by Judy Jones
Revelation 8:1
The Good Book as Good Business
We know, if we think about it, that God didn’t speak to His biblical scribes in seventeenth-century English prose; that the King James version of the Bible is not carved, Cecil B. DeMille–style, in stone. This allows for considerable diversity of opinion about how He said whatever it was that He said. It also makes for a Bible-publishing industry that has churned out 2,500 English-language versions alone over the past couple of centuries and that continues to ring up an estimated $180 million in sales each year.
Some of the superabundance of Scripture is justified. For one thing, new discoveries of ancient texts and more sophisticated methods of interpreting them have allowed scholars to correct errors in earlier translations. For another, some people sincerely want to get the Word across to a new generation of readers with considerably different literary needs. Then there’s simple chauvinism: Every sect and denomination now seems determined to have its own version of things, translated by its own scholars, to present to its own faithful. So, as scrambled eggs and fried-egg sandwiches have been joined by the Egg McMuffin, next to the King James and the Revised Standard versions, we now have such bestsellers as The Good News Bible and The Book. Here, contributor David Martin provides a brief critical guide to ten Bibles, complete with samples of how each handles two familiar biblical passages.
THE KING JAMES BIBLE (a.k.a. the Authorized Version): Retains its popularity more for sentimental than for utilitarian reasons. Despite ongoing revisions, it still presents translation problems, and some of the language, already slightly outdated when it was published in 1611, is now so archaic that it’s impossible to decipher without divine guidance. But it’s beautiful stuff, whatever it means, and it did help shape the English language for the next couple of centuries. If you have no purist hang-ups, the abridged and heavily annotated collegiate version known as The Dartmouth Bible can make the going a whole lot easier.
THE REVISED STANDARD VERSION: An American reworking of the King James Bible, issued between 1946 and 1952. Proponents praised it for cleaning up the King James language and many of its textual errors. Detractors said it still retained too many archaisms, while fundamentalists blamed the Commies for its supposedly weakened stance on the divinity of Jesus, the integrity of the Trinity, and the historicity of the Virgin Birth. Has become, as the name implies, the familiar version of the Bible in the United States and probably throughout the English-speaking world.
THE NEW ENGLISH BIBLE: Published in 1970 by the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and a totally new translation from the original texts. Instead of a word-for-word translation, though, which produces what has come to be known as “Bible English,” this goes meaning-for-meaning and favors contemporary idiom; as a result, it’s clearer than the King James but also wordier. Its Anglicisms—“truckle to no one,” “meal-tub,” “throw on the stove”—can drive an American crazy.
THE JERUSALEM BIBLE: Brought out in 1966 and heralded as the first Roman Catholic translation into English from the original text rather than from the Latin Vulgate. A formidable piece of scholarship, it includes book-by-book introductions and notes on archeology, geography, theology, and language that are considered by many to be the most complete of those in any one-volume Bible. The doctrine is relatively liberal, although Catholic dogma does creep into the notes (e.g., on I Corinthians 7: “Virginity is a higher calling than marriage, and spirituality more profitable”).
THE NEW AMERICAN BIBLE: The first translation from the original texts for American Catholics, and a surprisingly undogmatic one. A word-for-word translation, it gets a bit ponderous, but does clean up a lot of archaism.
THE LIVING BIBLE: Completed in 1971, and comes in various versions. (The one for Catholics called The Way: Catholic Edition, and for blacks there’s—honest— Soul Food.) Literally a paraphrase, The Book, as it’s now called, has been criticized extensively for its careless treatment of the geography, history, and language of the times, as well as for some of the theological conclusions of its author, Kenneth N. Taylor. Some people also take exception to having The Book touted on bumper stickers. No beauty here: The Psalms are done in prose, the Song of Solomon as some kind of a dramatic reading among several speakers, and its colloquial style is sitcom-flat: “Hey, who’s that girl over there?” “Martha was the jittery type.”
THE GOOD NEWS BIBLE (Today’s English Version): The American Bible Society’s popular illustrated model, designed to be easily understood by absolutely everyone, including newcomers to the English language. The translation is accurate enough, but the style is strictly newspaperese.
