The Bible... by God and Man : A Review of Four Translations of the Torah
Sisterhood Book Review
How delighted I am to inaugurate this, our 71st Annual Series of Congregational Book Reviews. I want to thank Violet Marcus for organizing this year’s series and for inviting me to be the first in what I know will be a wonderful series of insightful presentations by a panel of distinguished educators and thinkers from throughout our city. I am grateful, as well, to the members of our Sisterhood for all the work that you put into everything that makes this series such a significant part of our congregational calendar year.
It means a great deal to me to be able to join you today, come together as we are in the midst of the festival of Sukkot. That I have the singular privilege of speaking with you from within this beautiful sukkah ‐‐ for which, I should say, all of us owe a debt of gratitude to the Women of Reform Judaism, to our Sisterhood, for their work each year – and on this year in particular, for creating what is without a doubt the most beautiful sukkah ever! It is a singular privilege to be with you and you honor me in your numbers and attendant enthusiasm.
I do, however, understand that may be some confusion about the topic, if not the title, of the book I shall be reviewing this morning. And so that any who have come to be with us today, under any misapprehension of what we shall be speaking about, have the chance to leave before I get into my intended subject, permit me, if you will, to clarify the title of the book to which I will address my remarks.
In some of the literature and publicity that has brought this morning’s review to your attention, there may have been some confusion. And for that, I apologize. In some of the printed materials, it was reported that I will today be reviewing a book entitled “The Bible... by God and Man.”
It sounds like a good read; and when such a book is published, I have every intention of taking it up. But to the best of my knowledge – and both Amazon.com and Google can confirm this – no such title yet exists. And you came to hear such a book reviewed, I am sorry to disappoint. The confusion came to be as a result of my trying to be clever.
You see, when Violet invited me to give this inaugural address and shared with me the date on which I would be assigned to speak, I took note of the liturgical calendar. And aware as I am – and no doubt are you – of the fact that we are perched between the Festival of Sukkot, which Rabbi Henry explained to us at yesterday morning’s Festival Service is Z’man Simchatenu – the Season of Our Rejoicing – perched as we are between Sukkot, the festival on which we rejoice in our youngest and newest religious school students being consecrated to a life of Torah study and good deeds – perched as we are today between the Festival of Sukkot and the holiday of Simchat Torah, the day on which we complete the reading of the final book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, and immediately begin again with the Torah’s first book, Genesis....
In an act that might alternately be described as outsized or even chutzpadik, I decided – in the parlance of the idiom of football, “to go long....” and to take it upon myself to review what has been described, not inaccurately, as publishing’s blockbuster “bestseller of all time,” namely, the Bible – or more specifically the Torah, which is to say the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy.
And when to my delight Violet accepted my rather outsized choice, she then, perhaps not even realizing it, called my bluff by asking me how I should like to identify my chosen title’s author.
I thought for a moment and suggested three different choices: “The Bible... by God with help from Moses; ...by God with a little help from his friends; ...and The Bible, by God and Man.” In retrospect, as I am not exactly reviewing the Bible or the Torah, per se, but four recent translations of the first five books of the Bible.
It would have perhaps been more accurate for me to identify my subject this morning as, “The Torah or the First Five Books of Moses, by God... and Everett Fox, any number of rabbis and scholars affiliated with the Conservative Jewish Movement, the Reform Jewish Movement, & Robert Alter.”
Now I made this decision – to review four recent critical translations of the Torah ‐‐ not in any effort to front load book reviews that would cover me not just for this year’s series but for the next four years, as well, but rather so that we might share together insights as to: (1) what we mean when we talk of the Bible and/or the Torah, (2) what a brief outline of the history of Biblical translation looks like, (3) what we can meaningfully say about 4 recent critical English translations of the Torah, and finally (4) we will need to say a bit about the significance and pitfalls of the act of translation generally.
For though it may appear on first gloss that once a translation has been made of a text – and the Torah, indeed the whole of the Jewish Bible (which by Jews is most appropriately referred to as the TaNaKh, which is an acronym comprising the first letter of the names for each of the 3 sections of the Jewish Bible: 1. Torah, 2. the Prophets or Nevi’im, and 3. the Writings or Ketuvim [taf‐nun‐khaf = TaNaKh] – and often the TaNaKh is referred to in non‐Jewish circles as the Old Testament – both of these – the words TaNaKh and Old Testament refer to the same thing: the Jewish Bible)...
And as I say, the Jewish Bible – the TaNaKh – and, therefore, the Torah has been translated innumerable times; and though it may appear on first gloss that once a translation has been made of a text, there is no need for another, as we shall soon see, noting could be further from the truth.
