Scripture Translations and Who Defines the Divine

Scripture translations have intrigued me since High School when I met Judy Brummer, a South African translator of the Book of Mormon who shared her experience of feeling Moroni’s energy sitting with her while she translated his words into the Xhosa language. Her creative, transformative experience of translating scripture greatly influenced my reading of scriptural texts. Suddenly, these sacred words no longer seemed magical or mystical, but more human– more prone to error and bias. 

From then on, the words on the scritta paper weren’t necessarily the words of God but the words that translators thought were God’s–which seemed much more interesting to me. I realized that scriptural texts are filtered through invisible human translators who influence the messages and ideologies of a text. And yet, we rarely know their names–these writers of scripture. 

Years later, when writing a paper in college, I came across a story about an Iraqw Bible translation project that again transformed the way I viewed God. The Iraqw language, a Cushitic language spoken in Northern Tanzania, posed a translation challenge because the Iraqw word for God is feminine.

According to Aloo Osotsi Mojola, a translation scholar at the University of Nairobi, translators are often confronted with issues of inadequate direct translation–words that require the translator’s creativity and judgment. When faced with a word, “God” in this case, that has no direct equivalent, the translators must make a choice: Do we take the path of domestication, using one of the names of God from the local language? Or do we opt for foreignization, borrowing one of the names of God from the neighboring dominant languages? 

The Iraqw name for God is Mother Looa. This ancient goddess appears in their folktales and myths, in their daily conversations, and in their prayers. For centuries, Iraqw-speaking people understood that the creator of the universe was Mother Looa. She is the protector and loving mother of all humanity, “she represents all that is good, beautiful, and true.” By contrast, the masculine god, Neetlanqw, is understood to bring evil and calamity, suffering and chaos to the world. Naturally, the Bible translation team–consisting mostly of women–decided to translate the English word “God” to the Iraqw “Mother Looa.” 

As I read this scholarly article, I loved imagining these people calling to Mother Looa when they were in trouble, reading Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning Mother Looa created the heavens and the earth.” I knew it was just normal to them, and I hated the idea of Christianity commandeering their Goddess of goodness, forcing her to enact the horrors attributed to the God of Israel in the Bible. But–wow. The Christian Bible held a Goddess in its pages, and she transformed all the hes into hers. 

What a difference a word makes, I thought.

But the story ended predictably: Christian leaders discovered this feminine translation and took immediate action. 

Obviously, there was no room for feminine language in the Bible. The Christian leaders argued that “everyone knows, God is a father and therefore masculine.” I would argue that the Iraqw-speaking people did not “know” that, but Mother Looa was cut from the Bible–erased from Christian tradition, theology, and thought. Instead of listening and straddling two worlds like translators do, the leaders held rigidly to the foundation of Christianity: Father, man, he, him.

And though I love the idea of a Goddess in the Bible, stripping away all those masculine pronouns, I am also–sadly–glad that Looa was released from the barbaric acts of our Old Testament God.

I’ve thought often about this story of translation, the power of a single word, and the decisions of translators–the invisible world-makers. This erasure of Mother Looa was still fresh in my mind when I learned of another instance where translation shaped (or reshaped) religious texts in 17th-century England. Mary Sidney, who knew five languages, including Hebrew, translated many texts into English, but when I read the Psalms that she translated, I was transformed. 

For me, the Bible is literarily clunky and strange and hard to read. This ugliness was always excused to me because people said it was translated from an ancient language, but then I read Mary Sidney’s Psalms and realized that that just isn’t true. Her wordplay, metrical complexity, and linguistic prowess made scripture beautiful to me. Delightful. For example, here is a portion of her translation of Psalm 150: 

Let ringing timbrels so his honor sound,
Let sounding cymbals so his glory ring,
That in their tunes such melody be found
As fits the pomp of most triumphant king.

Her Psalms, which she presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1599, demonstrate rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration. Her words are so much more beautiful, so much more linguistically complex and clever than the King James version of Psalm 150: 

Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

Yikes. Both translations originate from the same Hebrew poems, and yet, they vary vastly based on the person translating. I find Sidney’s translation more to my liking, but isn’t that fascinating? Two translators take the same Hebrew words and create two completely different products. Translators matter.

Ultimately, Bible translation is not just about words—it’s about power, belief, and who gets to define the divine. 

*This post was inspired by guest blogger Leticia Storr’s beautiful post, God’s Language .

*Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash