On his relatively new blog Ketuvim (started in March 2007), Jim Getz has recently addressed the quandary of selecting a required translation for a collegiate Bible course. Jim’s eventual choice—unfortunately reached mostly by process of elimination—is the New Revised Standard Version (available for online reading through the Oremus Bible Browser and Crosswalk but not the Bible Gateway; I much prefer the Oremus service, which does not try to do anything other than present the biblical text, and is thus free of annoying sidebars, navigation systems, and above all, advertisements). I found Jim’s comments interesting, engaging, and for the most part, agreeable, but problematic in one important respect.

Before I continue with my thoughts here, I should state clearly that—given the current state of the Bible translation market—I concur with Jim’s selection of the NRSV for his course, and have for quite some time. At Milligan College and at Pepperdine University, I have been fortunate to serve on faculties where we all agreed that the NRSV is, at present, the best translation available for collegiate-level academic study in English. Long-time Higgaion readers will recall my brief flirtation with Today’s New International Version, which was driven by the TNIV’s greater ease of reading relative to the sometimes highfalutin NRSV. However, due to accuracy concerns (some justified, some erroneous on my part), I quickly went back to the NRSV. I generally allow my students to read the NRSV online, but we sell the HarperCollins Study Bible in our bookstore for those who want a physical copy (and some of my colleagues may use some of the editorial materials in the HarperCollins Study Bible—which, curiously, has the same initials as the Homan Christian Standard Bible; perhaps I’ll come back and blog someday about my perplexity at the number of “standard” versions that now exist).

I thought that Jim had some interesting, if brief, things to say about readability. This is actually my biggest problem with the NRSV; although it’s clearly more readable for modern students than the KJV, the supposed 11th-grade reading level of the NRSV is based on an idealized 11th-grader reader, and my students—raised on the NIV, or The Message, or no Bible at all—often misunderstand some of the more sophisticated English in the NRSV. I also found Jim’s comments on ideological consistency with one’s education context quite interesting, and again, I may have more to say about that issue later on too.

The main point of this post, though, is to interact with Jim’s application of his “accuracy” criterion. It should hopefully go without saying that I think the accuracy criterion is the most important of the three that Jim proposes. In general, I trust the NRSV more than any other current mass-market translation to give my students a good sense of the Hebrew text. I don’t think the NRSV is perfect, and I don’t think the TNIV is awful, but I do think the NRSV exhibits less theological bias than the TNIV. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s just that the NRSV exhibits my theological biases.)

However, I’m not sure that Psalm 2:12, Jim’s test case, is really the best test case to use. Please see Jim’s original post for a long review of English translations of this verse. Please allow me to highlight just a few of those that Jim listed, just to lay the foundation for my own assessment. I draw your attention here to the opening phrase, in keeping with Jim’s analysis.

• MT: … נשקו־בר
• NIV: Kiss the Son …
• TNIV: Kiss his son …
• NRSV: kiss his feet …
• NET: Give sincere homage! …

To these, allow me to add:

• LXX: δράξασθε παιδείας …(”accept [?—literally ‘catch, trap’] instruction …”)
• NJPS: pay homage in good faith …

Jim rejects all of the translations that he surveyed, except for the RSV, NRSV, and NET. Jim wrote:

Now, it becomes obvious that some of these translations are different than others. The NIV, NASB, HCSB, NLT and ESV all see the Aramaic בר “son” rather than the Hebrew בר “foot.” Why see a stray Aramaicism in an otherwise standard Hebrew psalm? Easy: they want the psalm to be about Jesus. Obviously Heb 1 takes this messianic psalm of a Davidic king as pertaining to the Messiah (note the caps), but that doesn’t give the translators the leeway for linguistic flights of fancy. Notice how far that some translations take this: capitalizing “Son” and “He,” and even adding “his” and/or “royal” before “son, “adding even more levels of interpretation upon an already poor translation choice. Please note: I am not saying that Hebrews is wrong in saying that Ps 2 pertains to Jesus; I am saying these translators are wrong in how they read the Hebrew.

I concur with Jim in disliking the Christianized translation “Kiss the son,” but in fact the RSV and NRSV are not really any better, and may in fact be worse. Let me explain.