And so then, if you will permit me, I should like for us to begin our conversation this morning – my review of four recent translations of the Torah – one by Everett Fox, a second by the Conservative Movement, a third under the agency of the Union for Reform Judaism, and the last and most recent of the four by Robert Alter – If you please, I should like to begin our discussion this morning by briefly tracing a few historical highlights in the history of the Torah’s translation.
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Let us start where Torah translation comes into our community, and for this we must go back to Mount Sinai, for it was there atop that fabled mountain in the Wilderness that Moshe Rabbenu, our teacher Moses received aseret hadibrote – the Ten Commandments ‐‐ which is for us a literary trope, a metonym, a part which represents the whole – for though it was there atop Mount Sinai, that Moses receives the Ten Commandments, we understand that therein Torah came into our midst.
And according to tradition, Moses there received both a Written Torah, that which was inscribed on the two tablets of the law, as well as an Oral Torah, which includes all of the insights and subsequent teachings which would be derived from the former...
And then, having received the Ten Commandments from God, the Rabbis teach that Moses translated the Torah into the seventy languages of the world..., which is to say the Torah came to be appreciated in as many different ways as it has readers (and understand this to imply that the Torah came to be appreciated in as many different ways as the Torah has would‐be‐translators... And so, if you will, ever since Moses received the Torah from God – in a form both written and unwritten – (a tradition which itself is an imaginative means of suggesting how it is that a tradition that was once completely oral came to be written, redacted and transmitted to us in the form we know it to be today)...
The Torah text as we know it is unpointed, which is to say that it is written using only consonants, no vowels – indeed, the vowels and also the cant illation marks that tell us how the words are to be pronounced, accented and sung were not added until a time between the 6th and 10th centuries, only 1000 to 1400 years ago by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Massoretes. And so, the effort to begin to make sense of what the original author or authors of the Torah text – be that God or a few of God’s friends... if you will, ... to begin to make sense of what God and man intended the text to say began quite early and continues even until this day.
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The earliest translations of the Torah text into a language other than Hebrew took place as a result of a decline in Hebrew fluency among Jews in the period leading up to last century before the Common era. Rendered into the more common vernacular, these Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Torah were, much as translations are today, introduced and improved upon in each generation so that the meaning of the original Torah text could be made accessible to “the Jew in the pew.”
The Torah – indeed the Jewish Bible as a whole ‐‐ was first translated from Hebrew into a language other than a Semitic counterpart, in the 3rd Century – 2300 years ago ‐‐ when at the behest of Ptolemy Philadelphus, ruler of Alexandria, 72 scholars were commissioned to translate the ancient Hebrew text into Greek. According to legend, each of these 72 scholars, working in the strictest isolation, labored on their own respective translations, and after 70 days, each man emerged with an identical translations complete with 13 identical revisions from the original; their efforts are known as the Septuagint.
And then, 700 years later – in the year 382 CE, Pope Damasus commissioned a Roman scholar named Saint Jerome to translate the original Hebrew text and as well as the Septuagint Greek texts of both the TaNaKh and the New Testament into Latin. Today we know this work of translation as the Latin Vulgate. And it is Saint Jerome’s translation of the Torah into Latin which became the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church even to this day, and it was Vulgate which Johan Gutenberg used in the first successful operation of a printing press in 1450.
The first English translation of the Hebrew Bible was not taken up for another 1100 years, when ‐‐ just 480 years ago ‐‐ in 1530 a theologian named William Tyndale, translated what he called “the Old Testament” into English in order that the ʺcommon man” have access to it. However, for his efforts ‐‐ which many of the powers‐that‐be deemed to be radical ‐‐ Tyndale was burned at the stake as a heretic but ten years after publishing his work.
And though it would come as no comfort to poor Tyndale, when in 1611 a group of English scholars were commissioned by the King of England to produce an Authorized Version of the Bible, they retained fully 90% of Tyndale’s translation!
And today it is this work, which some regard as the only instance in which a distinctive work of literature was produced by a committee; and today it is this work and not the Hebrew original nor the Greek Septuagint, nor the Latin Vulgate nor Tyndale’s earlier work – but it is the work commissioned of a committee in less than 400 years ago, which for many English speakers, if not for most of the English‐speaking world, is the most widely read and universally admired of “authentic” Biblical texts.
Indeed, surely even for many of us, it is the cadence of this... the King James Version of the Bible... which colors how we approach all subsequent efforts to bring the Bible to a community in which those who can access the original Hebrew are a miniscule few.
And thus, though there have been literally 1000’s of translations of the Bible generally, and the Bible’s first five books specifically – and thus, though there have been literally 1000’s of translations of the Torah, we come to four of the most recent translations – all were brought to press in the last ten years; three in the last three years. For the lack of the four, I would be the poorer were they not on my shelf.
