As of next week, my blog posts will appear five days a week, from Monday to Friday, rather than weekly. The subject of each day's post will be one of the 76 passages into which I decided, earlier on, to divide the text of Genesis for my purposes. For a list of all the passages, click on the "Passage study index" tab at the top of the blog (illustration below).
In reality this will be a continuation of what I've been doing up to now, but since some general concepts have already been discussed in past blog posts I will be free to concentrate on other points of detail. And while I do believe that much if not all the discussion will be of potential interest to readers who just want to get the most out of their experience of Genesis as literature, it will be necessary to be somewhat painstaking and occasionally even a bit technical (where language is concerned) since I am making these notes as a translator, let us recall, and these are the points that I believe a translator such as myself needs to come to grips with; if other translators of Genesis want to refer to these notes for guidance, I would not like them to feel that I have glossed over the most important things and left them in the lurch!
When I say "translators", let me say once again, for clarification, that I am thinking of "real translators" who want to translate the original book of Genesis into another language - not to take somebody else's translation and paraphrase it. To properly translate Genesis you have to work from the Hebrew (and to translate the New Testament properly you have to start with the Greek). Therefore it is with Hebrew that I going to be mostly concerned in the notes: the passages are passages in Hebrew, the verses are Hebrew sentences, the words are Hebrew words, and it is their meanings that we will be after.
But I don't want to exaggerate the technical level of specialization of the notes I will be posting. Remember that my goal is to understand Genesis as literature and to try to find out what we need to know to translate it as such. That may seem "technical" enough to some people, but to others it really isn't; it's a question of perspective. To grasp that perspective, it should be borne in mind that the Hebrew Bible is surely the most studied, interpreted, commented, annotated, systematized, analysed, disputed, explained, translated, paraphrased, deconstructed and reconstructed body of literature anywhere, ever. The process of talking about what it means has been going on for a longer period than many present-day civilizations have existed! It has been approached from all angles. Entire religions have been built out of it. Entire schools have been founded merely to study it. Countless individual careers have been devoted to reading and contributing to the literature about it. More people have obsessed themselves with trying to find what they consider the "true meaning" of a text which for many is more than just a text that talks about things, they believe it is a thing in and unto itself, its words are attributed magic powers and the mere fact that certain words appear in it is treated by them as sufficient proof in and of itself that it is so - whatever "it" is, depending on how you understand "it", of course. Livelihoods have consisted, for century upon century, of reading these books and then telling other people (some of whom cannot read) what it says. Every word, every letter has been chased round and round the world in search of "inner truths" and mysterious transcendental states of being.
So it is time for a few disclaimers. First and foremost, with all due respect, I am not privy to any of that. I am not setting myself up as a xakham (or a khokhem in Yiddish), a sage casting light into other people's darkness. I want none of it! I don't know what all those people have said because I haven't read it, I'm sorry, but it wasn't my intention or purpose to do so. I am not privy to that wisdom, I have not spent my lifetime poring over those venerable tomes, I know nothing about those imaginative flights of fancy, I have not been inducted into those cults, I am not anybody's priest, minister or rabbi, I haven't studied at any of those schools. All I have done is read a book, and tried to find out what, on the face of it, it is saying so that I can (a) understand it, (b) translate it and (c) talk to you here about the experience, the adventure of my endeavour and share some of the fun I have had.
And even for that, my personal knowledge is insufficient and I have had to read books written by others more knowledgeable than I so that these authors might explain to me some of the things I wouldn't have understood, and nearly everything I know, let's call it 99%, is what I have learnt from them, so there is not much for me to take credit for here. And even that literature is so vast that I can lay no claim to having mastered it; all I have done is find a few books that were useful to me, squeeze what knowledge I could out of them, and rearrange it. I wish to confess honestly that this is what I have done, lest it be thought that I really came up with all of this myself, or know more than anyone about it, or am an authority on it: I didn't, I don't and I'm not.
However, inasmuch as Genesis is, when all is said and done, a book; and understanding that this makes it a work of literature; and on the grounds that I have read that book, I may at least perhaps be better placed to think about what the book says, and what it means by it, than most people who have not read it - and by read it, I mean the actual book, not a translation! There is nothing exclusive about that; in some places, everybody can read it, and they may all know more than I do about it for all I know; and anybody who really wants to can study Hebrew as I did and they can read it too.
Besides knowing what it says, I can do one other thing too that you can't do without understanding the original: I have enjoyed it, in its true form, in its literary splendour. And literature is for enjoyment. Perhaps literature is for more, besides: literature can inspire, for example. But I don't believe one can really share inspiration. I can, however, share the fun. And if you find Genesis fun too, then if there is anything in Genesis to get inspired about you might find it. That, however, won't depend on me.
After that I will usually begin with a few lines about the passage as a whole, where I will attempt to situate the passage in a larger context, ask pertinent questions about the sense it is supposed to make or the reason why it is there (and sometimes even try to answer them), take note of relevant disagreements I have noted between the commentaries I have read regarding something or other in the passage, remind us of pertinent remarks I may have made in my earlier blog posts, and so on and so forth.
For a list of abbreviations used in my notes, click on the "Abbreviations" tab at the top of the blog. If you click on the "Other pages" tab and then on "Online resources" you can see a list of some of the resource I have had access to (and you can too), though only the ones that are online, as the name indicates.
