The English-speaking world has the great distinction of having at its disposal many more translations of the Bible than most other languages. Since the time of John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, the Latin Bible has been rendered into English; and from the Reformation in the sixteenth century to the present day, the Hebrew Bible has, time and again, been newly translated. But not only that! The King James Bible, published in 1611, has deeply shaped English culture and literature. Its wonderful language has captivated generations of readers, and, even now, no one can escape its charm. Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, other translations began to be published in response to newly arising demands.
Jewish readers wanted, indeed, a separate translation of the Bible; and for Catholics, a church-approved Holy Scripture seemed desirable. On the linguistic side, the English-speaking public wanted, in particular, to take into account the different varieties and social levels of the English language so that everyone could understand the Word of God in the Bible: British, American, African, and Asian, both simple people with limited vocabulary as well as the philological and linguistically sophisticated, who take an interest in a precise understanding of the original text; all expected to have a Bible in their language which was suitable for them.
Moreover, with the late nineteenth century rise of critical biblical studies came new interpretations of the words, expressions, and ideas which are found in the Bible. Some translators wanted to share what they regarded as the latest scientific knowledge and the most recent discoveries with the Bible-reading public. That is why they created new Bible translations or published old translations in revised and corrected form. Certainly, the past two hundred years have witnessed a groundswell of new translations and revisions of the English Bible that is indicative of an extremely lively and intensive preoccupation with Scripture. As part of the enterprise, the possibility to improve the textual basis of the Bible is documented in many editions of the Bible and in numerous practical and theoretical writings concerning the art and practice of Bible translation.
It is quite astonishing that until now there has been no single investigation about which text or texts underlies the many translations. This question proves to be different for the Old Testament and the New Testament. For the Old Testament, or as one likes to say today, for the Hebrew Bible, the question is especially important. Translators and publishers of Bibles have had to decide since the sixteenth century on certain text forms. Sometimes the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Bible are difficult to interpret. (The same applies to the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles for the Greek parts of the Old Testament in the Holy Scripture.) Scholars give different answers for difficulties in the text. Translators and publishers must therefore, of necessity, choose between the proposed solutions.
When they make their choices, some translators include notes describing the decisions made so that the reader can see why the text of the Bible was translated in a specific way. But others do not include notes. Therefore, a reader often does not know that his Bible text could or should be translated differently. Again, other Bible editions possess an accompanying volume in which the solutions and decisions are compiled. All translations contain details, however, where the selected translation actually needed an explanation, which is lacking because the publishers did not want to burden the edition with too many comments.
Translators and publishers have solved difficulties in different ways. Sometimes they select between Hebrew (and Aramaic) text forms that are attested in the traditional biblical manuscripts themselves (which are called “Masoretic,” because they were copied and preserved in admirable detail by the Masoretes, Jewish scholars from the eighth to the twelfth centuries). In other cases, they adopt a form from the manuscripts discovered at Qumran near the Dead Sea because this form of the text seems to suggest itself as better than that of the traditional biblical manuscripts. In still other places it has seemed advisable to many specialists to accept a passage out of the old Greek Bible because, indeed, this old Greek translation, the so-called “Septuagint,” is based on very ancient Hebrew manuscripts. In a few cases, other ancient Bible translations, in particular the Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin translations, can also offer a form of the text which seems to solve a difficulty in the Hebrew text. Finally, translators sometimes resort to a Hebrew wording which may have been in the original but is not found anywhere in writing. One calls this procedure a well-established supposition or conjecture.
How often have English translations resorted to such solutions? We cannot know that at all today because no translation gives a clear and full account of where it has selected which solutions! The book of S.C. Daley fills exactly this gap. He examines for the first time the relationship of English Bibles to the Hebrew and Aramaic texts on which their translations have been based. Where have they followed it and where have they abandoned it? When the Hebrew manuscripts themselves offer alternatives, such as the so-called Ketib-Qere forms of the text, which of the two have they chosen? How great is the influence of the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts discovered in Qumran and at the Dead Sea since 1947? These questions have never been systematically posed, let alone answered. That is most astounding because readers of the Bible want to assess a translation not only according to its linguistic quality. They would also like to know how near the translators remain to the Masoretic Text and at which places they prefer other text forms. That belongs essentially, of course, to the individuality of a particular Bible translation, and the reader has a right to know which text the translations presuppose.
