Another new Bible translation!

A Biblical scholar is publishing yet another translation of the Bible. I wonder how many times this had been done over the centuries? Thousands of times I bet, each time more and more has to be lost. I wonder if we will everknow the real text of the Bible!


Reuters) -- It is considered the most magisterial opening in English literature: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

But now a major revisionist translation of the Bible would have the cosmos begin with a more conversational clause: "When God began to create heaven and earth ... "

And where the King James translation of Genesis had the earth begin "without form and void," the new translation of the Hebrew Bible says that the earth was "welter and waste."

www.cnn.com...

Biblical scholar Robert Alter's major new English translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible -- alternately called the Five Books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch -- has some critics manning the barricades while others are applauding his efforts to return the work to its original Hebrew meanings and majestic repetitions.

The Bible is important to so many people, I don't know why they feel they have to "translate" it so often. If this man can bring it back more to it's original meanings I wonder how many will argue and dispute any changes in the passages?

I'd be VERY curious as to what "exact texts" this person chose to use in Hebrew in order to formulate/re-create what he considers "the original meaning of the Hebrew Text" since there is not one single text in Hebrew but rather (thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in all those Qumran Caves in December 1946) there are at least 4 families of Hebrew manuscripts that DON'T match each other for the Pentateuch very closely:

l. The Hebrew Vorlage to the LXX (around BC 350)
2. The late Masoretic Text of Leningrad (around AD 980)
3. The SamPent (Samaritan Pentateuch) around 400 BC
4. The Dead Sea Scroll mixed families of Torah Texts (BC 250 to AD 68)

5. then there's all those Targums in Aramaic, some of which were based on on a fifth Hebrew text family altogther.

All of these different versions OF THE HEBREW text of the Torah (i.e. the first 5 books of the socalled Bible) differ from each other by roughly 23% which means for every 100 words of text, approx 23 words are different between # 1 and #2, and between #1 and # 3 and between # 1 and #4 and between #2 and # 3 and between #2 and #4 and between #2 and # 5 and between # 3 and # 4 and between # 3 and # 5 and between # 4 and # 5...

In other words, lots of contradictory Hebrew manuscripts from which to make "arbitrary" decisions on an "official version" :

And that's just establishing the HEBREW TEXT (it does not address the problem of translating paleo Hebrew without Vowells into modern American English).

So you can see some of the issues here....

This is so funny I guess when somebody does not like the way the bible looks to them they call themseves "Scholars" and change it the way they like it.

This has been done in the US many times over, Just go to a bible store and check how many versions of the bible they have.

I would still be interested to know the methods he used. It would be interesting to read. The Bible is meant to be interpreted by each individual. Though often taken literally, I believe the parables and stories just present a message. Some things hold true facts and some are just meant to be stories conveying these messages. I'm glad to see an interest in bringing multiple viewpoints to scriptures.

The problems of the diferents views is that they are the diferent individuals opinions and when human feelings are brought to change something it turns bias.

There was a lesbian, Virginia Mollenkott, who worked on the NIV version. Included in the hellbounds according to the NIV are "homosexual offenders." Homophobes if you will.

I stand by the Authorized King James.

I heard of this one version where Peter is called Rocky and Mary Magdalene is called Maggie, etc. It really slings the lingo.

yeah and John the baptist is refered to as " the Dipper"