 We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click the NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 161, Translating Genesis 1-11. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey Mike, how you doing? Very good. Another busy week, but, you know, that's good. It's good to be productive. I hear you. Well, this week we got two special guests. Well, you know, one I know from Wisconsin, my days in graduate school in the Hebrew department, and the other is new to me, but they've partnered together on a new translation of Genesis 1-11. But it's more than a translation, as we're going to find out. It's a significant work in terms of the notes that are put into the translation effort. I will say more about it, obviously, as we get into discussing it with them, but this is something that I think people would really benefit greatly from. If they were to get this read through the translation and just take advantage of, you know, something that really answers the question, what do translators think about, and more importantly, what are they supposed to think about? That's a great resource. Awesome. Well, let's get to it. Well, we're thrilled to have John Hobbins with us and Samuel Bray. Now, I know John from the University of Wisconsin Hebrew Department, graduate school experience. We'll just call it an experience for the sake of our discussion here. I've not met Sam until, you know, we connected here today, but they have what I think is a very interesting work out. It's a new translation of Genesis 1 through 11 that is really hot off the presses here, and we'll talk about how you can get that toward the end. But I'd like to begin by asking both of you guys, you know, in any particular order you want, to introduce yourself. And then we'd like to know a little bit as well about your translation experience and sort of, you know, what the roles were in this joint production, how the partnership formed, and then, you know, how did it work? So let's just start there. If you can introduce yourselves, that'd be great. Go ahead, Sam. I'm Sam and I'm a law professor at UCLA. Actually, this year I'm a Harrington faculty fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. So I have two university affiliations, but my background is all in the law and not in biblical studies and except where there's overlap between the two. So I've drawn on biblical scholarship for work on figures of speech in the law. But I'm John's partner in this, but my area of expertise is in the law and in language and in the use of language in the law and here in our translation. Good. And so as Mike was saying, my expertise is more in languages. We got to know each other through being students in the Hebrew department in Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin. And it was there that I picked up some languages very early on. I learned Hebrew and Greek when I was about 13 years of age. It was a good time to learn it because it sort of sunk into my bones. And it's been a part of who I am ever since. I'm a pastor, but I've also taught Hebrew in various places in Rome and Madison and in Oshkosh. Are we teaching Hebrew in about a month in Gambeva, Ethiopia? So Hebrew is a language that means a lot to me. And I've been involved in various translation projects as a consultant before. And at a certain point, Sam approached me. He was working on a translation for the sake of his children, reading the Bible to them. And it was at that point that we connected. I read some of what I've written online. I used to have a blog, it's still available, but I'm no longer posting regularly about issues of translation often. And poetry in particular, how that can be translated, and how that can be understood in Hebrew poetry. So we connected just because of what I had online available to anyone. And it really helped me and things sort of took off after a little while. So Sam, this is kind of interesting. I mean, what translation enterprise were you working on for your kids? I mean, what was the procedure there? What were you trying to do? What was the goal? I was trying to decide on what the best translation would be to use at home for reading aloud. And the natural choice for me for something in the Tindall KJV tradition, because it would have a network of illusions and connections with hymns and literature and Christian culture, would be something like the ESV or the NRSV. And so I had used both and I'd used a lot of other English Bible translations. And I was trying to decide which one I wanted to use for reading every day. And so it would form in the memory of my kids. And the problem was the ESV is just often, despite being a good translation, just is awkward when read aloud. It doesn't have the same attention to rhythm and grace that I would expect in really good writing. And sometimes I hit sing song passages. Like there's one in where Cain says to God in Genesis 4, you've driven me today away. And that's the sort of thing I wouldn't let stand in my own writing. And so I was, I guess, my standards for how the writing sounded when it was read aloud were very high. And so I was frustrated with it and the NRSV paraphrases on all the gender points. And so I wasn't really happy with either one. So I was trying to do some adaptation and some translation. And I had been a longtime reader of John's blog. And I knew we had similar attitudes toward translation and its need to be close and its need to be literary and its need to preserve the imagery and physicality of the original. And so I approached John and the partnership has just taken off. I'll tell you what that reminds me of, especially the sing-songy thing. And I imagine some people are listening to this and thinking, well, that's kind of an elitist view. Like who cares about what it sounds like reading aloud? And shouldn't it communicate to the average Joe and basically a utility approach to it? But I think that there would be a tendency to not appreciate what you're saying because we don't hear extensive passages that the scripture read anymore. What it makes me think of back in my Wisconsin days, we had a woman who worked with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. And there were a couple of occasions where our pastor was on vacation or whatever and naturally there would be the need for Pulpit Fill. And one week he asked her to fill in. And I think they were sort of in cahoots with this because what she did, and I believe what he asked for because he sort of knew that she was good at this, was she got up and she did nothing for 30 minutes but read the text. And