… read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made…. Face the book with a new attitude as something new…. Let whatever may happen occur between yourself and it. You do not know which of its sayings and images will overwhelm and mold you…. But hold yourself open. Do not believe anything a priori; do not disbelieve anything a priori. Read aloud the words written in the book in front of you; hear the word you utter and let it reach you.
—adapted, from a lecture of Martin Buber, 1926
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WORK IS TO DRAW THE READER INTO THE WORLD OF THE Hebrew Bible through the power of its language. While this sounds simple enough, it is not usually possible in translation. Indeed, the premise of almost all Bible translations, past and present, is that the “meaning” of the text should be conveyed in as clear and comfortable a manner as possible in one’s own language. Yet the truth is that the Bible was not written in English in the twentieth or even the seventeenth century; it is ancient, sometimes obscure, and speaks in a way quite different from ours. Accordingly, I have sought here primarily to echo the style of the original, believing that the Bible is best approached, at least at the beginning, on its own terms. So I have presented the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice.
The result looks and sounds very different from what we are accustomed to encountering as the Bible, whether in the much-loved grandeur of the King James Version or the clarity and easy fluency of the many recent attempts. There are no old friends here; Eve will not, as in old paintings, give Adam an apple (nor will she be called “Eve”), nor will Moses speak of himself as “a stranger in a strange land,” as beautiful as that sounds. Instead, the reader will encounter a text which challenges him or her to rethink what these ancient books are and what they mean, and will hopefully be encouraged to become an active listener rather than a passive receiver.
This translation is guided by the principle that the Hebrew Bible, like much of the literature of antiquity, was meant to be read aloud, and that consequently it must be translated with careful attention to rhythm and sound. The translation therefore tries to mimic the particular rhetoric of the Hebrew whenever possible, preserving such devices as repetition, allusion, alliteration, and wordplay. It is intended to echo the Hebrew, and to lead the reader back to the sound structure and form of the original.
Such an approach was first espoused by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in their monumental German translation of the Bible (1925–1962) and in subsequent interpretive essays. The Five Books of Moses is in many respects an offshoot of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation (hereafter abbreviated as B-R). I began with their principles: that translations of individual words should reflect “primal” root meanings, that translations of phrases, lines, and whole verses should mimic the syntax of the Hebrew, and that the vast web of allusions and wordplays present in the text should be somehow perceivable in the target language (for a full exposition in English, see now Buber and Rosenzweig 1994). In all these areas I have taken a more moderate view than my German mentors, partly because I think there are limitations to these principles and partly because recent scholarship points in broader directions. As a result, my translation is on the whole less radical and less strange in English than B-R was in German. This, however, does not mean that it is less different from conventional translations, or that I have abandoned the good fight for a fresh look at the Bible’s verbal power.
Buber and Rosenzweig based their approach on the Romantic nineteenth-century notion that the Bible was essentially oral literature written down. In the present century there have been Bible scholars who have found this view attractive; on the other hand, there has been little agreement on how oral roots manifest themselves in the text. One cannot suggest that the Bible is a classic work of oral literature in the same sense as the Iliad or Beowulf. It does not employ regular meter or rhyme, even in sections that are clearly formal poetry. The text of the Bible that we possess is most likely a mixture of oral and written materials from a variety of periods and sources, and recovering anything resembling original oral forms would seem to be impossible. This is particularly true given the considerable chronological and cultural distance at which we stand from the text, which does not permit us to know how it was performed in ancient times.
A more fruitful approach, less dependent upon theories whose historical accuracy is unprovable, might be to focus on the way in which the biblical text, once completed, was copied and read. Recent research reveals that virtually all literature in Greek and Roman times—the period when the Hebrew Bible was put into more or less the form in which it has come down to us (but not the period of its composition)—was read aloud. This holds for the process of copying or writing, and also, surprisingly, for solitary reading. As late as the last decade of the fourth century, Saint Augustine expressed surprise at finding a sage who read silently. Such practices and attitudes seem strange to us, for whom the very definition of a library, for instance, is a place where people have to keep quiet. But it was a routine in the world of antiquity, as many sources attest.
So the Bible, if not an oral document, is certainly an aural one; it would have been read aloud as a matter of course. But the implications of this for understanding the text are considerable. The rhetoric of the text is such that many passages and sections are understandable in depth only when they are analyzed as they are heard. Using echoes, allusions, and powerful inner structures of sound, the text is often able to convey ideas in a manner that vocabulary alone cannot do. A few illustrations may suffice to introduce this phenomenon to the reader; it will be encountered constantly throughout this volume.
