Learning a Language
During the summer of 1976, between my freshmen and sophomore years of college, I went to Israel and worked on a kibbutz. At the time, I knew no Hebrew at all. By the time I came back to California, well-tanned from working in the banana fields and among the date palms, I had learned a dozen Hebrew songs, a few words and phrases, and I could easily count to ten.
When I returned to college I signed up for an introductory course in Hebrew. It was not modern Hebrew. Since I attended a small Christian liberal arts college, I learned the ancient language of the Old Testament. Even so, the Coca-Cola bottle I had brought back with the odd Hebrew writing quickly became just another Coke bottle: unexceptional and mundane, it’s formerly unfathomable letters transforming into the comprehensible.
Growing up I regularly attended Sunday School. As a child I learned that the Bible had not been written in English, but instead had been written in other languages, specifically Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. My first Bible was only a New Testament. My mom told me I could have the Old Testament along with it once I got older, and so I looked forward to that with great anticipation. Perhaps that longing contributed to my lifelong interest in the Old Testament.
As I became a teenager, I began to have concerns about how reliable the Bible was, especially whether I could I fully trust the translations: could I rely on people I didn’t know to stand between me and what the text actually said? I didn’t really understand the concept of translation. It seemed a profound mystery to me: something secret, something hidden, something reserved for only the elite. I wondered: if I were to learn Hebrew and Greek would I discover the Bible said something other than what I thought it did? Learning that there were other translations of the Bible than the one I had grown up with contributed to my fear that there might be something amiss with what I thought the Bible was all about.
But then, after that first summer in Israel, I found myself starting to peel back the mystery, learning what I had imagined until then that only a select elite could possibly understand.
As I passed my quizzes and the exams, as the grammar and the vocabulary slithered into my brain, it occurred to me that Hebrew was not so mysterious after all: it wasn’t even hard. The ancient Hebrew words in the Bible were no more peculiar, no more mysterious, than the words on the side of that Coke bottle. It was still just Coca-Cola, regardless of the shape of the letters.
My childish thought that translation might be something like twisting the gears on a Cracker Jack decoder ring, where the letter A was now represented by B and so on was of course mistaken. It’s a bit more complex than that, but of course Hebrew is no weirder than Spanish or German. But since there’s more to translation than just using a decoder ring, it also means that there’s no such thing as “literal” translation. The concept of idiom made its way into my head: ways of speaking that we take for granted that make no sense if you tried for literalizing them in translation. I realized that an English phrase like “I’m sick and tired of apple pie” was not so easy to render into another language. If I insisted on literalism instead of finding the equivalent idiom, a Spanish speaker would think that apple pie made me sleepy and nauseous. Like English, Hebrew has idioms and simply accomplishes the same meanings in ways entirely different than we do it in English Hebrew nouns are all masculine or feminine, unlike in English, where most of them are genderless. In English we use forms of the verb “to be” in phrases such as “the man is ugly” or “I am Jane.” Not so in Hebrew. In Hebrew, the same phrase is simply “the man ugly” and “I Jane.” It reminded me of Tarzan-speak.
And so, after three years of ancient Hebrew as an undergraduate, and another four years as a graduate student at UCLA (plus two years of the modern language), I find myself nearly as comfortable with the biblical language as any non-native speaker of a dead language can be. Of course, I suspect a kindergartner in Israel still knows Hebrew better than I ever will.
But now I know that I don’t lose anything much in translation—except for the puns. Those just don’t translate well. And the various translations available of the Bible that one finds in any bookstore are no more questionable or unreliable than the various translations you’ll find there of Homer, Gothe, Dostoevsky , Tolstoy, Dumas or Jules Verne. Of course a translation of Homer made in 2014 will probably be easier reading than one made in 1611, just as J.K. Rowling is easier reading than William Shakespeare.
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