By way of reviewing the Bible – or more accurately the Torah in translation, I should like to share my thoughts about each of them in turn with you. I shall treat first the earliest independent effort, that of Everet Fox, and follow with the two recently released by the Conservative and Reform Jewish Movements, and conclude with the newest independent effort, that of Robert Alter, which has received tremendous, and nearly unanimously approving press.
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The Five Books of Moses : Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy : A New Translation With Introductions, Commentary, and Notes Everett Fox, Schocken Books, 1995
Ten years ago, Everett Fox, Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, translated and edited a unique edition of the Torah. Modeled after a German translation done on similar principles by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber seventy years ago (1933‐1939), Everett Fox devoted twenty‐five years to this unique approach to Bible translation. Restoring the echoes, allusions, alliterations, and word‐plays that rhetorically underscore its meaning and are intrinsic to a text meant to be read aloud and heard, Fox’s English translation restores the poetics of the Hebrew original.
Appropriately, the Fox translation has been hailed by scholars and theologians of every denomination, as a work of major religious, scholarly, and literary significance. Coupling a translation that has been described as pure poetry that is a joy to read with extensive commentary and illuminating notes, the Fox translation of the Torah draws even the most casual of readers closer to the authentic living voice of the Bible.
What differentiates Everett Fox’s achievement from those who came before him is his appreciation for the original rhythms and nuances found within the Hebrew; and it is his ability to render the power of the original Hebrew into English that enables the reader to see and to hear the Torahʹs true message in new and powerful ways.
This work is, in a word, a stunning achievement. To read it is to hear the Bible as if for the first time. While other English translations of the Bible render its language as if it had been written in English, this new translation re‐creates the full force of the Bibleʹs original rhetoric and poetry — its rhythms, nuances, and stylistic devices — thus allowing the English reader to experience the spiritual and aesthetic power of the Bibleʹs own voice while recovering layers of meaning that are missed entirely in conventional translations.
In a front‐page review for the New York Times Book Review, Edward Hirsch, called Fox’s work ʺa binding religious text, an historical document of the first importance, and a work of great literary imagination.ʺ And Jon D. Levenson, of the Harvard Divinity School has opined that ʺno serious Bible reader, whether they be Jewish, Christian, or secular, can afford to ignore this volume.ʺ
What is it then that so sets this version of the Torah apart from those that have come before? Like the earlier German work by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Foxʹs translation ʺtries to mimic the particular rhetoric of the Hebrew whenever possible, preserving such devices as repetition, allusion, alliteration, and wordplay.ʺ
As Fox explains in his preface, over the course of the quarter century – for the better part of his professional career ‐‐ in developing this monumental work, he sought to follow the principles first expounded by Buber and Rosenzweig, as they first rendered the Hebrew into German in the mid 1930’s. “The purpose of [my] book is to draw the reader into the world of the Hebrew Bible through the power or its language... I saw the project as a combination of [what is, to my mind, a] scholarly and artistic endeavor. Other translations have as their focus the language into which they are being translated, and are trying to create a modern text which is comfortable, and flowing, and idiomatic, which is always a goal of translation.”
In keeping with Buber and Rosenzweig before him, Fox describes his goal as ʺdrawing the reader into the world of the Hebrew Bible through the power of its language.ʺ The impossibility of doing this in a natural English idiom led Fox to render some of the original Hebrew into an English that stretches the limits of conventional language. For example, he translates the Hebrew word for ʺgenerationsʺ as ʺbegettings,ʺ ʺaltarʺ as ʺslaughter‐site,ʺ ʺofferingʺ as ʺgrain‐gift,ʺ and ʺbedʺ as ʺplace‐of‐lying” to name just a few such provocative renderings. In such cases, Fox does provide notes to help the reader through some of these renderings, but at the same time, he warns that the reader ʺbe prepared to meet the Bible at least halfway” and that we “must become an active participant in the process of the text, rather than [simply behaving as] a passive listener.ʺ
Robert Alter, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley – who himself has since translated the Pentateuch into a modern English – which is the latest addition to the translation canon, and which we shall discuss as the fourth Torah in this review; Robert Alter has said of Foxʹs translation that it “has the rare virtue of making constantly visible in English the Hebraic quality of the original, challenging preconceptions of what the Bible is really like,” and then Alter goes on to suggest that Fox’s efforts are “a bracing protest against the bland modernity of all the recent English versions of the Bible.ʺ And in a moment, we shall discuss Alter’s own efforts at protesting the bland modernity he credits Fox with rejecting.
And to my mind, this is one of the ways in which, Fox, emulating the Buber‐ Rosenzweig approach, has provided us with an English vernacular version of the Hebrew Bible that goes a great distance towards capturing the original intent of the text. Recall that in ancient times the Bible was not so much ʺreadʺ as it was ʺspoken and heard,ʺ and, therefore, many of its rhetorical features go otherwise unnoticed when it is simply printed on the page as ordinary prose or, alternately, when it is read aloud but in a flat way that gives no poetry to the prose.