she was just an excellent reader and it was so memorable. I was asked to do Pulpit Fill a month ago and I was waffling between do I want to do some sort of message that I really thought the church needed to hear or am I going to just get up and read if I could do it as well as this person I'm thinking did. But it's so absent that if you're not used to hearing it and especially read from something that is just well written, you can't really understand what you're missing. I don't know if any of that resonates with you but that's the first thing that popped into my head. Absolutely. We just don't hear it. We don't hear scripture that often which is kind of startling to say. Maybe John you do a little bit more reading because I know you work hard at producing your own fresh translations for sermons so it probably goes hand in glove with that but I think the average person just has not had the experience of hearing scripture read at length. Yeah it really is an amazing experience to translate the Bible afresh and to try to capture some of the figures of speech, some of the metaphors in a way that perhaps hasn't been done very often although the older English translation tradition Tyndall and King James often did a better job than is now the case. With more modern translation theories there are other priorities but we decided to return to some of the strengths of the earlier translations one of which is the ability to be heard and to be understood when spoken. Another has to do with being attentive to form and structure not just content as we believe all three of those things are interrelated and also an attentiveness to the history of interpretation so we're interested in our translation work to see how the passage has been understood over time. I'll tell one funny story. I once went to Missouri to visit relatives and I was asked to guest preach at my aunt's church and they said you can choose a passage and you can do whatever you want and so I chose Ezekiel 16 which is a very long passage and Mike knows what I'm talking about and I retranslated the whole thing it's full of sexual innuendo as a matter of fact and the preacher for whom I was preaching that day I was his guest looked at the passage ahead of time and he figured oh no this is horrible what am I going to do? So he read it in the King James he read it very poorly and so no one understood it and then little did he know he had the whole thing translated again and you could not hear a pin drop after I gave it in my translation because no one had ever heard it as Ezekiel would have given it and it wouldn't have mattered what I said afterwards because I had their attention their complete attention Did you start looking for the exits at that point? At that point a lot of red faces but you know there's just something there's a power to scripture and also the Genesis 1-11 many of these passages are full of suspense and full of a plot that's very interesting and each twist and turn is worth paying attention to also in translation Well I don't want to get blindsided but toward the end here I'll ask either one of you to pick a passage out and just read it so we get a little bit of a feel for the translation but that's for later you can be thinking about it as we talk here so you've already gotten into this this next question I have written down because I read the preface to the translation I read a good portion of the translation as well prior to this point just to get a feel for it but the question I have here in front of me on my list next is what were you trying to fix? In other words what are you trying to do better and you've already alluded to some of these things so if you could by way of an answer to this if you could sort of pick out a few things in the preface where you're explaining to the reader just this what do you see as the problem and what are you trying to fix and how are you proposing to fix it if you can give us an idea of some of the issues because we've talked about like how we got our Old Testament how we got our New Testament on the podcast before and at the end I append something about hey you know read the preface to your Bible it's going to talk about whether they leaned formal equivalent word for word correspondence or dynamic equivalent thought for thought I mean so this audience is a little bit familiar with sort of the two major options that get batted around but you're after more than that and you've already alluded to that so if you can take us through some of the things you were trying to fix and how you're approaching them so one thing I think we were trying to fix is attention to the repetition in the text repetition is not something that's usually considered good English style right now but it's pervasive in the Bible and often the way that meaning gets constructed in biblical stories is through layer after layer of repetition and then sometimes a repetition with a crucial variation so a couple instances of that are one in Genesis 3 where the serpent promised to Adam and Eve if they ate of the fruit of the tree of the garden serpent says this to Eve when he's talking to her God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God's knowing good and evil and then of course we all know what happens next in the plot I think it will be and we'll be spoiling the plot for anybody to say Eve eats, Adam eats and then what happens and then what happens is that they know that they were naked and so you get a repetition of the same word they were supposed to know good and evil but instead what they know is that they're naked so you get this profound irony and this sense of bitter disappointment a lot of translations wash that out in a way that if you eat the fruit the serpent promises you will know good and evil but then they realized that they were naked and so you've lost this crucial connection this echo reverberating through the text that's supposed to show you just how disappointed they are one more example is before the flood it says that humans have ruined the earth and God is going to bring ruin upon them because they've ruined the earth you get a repetition of the same verb stem exactly but in a lot of English translations it says that humans have destroyed the earth or rather corrupted the earth corrupted the earth and then God is going to destroy them so what you miss is the sense that the divine justice is kind for kind measure for measure the exact proportion to what humanity has done that's a crucial part of the text and we want to try to carry that over yeah ruin for ruin there this audience it's usually it's