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION: Published in 1978 with a strikingly familiar format. When someone speaks, there are quotation marks; when the speaking voice changes, so does the paragraph—just like in a James Michener novel. The translation itself, neither literal nor paraphrased, is innocuous, and the theology, conservative evangelical.
THE HOLY SCRIPTURES: Completed in 1982, and the first translation from Hebrew by Jewish scholars since the Septuagint, the Hebrew-to-Greek translation of the Old Testament done more than 2,200 years ago (and so called because it was the work of seventy-two scholars). Although more formal than many Christian translations, it’s very literal and reads well aloud (the novelist and rabbi Chaim Potok served as literary coordinator).
THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION: An attempt to update the King James. It restored certain parts of the original seventeenth-century text, which had been inadvertently changed, and modernized some of the language—“sheweth” to “show,” “thy” to “your,” for example. On the whole, though, the translation tends to vulgarize the prose without making it all that much more accessible. Also available in paperback, in a version marketed as The Bible, with commentaries on everything from stress to drugs to homosexuality.
Bible Baedeker SIX IMPORTANT PLACES THAT BEGIN WITH THE LETTER G
GILEAD: A fertile, mountainous region east of the Jordan River, between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Badlands of a sort, Gilead (with its colonizers, the Gileadites) was both cut off from the rest of the country and open to attack by hostile neighbors. This was the home of the outlaw king Jephthah and of the prophet Elijah. King David fled to Gilead to escape the rebellion led by his son Absalom, and it was here that the Syrian Laban caught up with his fugitive son-in-law Jacob. The region was known for its spices, myrrh, and balm, which prompted the prophet Jeremiah, seeking a cure for the decline of the Hebrew nation, to ask his famous rhetorical question: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Are there no physicians there?” Poe’s narrator in “The Raven” was even more skeptical, wondering: “Is there balm in Gilead?”
GAZA: A town that spelled trouble for Israel right from the start. Located on the plain between the Mediterranean Sea and western Israel that is now known as the Gaza Strip, this began as an Egyptian garrison town and was later one of the five great cities of the Philistines. In fact, it’s where the Philistines brought Samson to blind him after his betrayal by Delilah (hence the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza); Samson retaliated by bringing down the Philistine temple on top of them all. Later, the unlucky town was besieged, first by Alexander the Great, then during the wars of the Maccabees, and again during the Crusades. Although the exact location of ancient Gaza is unknown, modern Gaza is the principal city of the Gaza Strip, the impoverished area that, since the 1940s, has been the site of massive Palestinian refugee camps and, despite the removal of Israeli settlements in 2005, the scene of endless clashes between Egyptians, Israelis, and Arab guerrillas.
GEHENNA: A corruption of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom, the valley outside Jerusalem where, during various periods, the Jews slipped into the pagan rite of human sacrifice. The practice was to burn one’s child, usually the firstborn, as an offering to the fire god, Moloch. God was, naturally, appalled by the custom; according to Jeremiah, he laid a curse on the place, changing its name to “the valley of slaughter” and promising: “I will make th
is city desolate, and a hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss, because of all the plagues thereof. And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness …” (Jeremiah 19:8). Later, Gehenna became synonymous with Hell, as in Rudyard Kipling’s verse: “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne / He travels fastest who travels alone.”
GOSHEN: There have always been too many Goshens to keep track of. One was a region of Egypt, probably located in the northeast part of the Nile Delta, where Joseph settled his brothers and his father, Jacob, after returning from his exile in Egypt. During this period they were under the protection of the Pharaoh, but over the next four centuries the Jews living in Goshen became the slaves of the Egyptians. (When Moses finally came along and delivered them from slavery, they headed directly east, it’s thought, to a place called the Sea of Reeds, not, as it says in the Bible, to the Red Sea.) Another Goshen probably refers to the hill country near the Negev, once occupied by Joshua’s army; this is the one from which we got the expression land o’ goshen. And then, of course, there’s Goshen, Indiana, and Goshen, Connecticut.