However, scholars and critics are not all are of one mind when it comes to Fox’s efforts. James Kugel, a Jewish scholar who has written extensively on Hebrew poetry and the problems of translation, criticizes Fox, saying: ʺIt may be fun for readers who donʹt know Hebrew to imagine that they are somehow getting closer to the original [essence of the text] through such contortions [as Fox employs], but actually the opposite is true. This style of translating only succeeds in making the language sound bizarre.ʺ
To which Fox replies, “What Iʹm trying to do is to reproduce the text the way that I hear it. Itʹs an ancient text. Thatʹs what it is...”
And indeed, an immediate result of this singular work of translation is – Kugel’s critique notwithstanding ‐‐ a melodious Bible that – as it was once an oral record of a people’s most central and existential of longings ‐‐ demands to be read aloud. And by laying the text on the page as so much poetry is typeset in order to give greater emphasis to given words or phrasing and to call attention to the oral tradition’s rhyme and meter, Fox’s translation restores the rhythmic feel of poetry, and significantly, is as pleasing to the ear as it is to the eye.
Jaroslav Pelikan has written that “Translations of the Bible, be they ancient or new, beautiful or pedestrian, can run the danger of artificially domesticating the language of the Torah. At one level, of course, that is their very purpose, and yet ... what is lost when the spoken word is reduced to writing must be balanced against what is preserved in the same process...”
As a contribution to Torah translations, Everett Fox’s translation neither domesticates the original Hebrew nor preserves it in an amber... rather does Fox provide us a poetic rendering of a sacred text that for many had been reduced to a stilted formal reading. Everet Fox’s translation of the Torah is anything but.
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Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism Jewish Publication Society, 2001
A second Torah translation: The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents 1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, for the first time in 60 years, a recently published new Torah and commentary. Called Etz Hayim, which translated from the Hebrew means ʺTree of Life,ʺ this new addition to the spate of novel Torah translations and commentaries offers an interpretation of the first five books of the Jewish Bible that does much more than provide a new translation of an ancient text.
Over and above providing this, which Etz Chaim does well, the Conservative Movement’s newest edition of the Torah represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document.
Incorporating the latest findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures, and drawing on talmudic, medieval, Chasidic and modern Jewish commentators to elaborate on the textʹs deeper meaning, Etz Chaim, represents the unique collaboration of many Conservative scholars and luminaries. Chaim Potok (best known as the author of ʺThe Chosenʺ), edited the peshat or plain meaning commentary; Harold Kushner (best known as the author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”), composed the derash or literary‐ psychological‐midrashic commentary;
Elliot Dorff and Susan Grossman wrote the commentary on the guidelines for Jewish practice. And Michael Fishbane contributed the commentary on the haftorot prophetic portions, while Jules Harlow served as literary editor; in addition, Etz Hayim provides more than 40 topical essays, each written by a rabbi or scholar affiliated with the Conservative Movement.
Significantly, as these topical essays do not shirk from challenging conventional assumptions as to the traditional understanding of scripture in relation to science and modern scholarship, Etz Chaim’s forthrightness with regard to these matters will no doubt come as a surprise to many members of the Conservative religious establishment.
For instance, an essay on Ancient Near Eastern Mythology, by Robert Wexler, who is the president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, states that on the basis of modern scholarship, it seems unlikely that the story of Genesis originated in Palestine.
More likely, Mr. Wexler says, it arose in Mesopotamia, the influence of which is most apparent in the story of Noah and the Flood, which probably grew out of the periodic overflowing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The story of Noah, Mr. Wexler adds, was probably borrowed from the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh.
Equally striking for many readers will be the essay ʺBiblical Archaeology,ʺ by Lee I. Levine, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who writes that ʺthere is no reference in Egyptian sources to Israelʹs sojourn in that country,ʺ continuing, ʺand the evidence that does exist [for the Israelite’s 400 year experience of slavery under Pharaoh] is negligible and indirect.ʺ
He then goes on to add that the few indirect pieces of evidence for our enslavement ‐‐ upon which the entire Exodus story and Passover holiday is based ‐‐ like the use of Egyptian names within our Torah text, ʺare far from adequate to corroborate the historicity of the biblical account.ʺ
Similarly ambiguous, Mr. Levine writes, is the evidence of the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the ancient name for the area including Israel. Excavations showing that Jericho was unwalled and uninhabited, he says, ʺclearly seem to contradict the violent and complete conquest portrayed in the Book of Joshua.ʺ Whatʹs more, he says, there is an ʺalmost total absence of archaeological evidenceʺ backing up the Bibleʹs grand descriptions of the Jerusalem of David and Solomon.