not usually a translation issue per se but we do a lot of connecting old and New Testament how the New Testament writers cite the Old Testament a lot so I'm hoping that this audience is used to hearing me or remember hearing me say things like look when the writer picked this phrase or picked this lemma they intentionally want your mind they assume again because they're writing for people in their own time period their own audience their immediate audience they assume that your mind will go back to a particular passage again this connection this resonance between this word or phrase that they'll be able to pick up on what he's doing in the writing and so this is a good example of doing that in English where you know when you do have repetition of Hebrew words and of course again we have to assume that's intentional there's some stylistic intent behind that that if you keep translating that same term with different English terms you're never going to pick up on that and it's really important if the Old Testament is repurposing some other portion of the Old Testament and it can only be a word or a phrase but how one incident or one statement will get threaded through other passages later on through the Hebrew Bible so if your vocabulary is not reflecting that you'll never see it Yeah absolutely and we see that in a number of keywords in Genesis 1-11 a good example is on the seventh day God blesses something and then we translate any hallowed it and the word hallow is is dropped out of most translations now however it's familiar to most Christians because it occurs in the Lord's Prayer hallowed be thy name and if you only preserve it that's basically what's happened now if this word is only preserved in the Lord's Prayer and it's been some other words some other equivalents sometimes very paraphrastic have been introduced elsewhere in Scripture then all the connections have been severed you don't really see how holiness and hallowed even fit together and a lot is lost so we're trying to preserve some of these connections For my audience I'll give a familiar illustration again of this a big point of irritation every time I hit it in the New Testament I have to complain about it and that is the translation Saints you know it's Hagiore why don't you translate it Holy Ones because that will take your mind back to Holy Ones in the Old Testament you know and then you get this you can recover sort of the sense that well initially humans were supposed to be part of the divine family Eden is where heaven intersects with earth God comes down to dwell with man I mean there's all these concepts that a crew or at least can a crew ought to accrue to language like this but you know we if we don't create those connections as translators between the two testaments no one will ever sort of get a sense of oh holy ones well that has a history who are the holy ones back in the Old Testament well it can be you know members of the heavenly host it can also be people and why would it be both why would they do that well again there are theological ideas that accrue and attach you know to just a wording like that but it's just lost you'll never see it again because of the way that the text is treated do you have any other examples or I can move on to something else and I'll just do that along with this what about structure I know you're big on structure John you know with not only your blog but generally your interest in poetry what's wrong with the way most English translations convey both poetic structure and then also just other issues of structure other kinds of structure and how do you propose to fix that or how are you trying to address it well one way to talk about this is is to if you read Hebrew and you're familiar with the classical stock of Hebrew it seems quite limited and in some ways it's not as extensive as one might have thought just in the abstract and so one way to describe this is the the plainness and the simplicity of the diction of the Hebrew Bible and we really do our best to preserve this you might call it embracing simplicity but on the other hand to accomplish this is a very complex process because there are always trade-offs that's the thing about translation there is no such thing as one obvious translation and all the other ones are obviously wrong it's not that simple but to make a choice to not gussy up the language of the text before us just because it's easy for us to do in English requires a form of discipline that I think is lacking in a lot of modern translations when you have a verbalist clause in Hebrew for example how many translations would just fill in with a verb that sounds sounds natural in English instead if at that structural level too how a narrative works we go back to what you find in the early modern English translations like the King James we carry over the and and and structure in the narrative that's a choice that one or two modern recent translations have also done but it is very it might even be counterintuitive to most people to do that and then I think the proof is in the pudding try it out see if this works for you my experience with a translation like this is that if it's read aloud for example by someone who's an excellent reader all the sudden connections that otherwise would have been missed become crystal clear can you give us an example of like a poetic structure or again just where structuring matters you know maybe the the Lamec passage obviously this isn't you know the Psalms or anything like that in Genesis 1 through 11 but there are you know little portions where something is structured deliberately that you know this kind of thing can help or at least avoid some sort of misunderstanding anything come to mind specifically one structuring device in Genesis not just one to eleven but throughout throughout Genesis is the Toladot formula these are the generations of X and that formula marks the seams between a number of major units and for the reader to pick that up you have to give it a consistent translation I notice also that you made that like a a header like the first verse when you have the Toladot so that that conveys it's a very simple typeset stylistic thing that conveys the fact that this is a new section right and that's exactly right so we italicize and center the Toladot formula so in Genesis two four these are the generations of the heavens and the earth as they were created and behind that is not only a desire to follow the text closely but also a kind of interpretive modesty instead of putting in our own titles for the different sections to guide the