Out with the Old

New Bible translations seem to be born every year: there are Bibles in Basic English, in meter, in I-see-the-cat prose for kindergartens, in Reader's Digest-like condensations. But the New English Bible that is being translated by British Protestant scholars is no such trifle. It is a serious effort to create an accurate Bible in contemporary prose, and its sponsors hope that it will be good enough to replace the King James Version in Christian worship services. The New Testament went on sale last year; the Old will not be ready for publication until 1968.

Saith Not. Critics generally liked the clarity of the N.E.B.'s New Testament, but many thought that it substituted the bland corporate prose of a newspaper editorial for the majestic cadences of the King James Version. Last week Dr. Godfrey Driver, chairman of the N.E.B.'s ten-man team of Old Testament scholars, made it clear that the translation of the Old Testament will raise exactly the same kind of hopes and hackles. He reported that 21 of the 39 Old Testament books have been completely translated and passed by the anonymous panel of literary experts--including two poets and a number of university professors--who approve the translation's English style. Others are in progress, but three of the books have not yet been started.

Driver and his team are ruthlessly pruning archaisms from their translation: saith and doth are out; thee and thou are not used, except when God is addressed. Lord (in capital letters) will be used in place of Jehovah--a philologically meaningless attempt to render the sacred Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH. The translators are also trying to weed out what Driver calls "nonsense" caused by faulty reading of the manuscripts. In Psalm 2, for example, "Tremble before him and kiss his feet in homage" will replace a serious misinterpretation in the King James Version: "Rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry." Job's picturesque "If I wash myself with snow water" becomes the prosaic "If I wash myself with soap," on the ground that snow water has no extra-special cleaning power. Until the scholars can think of a better word for it, Miriam's leprosy (in Numbers 12:10) will become "a disease of the skin"; what she really had, says Driver, is psoriasis.

"As a Lover of English." The Old Testament translators are aware of the criticism against the New Testament, but Driver defends the effort to produce a new Bible. "The job has to be redone every 100 years or so," he says. "You've got to meet the speech of that generation. What we have to do is to persuade the back-countryman that, beautiful as it is, the old version is often nonsense."

Not all the back-countrymen are convinced, although the N.E.B. New Testament has sold about 4,500,000 copies and is used in some Anglican church services. Last week one Church of England layman with some competence in English letters wrote to the Times, protesting against the use of the New English Bible in worship. "Before such substitution becomes common practice, it is to be hoped that the style of this translation may be improved. I am not here raising any doctrinal question, but write simply as a lover of the English language." The complainant: Poet T. S. Eliot.

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