Now, such a well‐reasoned and scholarly position, well‐grounded as it is within the accepted school of Biblical criticism, upon which Reform Jews have long built an approach to Both Biblical scholarship and religious practice, may not strike any one of us as particularly groundbreaking or even noteworthy.
But until now, for more than 50 years Conservative rabbis have preached from their pulpits the message that the Torah is a divinely inspired document that evolved over centuries. And yet over that same period of time, most of the Conservative Movementʹs 800 congregations have relied on the ʺHertzʺ Chumash, written in 1936 and named for its editor, the late Joseph Hertz, the first graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the chief rabbi of the Britain.
Working in an era of rampant anti‐Semitism and in the midst of Christian efforts to demonstrate the inferiority of the Old Testament to the New, Rabbi Hertz dismissed all doubts about the integrity of the Biblical text, maintaining that it was inconceivable that a people would invent for themselves so ʺdisgracefulʺ a past as that of being slaves in a foreign land, writing ʺof all Oriental chronicles, it is only the Biblical annals that deserve the name of history.ʺ
Lawrence Schiffman, a professor at New York University and an Orthodox Jew, has said of Etz Hayim, that the Conservative Movement’s most recent edition of the Torah is such a departure from that upon which the Movement had for so long relied ‐‐ Etz Hayim goes so far in accepting modern scholarship and moving away from Hertz’s spirited claim that the Torah was necessarily revealed in its entirety to Moses by God at Mount Sinai ‐‐ that, without realizing it, Etz Hayim ends up being in ʺnihilistic oppositionʺ to what Conservative Jews stand for.
However, Schiffman notes, most of the essays which raise questions about the Bibleʹs historicity have been tucked away discreetly in the back of the book, and “the average synagogue‐goer is never going to look there.ʺ
Still Conservative luminaries most closely involved with Etz Hayim maintain that this new effort will help all of us to better understand the true ideology of the Conservative Movement, and will permit Jews everywhere to experience the biblical text through a Conservative Jewish lens.
As the first modern Torah commentary for the Conservative Movement since that movement welcomed women into the rabbinate, Etz Hayim goes a long way towards tempering the Bibleʹs heavily patriarchal orientation and therein makes the text more palatable to modern readers. In Etz Hayim, womenʹs voices are mainstreamed, so that they’re part and parcel of the overall approach to the text.
For example, the passage in Genesis that describes how the aged Sarah laughed upon hearing God say that she would bear a son is traditionally interpreted as a laugh of incredulity. In its commentary, however, ʺEtz Hayimʺ suggests that her laughter ʺmay not be a response to the far‐fetched notion of pregnancy at an advanced age, but the laughter of delight at the prospect of two elderly people resuming marital intimacy.ʺ
In the course of undertaking such a major scholastic project as was the compiling of this work – and undertaken by the leaders of a liberal religious movement that is itself struggling for self‐definition, there were inevitably many points of contention and disagreement as the project went forward. But Rabbi Harold Kushner reports that among all of the potential flashpoints for dispute, the only one that eluded resolution concerned Leviticus 18:22, which problematically inveighs, ʺDo not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence.ʺ
That this verse presents many of us with a conundrum – how to reconcile the apparent plain meaning of the verse with the knowledge we have gleaned in the intervening years from modern medicine and psychiatry, to say nothing of the North Star of our personal value systems.
That this verse presents many of us with a conundrum is an even greater truth for those who lead the Conservative Movement, for homosexuality, and how to integrate homosexuality into the life of the Conservative rabbinate, is the hot button issue within the highest circles of that movement’s rabbinic decision making.
And so with regard to this question, Rabbi Kushner reports, “We couldnʹt come to a formulation that we could all be comfortable with... Some [of us] felt that homosexuality is wrong, [and] we werenʹt prepared to embrace that as the Conservative position. But at the same time we couldnʹt say this is a mentality that has been disproved by contemporary biology, for not everyone was prepared to go along with that [position either].ʺ Ultimately, the editors settled on a compromise, noting that the Torahʹs prohibitions on homosexual relations have “engendered considerable debate,” then adding the politically inclusive message that Conservative synagogues should do all they can to ʺwelcome gay and lesbian congregants in all congregational activities.ʺ
In this way ‐‐ by showing how Jewish laws and values evolved as social conditions changed ‐‐ the new commentary comes at a time when many of the Conservative movementʹs leading academics and pulpit rabbis are attempting to close a yawning religious gap between themselves and their followers.
More so than any other synagogue movement in America, Conservative Judaism has been dogged by the claim that its ideology — a hybrid of religious innovation and adherence to traditional rabbinic law — is rarely followed, if even understood, by the bulk of its members.
ʺFor the first time in over a generation, we have a Chumash, that reflects the ideology of the Conservative movement,” Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, has stated. For the first time, in Etz Hayim, we have a Torah that allows Conservative Judaism to speak with a unified theological voice, an especially significant achievement for a movement not very often on the same path theologically, religiously or even programmatically.