Sound plays a crucial role in one of the climactic sequences in Genesis, Chapters 32–33. Jacob, the protagonist, has not seen his brother Esau for twenty years. Now a rich and successful adult, he is on his way back to Canaan after a long exile. He sends messengers to forestall Esau’s vengeance—for twenty years earlier, Jacob had stolen the birthright and the blessing which Esau felt were rightly his own. When Jacob finds out that his brother “is already coming … and four hundred men are with him” (32:7), he goes even further, preparing an elaborate gift for Esau in the hopes of appeasing his anger. The text in VV.21–22 presents Jacob’s thoughts and actions (the translation is taken from the New English Bible):
for he thought, “I will appease him with the present that I have sent on ahead, and afterwards, when I come into his presence, he will perhaps receive me kindly.” So Jacob’s present went on ahead of him. …
This is an accurate and highly idiomatic translation of the Hebrew, and the reader will notice nothing unusual about the passage as it reads in English. The sound of the Hebrew text, on the other hand, gives one pause. It is built on variations of the word panim, whose basic meaning is “face,” although the Hebrew uses it idiomatically to encompass various ideas. (Note: in Hebrew, the sound p is pronounced as ph under certain circumstances.) If the text is translated with attention to sound, its quite striking oral character emerges (italics mine):
For he said to himself:
I will wipe (the anger from) his face (phanav)
with the gift that goes ahead of my face; (le-phanai)
afterward, when I see his face, (phanav)
perhaps he will lift up my face! (phanai)
The gift crossed over ahead of his face. … (alpanav)
Comparison of these two English versions is instructive. In the New English Bible, as in most other contemporary versions, the translators are apparently concerned with presenting the text in clear, modern, idiomatic English. For example, they render the Hebrew yissa phanai as “receive me kindly.” The N.E.B. translates the idea of the text; at the same time it translates out the sound by not picking up on the repetition of panim words.
What does the reader gain by hearing the literalness of the Hebrew? And what is lost by the use of its idiomatic meaning? As mirrored in the second translation, it is clear that our text is signaling something of significance. The motif of “face” (which might be interpreted as “facing” or “confrontation”) occurs at crucial points in the story. The night before his fateful meeting with Esau, as he is left to ponder the next day’s events, Jacob wrestles with a mysterious stranger—a divine being. After Jacob’s victory, the text reports (32:31):
Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel/Face of God,
for: I have seen God,
face to face,
and my life has been saved.
The repetition suggests a thematic link with what has gone before. One could interpret that once the hero has met and actually bested this divine being, his coming human confrontation is assured of success. Thus upon meeting Esau at last, Jacob says to him (33:10):
For I have, after all, seen your face, as one sees the face of God,
and you have been gracious to me.
It could be said that in a psychological sense the meetings with divine and human adversaries are a unity, the representation of one human process in two narrative episodes. This is accomplished by the repetition of the word panim in the text.
The above interpretation depends entirely on sound. Once that focus is dropped, either through the silent reading of the text or a standard translation, the inner connections are simply lost and the reader is robbed of the opportunity to make these connections for himself. Clearly there is a difference between translating what the text means and translating what it says.
While the Jacob passages use the sound of a specific word to indicate an important motif in the narrative, there are other cases where sound brings out structure, and the structure itself conveys the principal idea of the passage. A striking example of this is found at the beginning of Genesis. God’s first acts of creation in 1:3–5 are portrayed in a highly ordered fashion, suggesting that creation itself is orderly, and this idea is the thematic backbone of the whole chapter. We are meant to experience the orderliness of God’s activity through the sensuality of the language and through the particular way in which the text speaks. A translation keyed to the sound of the Hebrew reads:
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!
The four occurrences of “God” plus verb accomplish the narrator’s goal, and give a tone to the creation account that makes it akin to poetry. In contrast, virtually all modern translations treat the passage as prose, rendering it into clear written English but simultaneously removing its inner structure. What remains is a statement of what is taking place in the narrative, but without its underlying thrust. Again the New English Bible:
God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light; and God saw that the light was good, and he separated light from darkness. He called the light day, and the darkness night.
This translation is cast in good English style. For just that reason two occurrences of “God” have been omitted, and the passage consequently reads smoothly—so smoothly that one glides past it as if creation were the same as any other narrated action. But what has been lost is the characteristic oral ring of the text, and simultaneously its intent to say something beyond the content of words alone.
Another example of translating with an ear to the sound and structure of the original, this time from the book of Exodus, comes from the dramatic story of the Sea of Reeds (14:11–12). The newly freed Israelites find themselves pursued by their former masters, the Pharaoh and his army; with their backs to the Sea, they panic, and bitterly harangue their would-be deliverer, Moses. The present translation, attempting to reflect the repetition and structure of the original, yields the following:
they said to Moshe:
Is it because there are no graves in Egypt
that you have taken us out to die in the wilderness?
What is this that you have done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?
Is this not the very word that we spoke to you in Egypt,
saying: Let us alone, that we may serve Egypt!
