There's Fish in This Barrel, Too!

A fellow named Bill Jemas, who worked in comic books a few years ago, has a project to create a new translation of the book of Genesis. He's not the fish I'm taking aim at, though. Reading the story, he seems like a fellow who's taken at least some pains to do the work necessary to try to understand Genesis in Hebrew, although he notes that the only Hebrew he's studied is what he learned in connection with his translation project.

No, I'm having some fun with the reporter who wrote the story. Let's start here:

His goal is to write an English translation of Genesis that is truer to the Hebrew text than are widely used English translations like the famed King James Version.

Mr. Diamant has been left unaware, it seems, of translations like the New International Version, completed in 1978. Or the New Revised Standard Version, finished in 1989, which was itself an update of the Revised Standard Version, completed in 1952. A modern translation used by English-speaking Jewish people is The Tanakh, published by the Jewish Publication Society and completed in 1984.

What these translations have in common with each other and with a significant portion of other modern Bible translations is their use of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, an edition of the Hebrew Bible based on a much older complete text than that used by the King James translators in 1611.

While those translations I mentioned are all Biblical best-sellers, knowledge available with a few Googles, there are some other new translations that do pretty much the same thing Mr. Jemas wants to do. And they're by people who've spent some years studying the languages and literature. Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, published a translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, in 2004. You can read a review of it here. Everett Fox, a professor of Judaic studies at Clark University, published a translation of those same five books in 1995. A brief review is here. Alter and Fox may not pop up on the casual reader's list of Biblical translations, but the casual reader isn't writing a news feature about someone who's doing a Biblical translation project.

Mr. Jemas seems to want to provide an alternative to the King James Version of the Bible, using an older Hebrew text than those translators had available. He may or may not know that's already been done, a bunch -- my guess is he does, but you don't sell books by telling people about everybody who's already done what you're doing. He may or may not know about literary translations like those by Alter and Fox. If he does, he may see his work as a potentially more popular version of the same project they did, or he may again figure that it's his job to sell his book, not theirs. I don't disagree.

Mr. Diamant, however, should have known better. More than one journalism professor told us the creed of the reporter is, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Even if you don't go that far, you might still wonder about whether or not Bible scholars and translators have done any updates in the last four hundred years. Mr. Diamant solicits opinions from a couple of them about Mr. Jemas's project (they're wary but approving), so he had the chance to ask. He didn't, so his story winds up leaving anyone who doesn't know much about biblical translation no more informed than they were before.