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The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Edition Union for Reform Judaism, 2005
For an entire generation of liberal Jewish religionists, namely the vast majority of Reform and Conservative Jews, Etz Hayim’s predecessor, the Hertz commentary, had little competition – that is until 1981, when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the official arm of Reform Judaism, published its own Torah commentary.
Edited by Rabbi Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary took note of the growing body of archaeological and textual evidence that called the accuracy of the biblical account into question. The ʺtalesʺ of Genesis, it flatly stated, were a mix of ʺmyth, legend, distant memory and search for origins, bound together by the strands of a central theological concept.ʺ
But of Exodus, it insisted, while there are scholars who consider the Exodus story to be folk tales, this view is a minority opinion, and therefore the Book of Exodus belonged in ʺthe realm of history.ʺ And yet, in spite of what even the Conservative Movement now recognizes as a romantic delusion, how far we have come.
Critical commentaries on the Bible have been published since the 19th century, and yet these early books were translated and edited by Protestant commentators. The original Plaut commentary which for nearly a quarter century was the Reform Movement’s bible, if you will, was the first liberal Jewish commentary ever published. Since then, of course, other critical Jewish commentaries have emerged, to which each of the four Torah translations we treat this morning attest.
For those of us who grew up with it, even after nearly a quarter‐century in print, Plaut’s commentary still strikes a chord. Rabbi Hara Person, editor in chief of URJ Press sums up what many of us believe when she says “The commentary itself, for the most part, still holds up beautifully... [for the most part] it’s still up‐ to‐date and valid.” She did added, however, that there were “some exceptions” to its relevance – the blanket acceptance to the whole of the Book of Exodus as history being just one example.
But the fact that Plaut’s Modern Commentary came to need some updating is only one of the primary reasons leaders of the Reform movement decided a new edition of the Torah for the Reform Movement was needed. Plaut’s original version was designed for adult study groups, and thus the biblical text was divided into topical sections – ‘Rescue at the Sea,’ ‘The Festival Calendar,’ etc.
These thematic divisions – often cutting a given Torah portion into two or three smaller sections, made it a difficult text to use in the pews. Soon after being published, however, because the volume was the best commentary available for congregational worship, Plaut was placed in the pews, and in time the sanctuary and not the classroom, per se, became the main setting in which it was read. But the topically oriented book was never easy to navigate for liturgical purposes; and, at times, could be downright frustrating. Not so the Reform Movement’s “new and improved” Modern Commentary, which has been arranged specifically with liturgical – as opposed to pedagogical ‐‐ use in mind.
Which is in no way to suggest the Reform Movement’s newest contribution to Torah translation is unmindful of the increasing interest in Torah study within the fast‐growing Jewish movement in the United States.; on the contrary.
“We have declared that the goal of our movement is ‘Torah at the center,’” Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, writes in his foreword to the revised edition. “That is, [we believe] that keeping Torah at the center of our lives is the best path and the first step to securing the Jewish future.”
Since it our movement founded some 130 years ago, Reform Judaism in the United States has evolved from a German Jewish movement that advocated “enlightenment coupled with an emancipation from ritual” to a movement “that seeks a deeper engagement with tradition and more active participation in Jewish ritual life.” For this reason, “The changes [the new Torah commentary introduces over Plaut’s original] were employed to reflect where the Reform movement is [today],” Rabbi Person has stated.
As Rabbi Elyse Frishman has said, “It’s not that the Reform Movement hasn’t had an interest in Torah, but that today the Reform movement is so committed to applying the teachings of Torah to our lives that it was critical we review the tools that we have for doing so. This contemporary translation speaks in the language of our time.”
When in the 1990’s – at least ten years after Rabbi Gunther Plaut first prepared his original Modern Commentary – along with his colleague Rabbi Chaim Stern, Plaut retranslated Genesis and added a revised commentary. Today, the Revised Edition of The Torah: A Modern Commentary, uses Plaut’s and Stern’s rendering of Genesis alongside the Jewish Publication Society’s translation for Exodus through Deuteronomy. The synthesis of these two efforts is “an attempt to present the most recent biblical, archaeological and feminist scholarship; the evolving societal perspectives on homosexuality, intermarriage, and divorce; and readers’ changing understanding of gender language.” And in more than 40 other ways has, the commentary published just this year has been updated and improved over Plaut’s original.
Numerous changes were introduced solely so as to make the revised edition of the Modern Commentary an easier, more user‐friendly book. Some of these changes include: Hebrew and English translations that are placed side by side as opposed to above one another so to make it easier to follow along; a closer visual correlation of the Hebrew text with the translation, again making it easier to follow the original poetic meter; a text that is ‘gender sensitive’ or, as Rabbi David Stein, the general editor of the revised edition, calls it, “gender accurate.”