The translation of בר as “son” in Psalm 2:12 at least has the virtue of being based on the well-attested Aramaic word בר, “son.” Jim’s question, “Why see a stray Aramaicism in an otherwise standard Hebrew psalm?” is certainly quite appropriate. The Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS; the most widely used critical edition of the Tanakh) apparatus does not list any textual variants for Psalm 2:12. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament, abbreviated LXX) comes nowhere near supporting the NIV, etc. in translating נשקו־בר as “kiss the son” (much less “son” with a capital s or any of the NLT-type shenanigans to try to increase the Christian messianic potential of the verse). As Jim noted, the book of Hebrews does give other verses from Psalm 2 Christological interpretations, but I agree with Jim that “that doesn’t give the translators the leeway for linguistic flights of fancy.” Yet this is not quite the whole story. An apparently Hebrew word בר “son” is attested in Proverbs 31:2, where King Lemuel’s mother is quoted as saying, מה ברי ומה בר בטני ומה בר נדרי. Perhaps this use of בר is an Aramaism, explicable by the saying’s apparent non-Israelite provenance, but otherwise seems to be . Perhaps, as the Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) lexicon seems to suggest, בר was indeed used for “son” in late biblical Hebrew, and this is our evidence. Or perhaps, as Gary Rendsburg is fond of suggesting, this is Israelian Hebrew rather than late Judean Hebrew (isn’t that one of the drums Rendsburg beats, or am I thinking of someone else?). In any event, there is biblical attestation of a Hebrew בר, even though it is very slim. The NIV, etc. are thus not completely without foundation in reading בר in Psalm 2:12 as “son.” However, I do not think this is the optimal reading, as I will explain below.

Moreover, as much as I appreciate the NRSV, I must demur from Jim’s assessment that the NRSV presents an “accurate” translation of Psalm 2:12. Jim writes of “the Hebrew בר ‘foot’,” but as far as I can tell, no such word exists. Now I might very well be wrong on this, and perhaps there is a Hebrew word בר “foot.” If so, I would like to be shown where it is; but consider the following data.

At this very moment I am in a place where the only real tools I have available to me are those freely available online plus my Accordance library. My Accordance library is not inconsiderable, but I have not invested in the Accordance HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) module. Therefore, I have very limited resources. Nevertheless, neither the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon nor the BHS Wörterbuch (Accordance editions) list any such Hebrew word as בר “foot.” The BHS Wörterbuch lists six different words spelled with the consonants בר, and this count excludes any verb forms. BDB likewise knows a number of בר words, none of which mean “foot.”

Of course, lexicons and wörterbuchen are not the end-all and be-all of philology, but the absence of a biblical Hebrew בר “foot” in such resources does raise questions about the NRSV rendering. To see for myself, I did an Accordance search for בר. I got 59 hits in 53 verses. Quite a few of these hits are in the Aramaic portions of Daniel and Ezra, where בר is clearly the Aramaic word “son.” Excluding those Aramaic passages, here’s what I found for Hebrew בר:

• Recall the use of בר for “son” in Proverbs 31.
• Gen 41:35, 49; 42:3, 25; 45:23—In these verses, בר means “grain.” I generally get poor results when I try to use pointed Hebrew in my blog posts (even with Unicode); in the interests of complete details, I will add that in these verses בר is pointed with a qāmēṣ. The prophetic books also attest this word, בר “grain” (and no other word spelled בר; in the MT, whether this word is pointed with a qāmēṣ or a pātaḥ, depending on the accentuation. See Jer 23:28; Joel 2:24; Amos 5:11; 8:5, 6 for the prophets and Ps 65:14; Prov 11:26; 14:4 for the writings.
• In Job 39:4, some lexicographers and translators recognize a separate word בר with the sense of “field, open space.” I’m not quite sure if this is a genuinely different word in biblical Hebrew בר, or a distinction driven by English semantics.
• 2 Sam 22:21, 25//Psalm 18:20, 24—In 2 Sam 22:21//Psalm 18:20, כבר ידי is parallel to כצדקתי, and in 2 Sam 22:25//Psalm 18:24, כבר לנגד עיניו is parallel to כצדקתי. In these cases, the lexicons and English translations render בר (pointed with a ḥōlem as “purity,” well in keeping with the parallel word צדקה). This usage is also attested in Job 39:4.
• “Pure,” an adjectival form of the usage just mentioned is also possible, as in Psalm 24:4, where נקי כפים ובר לבב characterize those admitted to the presence of God for worship. Adjectivally, this word appears in the MT with a pātaḥ; a feminine form ברה and a construct form ברי are also attested. This usage is evident in Ps 19:9 (English versions number this verse as 19:8); 24:4 (aforementioned); 72:16; 73:1; Job 11:4.
• Perhaps as an extension of the use of בר as an adjective with a meaning like English “pure,” an adjectival ברה is twice attested in Song of Songs (6:9, 10), apparently meaning something like “precious” or “beautiful.” In Song 9:10, ברה is parallel to יפה.
• Isa 1:25 illustrates another use of בר (pointed with a ḥōlem): ואצרף כבר סיגיך, “I will smelt away your dross as with בר.” The lexicons and translations use “lye” or “potash” to name this smelting agent in English. See also Job 9:30, where בר (pointed with a ḥōlem is something like soap, a cleansing agent for human skin.

