Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
gh I walk through the vall w of death, I will fear no ev In constant evolution The Bible in translation BY SARAH ROSE LEONARD
In The Good Book, the Bible is an ever-shifting third protagonist. Moments in the history of the Bible’s creation intertwine with the stories of Miriam, a Christian Bible scholar, and Connor, a Christian Bible enthusiast. These moments show us snapshots of the book changing its place in society over time. Many hands shaped the Hebrew and Christian Bibles as they formed—and continue to form—and translators played key roles in how the Bibles evolved. Through choices about language and editing, they both reflected and shaped the times in which they lived. Religious practitioners received their editions with rebellion, acceptance, and everything in between. Examining four different translations illuminates some key turning points in the Bible’s creation. In the third century bce, a large population of Jews inhabited the city of Alexandria, Egypt. As the pervasive Greek culture influenced the Jewish population, they lost their Hebrew language skills and required a Greek translation of their Bible. When the Pharaoh heard of this idea, he envisioned the new translation as a crowning achievement for the famous library in Alexandria, which, in an attempt to collect all the books in the world, contained some 400,000 volumes. Legend has it that in order to make the translation possible, he freed more than 100,000 Jews who had been captured during his father’s war efforts in Judea (modern-day Israel). In return, the high priest of Judea sent 72 Rabbis and translators to Alexandria. Some accounts claim that the translators worked separately in cubicles and produced, without seeing each other’s work, identical translations. This miracle presumably demonstrated the Hand of God at work on them. The translation earned the name Septuagint, or the lxx, from the Latin for “seventy.” Today, most scholars believe that Jews from Alexandria, not Jerusalem, produced the Septuagint as the translation is in a Greek dialect that was common in Egypt. As in many cases with biblical scholarship, the truth is lost to time. When Christianity came into being, the Septuagint became the Christians’ version of the Hebrew Scriptures, entitled the Old Testament.
Within the next six centuries, the Roman empire had supplanted the Egyptians and the Greeks. Born around 346 ce, the scholar Saint Jerome received a model Roman education: he knew Latin and Greek, studied texts ranging from Greek plays to Roman philosophy, and built up his library copying manuscripts by hand. Jerome served as a monk for a time. He had a vision from God that told him he wasn’t a real Christian, and subsequently resisted this dream by banishing himself to the desert. After living in a cave and studying Hebrew and praying he realized he needed to return to his love of classical literature. He then studied theology in Rome, where he later became Pope Damascus’ secretary. The Pope noted Jerome’s scholarly skill and commissioned him to produce a new Latin version of the Bible. This would require more than a mechanical translation. Jerome had a hefty task: there were major discrepancies between the Septuagint, old Latin translations, and the Hebrew text. The first two contained books that were not part of the Hebrew canon. The non-canonical works, according to Jerome, were like “the crazy wanderings of a man whose senses have taken leave of him.” He labeled these books Apocrypha (for “hidden”) and placed them outside the Christian canon. Jerome spent most of his life on this work. By the time of his death in 420 ce, he had generated a body of work comprising 63 volumes of commentaries, some 100 sermons, and numerous polemics, letters, and other writings. His Bible received a mixed reception: some groups felt it challenged their views on the sacredness of the received texts, while others supported his efforts. Over time, Jerome’s translation, known as the Vulgate (for “common” text), became the primary text in Christianity. At the time that Jerome wrote the Vulgate the literate European population read and spoke Latin. But as people continued to migrate throughout Europe, the use of Latin waned. Between the 7th and 15th century, translators created “glosses” for the Vulgate: word-for-word transcriptions between the lines of the Latin, aided by explanatory notes. Increasing numbers of translators aimed to give people a more direct CO N TIN U E D O N N E X T PAG E 2 0 1 8–1 9 · I S S U E 6 · T H E B E R K E L E Y R E P M AG A Z I N E · 2 1
