The heresy of explanation

The Pentateuch belongs to all sorts of different people and I cannot speak for them and their needs, so I’ll stick with what I know. Most of my church friends rarely read the first five books of the Bible because they rarely read the Bible. They own Bibles, of course, several, maybe a Vulgate, a King James, a Revised Standard or even one of the more modern ones such as the Jerusalem. But they seldom open them; for a very good reason. They think it wiser to take their Scripture in short chunks edited and organised for them by authority. So they read it as presented in the Breviary or Prayer Book, in the various readings at Mass or in extracts followed by commentaries. They like their gin with plenty of ice and lots of tonic. The Bible itself, like neat, extra-strength Tanqueray, is just too strong. Some of them also doubt their ability to read it in the slow, reflective but concentrated way it requires.

I think they are too careful but partly right. In the best translation, it is overwhelming stuff both religiously and aesthetically. But they don’t have to avoid it altogether. Approached in the right frame of mind and at the most a chapter at a time, it is an extraordinary experience. Judging from past new translations, such events seem at least initially to send people back to their Bibles. Certainly sales increase. But rarely have these new translations given the overwhelming experience. Their fault, apart from limp prose, says Alter in his introduction, is ‘the heresy of explanation’. When accurate translation produces a word or phrase that the translators feel is strange or ‘inaccessible’ to modern readers they adjust it so that it explains itself. The result is ‘a betrayal’ and, since strangeness is a quality of the Hebrew original, the translation places ‘readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language’.