Indeed, better for us serving Egypt
than our dying in the wilderness!
This passage demonstrates several aspects of a rhetorical translation method, if we may so term it: the laying out of the text in “cola” or lines meant to facilitate reading aloud (more on this below); the repetition of words—“Egypt” five times and “wilderness” twice—to stress the irony of the Israelites’ predicament (as they see it, Egypt means life, and the wilderness, certain death); and the double use of “serve,” the very word that Moses constantly drummed into Pharaoh’s ears in the early part of the book to denote the Israelites’ desire to go and worship their God (“Send free my people, that they may serve me”). If we juxtapose the above translation with that found in, say, the New International Version, the importance of this approach to the text becomes clear:
They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”
Here the rhetorical force of the Hebrew has been ignored. The Hebrew text does not transpose “desert to die” to “die in the desert” at the end of the passage (the word order repeats in the original, for emphasis); it does not distinguish in sound between “Egypt” and “Egyptians”; and it certainly does not read like standard colloquial prose. Indeed, all of Chapter 14 of Exodus demonstrates the Bible’s use of an intermediate form between poetry and prose, a form designed to instruct as well as to inspire.
But it is not only in narrative that the rhetoric of biblical language makes itself felt. Fully half of the book of Exodus is law or instruction, and one can find there further examples of the importance of sound structure in the Bible. Take, for instance, the law concerning the protection of widows and orphans (22:23–24). This time I shall present the text first through the eyes of the Jerusalem Bible:
You must not be harsh with the widow, or with the orphan; if you are harsh with them, they will surely cry out to me, and be sure that I shall hear their cry; my anger will flare and I shall kill you with the sword, your own wives will be widows, your own children orphans.
This is powerful language, especially in a law code. But the Hebrew text goes much farther, utilizing as it does a double form of the verb rarely found in multiple sequence:
Any widow or orphan you are not to afflict.
Oh, if you afflict, afflict them …!
For (then) they will cry, cry out to me,
and I will hearken, hearken to their cry,
my anger will flare up
and I will kill you with the sword,
so that your wives become widows, and your children, orphans!
Here the text is in effect slowed down by the division into lines, and the verb forms are isolated to underscore their unique rhetoric. The effect of the whole is to focus attention on this particular law among a host of others.
Once the spokenness of the Bible is understood as a critical factor in the translation process, a number of practical steps become necessary which constitute radical changes from past translation practices. Buber and Rosenzweig introduced three such major innovations into their work: the form in which the text is laid out, the reproduction of biblical names and their meanings, and the “leading-word” technique by means of which important repetitions in the Hebrew are retained in translation.
First, as is obvious from the excerpts quoted above, the translated text is printed in lines resembling blank verse. These “cola” are based primarily on spoken phrasing. In Buber’s view, each unit represents simultaneously a unit of breathing and of meaning, thus illustrating the deep connection between form and content in the Hebrew Bible. While current scholars, myself included, would not agree with Buber that the text’s rhetoric necessarily corresponds to “breathing,” cola divisions do facilitate reading aloud and make it possible for the listener to sense the text’s inner rhythm—and only at that point can the text begin to deliver its message with full force.
Cola do not correspond to the traditional verse divisions found in printed Bibles. Those divisions are of late origin (perhaps from the ninth century, in written form), and were adopted for the sake of reference. Jews and Christians have used them in roughly the same form since the middle ages. Cola, on the other hand, arise from the experience of reading the Hebrew text aloud and of feeling its spoken rhythms. The specific divisions used in this volume are somewhat arbitrary; each reader will hear the text differently. My line divisions are sometimes identical to B-R, but often are not; they sometimes correspond to the punctuation laid down by Jewish tradition (the Masoretic accents or trop), but not always. What is most important, however, is that the practice of dividing the text into lines points away from the apprehension of the Bible as a written book and restores the sense of it as spoken performance.
Second, personal and place names generally appear in Hebrew forms throughout this translation. Thus, for example, the Hebrew Moshe is retained instead of Moses, Kayin instead of Cain, Rivka instead of Rebecca, and Bil’am instead of Balaam. This practice stems from the central role that names play in biblical stories (as often in literature). In biblical Israel as throughout the ancient world, names are often meant to give clues about their bearer’s personality or fate. The meaning of a name is often explained outright in the text itself. In The Five Books of Moses this is represented by a slash in the text, as in the following example (Gen. 30:23–24):
She said:
God has removed/asaf
my reproach.
And she called his name: Yosef,
saying:
May YHWH add/yosef
another son to me.
The name here is a play on words, hinting at Joseph’s eventual fate (he will be a son “removed” and “added,” that is, lost and found by his family). By retaining the Hebrew sounds in translation, a meaningful portion of the narrative is thus moved from footnotes, where it appears in most modern translations, back to the body of the text. That this is important is demonstrated by the fact that virtually every major (usually male) character in Genesis has his name explained in this manner.
