‘A wealth of Bibles’

For the March issue’s theme on Translation, CC’s Editor interviewed Dr. Albert M. Wolters, emeritus Professor of Religion at Redeemer University and a biblical scholar who translated one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here, Dr. Wolters tells the story of being invited to view the actual Copper Scroll in Jordan and what happened after he found a new way to translate one word in the book of Daniel. 

CC: Why do Bible translations differ so much among themselves?

Wolters: There are many reasons. One is that different translations make different choices as to what the underlying text in the original language actually is. For example, in Matthew 6:13 did Jesus actually include the words “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen” at the end of the Lord’s Prayer? Since these words are not found in the earliest Greek manuscripts, most contemporary translations have decided to omit them. 

Another reason is that translators often have to choose between accuracy and intelligibility. An animal that is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament is the re’em, and there is widespread agreement that this refers to an “aurochs,” an extinct bovine species (Bos primigenius). Since most people today have never heard of an aurochs, translators usually choose to use “wild ox” instead (see for example Psalm 29:6).

A third and most important reason why translations differ is that modern scholars simply do not know what a particular word or expression in the original language meant, especially if that word or expression occurs only once. In such cases translators have to make an educated guess, mainly based on context, existing translations made in antiquity, and the meaning of cognates in related languages. An example is the Hebrew word tsanterot in Zech. 4:12, which occurs in Zechariah’s vision of the lampstand. Nowadays it is usually translated “pipes” or the like, but this is really just a guess first made in the sixteenth century. In the course of working on my commentary on Zechariah I made a special study of this word (which occurs only here) and discovered that over the centuries there have been no fewer than 30 different proposals for the meaning of this enigmatic term, ranging from “nozzles” and “thighs” to “faucets” and “funnels.” I myself further complicated things by proposing (tentatively) that the word means “oil-pressers”! 

Obscure words like this are fairly frequent in the Old Testament, partly because, apart from the Old Testament itself, there is not much Hebrew literature that has survived from antiquity, so that there is relatively little comparative material. Obscure Hebrew words like tsanterot are especially common in poetical books like Job. Accordingly, as I discovered when I worked on the book of Job for the New Living Translation, almost every second verse has words that are rendered very differently in the various Bible translations. The situation is somewhat different for the New Testament, since the books of the New Testament are a tiny fraction of the Greek literature that has survived from antiquity. Nevertheless, even here there are cases where scholars simply do not know what a word means. An example is the Greek adjective epiousios, which occurs in the Lord’s Prayer, and is usually translated “daily,” as in “Give us this day our daily bread.” However, it is not at all clear that this is the right translation. The standard dictionary of New Testament Greek gives no fewer than eight possible meanings. Among the alternatives to “daily” it lists “for the following day” and “necessary for existence.”

There are other reasons too why translations differ. Some prefer an elevated literary style, others a more colloquial level of discourse. Some are more literal, sticking as much as possible to a word-for-word rendering, others aim for a freer, thought-for-thought, equivalence. Some avoid vulgar words, some do not. Some smooth over apparent inconsistencies, while others let them stand. Some are concerned to avoid the appearance of non-inclusive language; others not so much. A myriad of considerations come into play.

CC: What translation of Scripture do you turn to most regularly?

Wolters: Probably the English Bible translations I most frequently consult are the New Revised Standard Version and the New International Version. The NRSV is most at home in mainline churches. The NIV is the most widely used translation produced by evangelical scholars, and actually owes its origin to an initiative of the Christian Reformed Church. I myself had a hand in translating the New Living Translation, and that is the version I mainly used for my own devotional program of reading through the entire Bible once a year from 2000 to 2020. Because of the readability of the NLT I found it suitable for reading longer passages at one sitting. Until recently I owned Bible translations in more than a dozen languages, and I would often consult different ones of them.

CC: Can you tell me a little about how you became an expert on the Copper Scroll? Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls significant?

Wolters: In the academic year 1985-86 I took a course on the Dead Sea Scrolls taught by the Israeli scholar Shlomo Morag. In that course I was introduced to the Copper Scroll, which is an enigmatic list of buried treasure, probably from the Temple in Jerusalem. For the course I wrote a paper on “The Last Treasure of the Copper Scroll” and received a good grade. Emboldened by this I subsequently presented this paper at an annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. On the strength of that paper a representative of a publisher invited me to do an edition and translation of the Copper Scroll for a series on the Dead Sea Scrolls which he was planning. Somewhat foolhardily, I accepted, and accordingly plunged into an intense study of this mysterious scroll. I subsequently published not only my course paper and the requested edition/translation, but also a series of other related articles. In 1992 I even travelled to Amman, Jordan, to examine the actual Copper Scroll with my own eyes.

As for the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in general, that can hardly be overemphasized. For biblical studies it has been revolutionary, not least because manuscripts of parts of almost every book of the Old Testament were found that could be dated a thousand years earlier than the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament that we had before. Occasionally this meant that the traditional Hebrew text could be corrected, for example by the restoration of the second half of Psalm 145:13.

CC: What happened after you discovered a second way to interpret one Aramaic word in Daniel 5?