You will most likely wish to read each passage of Genesis or at least have it in front of you as you are reading the notes on the passage (unless you know it by heart). I have mentioned how to read it in Nawat if you can, or in the NBIE rendering when I have one to offer: what about other versions? There are endless options for reading Genesis online, but if you're lost for choice allow me to suggest, for a wide variety of languages and versions, the Bible Gateway portal for starters. Or for another kind of presentation that is useful for study and you can keep on your own hard disk, a favourite of mine is e-Sword. But if what you want is to study Genesis in the original Hebrew (or even in the Aramaic of the Targum Onkelos), than I recommend Mechon Mamre which has some great resources. There are also some good translations and resources that are not easy to find online, of course! I have placed the Hebrew and a few translations of our first passage (Creation) on a special page which also points you to some other on-line materials, but I have only provided this for the first passage to get you started; from there on out, it's up to you.
Although the main reference is always the Hebrew (Masoretic) text, sometimes for comparison or in cases of doubt I will cite other versions of Genesis in my notes and comments. The languages that I sometimes quote include Aramaic (from the Targum Onkelos), Greek (Septuagint), Latin (Vulgate), Spanish (Reina Valera), Yiddish (Yehoyesh), Nawat (NBTN) and of course English. I may quote from any of various English versions and sometimes from more than one. Although there are a very large number of English versions, in practice it is not necessary to look at most of them because they rarely if ever provide any new information and there is simply not enough time in a day to look at things that tell us nothing we don't already know, so a choice has to be made.
The same is true of other language translations; ideally there are one or two more I would have liked to look at, both ancient and modern, but for the most part, these will very rarely offer up anything really new that isn't present in the range of versions I have sampled. Bear in mind that many modern translations are really mostly based on other translations, which will usually either be one of those I have looked at or ultimately derivative of one of these. There are several Spanish translations, for example, but they are all very similar to each other and for the most part follow the Latin Vulgate, and are hardly ever innovative vis-à-vis other translations, so it is not productive for me to consider them in most cases, though occasionally I will, merely on account of the importance of Spanish in the Latin American context.
Returning to English now, one translation I sometimes quote from because it has acquired the status of a standard reference is the King James version. This is also interesting sometimes because it is very literal (sometimes too literal), but we must bear in mind that it was produced long before the development of modern biblical scholarship and there is much that is known now that was not known back then; so in a sense its interest is chiefly historical. For a more modern translation which is nonetheless quite conservative and might be thought to represent present-day unadventurous Christian orthodoxy, I sometimes choose the English Standard Version. Modern English paraphrase versions are of no great interest for my purpose, mainly because they rarely represent original translation work from the source but seem to be reworkings deriving from pre-existing English translations. That is not a value judgment, but like many of the translations into other languages mentioned above, such work can contribute little to my quest for a fuller knowledge of the original book.
Three other English translations of recent years were found of interest and importance and are often taken into consideration since they are based on more modern scholarship. On the one hand we have the current translation of the Jewish Publication Society which draws on much current knowledge that was not available in the days of the King James, while in other respects it is still quite conservative and in fact often stays close to the latter where there is no reason to differ; I have copied this from an edition of the bilingual Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary. Akin in many ways to the JPS translation is that of Genesis found in E.A. Speiser's book in the Anchor Yale Bible series Genesis: A new translation with introduction and commentary, which reflects Speiser's understanding of the book on the basis of recent scholarship. The explanation for the affinity between this and the JPS translation is that Speiser was a member of the JPS translation committee until his death, but in his book he allowed himself to be a little more adventurous. Another kind of translation approach is represented by Everett Fox's work, which seeks to conserve the textual characteristics of the Hebrew original, in line with the earlier work of the German translators Buber and Rosenzweig (see my critical discussion of this translation here).
At times I will quote from any and all of these translations when discussing questions about the best way to understand the Hebrew text of Genesis. I have found that of them all, the JPS translation often offers a good baseline because it is both a modern translation that benefits from modern scholarship while it is also fairly conservative, making it somewhat middle-of-the-road all told. I will usually identify the source of all translations cited but where the source is omitted, JPS will be used as a default. It should be borne in mind that given the purpose of this study, no translation in English or any other language will be taken as authoritative; they are all just proposals. Therefore, using the JPS translation as "default" does not imply any sort of "favouritism", it is merely a practical question of doing what is most useful.
As I said, it is my intention to post notes on one passage each day. I am not sure whether I will be able to maintain that rhythm through to the end, however, because it depends on various factors I don't fully control. If necessary, I will announce a pause to give me time to catch up and then we will continue. But for now, at least, off we go!
A WORD ABOUT LEARNING HEBREW
I am not going to assume that everyone reading my blog knows Hebrew and talk as if you have no business reading if you don't know all about Hebrew; I will make every effort to make allowance for the fact that many readers who know no Hebrew may be interested in the discussion, but it will not be possible to stop constantly to explain every detail.Of course, you may be one of those rare people who, confronted with this situation, respond by saying: "Now I want to learn Hebrew too!" And I encourage you to do so. There are various arguments in its favour (as well as the fact that it's the way to really read Genesis!). To linguists I would say that as a linguistic system Biblical Hebrew is crazy enough that you may be missing out on some fun if you pass this up. It is probably also fair to say that for anyone who is up to the challenge, learning Biblical Hebrew is exceptionally good mind-training, in the same sense in which this used to be said a lot in defence of the teaching of classical Latin and Greek in schools. And of course, Biblical Hebrew (like all languages, but shhhh!) is a very beautiful language. (The best beginners' book I know which may be found useful by seasoned, motivated language people as a way to get started is T.O. Lambdin's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew.)
BH is a complicated language to learn, this is true; on the other hand, there is no need for textbooks to make it look worse than it is, and some newer, more approachable materials might also help. I think that getting started is particularly daunting because there are so many different dimensions you need to start to grasp early on, but I'm not saying that once you get past the elementary stage, it is clear sailing either! Hebrew is a perfect language for people who love a challenge and don't want to ever stop learning!!
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