It should be noted that such interpretations of names in the Bible are not based on philological derivations, that is, on scientific etymology. The name Jacob/Yaakov, for instance, which is understood in Gen. 25 as “Heel-Holder” and in Chapter 27 as “Heel-Sneak,” probably held the original meaning of “may (God) protect.” But the biblical writers were not so much concerned with what a name originally meant as they were with its sound, and with the associations inherent in that sound. Therefore what is important in our example is that “Yaakov” recalls ekev, “heel.” This kind of interpretation is known as “folk etymology” or “popular etymology.” A similar phenomenon appears in the naming of Moses (Ex. 2:10).
A third important technique with which biblical literature often conveys its message, and which must influence the translation of the text, is what Buber called the “leading-word” (Leitwort) principle. Key (“leading”) words are repeated within a text to signify major themes and concerns, like recurring themes in a piece of music (hence the similarity of Buber’s term to composer Richard Wagner’s word Leitmotif). A leading-word operates on the basis of sound: the repetition of a word or word root encourages the listener to make connections between diverse parts of a story (or even of a book), and to trace a particular theme throughout. This is not to be seen, however, as a static process. A leading-word may appear in different forms and contexts, with changed meaning, thus lending a sense of movement and development to the text and its characters. One example may be cited here; others appear throughout this book.
Buber’s essay, “Abraham the Seer,” traces the biblical tradition’s portrayal of Abraham through the use of key words and phrases in the text. Chief among these is the verb “to see” (Hebrew ra’o), which appears constantly in the Abraham narratives and which tells us something significant about both the man himself and how he is meant to be remembered. At the outset of Abraham’s journey to Canaan, which signals his entry into biblical tradition as an independent personality, God sends him off to a land that he will “let him see” (12:1). Arriving in the land, Abraham is granted a communication from God, expressed by the phrase “YHWH was seen by Avram …” (12:7). God subsequently promises the land to him and his descendants (“see from the place that you are … for all the land that you see, to you I give it and to your seed, for the ages” [13:15]). “Seeing” comes to the fore in the story of Abraham’s concubine Hagar; her encounter with God’s messenger ends with her addressing a “God of Seeing” (16:13). Further meetings between Abraham and God (17:1, 18:1) likewise express themselves visually, with the latter scene, where God announces Isaac’s impending birth at Abraham’s tent, almost unique in the Bible for its bold picture of God appearing directly to human beings. Finally, with the great test of Abraham in Chapter 22, the “Binding of Isaac,” the theme of seeing is brought to a climax. Buber describes the use of the leading-word in that passage, summarizing how it rounds out the entire Abraham cycle:
It appears here more often than in any previous passage. Abraham sees the place where the act must be accomplished, at a distance. To the question of his son, he replies that God will provide (“see to”) the lamb for the burnt offering. In the saving moment he lifts up his eyes and sees the ram. And now he proclaims over the altar the name that makes known the imperishable essence of this place, Mount Moriah: YHWH Will See. … God sees man, and man sees God. God sees Abraham, and tests him by seeing him as the righteous and “whole” man who walks before his God (17:1), and now, at the end of his road, he conquers even this final place, the holy temple mountain, by acting on God’s behalf. Abraham sees God with the eye of his action and so recognizes Him, just as Moses, seeing God’s glory “from behind,” will recognize Him as Gracious and Merciful.**Martin Buber, On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 42.
Buber goes one step further in his analysis of the leading-word see: he views it as a clue to the biblical concept of Abraham’s role in history. Taking the hint from I Sam. 9:9 (“the prophet of our day was formerly called a seer”), he posits that the Bible wants us to understand Abraham as the spiritual father of the later prophets. Abraham, then, is preeminent as the first man in the Bible of whom it is reported that God “was seen by him.”
Such an understanding of the role of leading-words as crucial to biblical style rarely makes itself felt in translation. Bible translators are reluctant to reproduce repetitions of Hebrew words in the text because they are generally fearful of creating a tedious English style. However, once one abandons the idea of the Bible as primarily a written work, the repetitiveness of leading-words becomes a signal rather than a stumbling block, freeing the reader to experience the dynamic manner in which the Bible expresses itself. That this sometimes entails a loss of nuance in the translation (where “see” in Hebrew may signify “perceive” or “understand” in a particular passage, for instance) is a price that must be paid; yet such a translation may in fact retain more of the breadth of the Hebrew than is immediately apparent.
A final word needs to be said about the leading-word technique. It may serve a purpose in the text beyond conveying meaning: it may play a structural role, unifying sections that have been culled from different sources within biblical Israel to form a composite account. The ancient redactors of the Bible apparently crafted the material they received into an organic whole. Using such means as leading-word repetition, they in effect created a new literature in which deep relationships exist between the parts of the whole.