reader like think that this is this is the following subject instead we're trying to get out of the way as much as possible let the text speak about its own categories and its own genres that's really interesting because again my experience like teaching on the undergrad level or even you know even having a discussion in church well well this section of this chapter is about this topic well how do you know that well look right here you know that my study Bible gave it a header and so that predisposes the person or the reader to think certain thoughts that I'm not saying it's sinister and evil but it may miss the point or it may leave their thinking in some other direction that will cause them to kind of miss what's going on here it also gives you permission to stop reading yeah and so when you see that like Genesis 6 9 running all the way into the beginning of partway through chapter 9 is the story of no and the flood and there's just no break it just keeps going then you're supposed to read it all as a you're supposed to keep going yeah alright I have a question for you about the Toledoat if you look at we're in Genesis chapter 10 and you get to you know verses 26 27 or it's actually Genesis 11 here right in the middle there at 27 is these are the generations of Tara and that is not centered and put off you know as a header in what I'm looking at maybe I just have a prepublication for this but is that intentional and why would you keep the generational note there in the running text instead of breaking it out so if you go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls those are our oldest manuscripts of books of the Bible in Hebrew you already have what are later called sections situmotin pituhot open and closed sections a variety of ways of a paragraph even though the term paragraph is a little bit of a misnomer because you're talking about usually much longer units usually in Genesis 1-11 already in the Dead Sea Scrolls the fragments that we have the the paragraph follows a tradition that's pretty stable and in this one instance there is no paragraph break and so we make them the Toledoat formula into headers when they are at the at the juncture of a section break and that's interesting to reflect upon why there isn't one here because it's an exception and I thought we we have extensive notes that I think people really find interesting because if you are you going to publish them they're in with the translation you're talking about those notes I think will be very interesting to many people because I know how many serious students of the Bible like to compare one translation to another but they have no way because they don't necessarily know any Hebrew to make some sort of informed comparison and we do our best to give the reader a chance to sort of get beneath the hood and see how this operates and that applies also to the sections what we discovered which is interesting is that the passage that begins with Genesis chapter 11 verse 10 these are the generations of Shem that in many Masseritic manuscripts is a major division which doesn't come to a conclusion until chapter 12 verse 9 so that was just an illumination for me to read this and work very closely with the manuscripts not just with a particular printed edition and discover that for many there's a long tradition going back all the way to before Christ to read Genesis 11 verse 10 through 12 verse 9 as a unit and if you do so you discover some things that otherwise you would just miss that's what what paragraph he does what division does we block things in a certain way and then we see things we would not otherwise see. One place that happens is Genesis 10 where there's the sons of Noah and it's the table of nations about the different nations that come from Shem and Ham and Japheth and if you look at an English Bible unless it has like a dozen paragraphs in that chapter a lot of them will have three paragraphs so they'll have a paragraph on the sons of Japheth and then they'll have a paragraph on the sons of Ham and then they'll have a paragraph on the sons of Shem and in the Maserati tradition there are three sections but they're not Japheth, Ham and Shem instead they're Japheth and Ham except for Canaan and then the second one is Canaan who's one of the sons of Ham and the last one is Shem and what that division does is it really highlights the contrast between Canaan and Shem which fits into one of the themes for the end of Genesis 1 to 11 and sets up the rest of the Torah. Yeah, that's really interesting especially we just went through the the sin of Ham and the curse of Canaan and Genesis 9 and I followed Seatson Berg's and JBL, I don't know if you read that John but listeners to this podcast I think we'll find that really interesting what Sam just said and how the descendants of Canaan the Canaanites as it were I guess you could say are set off and contrasted like that that's really interesting actually how that is telegraphed I like telegraphing when I come across something like that where it's pretty clear that again there's some intentionality behind this and you're supposed to think something you're supposed to notice that the writer did this or if you're hearing it with a good reader you're going to pick up on it by ear what might that be so I think that's important now you you brought up the Dead Sea Scrolls do you have any sort of textual commitment you're going to stick to the Maseridic text you're going to observe kumran readings that might be superior if you have a predilection there as you keep going after Genesis I assume you're going to do the whole Torah here at least do you have any sort of guiding philosophy yet on that we do plan to finish Genesis the rest of Genesis in short order and continue with other portions of the Hebrew Bible it will be interesting to see we've got some ideas on that no we made a very explicit commitment to the Maseridic text and also to the Kare that is to the text as it has been read and we explained that in the introduction we don't mean to imply by making that choice that the Maseridic text is always the best text however you might define that there's more than one way to define that of course but we thought it would be a very important thing to stick to one text in this case also it works for this book very easily Codex Leningradensis is without a doubt the best available witness to the Maseridic tradition we paid attention to other witnesses as well but that's what we've got and it's interesting when you do that when you make a strong commitment to one text then when you see when there