A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
There seems to be yet another translation out on the market. However, this one is not buy a Bible scholar or group of scholars working together. Rather the Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) is by one layperson (A. Frances Werner) and her desire to translate every word the same in every context. Proving again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In the press release, Werner is quoted as saying:
“If you look at the top 100 Hebrew words used in the Old Testament, you’ll find that only one or two words are used 100% consistently in the bestselling bibles. That means that when you are reading, you can never be sure that you are following the original Hebrew without consulting another reference book,” says A. Frances Werner.
On the official website Werner describes her methodology as such:
The Translinear method was born from a detailed scientific analysis of several bible versions… The light went on for me when I realized that the reason we needed things like cross-references and Interlinear bibles because none of the bibles that had been published to date were close enough to the original language. They have extra words, are missing many unique words, and were not utilizing English consistently with the original language. So all the classic bible study tools were needed to find out what the ancient text really said.
Notice the language: All translations are missing parts of the real Bible. No translation tells you what the Bible really says. Only this book will really give you the keys to the Kingdom.
This would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that honest people are going to buy this thing thinking that it’s what the Bible “really” says without realizing it’s based on a poor (or even no) understanding of how translation actually works.
(HT Claude Mariottini)
Wow. In first year Hebrew I used to get a laugh out of always translating ישב as “sit,” it produced some highly amusing results at times, but hardly captured the full semantic range of the verb. I’d sort of like to pick this translation up just to see how anyone could make sense of anything when only using one definition.
That’s a little knowledge in the Biblical sense that’s a dangerous thing, right?
Glad to hear I’m dangerous.
Seriously. . . my goal has been to restore the full biblical Hebrew vocabulary. Have you read the Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB)?
Calvin jokes about the word “sit” which is Strong’s number 3427. It is not “sit” in ARTB, but “dwell”. Take a look at all the times it occurs by going to my website, http://www.AncientRoots.com, and going to “ARTB Bible Search” and typing in 3427. Evaluate whether the word “dwell” is appropriate. Let me know if there’s a better word.
A. Frances Werner
Thanks for stopping by. The problem that I and others have with your project is that there is no such thing as a one-to-one correlation between ancient Hebrew and modern English. You can’t simply take a word in Hebrew and consistently drop the same English word in over and again and have it make sense. No two languages have that tight a correlation.
So when you ask if there is a better word for ישב than “dwell” the answer you’re going to get is “better where?” Obviously when the context is a king ישב-ing on a throne, I’d say “sitting” would be better than “dwelling” in English, since we sit on chairs in English, we don’t dwell on/in/upon them.
Hope that explains things a bit.
As a scientist, I certainly appreciate your understanding of correlation. And I know that expecting one-to-one correspondence is nuts, and certainly not where I started.
What caused me to ask the question was the analysis that I did on the vocabulary of 20 translations. When I started, I would have expected approximately 90-95% correspondence between English and Hebrew–certainly giving translators “wiggle room” to provide better meaning in appropriate cases (like throne, as you mention above). But I was very surprised that the major versions were only between 50-75% consistent in their application of English to Hebrew. Paraphrase versions generally were 25-50%.
That also may not have surprised me if the Hebrew vocabulary was very small in comparison to the English vocabulary. (Which is what I thought originally.) But quite the opposite is true–most English versions are missing significant amounts of Hebrew vocabulary. Most people don’t care that their version misses 6 words for “lion”, but important desert-culture words like “oasis” are missing.
Rather than argue the point theoretically (the data are presented in my book “Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Surprising Bias in the Old Testament”), I decided to demonstrate the gap by creating “Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB)”. It is specifically named TRANSLINEAR, because it is not a TRANSLATION per se.
Enough on my end. Are you surprised at the poor correlation between the English and Hebrew? Or is it what you expected?
Thanks for your time.
The word yashev, coming from the root shev to sit, can also be used not only for a king on his throne, but also for dwell, that is, to live in a certain place, to put down roots, etc. There is also a connection with the word shevah meaning seven, meaning the seventh day, meaning “Shabat, or Sabbath”, meaning to rest or sit, on the seventh day etc. as the Torah says in Beresheet, or Genesis. And I’ll bet there are many more.