Please note that these seem to be the only attestations in the Tanakh of words spelled בר. We thus have biblical Hebrew words spelled בר that mean:

• grain
• purity
• pure
• precious
• purifier (viz., lye, soap)
• son

Please note further that there is no such biblical Hebrew word as בר “foot,” unless that word is attested here and here alone. The NRSV margin even confesses that “feet” is a correction (to use their terminology) of the Hebrew text, because, in the NRSV translators’ view, the “meaning of [the] Heb[rew text] of verses 11b and 12a is uncertain” (quoting the NRSV footnote). If our choices are between “son” and “feet,” then the lightly-attested בר “son” (NIV, etc.) has a better claim to “accuracy” than the “corrected” NRSV, and still more than the non-existent בר “foot”!

However, our choices are not between “son” and “feet.” “Feet” is not attested at all for biblical Hebrew בר, and “son” is attested in biblical Hebrew (as distinct from biblical Aramaic) only three times, and all of those are in a single verse. Yet that leaves dozens of uses of בר in the Tanakh. The sense “grain” is obviously nonsensical in Psalm 2:12, but what about something in the semantic range of purity? Both a noun “purity” and an adjective “pure” are well-attested for בר in biblical Hebrew. Jim judged the NRSV and the NET as “accurate” in Psalm 2:12, but they render the opening phrase quite differently:

• NRSV: kiss his feet …
• NET: Give sincere homage! …

Recall also the NJPS rendering, “NJPS: pay homage in good faith …” The NJPS and NET translators both avoid the probably Christologically-driven decision to translate בר in Psalm 2:12 as “son,” but they do not invent an otherwise unattested meaning of “feet” or anything else. Instead, they try to stick with the very well-attested semantic range of purity. Admittedly, to accomplish this, the NJPS and NET translators must regard בר in Psalm 2:12 as an adverb, perhaps, with the rough sense “kiss purely.” Both sets of translators then have to fudge a bit on the usual translation of נשק, rendering it as “give/pay homage,” but surely this is also what the translators of all the “son” translations have in mind.

If we’re using Jim’s criteria, then, we’re in a real bind. If ideological commitments demand gender-inclusive language, and scholarly integrity demands a commitment to as accurate a representation of the text as possible, this seems to be a no-win situation. The NRSV offers gender-inclusive language throughout, but in Psalm 2:12, the NET and NJPS translation has a much better claim to “accuracy” than any of the other mass-market translations.

I have previously blogged about The Contemporary Torah, which—according to editor David Stein—the Jewish Publication Society would like to see abbreviated CJPSV, for “Contemporary JPS Version.” At our Contemporary Torah forum at WECSOR, David indicated (in answer to my question on this topic) that the JPS may soon undertake a completely new translation from the Hebrew text, guided by principles similar to those used when preparing The Contemporary Torah (which is a revision of the NJPS, not a new translation). More to be desired is this than gold, yes, than much fine gold! I am also aware of the existence of The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures, although I have not had a chance to examine this translation.

In the end, I find myself ambivalent. I am least ambivalent about the New Revised Standard Version, and continue to require it in my introductory classes (as do the other professors at Pepperdine who teach similar classes). In my advanced classes, however, I recommend that my students read assigned passages in the NRSV and the NJPS, and I suggest that they choose and use a third translation at the same time. For students who are unable to read Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, reading the text in multiple English translations seems to me the best way to alert oneself to significant issues in textual criticism and translation.