is variation what advantages there are to being consistent so I guess it's a strength that we want to cultivate in the translation more than one way and that is consistency or consistent also in terms of textual basis you can always address things in notes extensive notes you don't have to mar the consistency you're trying to shoot for otherwise you can bring up whatever you need to bring up later on most translations will opt for that even the one that we did in the building which really didn't start out as an effort to produce a translation of great literary quality and I'll be the first to say that it's not it hasn't had that much thought put into it we did it for different reasons but we made the same decision there editorially it was just easier rather than having to evaluate so many different things just stick with the text and if there's something that's really important you say something about it at that point how about the divine name do you opt for Lord again is that to create continuity with other translations or is there something else behind that definitely it is to maintain continuity with a tradition that goes back all the way to the Septuagint and it does have its there's always a cost in doing something like this whenever I talk to a JW it's always a matter of discussion right so I realize that for me the struggle in particular is when I'm translating the Psalms and I'm used to reading the Hebrew as a prayer it seems it seems very confining not to use the tetragrammaton the name of God in some way that's very much a part of the content is to address God with a name rather than title so there are drawbacks there's no doubt the fact that we have Lord obviously connects Genesis in a way that it connected with people in for Jesus himself and for Jesus' day because that's the substitute that they that they were familiar with and that was not changed that's what I'll point out to a JW would just say well I don't think Jesus thought that was an issue no change on that matter we preserve that and at the same time we make a note about it so people are aware of what we're doing Sam I'd like if you can come up with an example of where your specialty again the legal language where that I don't know what the right word is here were that influenced or translated something or there's a better word give us the better word but how is that a factor can you give us an example so I'll give an example from the figure of speech hindiatis it's a figure of speech I'm interested in and according to the Genesis commentators it often it shows up a lot in Genesis so define that hindiatis is a figure of speech where you have two terms separated by a conjunction and they work like and and they work together as a single unit of meaning so if I'm a farmer and I say my cow is nice and fat I don't mean two things my cow has a good disposition and my cow's fat I mean one thing nice and fat is nicely fat quite fat only one thing not two and so one question is whether hindiatis shows up in Genesis another question is whether hindiatis shows up in the constitution and I've written legal scholarship on that and some examples I think from the US Constitution are necessary and proper and cruel and unusual and probably though I haven't written on this one at length advice and consent so those are examples of hindiatis one question is whether it shows up in Genesis so some people think an example would be without form and void and so if you think it's a hindiatis then you're more likely to paraphrase that structure that A and B structure and say something like the revised English Bible does a vast waste but having thought about the figure of speech in the different ways languages can connect words and use them in parallel phrases John and I came to the conclusion that this one and some other instances too in Genesis 1 to 11 aren't really examples of hindiatis but are more like rhyming pairs so they're not trying to use two different terms to work together in a complex relationship but rather it's sort of like might and main or shaven and shorn or bold and brazen where in English we put two words together that are similar and they're getting most of the added forces just from the sound the sort of playful almost accumulation of intensity that comes from the sound so that's a very fine point like how are these words related and how do they play off each other but that's a point where thinking through an issue thoroughly for legal scholarship helped with translating Genesis are you taking instances each on their own merits or demerits I mean Genesis 1 to you have void and desolate but I'm thinking okay what about something like be fruitful and multiply I think that's probably the best instance the phrase that has the best claim to be a hindiatis in Genesis 1 to 11 so be fruitful and multiply are not two separate things but it's not a mere repetition it's a multiply being fruitfully or be fruitful in the sense of multiplying so I think that's probably more like a hindiatis than anything else in Genesis good call well yeah that's interesting because again I'm hoping that listeners sort of pick up on hey there's a lot to think about in other words it's not just looking at one language okay I know what that word is in Hebrew so now I'm going to pick an equivalent English word and there we go next word you know it just because we get this sort of impression that especially and I like formal equivalence you know and I realize it can be caricatured and I'm going to caricature it a little bit here but you know the this enterprise of having to account for every word like it's a it's an atom you know atomistic process and then when I'm on the other side of it I've accounted for every word and then okay well we're not going to change it in those words it's more readable and that's a translation you know it is difficult to try to again communicate what's there without dispensing with something that might be important and on the flip side you know without being sort of you know this you're enslaved by this this compulsion you know to account for every word I mean here's an example where you're talking about you know how to even think about two words juxtaposed to each other you know what do we do with that there's just a lot to think about when it gets right down to it what do either of you think about the comfort level of readers do you care about the comfort level of readers with respect to translation I'm going to pick an example here to illustrate this that's outside Genesis 1 through 11 but I do that to get the point across Hasatan chapter 