Our Hebrew tongue

Over the past decade or so, publishers in America and Britain have favoured us with different editions of the Bible in contemporary idiom: politically correct versions, inclusive-language translations, renditions in northern slang, and readings in Cockney dialect. Such publications raise fundamental issues which, in different ways, both George Steiner's Old Testament and Alter's Genesis seek to redress.

Steiner's introduction to The Old Testament is an impassioned argument for the preservation of the 1611 Authorized Version, because of its witness to the growth and development of the English language at its "high noon period". "The words before you in this edition are the very tongue 'that England spake' or speaks when it was, when it is, most itself." Steiner, on his own admission, is neither Old Testament specialist nor Hebraist; as a professor of comparative literature, writing for Everyman's Library series, his concern is to introduce the Bible within the ranks of English literature, alongside the new introductions to Fitzgerald by Craig Raine, Wharton by Julian Barnes, and Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances by Tony Tanner.

If Steiner's defence of the Authorized Version is an important corrective to the contemporary English versions, it nevertheless poses problems of its own. For the Bible is self-evidently not the product of an English culture, nor is it, like other books in the series of which it is a part, the product of a single mind: its linguistic cultures are essentially Semitic and Greek, and its literary medium can be traced to an array of writers, compilers, collectors and translators. To praise its worth in terms of the criteria used for 17th and 18th-century literature is to make the same kind of culture-relative assumptions as do the modern translations which Steiner deplores.

But the fundamental problem is that this is a publication of the Old Testament alone. Steiner offers a most lucid, readable history of the "love affair" between the Bible and the English language: this history comes to its climax in the conference of theologians at Hampton Court in January 1604, and in the completion of the entire Bible in 1611. The AV is a Christian translation, and a Protestant one at that. It works from the New Testament backwards into the Old (Steiner himself notes the mistranslation in Isaiah of a "virgin" bearing a messianic child where the Hebrew denotes simply a "young woman"). The AV's Old Testament has been transfigured by Christian culture, in the same way as Origen's Hexapla, Jerome's Vulgate, the Wycliffe Bible and Tyndale's Bible were before it. Although the Bible lacks a single author, in the minds of the AV translators the Old and New Testaments were inextricably bound together as a theological and liturgical unity. If one is to extol the AV because of its place as a "formative monument" in our language and our literature, its worth can only be judged as a whole. Given that the introduction illustrates the many "cadences, sonorities, amplitudes and concisions" taken from Tyndale's translation of the Greek, the omission of the New Testament is odd.

Whereas Steiner upholds the value of the Old Testament on account of its incomparable English, Alter's Genesis seeks to do the same by bringing before the reader the salient characteristics of the Hebrew. As professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Alter has written widely on the art of biblical narrative and of biblical poetry, and love for the original language gives his work a cutting edge. Although more aware than Steiner of its limitations, Alter, too, praises the Authorized Version (or King James Version) as an invaluable translation, for it "remains the closest approach for English readers to the original - despite its frequent and at times embarrassing inaccuracies, despite its archaisms, and despite insistent substitution of Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones." Alter's aim is to interpret the Hebrew, as the AV tries to do, rather than to explain it, as modern translators do: "Broadly speaking, one may say that in the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew."

In many ways Alter's approach is commendable, and his translation and commentary are illuminating. He shows how relatively easy it is to convert into English idiom the "extraordinary concreteness" of Hebrew, and to translate the Hebrew style of repetition and parataxis into readable form. His English may be less nuanced and elegant than the AV (hence losing out in the same way as contemporary translations) but it is at least an honest representation of Semitic diction, syntax and rhythm.

Where he finds a problem in using present-day idiom, Alter adopts the principles of translation used in the AV. "The right direction, I think, was hit on by the King James Version, following the great model of Tyndale a century before it. There is no good reason to render biblical Hebrew as contemporary English, ... a limited degree of archaizing coloration is entirely appropriate." In this sense, Alter's work is a compromise, although, as may be seen in the following example from Genesis 3:8, in staying closer to the Hebrew it ends up closer to the AV than one might expect:

"And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden." (Authorized Version)

"And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden in the evening breeze, and the human and his woman hid from the LORD God in the midst of the trees of the garden."(Alter's version)

What Alter may gain in freshness and compactness, the AV gains in nuance and balance of style.

In some places, it would appear that AV has in fact caught the Hebrew better. Genesis 12:5 affords a simple but striking example. Describing Abram's immediate response to God's call to leave Ur and journey to an unknown land, it is a typical example of Hebrew repetition and parataxis. Two concise phrases use three different verbs of leaving, going, and coming, repeating the place of destination for emphasis. A literal translation might be: "And they departed (wayye-ts'u) to go (la-leket) to the land of Canaan and they came (wayya-b-o'u) into the land of Canaan."

Alter translates it: "And they set out on the way to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan." The AV, gaining not only the force of the Hebrew but also rhythm in the English, reads: "And they went forth to go to the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came."

Alter's subordination of the English to the "phonetic compactness" of the Hebrew sets him apart from mainstream English translators from the 17th century to the present day, but such a compromise creates problems for the English reader. As Steiner's impassioned, if somewhat misleading, advocacy reminds us, and as Alter himself agrees, modern translators have still a long way to go if they are to rise to the challenge of the standard of English which the AV set.

Susan Gillingham is tutor and fellow in theology, Worcester College, Oxford.