Here the Reform Movement’s new Torah Commentary makes strides to rectify those places in the text where there was an implicit sexism, such as in discussing the rule to eat unleavened bread during Passover, the first edition reads: “You shall tell your son on that day...” (Ex.13:8), whereas the new version reads, “You shall tell your child on that day...” And yet, in those places where the translation was found unduly gender neutral, for example the many regulations regarding “the first born,” due to the fact that that English phrase appears to include both males and females, and it is clear from the context that the Hebrew in o way intends to suggest that the rules in this case apply to girls, the new version has been “corrected” to read more accurately, “the male first born.”
Further, in this new edition of the Reform Torah, revised scholarly essays on the relationship between the Torah and ancient Near Eastern literature are included, and in the case of the word ‘God,’ translators have used several “God‐language strategies.” These include, for example, translating ‘His people,’ as ‘Godʹs people’ and ‘His voice’ as ‘the divine voice.’ In most instances the divine name and related pronouns are rendered in gender‐neutral terms, a choice that reflects both the devotional and educational needs of our time. This is in no way to deny that the Hebrew text is grammatically masculine, rather is it the hope of the translator that in placing the modern English rendering alongside the original Hebrew text, each will be enhanced by the other, therein opening up rather than obscuring the original wording.
Additionally, a number of changes have been made, each of which is intended to make participating in the Torah service easier. These include, as stated earlier, organizing the text by parshah; adding aliyah markers and clearer, more readable cantillation marks; and new paper has been used in the volume that has been described as heavier, brighter, thicker, and more opaque – all of which is intended to suggest that readers will find this commentary more accessible and more readable than any previous edition.
In short, the goal of this project was to create a text that is at once “a useful tool for both study and worship,” and as Biblical scholar Phyllis Bird has suggested “enables a modern audience to overhear an ancient conversation.” In so many respects, the editors of this worthy successor to the original liberal Jewish translation of the Torah have succeeded mightily.
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The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary Robert Alter, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004
The newest and last of the four translations of the Torah we shall speak of this morning is Robert Alter’s “heroic literary achievement” (in the words of Pearl Abraham in a recent review in the Forward. Alter is a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has steeped his new work in both the linguistic details of the Hebrew language as well as the Rabbinic midrash that lends so much contextual meaning to a text that Jews can simply o longer read in a vacuum.
Robert Alter is virtually uninterested in the Torah as the revelatory foundation of Judaism, to say nothing of its place in the firmament of Christianity or Islam. Rather is his objective, and here I quote Alter himself, “to provide a translation that somewhat approximates the literary effects of the original.... My interest is literature,” he continues, “and I suppose, [therefore], that my translation is not for serious fundamentalists. I swerve from the traditional Masoretic text and my notes and commentary presuppose modern literary scholarship.”
Alter hastens to add, however, that approaching the Torah as literature alone is a reductionist reading; ‘far from neglecting the text’s religious character,” my translation “focuses on its literary art.” And here, Alter’s translation – or at least the theory behind it – differentiates this work from the others we have discussed.
In this version of the Torah, Alter applies a literary analysis to the Torah’s artful use of language, to the shifting play of ideas, conventions, tone, sound, imagery, syntax, narrative viewpoint and compositional units. The result is what has been described as “a stylized, decorous and dignified [read] with beautiful rhythms and a slight strangeness.”
Now this – the “strangeness” Alter’s translation evokes ‐‐ is not as out of place as it may at first sound. After all, the language of the Bible is a foreign language ‐‐ and by that I do not mean to state the obvious: that the Torah is written in a language other than English, but that the torah was written in a time place that understood the world differently than we do today and its purpose is at once to provide us with moral direction, and at the same time to stir us out of complacency.
Indeed, it is the Torah’s very strangeness, its very foreignness, if you will, that is what commands our attention, and serves as the goad to engage us in the act of translation and explication. As Kierkegaard once said, “This message is not something you can tell me about while I am shaving! To be appreciated, the Torah’s language must be treated as something other than everyday speech which can be read but casually.
So it is that Alter’s translation strives to understand and bring to life the text’s ambiguities and inter‐textual repetitions and puns. He believes that the rules of Biblical style require the Torah to artfully reiterate ”key words” within scenes. According to Alter, these “key words” clue the reader into what’s at stake in a particular story or scene, either as “the chief mans of thematic exposition” or as that which links these stories – aurally – one to another.
Alter takes us with him on a journey into the heart of the very text itself, as he invites us to see and appreciate how the Bible embeds its most acute ironies and meanings in wordplays and repetition – after all, this was originally a text that was read aloud and shared orally. The Rabbis of the Talmudic and midrashic tradition understood the power of the wordplay and the intertextual connections which Alter brings to the surface so readily; and it is incredibly meaningful to see this idea taken up so cogently and coherently in an English translation.