For his investigation, Daley has developed an independent, new method. That was necessary for two reasons. First, the mass of texts which must be examined is enormously large. Therefore, a system was developed in order to deal with the fullness of the data. Secondly, it is a very delicate task to judge a translation. For the Zielsprache (target language, receptor language), in this case the English, requires certain unavoidable deviations from the source language. Such linguistic differences are to be carefully distinguished from textual differences. In the latter, the translator replaces the Hebrew-Masoretic Text form by another that he recovered from the manuscripts of the Dead Sea or from the ancient translations of the Bible. In the linguistic differences that result from the requirements of a translation, he preserves the Hebrew-Masoretic Text as it stands. Daley has developed a method that permits him to distinguish both categories of differences from one another also in those cases where the translations give no explanations.
The comparison of English translations in regard to their relation to the Hebrew-Aramaic text base rests on four selected representative chapters that correspond to the four main divisions of the Bible and offer respectively many difficult text forms: the blessing of Jacob in Genesis 49, the prophetic hymn in Habakkuk 3, Psalm 139 and the 14th chapter in the book of Proverbs.
From this investigation, a number of interesting and important results follow: English translations since 1611 are characterized with respect to their textual base; furthermore, an examination of the revisions of the Bible, for example, the Revised Version (1885), the American Standard Version (1901), the Revised Standard Version (1952), the New Revised Standard Version (1989), which all depend on the King James Version (1611), or the New English Bible (1970) with its revised edition Revised English Bible (1989), shows how successive translations have changed in their relation to the Hebrew base text. Third, different periods of activity become apparent, as, for example, the time between 1920–1970. In this time period, translators more commonly replaced the Hebrew-Aramaic base text than previously was the case, while in the years afterwards many English translators less frequently availed themselves of other forms of the text in order to resolve difficulties in the Hebrew-Masoretic Text.
But Daley does not stop with English translations of the Bible. In his conclusions, he deals with the more general problem of the biblical text. How close to the originals is the present text of the Hebrew Bible, that is, the Old Testament? Has it been preserved intact after all these centuries? As a result, on which text ought the translators to base their translation? But the question interests the exegetes also who have to explain the Bible. Which text must they explain? Textual criticism is also important to the historians who certainly have good and dependable historical sources. Therefore, what is really important for them is that the biblical text is dependable as well. In his book Daley also analyzes the new editions of the Hebrew Bible that claim to offer a philologically responsible text base.
In his important, moderate conclusions, Daley places much emphasis on the Hebrew text of the Bible which emerged toward the end of the first century of our era, and which coincides essentially with the Masoretic consonantal text. Textual criticism must study this text so as to identify and correct scribal errors. According to Daley, it would be a great advantage if translators had access to a well-studied and agreed upon text that they could choose to adopt as the basis of their Bible translations. Much of the confusion of the textual bases which mark the different translations of the Bible today could then be removed. Daley has in mind a common, accepted base text that could decrease the burden for translators to have to make text-critical decisions for which they do not always feel competent, and it would reduce to a minimum the variations in the text of Bible translations. It is indeed not to be denied that in the Bible translations of the last one hundred and fifty years a veritable Babel of text variety has forced its way in.
Daley’s proposal represents a wise reflection on how this deplorable state of affairs might be corrected. Perhaps, however, he adheres too much to the view that the text of the Bible today must be a single one. Judaism before the first century C.E. and the ancient Church until Jerome in the fifth century had a different outlook. A relative textual variety of the Bible was not regarded as an unwanted situation. At that time the churches of the Greek, Syrian, and Latin speaking areas did not impose an absolute monolithic textual unity of Scripture and they accepted the view that their Bible was not completely identical in all points with the Jewish Bible.
In conclusion, this book, despite a high academic level, is written in a clear and well-understandable style. Even complex and quite specialized facts are lucidly described. The author has a great pedagogical gift to explain complex matters in simple form. In content and in form, this book is a masterpiece. It is a pioneering work which rectifies a long existing deficiency.
A. Schenker
January 2017
Chairman of the Editorial Committee
Biblia Hebraica Quinta
Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Exegesis
University of Fribourg, Switzerland