The New English Bible: Back to Beginnings

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." What could be simpler, or more moving? For 360 years, the opening lines of Genesis in the Authorized King James Version of the Bible have seemed to many Christians to be as immutable as the Creator himself. Yet this week, with the long-heralded publication of the complete New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses; $9.95), comes a change: "In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void. . ."

Why the change? For one thing, says Oxford's Sir Godfrey Driver, head of a team of scholars who have been working on the N.E.B.'s Old Testament translation for the past 21 years, it was not simply, "In the beginning." The second verse of Genesis, Driver points out, clearly indicates that the water was already there when the creation of heaven and earth began. For another, he explains, "we wanted to make it clear from the start that we were giving the reader a fresh translation."

Completely new translations of the Bible are relatively rare. Contrary to popular belief, the King James Bible itself was a revision of the Bishops' Bible and the Great Bible of the 16th century, and those in turn had cribbed liberally from the pioneer English translation of William Tyndale and from the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome. In modern times, the scholarly and widely used Revised Standard Version of 1952 was consciously intended to hew close to the Tyndale-King James tradition. Both the excellent 1966 Jerusalem Bible and the ambitious but as yet uncompleted Anchor Bible (13 volumes published of the 50 projected) have gone back to original Greek and Hebrew sources. But as a popular work now intended both for broad public consumption and church use, the New English Bible may well be the most notable effort in centuries.

Laborious Stages. First conceived in Great Britain in the 1930s, the project was interrupted by World War II, then revived in 1946, when the Church of Scotland passed a formal resolution calling for a new translation in "the language of the present day." By January 1948, Great Britain's other principal Protestant churches and Bible societies had joined with the Scots and the Oxford and Cambridge presses to form a joint committee to undertake the translation. The work was entrusted to three panels of biblical scholars--one for the Old Testament, one for the New, one for the Apocrypha--and an eleven-member literary panel.

Like the N.E.B. New Testament, which was first published in 1961 and has since sold 7,000,000 copies (2,750,000 in the U.S.), the books of the Old Testament and Apocrypha went through laborious stages of development. First, a single translator produced each book; then he submitted it to his panel for line-by-line, verse-by-verse scrutiny. Next came the literary panel, whose task was to approve or improve the wording. Then the draft went back to the translating panel to ensure that correct meanings had not been obscured in the process. "Passages of particular difficulty," says Anglican Driver, "passed many times between panels. The most difficult book of all was Job" (see box).

One of the panelists' intentions was to fashion a text that would read well aloud; as a result, many passages now resound with a fresh, rolling cadence even more understandable than the R.S.V. or Jerusalem Bible. In the King James Version of Daniel, for instance, the fate of the wicked was almost lost in Elizabethan prose: when King Darius pulls the unharmed Daniel from the lions' pit and throws in Daniel's accusers instead, the King James Version reports dryly: "The lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den." The N.E.B. version: "Before they reached the floor of the pit the lions were upon them and crunched them up, bones and all."

There is more clarity, too, in the N.E.B.'s description of sexual acts and bodily functions. Saul no longer enters a cave "to cover his feet," but "to relieve himself." To ensure that their camps would be fit for God's presence, Israelites are instructed to carry a trowel with them; "When you squat outside" the camp, orders Deuteronomy 23: 13, "you shall scrape a hole . . . and cover your excrement." Husbands and wives no longer "know" each other, but "have intercourse." The man struck down by untimely death in Job no longer has "breasts full of milk," but "loins full of vigor." ("What he was full of was clearly semen," says Sir Godfrey, "but we put it more delicately.")

Ambiguous Isaiah. Some clarifications are bound to be controversial. "Thou shalt not kill" has become "you shall not commit murder"--thus depriving some pacifists of their principal Old Testament support. But the translators maintain that their reading is closer to the original Hebrew. There may be less quarrel with the N.E.B. rendering of Isaiah 7: 14, which in the King James Version ("a virgin shall conceive") had clearly prefigured the Virgin birth of Christ. Now, the meaning is more ambiguous: "A young woman is with child, and she will bear a son, and will call him Immanuel." But the R.S.V. helped pave the way for such a change two decades ago by translating the Hebrew almah as "young woman" (elsewhere in the Bible it is used to describe young women who are clearly not virgins). Even the Jerusalem Bible, a Roman Catholic project, uses "maiden" in the Isaiah verse, a compromise which allows, but does not demand, the reading of "virgin."

Many readers may be disappointed by other textual changes. The beloved 121st Psalm ("I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help"), now takes on a distinctly new meaning: "If I lift up my eyes to the hills, where shall I find help?" The "valley of the shadow of death," in the 23rd Psalm, becomes "a valley dark as death." Those who look for "vanity of vanities" in Ecclesiastes will find now only a vacuum: "Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."

Because the translators chose to retain "thee" and "thou" forms in addressing God, many of the Psalms are studded with "thees," "thous," "hasts," and "didsts." Still, if the translators have lost some poetry, they have gained some as well. Where traditional prose passages in such books as Genesis were found to have a certain rhythm, they are now set as verse.

One thing the N.E.B. could still use is an edition with more complete explanatory notes of the kind that distinguish the Jerusalem Bible. Even so, Jesuit Biblical Scholar John L. McKenzie of the University of Notre Dame, who predicts that the New English Bible will be quickly accepted for Catholic church use, praises it as "the most successful modern-language version I have seen." Other eminent biblical scholars, who have read advance copies of the complete N.E.B., agree. With such endorsements, the initial Oxford-Cambridge press run of 1,000,000 copies should be scarcely the beginning.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.