Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 59:234 (Apr 1902)
Article: The Latest Translation Of The Bible
Author: Henry M. Whitney

BSac 59:234 (April 1902) p. 217

The Latest Translation Of The Bible

Henry M. Whitney

I. Problems And Difficulties

The difficulties of translating the Bible into English lie in three languages,—the Hebrew, the Hellenistic Greek, and our mother-tongue.

Hebrew is probably as different from English as any other language, living or dead. It is dead, and dead in a far distant past. It is so different from English that it may have had an entirely independent origin, as it certainly had an entirely independent development. What little resemblance there is between Hebrew and English is wholly external, the result of the influence of Hebrew upon the English vocabulary and idiom through the text of the Bible itself. Imagine a language having no present tense, no perfect, no imperfect, no pluperfect, no future-perfect, no subjunctive, no optative, no infinitive! We are ready to think that a human being might about as well exist without three or four of his five senses,—until we remember what beauty and majesty and eloquence are to be found in the English Bible, and remember, also, that those

BSac 59:234 (April 1902) p. 218

wonderful things came directly from this same stiff and impossible Hebrew speech. The Hebrew noun has almost no range of cases, and what cases it has seem a curious antipode to the cases of any Indo-European tongue. It has no neuter gender. Its prepositions often put one into painful perplexity as to which, among the delicately differentiated English prepositions, is the one that ought to be used. Such things as intricate structure, the play of might, could, should, and would, the difference between would have been and were, and especially between will and shall, and pretty much all nice distinction, all subtle shading, have to be detected, if they are to be detected, chiefly through the sympathy of the translator with the Semitic frame of mind.

Hence the cases are frequent where there is a wide range of possible translation: many of these are noted in the margin of the English Revision (that of 1885), and still more in that of the recent American Revision, but a still larger proportion are left unmarked. It should seem that, if intelligibility is so much to be desired that the American version has been supplied with thousands of references to parallel passages, the margin should carry also all possible renderings that the translators themselves considered.1 The Hebrew language has been so long dead that some of the words in the Hebrew Bible are still of very doubtful significance, and some have come to be understood in an entirely different sense. Both these assertions are especially true of animals and plants: the “great owl...