1 and 2 typically you know we're going to see Satan with the capital S in that passage and that's a in many respects that's a concession to the expectation of the modern reader so do you guys care about that do you care about conceding anything there or how would you how would you approach something that you know well if we fiddle with this the readers going to wonder well hey have a red say it this way and now you're doing something different with it what are your thoughts there well we certainly struggled with it I'll let Sam give the example one that we struggled with a lot and that's where so everyone knows where the arc landed right but if you read our translation it lands somewhere else I know where you're going go ahead get into it everybody thinks it's error rat and we went with a RR to and tell them tell them why I actually just read something totally unrelated that where this actually came up so it's kind of fresh in my mind but go ahead error rat is certainly the traditional the traditional name so it's exactly what English Bible readers expect but the problem is it's easy to misunderstand because it's easy to think that it refers to what in later tradition came to be called Mount error rat when instead the text both here and throughout the Hebrew Bible when the word comes up is referring to an ancient land the ancient land of Aratu what we now call Armenia and so actually some translations I think the way Rhimes has Armenia as where the arc lands if memory serves but there because readers are likely to misunderstand the traditional rendering we went with a rendering that is very exact according to the term used in contemporary a seriological scholarship but not the familiar one to just it throws the reader off just a little bit but throws the reader off maybe from misunderstanding rather than from understanding yeah I mean the text has a plural there mountains of of course you know the traditional rendering there is error rat so you know the Hebrew is obviously not indicating a specific mountain but more of a region more you know something more regional so yeah I actually like that you know mountains of Aratu is how you render it here because you can't really be specific and you know it has me wondering you know if people are gonna you know flag that and wonder what in the world you were thinking there but I imagine you have notes on that that we're gonna get into it indeed we have 135 pages of notes and so it's not gonna answer every translation question but it's it's gonna be a lot of fun for people because it can help you no matter what translation you're reading to understand some of the decisions that went on behind it I think Michael more generally the question of the comfort of the reader is a really important one and it's a reminder of why there can't be any one perfect translation because every translation is going to make different choices about the comfort of the reader and there are a number of places in our translation where you might say that what we've aimed for is not the comfort of the reader as much as the comfort of the re-reader and what John and I are are asking the reader for is the kind of suspension of judgment to not expect it to be a quick disposable skimmable kind of project it's not a not a translation for skimming it's a translation for reading closely savoring and re-reading and we think that reader is going to be really comfortable but you have to be prepared to be that reader I'm gonna say right now that I think you know it's the book is Genesis 1-11 but personally I think the notes are worth the price of the book because for someone who doesn't read Hebrew who can't go back and get under the hood in that way this is almost going to be like a translation commentary and really take people who read this as a translation and then follow the rabbit trails and you're gonna learn a tremendous amount just by doing that exercise it's one of the reasons why the only thing I think I can compare this to and you guys have gone beyond it considerably is the net bible online where they try to explain why they rendered something this or that and you know like well this is a pronoun here but we substituted this noun because of the con they'll get into things like that the nuts and bolts sort of details of why they're doing what they're doing maybe with the tense or a participle or something like that but you guys are going considerably beyond that sort of thing and if people get this and just look at the notes it's just gonna really amp up what they get out of reading the text and having to think about what they're reading why it is what it is so I just wanted to throw that out at this point because we have this issue with Urartu people are just gonna learn a lot you know by following a bunny trail like that I have two more questions what do you think about preserving ambiguity I know this is asking for a lot in translation but there are just passages and I'm gonna use a New Testament illustration for the listener to again sort of help help us all understand what I'm getting at here but like 1st Corinthians 7 1 if you look that up in different translations it's good for a man not to touch a woman it's good for a man not to have sexual relations it's good for a man not to marry I mean you get you can justify any one of those in different ways but if you're just looking at the text it is the lemma for touch and so a rendering that is something like that preserves ambiguity and refrains from interpretation so how do you feel about the issue of preserving ambiguity in a translation I think it's important to preserve ambiguity we're not trying to create ambiguity but where the text can be read in different ways and especially where through the history of interpretation by Jewish and Christian authors it has been read in different ways we want to try to keep those lines of interpretation open for the reader one place where we do that is in Genesis 2 when God makes the garden we have in Genesis 2 8 and the Lord God planted a garden in Eden a four time in the east and there he put the man whom he had formed and there's a crucial ambiguity about whether it means in the east or it means a four time in former times and so we've put both of those to try to to try to point in because the phrase can point in either direction and we want to leave that open and not close it down for the reader where possible that's a really interesting example again because again for somebody who doesn't read Hebrew the lemma there kadem can be either just like you said east or some other qualifier before