The above three translation techniques—setting out the text in cola, transliterating and explaining Hebrew names, and reproducing leading-words—form the crux of an approach to the Bible’s spokenness, but there are other methods used by the text to the same end. Three are particularly worthy of mention: wordplay, allusion, and what I have termed small-scale repetition.
The Bible uses wordplay to make a point forcefully, especially in prophetic passages or those with a prophetic flavor. In Gen. 40:13 and 19, for instance, Joseph predicts that the king of Egypt will end the imprisonment of two of his courtiers. When the cupbearer is to be restored to his former position, Joseph says,
in another three days
Pharaoh will lift up your head. …
In contrast, when Joseph predicts that the chief baker will be executed, the text reads:
in another three days Pharaoh will lift up your head
from off you. …
By beginning both statements with the same phrasing, the narrator is able to heighten the impact of “from off you” on both audience and victim.
A powerful example of the second device, allusion, occurs near the beginning of Exodus. Baby Moses, floating precariously yet fetus-like on the Nile, is one of the enduring images in the book, as children have long attested. Modern English readers, however, are seldom aware that the Hebrew word for Moses’s floating cradle—rendered by virtually all standard translations as “basket”—is the same as the one used in Gen. 6:14ff. to describe Noah’s famous vessel (teiva). Preserving the connection between the two, as I have tried to do in the Exodus passage with “little-ark” (and which, incidentally, the authors of the King James Version did with “ark”), is to keep open the play of profound meaning that exists between the two stories.
Finally, we may give an example of small-scale repetition. Unlike the leading-word technique, this is limited to a brief report and is used to express one specific idea. In Gen. 6:11–13, for instance, it illustrates an important biblical concept: just punishment. Three times in the passage we hear the word “ruin,” indicating what human evil has done to the world; the fourth time (v.13) it appears in a causative form, to show that God retaliates in exactly the same terms, measure for measure.
Now the earth had gone-to-ruin before God; the earth was filled with wrongdoing.
God saw the earth, and here: it had gone-to-ruin,
for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.
God said to Noah:
An end of all flesh has come before me,
for the earth is filled with wrongdoing through them;
here, I will bring-ruin upon them, along with the earth.
The Bible is fond of this technique, which it uses in a number of narratives that deal with human misbehavior (e.g., the Tower of Babel story in Gen. 11). It is another example of how the form in which the text is cast goes a long way toward expressing its intent.
From the above examples it may appear that it is not difficult to carry out the Buber-Rosenzweig principles in a translation. In practice, however, the translator who wishes to bring the language spoken by his audience into consonance with the style of the Hebrew text runs the risk of doing violence to that language, forced as he or she is into “hebraizing” the language. There will of necessity be a certain strangeness and some awkward moments in such a translation. Buber and Rosenzweig themselves came under fire for creating a strange new kind of German in their work; one critic in 1933 accused them of “unusual affectations.” My renditions of the Torah books, while limited in what they wreak with the English language both by my cautiousness and by the less pliable nature of English (than German), have been liable to similar characterization, especially in the legal sections.
This problem, however, is inherent in this kind of undertaking, and I have accepted its risks willingly. In the last generation there have been any number of clear, smooth-reading translations of the Bible, all aimed at making the text readily accessible to the reader. I have taken a different road, arguing (along with Buber and Rosenzweig) that the reader must be prepared to meet the Bible at least halfway and must become an active participant in the process of the text, rather than a passive listener. To this end, there is no alternative but to force the language of the translation to become the instrument through which the Hebraic voice of the text speaks.
I have taken pains to illustrate some of the rhetorical devices that emerge from an oral reading of the text in order to indicate the direction taken in The Five Books of Moses. A concluding observation must be made. Every critic knows, or should know, that art defies categorization and exact description. We try to understand what makes a masterpiece tick, whether it be a painting, a piece of music, or a work of literature, yet in the end our analyses fall silent before the greatness and subtlety of the work itself. The techniques that I have described above must remain suggestive rather than definitive; they point out a direction rather than speak directly. Biblical narratives do not end with the phrase “The moral of the story is …,” any more than biblical laws overtly spell out their assumptions. Translating with attention to sound therefore may help to preserve not only the message of the text but also its ambiguity and open-endedness. In that persona the Bible has been familiar to Jewish and Christian interpreters, who for centuries have sought to fill in the gaps and resolve the difficulties in the text by means of their own ingenuity. This volume is aimed at helping present-day readers to share in that experience.
