several gods. Monotheism (a belief
in only one God) sprang forth from polytheism (the worship of
many gods) at a relatively recent time in human history, and
it progressed slowly, and only began to flourish several centuries
after the time of Christ. It developed from the later Hebrew
worship of a sole God, Yahweh - as, in The Religious Teachings
of the Old Testament, Albert C. Knudson, a professor in
the Boston University School of Theology, so aptly pointed out:
The sole godhead of Yahweh was a truth, that was only gradually
attained. The different steps in this development, may be distinguished
with a fair degree of clearness. We begin with the Mosaic age.
It was to Moses, as we have seen, that the establishment of
Yahweh-worship was due. Previous to his time the Israelites
seem to have been polytheists. On one of the cuneiform tablets
discovered by Winckler at Boghazköj and belonging to the
pre-Mosaic age we read of “the gods” of the Habiri
or Hebrews, and in Josh. 24.2, 14f. and in Ezek. 20.7f., 24
we are told that both in Mesopotamia and Egypt the Israelites
worshipped other gods. The very name “Yahweh” also
points in the same direction. The manifest purpose of such a
name was to distinguish the god of Israel from other gods. If
the Hebrews had not believed in the existence of other deities,
there would have been no need of giving a personal name to the
Divine Being through whom they were delivered from Egypt. He
would have been to them simply God. Then, too, it is a significant
fact that the common Hebrew word for “God,” Elohim,
is plural in form. This plural, it is often said, was not
numerical, but simply enhancive of the idea of might, a plural
majesty. And this was no doubt to a large extent true of later
usage. But originally the plural form must have had a polytheistic
background. People could have begun to use the plural “gods”
to express the idea of divinity only at a time when they believed
in the existence of a plurality of divine beings. This is illustrated
by the Greek use of theoi and the Latin use of dei.
The plural, Elohim, points, then, back to an earlier
polytheistic stage of belief. And this stage we naturally locate
in the pre-Mosaic period.
What Moses
did was to put monolatry in place of the earlier polytheism.
He did not deny the existence of other gods, but proclaimed
Yahweh as the sole god of Israel. He did not say that there
was but one God, but insisted that it was Israel's duty to have
but one God. But while he thus did not teach monotheism [like
the wayward do now], the monolatry he established was an important
step in that direction.
In fact, The Emphasized Bible even goes so far as to
translate Amos 5:26 thus: “But ye carried the tent of your
king-idol, and your Saturn-images-the star of your gods, which
ye made for yourselves.” This is a more accurate translation
than that in the King James Bible-wherein the Hebrew word used
for “God” is actually elohim, which once again,
should be translated “gods,” just as the Emphasized
Bible translates it. Apparently its translators saw no great
danger in rendering elohim as a divine plural in this
particular instance. But, like about two thousand or so other
times in the King James Translation, and in other translations
as well, the translators apparently thought it was safer and
wiser if the naive flock would read just “God,” so
that the greatest deception of two millennium - that is, that
there is but one God in this infinite universe - could be effectively
propagated to future generations for perhaps another two thousand
years. It is time for religious shepherds to teach their naïve
flocks the truth for a change.
References
The Bible
by John E. Remsburg
Several
books on the Bible by Paterson Smyth, B.D., LL.D., Litt.D
Strong's
Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
The Higher
Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments by A. H. Sayce
- Oxford Professor of Assyriology
The Religious
Teachings of the Old Testament by Albert C. Knudson - Professor
in the Boston University School of Theology:
The Emphasized
Bible
The Electric
Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting
by Larry Radka
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