hand or in the past or something like that that's really interesting John are you on board with that I would like to ask your partners on this we did work hard in several key instances to preserve a range of interpretive possibilities sometimes because that's just how things go particular word, a particular phrase in Hebrew has a wide resonance and it's not it takes some work to pick a phrase that in English is as extensive in its possible resonance we also do something I think it's worth pointing out and that is not always because there's many but in a number of key instances we we try to carry over some wordplay and like you know all about this you read Hebrew so you know how often there's wordplay going on and maybe a good example is at the at the border between chapters 2 and 3 where it talks about the two of them as being naked and then the man and his wife and they were not ashamed and then the next line in fact there's no division in the message text it's part of the same paragraph we translate what's smooth and shrewd beyond every other beast of the field because there's a play here a wordplay there's a word for conning for shrewdness and it sounds very similar to the word for nakedness in Hebrew and and a number of commentators very skillfully have pointed out how the wordplay here is intentional and we draw attention to that in the notes and we do what's called a double translation smooth captures the connection with nakedness and shrewd represents the standard meaning if you wish of this term that's a good example last question what do you think, John you're a pastor so this is going to be a real house but we have a lot of pastors that listen to the podcast but what do you think the responsibility of the pastor is when it comes to what we've been talking about translation should the pastor be introducing people to options and alternatives why or why not because I can imagine some would think well you know good grief on a Sunday morning I don't want to be getting people confused by all the possible things there are to think about in their Bible I'd just be thrilled if they'd read the thing and so that could create sort of an inner compulsion or propensity to just avoid getting into these sorts of issues really getting into the text at this level or in this way what would you recommend or do you have any strong feelings one way or the other on what the structural job is here when it comes to what we're talking about yeah well I certainly have a strong belief in the fundamental Reformation doctrine of the clarity of Scripture and at the same time there are passages which can easily be understood in more than one way and so how to hold those things in tension and be honest about it I think in the end it pays to be honest about passages that are difficult it wasn't just the Ethiopian eunuch who was able to admit I don't understand this that's a good point of departure we can go from there rather than just assuming that we understand it a certain humility is helpful and that's interesting the example of the Ethiopian eunuch actually relates to Genesis 1-11 because we made a choice too with some of the place names so the word in Hebrew for Ethiopia is kush and that often just gets transliterated so Nimrod is from the land of kush but we give it the same equivalent that was already we already find this which is Ethiopia and what's interesting about that is that connects us all the way to the New Testament and if you don't pick a term that bridges the two Testaments then you're not going to see the connection who would guess that the land of kush and the land of Ethiopia are the same unless you give a concordant translation Michael I think your last two questions are related to because if a translation leaves ambiguity open and leaves open the room for interpretation then it does make it easier on the pastor because you don't have to preach against the decision made in the text yeah that's a good point do you guys either one of you have a passage you'd like to read something that you know is substantial but not another half hour that sort of thing just give us a flavor of something that might bring out some of these things we've been talking about to give listeners a sample I've already said I didn't put it this way but I'll put it this way now even if you don't like the translation the notes are just worth the price of the book but the translation is again the centerpiece here it's the sweet spot of what John and Sam are doing but can you give us a sampling I can read Cain and Abel okay go ahead Genesis chapter 4 now the man knew Eva's wife and she conceived and bore Cain saying I gained a man through the Lord and she bore again his brother Abel and Abel was a herder of sheep and Cain was a worker of the ground and it happened at the end of his span of days that Cain brought an offering to the Lord of the fruit of the ground and Abel he also brought an offering of the first slings of his flocks of their fat pieces and the Lord looked with favor upon Abel and his offering but upon Cain and his offering he did not look with favor and Cain burned greatly with anger and his face fell and the Lord said to Cain why does it make you burn with anger and why is your face fallen if you mean well will your face not be lifted up and if you do not mean well at the door and the Lord said to Cain where is Abel your brother and he said I do not know am I my brother's keeper and he said what have you done the voice of your brother and the Lord said where is Abel your brother and he said I do not know am I my brother's keeper and he said what have you done the voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground so now cursed are you by way of the ground which gived wide her mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand if you work the ground no longer shall she give her strength to you a trembler and a wanderer shall you be upon the earth and Cain said to the Lord given see you have driven me out this day from the face of the ground and from your face I must hide and I shall be a trembler and a wanderer upon the earth and so it will happen everyone who comes upon me will kill me and the Lord said to him therefore everyone who kills Cain seven fold vengeance shall be taken upon him and so the Lord granted Cain a sign lest everyone who came upon him then Cain went out from the face of the Lord and dwelt in the land of wandering east of Eden in that selection I was looking at ESV which I think leans toward formal equivalence but what you were reading does bring out repetition in that section in a