Reading the Bible in the literary, rhetorical manner I have just explicated is grounded in certain assumptions about the text. The Five Books of Moses stays close to the basic “masoretic” text-type of the Torah, that is, the vocalized text that has been with us for certain for about a millennium. Deviations from that form, in the interest of solving textual problems, are duly mentioned in the Notes. In following the traditional Hebrew text, I am presenting to the English reader an unreconstructed book, but one whose form is at least verifiable in a long-standing tradition. This translation, therefore, is not a translation of some imagined “original” text, or of the Torah of Moses’ or Solomon’s or even Jeremiah’s time. These documents, could they be shown to have existed for certain or in recognizable form, have not been found, and give little promise of ever being found. The Five Books of Moses is, rather, a translation of the biblical text as it might have been known in the formative, postbiblical period of Judaism and early Christianity (the Roman era). As far as the prehistory of the text is concerned, readers who have some familiarity with biblical criticism will note that in my Commentary I have made scant reference to the by-now classic dissection of the Torah into clear-cut prior “sources” (designated J, E, P, and D by the Bible scholars of the past century). Such analysis has been dealt with comprehensively by others (cfi, for instance, Levine on the book of Numbers). In addition, it remains a theoretical construct, and the nature of biblical texts militates against recovering the exact process by which the Bible came into being. In any event, virtually all the standard introductions to the Bible deal with this topic; beyond these, readers may find Friedman (1989) of particular clarity and usefulness.
Given the text that I am using, what has interested me here is chiefly the final form of the Torah books, how they fit together as artistic entities, and how they have combined traditions to present a coherent religious message. This was surely the goal of the final “redactor(s),” but it was not until recently a major goal of biblical scholars. While, therefore, I am not committed to refuting the tenets of source criticism in the strident manner of Benno Jacob and Umberto Cassuto, I have concentrated in this volume on the “wholeness” of biblical texts, rather than on their growth out of fragments. My Commentary is aimed at helping the reader to search for unities and thematic development.
At the same time, in recent years I have found it increasingly fascinating to encounter the text’s complex layering. It appears that every time a biblical story or law was put in a new setting or redaction, its meaning, and the meaning of the whole, must have been somewhat altered. A chorus of different periods and concerns is often discernible, however faintly. Sometimes these function to “deconstruct” each other, and sometimes they actually create a new text. In offering a rendition that does not try to gloss over stylistic differences, I hope that this book will make it possible for an inquisitive reader to sense that process at work. As far as analysis of the text in this manner is concerned, I would recommend to the reader the brilliant work of Greenstein (1985a) and Damrosch (1987).
Some readers may wonder whether The Five Books of Moses is merely an English translation of B-R. It is not. Although B-R served as the theoretical basis for my work, I have found it necessary to modify their approach in the present setting. There are a number of reasons for this.
For one, Bible scholarship has made notable advances since Buber’s heyday (Rosenzweig had already died in 1929). Although he completed the German translation in 1961, and kept abreast of work in the field, it must be said that Buber did not greatly modify the text of the Pentateuch translation, philologically speaking, between 1930 when the second edition appeared and the revised printings of the mid-1950s. It seemed imperative to me to bring the work of postwar biblical philology to bear on the English translation, rather than relying solely on Buber’s etymologies. Some of the changes in this area have been cited in the Notes to the text (as “B-R uses …”).
Second, in the attempt to make the German translation mirror the Hebrew original Rosenzweig did not hesitate to either create new German words or reach back into the German literature of past ages to find forms suitable for rendering certain Hebrew expressions. To perform a corresponding feat in English would simply not work; the language is not flexible, and usages change so quickly that an artful appeal to the past seems futile except for the benefit of linguistic historians. While I have endeavored to produce an English text that reflects the style of biblical Hebrew, I have in the main shied away from pushing the language beyond reasonable and comprehensible limits.
There are other significant deviations from B-R here. I have used a different rendering of the name of God, which had been a distinctive B-R trademark (for an explanation, see “On the Name of God and Its Translation”). I have sometimes opted for different line divisions, based on my own hearing of the Hebrew; indented purely poetic passages, a practice not followed by B-R in narrative texts; read a large number of clauses differently from a grammatical or syntactical point of view; and loosened the practice, sometimes overdone in B-R, of reproducing a Hebrew root by a single English one wherever it occurs.
It will be noted that I have included here one element that many readers felt was sorely lacking in B-R: notes and commentary. Every translation of the Bible implies a commentary, but few have included one with the text. The Five Books of Moses especially requires such an apparatus, both to explain its translation technique and to show how it may be used fruitfully in interpreting the Bible. Read in conjunction with the text, the explanatory material presents a methodology for studying and teaching the Bible.
Finally, there is the personal aspect of this work. It was conceived as an act of homage to the B-R translation; at the beginning, I desired solely (and rashly) to bring their accomplishment over into English. It was therefore a labor of love, and despite the amount of work involved, a relatively safe one; I did not, at least initially, have to make my own decisions about the biblical text. I should certainly never have undertaken my own translation at that stage.
