Gabriel’s Revelation?

In Sunday’s New York Times there is an interesting story about a tablet discovered that dates to the second century BC: Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection. It reports that this MAY provide evidence of the pre-Jesus idea of the Jewish messiah dying and rising again after three days. There is some vital text missing from the stone but it seems to suggest that Jesus did not invent the idea of a suffering, dying, and resurrecting Jewish Messiah.

I can’t see this changing things though. Those who accept Jesus in the Christian sense will say that he fulfilled pre-existing expectations and died for the people of God, including both Jews and Gentiles, whereas those who do not believe will say that Christians co-opted an existing tradition and presented Jesus as this suffering, dying Messiah. Either way I’m sure we will be hearing a lot more about this next Easter if not in the coming months.

Verbosity in English Bible Translations

Karen H. Jobes presented a paper at the Fall 2007 Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting entitled “Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation.” It is now being promoted by Zondervan on their blog. They have not just posted it but are actively seeking out bloggers to comment on it by emailing them. I originally read about it on Ancient Hebrew Poetry and Michael Bird was also contacted and posted a link. I was not requested to respond but they are looking for everyone’s input according to Paul J. Caminiti, Vice President and Publisher at Zondervan.

My first impressions were not that favourable. I was immediately uneasy that Zondervan is using this discussion to promote the T/NIV. Jobes was a translator of the TNIV and has been a member of the Committee on Bible Translation since 1995. This certainly isn’t a problem in itself as I have personally studied under Gordon Fee and Bruce Waltke and know them to be top scholars. However, in this paper Jobes is obviously promoting the T/NIV and she singles out the ESV for comment “I do find it more than a little ironic that what is advertised as an ‘essentially literal’ translation is the most verbose of several popular English translations–and that the ESV has about 30,000 more words than the TNIV!” (16). She also singled out the ESV on page 14 even though it had exactly the same verbosity as the NASB. These comments do not inspire confidence that she is unbiased, especially in that Zondervan proudly displays her chart with the NIV and TNIV at the top.

I am also curious as to how this data allows her to make the following conclusion “As the very verbose ESV demonstrates, all good translations must be a mix of both formal and functional equivalence.” I do not see that she has demonstrated that verbosity is related to whether a translation is formal or functionally equivalent. I decided to compare Zondervan’s “Translation Continuum” to the verbosity results. In order to do so Jobes’ list must be expanded. I counted words using Logos Bible Software’s Speed Search feature except with those translations which include the Apocrypha in which case I used the regular search feature in order to limit the count to the 66 canonical books. I am unsure why the results are slightly different from what Jobes came up with using Accordance but the point still stands. I included the following translations: ASV, CEV, ESV²⁰⁰⁷, GNT, God’s Word, HCSB, KJV, The Message, NAB, NASB, NCV, NiRV, NIV, NJB, NKJV, NLT^2ed, NRSV, RSV, TNIV. For the interests of comparing oranges to oranges I am using Jobes’ counts for the MT (474,316) and NA27 (138,167) texts although they differ insignificantly from Logos’ results (475,525 / 138,103). Our base text therefore contains 612,483 words. All English translation counts are taken from Logos.

Before looking at the results I want to make a couple of preliminary points. Jobes is looking at bilingual quotation and, as she mentions in her paper, some languages are more verbose than others. With regard to the Bible the Hebrew text is significantly shorter by word count than the Greek text. The MT contains 474,316 words by Jobes’ count. The LXX of the 39 Hebrew books contains 502,795 words, an increase of 6%. When we look at a completely Hebrew Bible (MT+Hebrew NT) it contains 585,264 words as compared to 640,962 words for a completely Greek Bible (LXX+NA27) a difference of 9.52%. Obviously Greek is a more verbose language than Hebrew. On the other hand Latin seems to be a less verbose language as the Vulgate contains only 532,834 (even with the Apocrypha the Clementine Vulgate contains only 611,994) words and is thus 13% smaller than our base Hebrew/Greek text. This comparison therefore may say more about the English language than about which translation is best.

In the attached picture I have combined the results from the various translations with Zondervan’s continuum. Hopefully they don’t sue me for using their picture, as I am responding to their post at their request. As the picture shows there does not seem to be a direct correlation between Bible translation methodology and verbosity. The CEV is the closest in verbosity to the base text and is also far over toward the “thought for thought” end of the spectrum but the next two, NAB and HCSB, are both middle to left. At the other end of the spectrum is the NIrV with a whopping increase of 240,362 words (39.24%) over our base text but also very far over towards “thought for thought.”

I think the next task is to also complete this exercise in other languages with a multitude of Bible translations, e.g. German, French. The SESB module for Logos should provide enough data to extend the project to the European languages. I think we will discover that verbosity, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with whether or not the meaning has been conveyed adequately. Formal and functional equivalence debates will continue as long as more and more English translations are being produced.

Is Bible software a substitute for learning Greek and Hebrew?

On the Logos software blog today Dale Pritchett laments the lack of original language study taking place at seminaries and Bible colleges today. He suggests that this lack in learning the original languages can be solved “If the very best Greek, Hebrew and Hermeneutics professors adopted the best computer based reverse interlinear technology.” Obviously he is trying to sell Logos’ reverse interlinear Bibles, particularly their ESV. While I agree that reverse interlinears are convenient and would help those with little Greek or Hebrew to keep using what they do have they are no substitute for learning the languages. Over at Ancient Hebrew Poetry John F. Hobbins suggests that all Christians should train their children in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and any other languages that come to mind after they are finished with those three. This is because children have an easier time of learning languages than adults. I think that Hobbins’ suggestion is unrealistic (not least because I am well past the age of primary language learning).

Pritchett’s suggestion on the other hand is dangerous and demonstrates that he has never learned Greek and/or Hebrew. He uses an analogy of climbing a mountain concluding that “If we want every student to learn to use original languages we need to build a bridge that gets everybody to the destination.” However, in mountain climbing providing students with an elevator will get every student to the top of that mountain every time. However, they will not be able to climb any other mountains because they cannot get anywhere without an elevator. Similarly teaching someone to use a particular tool will help them reach the same conclusion every time but it will not help them in new areas. Only by teaching students to assail a mountain on their own will be allow them to climb any mountain. They may not climb every mountain perfectly every time but it is better than taking an elevator up and down the same mountain over and over. Reverse interlinears are particularly dangerous because the Greek follows the English word order and will leave the uninformed with the impression that Greek is structurally just like English but with different words.

On a related note, I know of one seminary that has tried this computer assisted approach with regard to Hebrew. ACTS seminaries in Langley, BC has a course, Computer Assisted Hebrew Tools. It is meant for those who will only study Greek and want a short cut to Hebrew. Unfortunately for Pritchett, the professor uses BibleWorks instead of Logos, although Logos is one of the programs recommended for students.

In conclusion, I agree that computer assisted biblical tools are very helpful, but I would recommend that only those who have been educated in actual Greek and/or Hebrew should use them. Anyone else can use them for their own interest but they should not draw any conclusions from their use. Generally speaking, they will be unable to draw any conclusions beyond the English translation that is being used, which is an inherent weakness in this plan.

What was the Septuagint’s influence on Greek?

There has long been a debate over the influence of the Greek language and culture on the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures but little has been said about the influence the latter had on the former. The Greek language gradually changed after Alexander conquered ‘the world’ and Jews played a role in this change. The Hebrew Bible was the way of life for Jews and therefore its translation into Greek would have impacted their use of that language more than that language would have  impacted them. Does anyone know of a study in which this impact is measured; ranging from little things like the use of “en” to translate the Hebrew to bigger things like the use of “kurios” for God?