few places where ESV doesn't I thought it was interesting ESV has the Lord put a mark on the Lord's name I mean you can still get the idea that this is something God's doing to help him or something some favorable act some merciful act but granted I think brings that out better there were just a number of things in there that would draw attention and again for listeners I do recommend getting this because you could use this and compare it with the translation why are they doing what they're doing and on the one hand you might be used to a study Bible doing a little of that here you're going to get a full-blown discussion of the things that really need to be thought about whether you agree with where John and Sam come down on this is sort of immaterial but what sort of thought process went into this and what sort of thought process needs to go into the whole enterprise I think it's really valuable so I want to thank you both for doing the work thanks for coming on the show thank you it's a pleasure before we go John is there a blog or website anything you'd like to promote or we could read more about you well you can always check out my blog ancient Hebrew poetry easy to find but I think Glosselhaus our publisher who I'm sure will work with you guys in the future has a special discount for the information we do the discount code word is get neck it so I love it is it spelled any KKD yeah it's normal it's get neck it I don't know how to say it alright so what's the website where you would put in the discount well I'll put the link on our website for everybody so if you go to neckandbiblepodcast.com I'll have a link there with the discount code get neck it but Sam is G-E-T-N-A-K-E-D there you go that's a discount code Sam is there anything anywhere we can find more about you anything you'd like to promote no I'm not a regular blogger though I will be doing on a legal blog at the Washington Post I'm going to do a 10 part series on the translation coming up next month that's interesting now you can throw in your work about the Constitution as well I'm sort of I'm a political junkie in the sense that I listen to a lot of talk radio and I was a political science minor so that's something I'm actually interested in but again what's the title of that and I imagine it's on Amazon right well the long article on Hinditis if that's the if that's the one you mean that's the book yes I'm on an author of a case book the Constitution of the United States that's with several other law professors and you can get it on Amazon and you can get a link to it from my web page at UCLA is that used as a textbook anywhere or yes it's textbook used in a number of law schools okay all right and the reading level I mean is it a what kind of level of detail are we at or is this just like an overview of the case so it's a book that's intended for law students but part of what my co-authors and I think is really important is that the Constitution is not the preserved and special possession just of lawyers and judges it's the people's Constitution we the people have adopted it and we think it should be of interest to everyone so I think the book is interesting to everyone but I should warn you it's got the price of a textbook so it is not cheap but but it's that's the idea it's for everybody's Constitution and we want to explain everybody's Constitution to law students all right well thanks again thank you and I hope your listeners will check out Glossahouse our publisher they can go directly to Glossahouse that's not too easy to I'm sorry not too hard Glossah G-O-L-S-A Glossahouse and you'll find it easy to order the book pre-order it it will be out very soon okay thanks for your time thank you for the opportunity really appreciate it absolutely yeah all the best Mike great to yeah thanks okay bye for now all right Mike well that was another good one it's always interesting getting into the textual criticism or translations if you will of the Bible yeah I think people you know listeners will appreciate again that there's a lot to think about here you know what John and Sam are trying to do is really really a literary work to try to treat the Bible as a literary work of artistry and try to preserve again the writer's intentionality in ways that you know are really hard for us to detect because of translation a lot of translations obscure things that we're supposed to notice you know that our attention is supposed to be drawn to so I think what they're doing here is really worthwhile absolutely I'm really looking forward to reading that and then the book again is Genesis one through eleven a new old translation and they have a discount code for all of our listeners and that's get naked G-E-T-N-A-K E-D that's a discount code I will put the link what's funny about that Mike did you talk them into that no no I didn't I love it of course of course it's perfect I love it so I'll put the actual link to the publisher on the naked bible podcast.com website go over there get naked get your discount I didn't do it he did it so I so it's perfect I'll take your word for it absolutely so please go over there get the book can't wait to read it but Mike next week be careful because I'm looking at you I'm giving you the evil eye I know we're going to do an episode on the evil eye believe it or not there's a passage in Ecclesiastes that sort of factors into this idea again the way somebody looks at you sort of affects you in various different ways this is actually part of ancient Near Eastern lore or belief and so I've actually been asked this a couple times in email and such and it would surprise you to know that there's actually a decent amount of scholarly material on this so we're going to take a crack at you know talking about the evil eye here on the podcast I don't know if I should be excited or worried because I'm going to be constantly head on the swivel but alright Mike well again we just want to thank John and Sam for coming on and talking with us and also Mike we decided that we're going to open up our voting for the next book that we're going to cover on July 1st so the voting will open up on July 1st and run through July 23rd at midnight so you'll have to wait and stay tuned to what you're actually going to be voting on but we got three choices for you so July 1st the voting will begin and again just want to thank John and Sam for coming on and just want to thank everybody else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast God bless www.nakedbibleblog.com to learn more about Dr. Heiser's other websites and blogs go to www.brmsh.com