But working on a project of this nature inevitably leads to things that are not predictable at the outset. It happened exactly as Rosenzweig wrote about his own involvement: like a seduction. It soon became apparent that, not only could I not in good conscience do to English what especially Rosenzweig had done to German, but I was also beginning to find my own voice as creator and scholar in the translation. Thus—although this was not my original intention—I am quite aware that in this book I am presenting a piece of myself as well as an approach to the Bible for English readers.
This having been said, The Five Books of Moses is still very much in the B-R tradition. It retains the general approach of its predecessor, exclusive of those principles that are dependent on the form and character of the German language. It is therefore the child of B-R, with all the links and independent features that a parent-child relationship implies. It may also be seen as an attempt to bring the work of B-R into a new era of Bible scholarship, and as an artistic endeavor in its own right.
The Five Books of Moses is heavily indebted to B-R, but one may also view it in a more contemporary context. Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of “literary” study of the Bible. Numerous scholars have turned their attention to the form and rhetoric of the biblical text, concentrating on its finished form rather than on trying to reconstruct history or the development of the text. Such an approach is hardly new. Already in late antiquity, Jewish interpretation of the Bible often centered around the style and precise wording of the text, especially as heard when read aloud. Similarly, the medieval Jewish commentators of Spain and France showed great sensitivity to the linguistic aspects of the Bible. In both cases, however, no systematic approach was developed; literary interpretation remained interwoven with very different concerns such as homiletics, mysticism, and philosophy.
It has remained for twentieth-century scholars, reacting partly against what they perceived to be the excessive historicizing of German Bible scholarship, to press for a literary reading of the Bible. Early pioneers in this regard include Umberto Cassuto, Buber and (later) Meir Weiss in Israel, and Benno Jacob (who was consulted frequently during the writing of B-R) in Germany. More recently we might mention James Muilenberg (who labeled his holistic approach “Rhetorical Criticism”), Edwin Good, James Ackerman, and Robert Alter in the U.S.; and J. P. Fokkelman in Holland. These names are now the tip of the iceberg, and one can speak of a whole school of interpreters in a literary or rhetorical vein. The reader will find a number of stimulating studies listed in “Suggestions for Further Reading.”
The Five Books of Moses is akin to many of these efforts, and has benefited directly from them. Although I began my work independently of the literary movement, I have come to feel a kinship with it, and regard my text as one that may be used to study the Bible in a manner consistent with its findings. At the same time, I am not committed to throwing out historical scholarship wholesale. It would be a mistake to set up the two disciplines in an adversarial relationship, as has often been done. The Hebrew Bible is by nature a complex and multi-faceted literature, in both its origins and the history of its use and interpretation. No one “school” can hope to illuminate more than part of the whole picture, and even then, one’s efforts are bound to be fragmentary. Probably, only a synthesis of all fruitful approaches available into a fully interdisciplinary methodology will provide a satisfactory overview of the biblical text (see Greenstein 1989). In this respect, approaching the Bible is analogous to dealing with the arts in general, where a multitude of disciplines from aesthetics to the social and natural sciences is needed to flesh out the whole. I hope that The Five Books of Moses will make a contribution toward this process, by providing an English text, and an underlying reading of the Hebrew, that balances what has appeared previously.
There is another more recent movement in biblical studies which deserves both mention and study. As of this writing, feminist Bible criticism has come into its own. A substantial number of thoughtful and thought-provoking studies have appeared in recent years that examine the portrayal and position of women in biblical texts. One of the glaring gaps in previous Bible scholarship—and one of the difficult issues for contemporary readers of the Bible—lies in coming to terms with the social/sexual milieu assumed by the text. Wrestling with this issue is an appropriate complement to the other types of text-wrestling that have taken place throughout the ages. I have tried to present some of the findings of feminist criticism on the text, and I have listed some appropriate recent works in “Suggestions for Further Reading.”
To what extent can any translation of the Bible be said to be more “authentic” than another? Because of lack of information about the various original audiences of our text, the translator can only try to be as faithful as the information will allow. This is particularly true where a work as universally known as the Bible is concerned. Even if the precise circumstances surrounding its writing and editing were known, the text would still be affected by the interpretations of the centuries. It is as if a Beethoven symphony were to be performed on period instruments, using nineteenth-century performance techniques: would it still sound as fresh and radical to us as it did in Beethoven’s own day? Thus I would suggest that it is almost impossible to reproduce the Bible’s impact on its contemporaries; all that the translator can do is to perform the task with as much honesty as possible, with a belief in one’s artistic intuition and a consciousness of one’s limitations.