Wolters: In the course of explaining the mysterious “handwriting on the wall” (mene, mene, tekel, parsin) Daniel says to the Babylonian king Belshazzar: “you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” (verse 27). That judgement was swiftly fulfilled, because Belshazzar was killed that very night, and Babylon fell to the Persians (verses 30-31). As I studied this well-known chapter (which is written in Aramaic, not Hebrew) I wondered whether the word for “scales” (Aramaic mozanya’) could have anything to do with the constellation Libra, since astrologers were prominent in the court of the Babylonian king (see verses 7 and 11), and Libra is simply the Latin word for “scales.” It turns out that this Aramaic word was indeed also used to designate the constellation Libra, and that the practice of calling this particular constellation “the scales” was common among Babylonian astrologers. So I wondered whether there was any connection between the date of the fall of Babylon and the constellation Libra. 

It turns out that there was. The fall of Babylon can be dated with considerable precision, namely Oct 12, 539 B.C., and both ancient astrologers and modern astronomers agree that this was the day after the annual rising of the constellation Libra in Babylon. In effect, Daniel is saying to the king: “You have been weighed in Libra [which appeared yesterday morning] and found wanting. The constellations which you believe rule the affairs of humanity are in fact only instruments in the hands of my God, who now holds you to account.”

CC: How many languages have you read Scripture in? How does the experience change from language to language?

Wolters: I have read parts of Scripture in at least a dozen languages. For some languages (like ancient Syriac) this involves puzzling my way, word by word and dictionary in hand, through a short passage that I may be studying. For others, like French or German, I can read quite fluently. The advantage of reading Scripture in another language is that it lends a freshness to your reading, so that sometimes it seems as though you are reading a particular passage for the first time. When you’ve grown up with the Bible, as I have, and heard it expounded in English from Sunday to Sunday, familiarity can easily breed, if not contempt, at least a kind of numbness. Reading the Scriptures in another language can bring a freshness and immediacy to the experience that can be bracing. In my own case, since my mother tongue is Dutch, there is also an emotional connection when I read the Bible in that language that can be quite elemental. The experience is different again when I read, with varying degrees of fluency, the Bible in the original languages. Here of course we are dealing with Scripture at the source, perhaps we could say, at its most authoritative. These are the very words of God. As a believer you cannot argue with the original in the way that you can argue with a translation. In recent years I have undertaken, in my daily devotions, to read through the entire New Testament in Greek. I’m on my third time through now. It feels partly like an academic exercise, but partly like a journey of discovery. 

CC: Any stories about when a translation error became (in)famous?

Wolters: I like to tell the story of how Moses is depicted, in medieval and Renaissance art, as having two horns protruding from his forehead. This is based on a mistranslation of Exodus 34:29 in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible that was widely used in the West until modern times. The relevant part of the verse in Latin reads: “and he knew not that his face was horned [Latin cornuta] from the conversation of the Lord.” This is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew verb qaran, which means “shone” or “was radiant.” Thus Moses was pictured as having an attribute which is normally associated with the Devil! 

CC: Are there any interesting Bible translation projects going on right now that you’re following or excited about seeing their outcome?

Wolters: I am not aware of any new Bible translations into English currently being planned. I am fine with that, because at the moment we probably have a surfeit of translations of the Bible into English. I say that even though I myself participated in producing one. What we need is not more translations of the Bible, but more readers of the Bible. In spite of the wealth of Bibles that we have available, biblical literacy is declining. On the other hand, there are many very worthwhile Bible translation projects going on for languages other than English, especially in cultures where no version of the Bible currently exists. 

CC: Does or should the translator’s faith influence the way they translate the Bible?

Wolters: I believe that faith necessarily plays a role in translation work, as it does in any academic endeavour. As the translator weighs the various kinds of evidence in determining what a given word or phrase or grammatical construction means it will make a difference whether they believe that God acts in history, that miracles happen, that prophets accurately foretold the future, that the Bible as a whole tells a coherent story culminating in Jesus Christ, and so on.

An example of how a belief in the coherence of the biblical story affects what translation one chooses is found in 2 Peter 1:4, where the apostle assures believers that they can become (according to a traditional translation) “partakers of the divine nature.” To many scholars, myself included, this has seemed out of tune with the rest of the New Testament, which nowhere else uses such Platonic language to describe the relationship of believers to God. I therefore re-examined the Greek and discovered that a plausible alternative translation is “partners of the Deity,” which is a better fit with the way the Bible normally speaks of the covenantal partnership of believers and God. (I wrote an article to that effect, and am pleased to report that a number of scholars have adopted my proposal.) 

CC: Anything else you’d like to add?

Wolters: I am sometimes asked what English Bible translation I consider the best. My standard answer is that it depends on the purpose or context for which it is to be used. Every translation is good in some respects, and not so good in other respects. However, I do not believe that there is any translation currently on the market that is seriously misleading, or that does not in every significant way communicate the truth of God. I often think of the Septuagint, a very imperfect Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is often quoted as God’s very truth in the New Testament, and which virtually was the Old Testament for most Christians in the first five centuries of the Christian church. Yet I would contend that virtually every Bible available today is a better translation than the Septuagint. God can and does use them all to bring people to Christ and to strengthen them in their faith. This is not to say that detailed philological study of the biblical languages is not important (I have been known myself to spend a great deal of time and energy on the nuances of a single Greek verb), but such detailed study contributes only a tiny brush-stroke to the canvas of the overall biblical story, which is reliably conveyed by every translation.