GETHSEMANE: The olive grove, or garden, on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, where Jesus underwent his “agony” (during which, as he prayed, “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground,” Luke 22:44), where he was visited by an angel, and where, soon afterward, he was betrayed by Judas and arrested. In the Bible, the garden seems to be under a kind of spell, which causes the disciples to fall asleep repeatedly while Jesus struggles with temptation. You’ve seen the spot as a backdrop in religious paintings.
GOLGOTHA: The same as Calvary; the place where Jesus was crucified. (Golgotha derives from the Hebrew, and Calvary the Latin, word for “skull.”) It was somewhere just outside the walls of Jerusalem, although no one knows the exact location. Ever since St. Helena discovered what she believed to be a piece of the cross in the area in A.D. FIVE FAMILIAR CHARACTERS WHO WON’T STAY PUT
ABSALOM: King David’s handsome third son, who killed his half-brother Amnon to avenge the rape of his sister. He was eventually pardoned by David, who was partial to him and probably overpermissive. Later, Absalom “stole the hearts of the men of Israel” and conspired to overthrow the king. During the decisive battle, Absalom’s hair got caught in the branches of an oak tree, and his mule rode out from under him. As he hung there helplessly, one of David’s men finished him off, despite the king’s orders that his son’s life be spared. David’s cry upon hearing the news—“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”—is the classic father’s lament. Absalom, as a symbol of the son who brings his father grief, was used by Dryden in his satirical “Absalom and Achitophel” and by Faulkner in his novel Absalom, Absalom!
ISHMAEL: Son of Abraham, conceived when Abraham’s wife Sarah, for years unable to have a child, finally sent her Egyptian maid Hagar in to sleep with her husband. Later, Sarah became pregnant with Isaac and, in a fit of jealousy, had Hagar and Ishmael cast out into the wilderness to die. God came to their rescue, however, by providing a well at Beersheba. Ishmael grew up in the wilderness under God’s protection and became the first Arab. (The story is sometimes used to explain the bad feeling between Jews and Arabs.) Ishmael is a symbol of the outcast, because of the line in the Bible that reads: “And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and everyman’s hand against him.”
Melville gave the name Ishmael to the narrator of Moby Dick, the philosophical schoolmaster who took to the sea every time he soured on the world. Captain Ahab, by the way, also comes directly from the Old Testament: He was Jezebel’s husband, a king who succumbed to idol worship.
JOB: The most put-upon person in the world; a healthy, happy, prosperous, and godly fellow who, for no apparent reason, suddenly has his family and his possessions wiped out and is himself covered with boils. His wife advises him to “curse God and die,” and his friends sit around with him all day urging him to repent for his sins, assuming that he must have done something wrong to bring all this misery down on himself. (The expression “Job’s comforters” refers to the kind of friends who, when times are bad, manage to make them worse.) Job never gives in, however; his point is that God doesn’t always have to make sense to us, that He doesn’t always punish evil and reward righteousness but can do whatever He wants.
God, in the end, decides that Job has passed the test and rewards him handsomely. Writers from Dostoevsky to O’Neill have wrestled with the theme of Job’s suffering, and Archibald MacLeish retold the story in modern terms in his play J.B.
SUSANNA: The heroine of a famous courtroom drama reported in the Old Testament Apocrypha. A beautiful and virtuous young married woman, she is accused of adultery by two lecherous elders whose advances she’s spurned. They claim to have seen her with a young man while she was bathing. She is just about to be found guilty and stoned to death when young Daniel comes to her rescue. Asking to be allowed to cross-examine the elders, he proceeds to demolish their testimony, Perry Mason–style. Justice wins out; Susanna is saved and the elders are stoned. The story was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters, who usually chose to depict the part of the story that takes place in the bath, because that allowed them to produce a religious work and paint a gorgeous nude model at the same time. Susanna reappears as a figure in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”
MARY MAGDALEN: An elusive figure, one of several Marys who were devoted to Jesus. She is known to have been possessed by “seven demons,” which Jesus exorcised, and to have been present when He was crucified, when He was buried, and again when His tomb was found empty. Beyond that, her story is a series of mix-ups. She may or may not have been the sister of Martha, and she probably wasn’t really a harlot; the latter slander came from the fact that she took her name from Magdala, her hometown, which was a seaport with a bad reputation. She may have washed Jesus’ feet, but then again, it may have been another Mary who did that. At any rate, she became a saint and a symbol of repentance, and she gave us the word “maudlin,” which means “tearful,” and the French “Madeleine,” the name and the cookie. In paintings, she’s usually the one with the red hair. FOUR PAIRS OF GROUPS WHO KEEP STEPPING ON EACH OTHER’S TOES
Not everybody was alone with his problems, his family, or his God in the Holy Land. The following preferred to travel in packs—packs that, like Democrats and Republicans or Oreo and Hydrox, were not always immediately distinguishable from each other.