Yet how are we to distinguish the point where explication ends and personal interpretation begins? From the very moment of the Bible’s editing and promulgation, there began the historical process of interpretation, a process which has at times led to violent disagreement between individuals and even nations. Everyone who has ever taken the Bible seriously has staked so much on a particular interpretation of the text that altering it has become close to a matter of life and death. Nothing can be done about this situation, unfortunately, and once again the translator must do the best he or she can. Art, by its very nature, gives rise to interpretation—else it is not great art. The complexity and ambiguity of great literature invites interpretation, just as the complexities and ambiguities of its interpreters encourage a wide range of perspectives. The Hebrew Bible, in which very diverse material has been juxtaposed in a far-ranging collection spanning centuries, rightly or wrongly pushes the commentator and reader to make inner connections and draw overarching conclusions. My interpretations in this book stem from this state of affairs. I have tried to do my work as carefully and as conscientiously as I can, recognizing the problems inherent in this kind of enterprise. I hope the result is not too far from what the biblical editors had intended.
My ultimate goal in this volume has been to show that reading the Hebrew Bible is a process, in the same sense that performing a piece of music is a process. Rather than carrying across (“translating”) the content of the text from one linguistic realm to another, I have tried to involve the reader in the experience of giving it back (“rendering”), of returning to the source and recreating some of its richness. My task has been to present the raw material of the text as best I can in English, and to point out some of the method that may be fruitfully employed in wrestling with it.
Buber and Rosenzweig translated the Bible out of the deep conviction that language has the power to bridge worlds and to redeem human beings. They both, separately and together, fought to restore the power of ancient words and to speak modern ones with wholeness and genuineness. Despite the barriers in their own lives—Buber’s early disappointments, Rosenzweig’s struggle with German idealism and later with a terrible paralysis that left him unable to speak—they each came to see dialogue as a central fact of interhuman and human-divine relations.
The era in which we live, seventy years after the first appearance of the Buber-Rosenzweig Im Anfang (Genesis), is, however, heir to many decades of a very different experience. Since 1933, but beginning certainly well before, the Western world has experienced the debasement and trivialization of human language, and thus of divine language as well. From Stalin’s and Hitler’s speeches, to Orwell’s visions, to the reality of Vietnam War jargon and on to the babble of television and advertising, words seem to have lost their elemental meaningfulness in a way that the optimistic nineteenth century into which Buber and Rosenzweig were born could not have dared to believe. In this situation, can a translation of ancient books, even though they are from the Bible, have anything to say, or are they merely a “message from a dead man,” to use Kafka’s poignant expression?
Yet Buber and Rosenzweig knew that language lives only in the mouths of speakers, human beings who face each other and who at every moment of conversation and contact literally translate for one another. The reading of the Bible is hopefully a cultural means for reawakening that conversation, for in the struggle to understand and apply these texts, one may come to perceive the importance of real words. A Bible translation should be the occasion for reaffirming the human desire to speak and be heard, for encouraging people to view their lives as a series of statements and responses—conversations, really. In sending the reader back to the text, the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible sought to counter the deadness of contemporary language and contemporary living which were all too apparent at the turn of the century, even before war and genocide began to take their toll. As we approach the end of that century, the same problems remain, altered further by the present revolution in communications. Amid the overcrowded air of cyberspace, the Hebrew Bible may still come to tell us that we do not live by bread alone, and that careful and loving attention to ancient words may help us to form the modern ones that we need.
Everett Fox
Clark University
Worcester, Massachusetts
January 1995
Shevat 5755
I have mentioned that this book should be understood as a performance. Nevertheless, at the present time I have made only a few changes, preferring to leave a more substantial revision—and citation of some excellent articles and books that have appeared in the meantime—for the future. At the same time, I wish to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of a number of scholars: Bernard Levinson (in “Recovering the Lost Original Meaning of ve-lo’ tekhasseh ‘alav [Deuteronomy 13:9],” Journal of Biblical Literature 115:4, Winter 1996); Judith Romney Wegner (Deut. 6:7); Marc Brettler (Gen. 22); and Robert Alter, in Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996).
Worcester, Massachusetts
January 1997
For the paperback edition, I have made some small alterations in the text. Most of these involve dropping “Now” from the beginning of sentences; I have mainly restricted its use as a narrative opener to verses that begin with a new thought (often a noun in biblical Hebrew). A few other changes appear as well, such as “zealous” for “jealous” (e.g., Ex. 20:5).
At this time I wish to express my gratitude to readers and listeners who have written and spoken to me about the translation over the past four years. Their interest and enthusiasm have been gratifying. I would especially like to thank Ashley James Hiden of Evesham, England, who since age eight has corresponded with me about translation and related issues in a spirited and well-informed manner.
I would also like to acknowledge the inclusion in this volume, since 1997, of drawings by Schwebel. My fellow conspirator in engaging with the great texts of the Bible, he has added a powerful visual dimension to the aural one in which I work. Our joint venture in the book of Samuel (Give Us a King! Schocken, 1999) has been particularly memorable for me.
Worcester, Massachusetts
September 1999