I got a curious e-mail tonight advertising “A New Website On Christian Apologetics.” The main text read as follows:

The “Building Upon Truth” Link Library is a comprehensive and growing library of Internet links which rigorously defend the concept of Truth from the perspective of the Christian Faith. Included are articles, online video, online audio, discussion websites, and other web resources. Some of best Christian scholars, apologists, and scientists such as Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, John Ankerberg, John Warwick Montgomery, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, Patrick Zukeran, J.P. Holding, Glenn M. Miller, Lenny Esposito, Mike Licona, Matthew J. Slick, Rich Deem, Ken Ham, Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Jonathan Sarfati, Jason Lisle, Hugh Ross, and many more can be found in this library of links.

Is it just me, or does the list “Ken Ham, Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, … Hugh Ross” seem really odd? Does the list imply that there is no fundamental difference between young-earth creationists and “intelligent design” proponents, or does “the concept of Truth” just not require internal coherence and consistency?

I’m teaching a course this semester on “Old Testament History,” a course title that somebody long before my time came up with and put into the catalog. I am trying to balance the course between literary-exegetical study of the Former Prophets and historical investigation into Iron Age Israel—activities that are by no means the same thing. I wanted to have my students read from a more biblicistic-”maximalistic” perspective and a more archaeological-”revisionist” perspective, so I chose to assign The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, and A Biblical History of Israel by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. To be sure, I could have gone still farther “to the left” of Finkelstein and Silberman, but The Bible Unearthed is much easier for undergraduates to read and understand than Ahlstrom’s work, for example.

In any event, I am growing very disappointed with A Biblical History of Israel. Of course, I knew going in that there would be much about Provan, Long, and Longman’s approach with which I would disagree. That’s not the source of my discontent. The first hundred pages or so—the methodological section—is actually worthwhile reading, even though I disagree with many of Provan, Long, and Longman’s conclusions. And there’s some fairly good literary-exegetical stuff, though not at the level you’d get from a commentary, in the subsequent chapters. What is bizarre about the book is that the amount of attention given to the value of any text for historical reconstruction tends to run inversely proportional to the amount of external data available that could be used to verify or falsify the historicity of the biblical storyline. That is, Provan, Long, and Longman spend almost 100 pages on the “historicity” of the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and “period of the judges,” even going so far as to try to reconstruct a chronology from the books of Joshua and Judges that would comport with the figure of 480 years from the exodus to the temple building per 1 Kings 6:1. Saul, David, and Solomon get another 70 pages or so, combined. The Omrides—the first group of Israelite kings for whom we have direct epigraphic attestation—get just under four pages. It’s as if, when they got to chapter 10, Provan, Long, and Longman were tired of writing and decided to merely paraphrase the biblical storyline. Everything from Rehoboam to Zedekiah, in chronological terms from the late 10th to the early 6th centuries, in canonical terms from 1 Kings 12 to the end of 2 Kings, is “covered” in a mere nineteen pages.

Given the environment in which, and against which, Provan, Long, and Longman wrote the book, and their conservative, “maximalist” agenda, it’s perhaps not surprising that topics like the historicity of the exodus and the geographical extent of King David’s territory receive the lion’s share of attention. But to skim over the ninth through sixth centuries in less than twenty pages, in a book that purports to be a history of Israel, does a major disservice to readers. I would even call it irresponsible. It is in the ninth century that we first have solid archaeological evidence of an Israelite kingdom (i.e., of the Omrides) and its interactions with other kingdoms. From the ninth century onward is precisely where the value of biblical narratives for historical reconstruction can most easily be tested (although I hasten to add that it wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate to project the general results of such tests onto other biblical narratives; e.g., nobody doubts that Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, so at least that much of 2 Kings 18 may be considered an accurate historical memory, but this has no bearing on whether Joshua fought the battle of Jericho). Why, then, do Provan, Long, and Longman not spend a considerable chunk of their book working with the nonbiblical materials that relate to Israel and Judah during this period, and try to critically correlate them with the biblical narratives whose storylines are set during the same period? Just when the data is available to make the study really interesting, and not just exercises in “maybes” and “not impossibles” and other types of speculations, the authors drop the ball and opt for paraphrasing the biblical text instead.

Just compare Finkelstein and Silberman’s sixteen pages on the Omrides to Provan, Long, and Longman’s four pages on the Omrides and you will see exactly what I mean, and why I am so disappointed in A Biblical History of Israel.

Tyler Williams is hosting Biblical Studies Carnival II, a review of recent blogging related to biblical studies. Check it out!