The Sacrament of the Last Supper by Salvador Dalí
APOSTLES AND DISCIPLES: There were twelve of each, but not quite the same twelve. While Judas is always counted as a disciple, he didn’t, according to the best sources, make the apostles roster, where he was replaced by somebody called Matthias. Strictly speaking, the disciples were students of Christ (from the Latin word for “pupil”), the apostles His envoys (from the Greek for “send away”). Paul is often added to the list of primary apostles, and Judas sometimes retained, swelling the group to fourteen. Also, the principal missionary to a country is sometimes designated its apostle: St. Patrick is the apostle of Ireland.
A pair of seraphim, one with head, one without—and each with a full complement of wings.
SERAPHIM AND CHERUBIM: First of all, they’re not those plump babies you see in Renaissance paintings. In the Old Testament, a cherub had anywhere from one to four faces and either one or two pairs of wings, and looked more like a lead guitarist than a toddler; God sat among or just above the cherubim. A seraph, by contrast, had three pairs of wings, hovered over the throne of God, had a reputation for zeal and ardor, and was the very highest-ranking of the nine “choirs” of angels. (Or, as the prophet Isaiah once remarked, “I saw the Lord seated on a throne…. About him were attendant seraphim, and each had six wings; one pair covered his face and one pair his
feet, and one pair was spread in flight.”) In art, seraphim are most often red-toned and may carry a candle; cherubim, the second highest-ranking, tend to be blue and sometimes have books. Both are depicted as mere heads, surrounded by the appropriate number of wings. For the record, the nine grades of angel, divided into three hierarchies, are, from highest to lowest: seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, all of which surround God in perpetual adoration; dominions, virtues, and powers, which together govern the stars and elements; principalities, which protect the kingdoms of the earth, and archangels and angels, which carry messages. Angelology, surprisingly, was a fairly exact science.
PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES: The two great Jewish religious sects and political parties in the last two centuries b.c. As far as Jesus was concerned, both were bad news: literal-minded, cold, hypocritical. The Pharisees were the majority party and an intellectual elite—whom we’d probably classify as religious liberals, at least in comparison with the Sadducees—full of learning and piety and consumed with getting their message to the people. That message, while firmly founded on Judaic law, had been much tampered with over the centuries, and its oral form, as practiced by the Pharisees, had come to include belief in institutions like an afterlife, a day of judgment, a resurrection, and the Messiah. The Sadducees were a social elite, supplemented by priests and, as such, deeply conservative; they accepted only the Hebrew Scriptures, rejecting all the oral traditions that had come to encrust it, barnacle-style. They were much stricter than the Pharisees (who themselves were no day at the beach); it didn’t enhance their popularity that, not believing in any afterlife or day of judgment down the road, they doled out harsh legal punishments here on earth. The strife between the Pharisees and the Sadducees ended in Roman intervention and domination, but at least the Pharisees made it into the second century A.D.; many of Jesus’ sayings find a parallel in the teachings of the Pharisees, and their ideas underlie many aspects of Orthodox Judaism today. (You could do worse than think of the Pharisees as the first rabbis.) Figuratively, of course, a pharisee is a self-righteous hypocrite. There is no such thing as a lowercased Sadducee, a reflection of the fact that they were the minority party, that they’d died out by A.D. 70 (the year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem), and that they left nothing of particular interest, philosophically or stylistically, to either Jew or Christian.