What Alter does, according to Judith Shulevitz, who reviewed his Five Books of Moses in The New York Times, is “read the Bible wit erudition and rigor and respect for the intelligence of the editor or editors who stitched it together and ‐‐ most thrillingly – with the keenest receptivity to its darker undertones.” In fact, it is out of Alter’s close readings and keen translation that something grander does take shape: the notion that the Bible is essentially mysterious, filled with a power unto itself.
Consider the way in which Alter approaches the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham: Where the King James Version says that Abraham went to “slay” his son, Alter reads it as “slaughter.” And in his notes, he tells us that the verb the text employs – and is so often translated as “bound” as in “Abraham bound Isaac to the altar,” occurs only once in all of Biblical Hebrew, rendering its meaning uncertain, and thus points out that we can only know its meaning here through our reading of how the word is later employed in a Talmudic context, where it refers to the trussing up of an animal.
By introducing us to the sheer butchery of the imagery, Alter evokes an eerie power otherwise secreted away within the Bible’s ancient words. This reminds us that a passage of the Bible never means only one thing, and yet some readings of a text are clearly better, more evocative, more true to the original speaker’s, the original author’s intent than others.
The translators’ task is to balance what is lost when the spoken word is reduced to writing against what is preserved in the same process. He challenge Alter tells us in the introduction to his monumental work is to avoid the heresy that translation can be used to explain the Bible, which in the worst case becomes explaining the Bible away.
Alter maintains that “there is no good reason to render Biblical Hebrew as contemporary English.” And for this reason, like Fox before him and as did both Etz Hayim and the URJʹs new Torah Commentary, occasionally Alter sets the type of his text off in a poetic fashion, therein alerting us to the presence of a poem or a song within the larger context of a narrative. This, of course, though familiar and comfortable to us, is a challenge to the original redactor, who with few exceptions chose to stitch the entire Torah text together, therein emphasizing the texts coherent wholeness and unity.
Alter’s approach and his methodology overall, calls into question all of the translations before his own. Of course, it is in part this audacity on Alter’s part, all the while providing us with a text which is both respectful and original at the same, which sets this work apart. Alter brings to the table all of the translations that came before him, a knowledge of philology, a wide and far‐ranging reading of Western literature, and the skills of a careful and considered reader.
His narratives are clear and his poetry is powerful – which is not to say that there aren’t places within the overall translation that one might not have done differently – this is to be expected; translations are by definition, subjective impressions – and yet, always is Alter’s rendering of the Torah text refreshing and theologically intelligible.
So it is that Alter’s translation deserves to become one of the essential versions of the Torah to which this and future generations of English‐speaking readers turn for insight into what the original authors of the Torah text meant to convey.
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A few final words about the significance and pitfalls of the act of translation.
A professor of mine at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati once quipped that the best thing a translator could do for him‐ or herself would be to destroy the original from which they were working. And truth to tell, translation is at the end of the day an interpretive act that is necessarily doomed to inauthenticity. It is chutzpadik and yet necessary, and all the more so from the act of Biblical translation.
For from the earliest of times we have been entrusted to be faithful custodians of a written text, which was, until only – and certainly within – the last century and a half, religiously believed to be the divine word of God. And it has been our charge to faithfully pass this text, our sacred Torah down from one generation to the next, word for word, even letter for letter, for as we are taught, each and every letter, each and every dot – in the translated words of a famed first century teacher, each and every “jot and tittle” has intrinsic and infinite divine meaning.
And then along come the translators – on a fool’s errand, and what has been described as a self‐deluding assault on the truth –and all in an effort to bring the word of the Lord to the masses, lest it be preserved, unchanged but wholly inaccessible.
In a lecture on the theory of translation, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: “How did translations begin? I do not think they came out of scholarship. And I do not think they came out of scruples. I think they must have had theological origins...”
And certainly, the four monumental efforts to make the Torah accessible to the people which each of our translators, be they individuals as in the case of Everet Fox or Robert Alter, or in the case of committees such as those of the Reform or Conservative Movements, were all undertaken l’shem shamayim – “for the sake of heaven.” Each of them is rooted in theological origins.
And though each of the four, in their respective ways, is imperfect ‐‐ which we could anticipate and would expect; in each case, respectively, these four critical and modern translations go a long way toward articulating a given methodology in the case of Fox and Alter, and clarifying and staking out a series of theological and political positions for the two liberal Jewish movements, Conservative and Reform.
And together they advance our collective efforts at better understanding what it was that God whispered to Moses as they shared those 40 days and 40 nights high atop Mount Sinai. My friends, the interpretive tradition is alive and well within our community.
All the rest is commentary, let us go and study...
