Reading The Bible With Rabbi Jesus By Lois TverbergShembull

Day Three: The Language Palette

Each language is a palette with a finite amount of colors. When you try to paint a scene in a different language, the same words carry different shades of meaning, so the result is never exactly the same. 

This is especially true when translating between Hebrew and English. Hebrew reflects an Afro-Asiatic heritage. It is tinged by the desert browns and burnt umbers of a Semitic, earthy tribe who trekked through parched wastelands, ate manna, herded sheep, and slung stones at their enemies. Hebrew also contains a smaller set of “pigments” than English—about eight thousand words, in comparison to one hundred thousand or more in our language. 

You could say that Hebrew expresses truth by splashing on bold colors with a broad brush, like van Gogh. Even though the details are quite rough, you mentally fill them in, inferring them from the context.

Even in English we sketch out a scene with a few “word strokes” and let listeners figure out the rest. Instantly we recognize the difference between getting a run in baseball, getting a run in your stocking, and getting a run in after work.

Imagine yourself as a Bible translator who is “repainting” a scene into English. You have to trade your wide Hebrew “brush” for a fine-tipped English “brush,” and your color palette isn’t quite the same. English may have more hues to choose from, but each stroke can pick up only one overtone within the original swath of color. 

The result of your efforts will show people the overall scene but it won’t quite capture the atmosphere of the original. Another translator would bring out different shades and overtones from the exact same text. Certainly, some renderings will be better than others, but it simply isn’t possible to perfectly reproduce a painting with a different palette and different brushes. This is why there will never be one solitary, “best” translation of the Bible that replaces all others.

What’s a person to do, then, to get the truest sense of the original text? Read from a few major translations that aim to be more word-for-word and then look at some that are more thought-for-thought. When you see the range of ways that artists “paint” the same passage, you’ll start to get a better sense of the colorful hues within the original. 

What Bible translation do you read the most? Is it translated word-for-word or thought-for-thought?