40-3-Pp455-520 JETS.Pdf

JETS 40/3 (September 1997) 455–520 BOOK REVIEWS Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1996, l + 1289 pp. + maps, $19.99.* With some reluctance I agreed to review the OT portion of the New Living Trans- lation (NLT). My disdain for its predecessor, the Living Bible (LB), and my personal preference for a more literal translation philosophy over a thoroughly dynamic equiv- alence approach no doubt makes me, from the start, prejudiced against any overtly thought-for-thought translation (though the NLT, as it turns out, is not always con- sistently thought for thought). But when I saw the names of the revisers, a virtual Who’s Who of evangelical OT scholarship, I became more positively disposed. The fol- lowing represents my impressions after investigating a sampling of OT passages in comparison with the older edition and with the NIV, with which it will primarily com- pete for market share. The original Living Bible was produced in the 1960s and early 1970s by Kenneth Taylor, who took the American Standard Version of 1901 (not the Greek NT or the He- brew OT) and rephrased it in his own words to bring out what he understood as the meaning. It was claimed that Greek and Hebrew “experts” checked the content, though to most scholarly reviewers these experts improved the work at most super˜cially. In contrast, the NLT no longer claims to be a mere paraphrase by a single author but a genuine translation by an international team of evangelical scholars based in the OT on the BHS Hebrew text. The NLT is clearly an improvement over the LB. Taylor’s text did serve as the basis of revision, and much of the wording remains unchanged. Taylor himself was on the translation committee as a “special reviewer.” Nonetheless the revisers have made changes in virtually every verse, and the book of Psalms in particular is so thoroughly revised as to be regarded as a new rendition. The vast majority of these changes have only served to improve the work. The LB was notorious for its midrashic interpretative glosses. These were often based on Taylor’s imagination and his desire to make the text more vivid and mean- ingful, but they lacked any basis in the original. These, thankfully, have disappeared. For instance, the baseless “All day long he sat on the hillsides watching the sheep and keeping them from straying” (Amos 1:1), “Don’t be afraid” (Isa 40:9), “Cyrus” (Isa 41:5) and the like are all gone. Gone too are many of the anachronisms (except in weights and measures), so that whereas the LB read in Ps 119:105 “Thy word is a ˘ashlight for my feet” the NLT once again reads “a lamp.” The “police” of Cant 3:3 (LB) are now * The publication by a mainstream evangelical publisher of a major new Bible translation/revision warrants a more in-depth review than JETS normally publishes. Accordingly three reviews follow, focusing respectively on the OT, the NT and the overall literary quality of the New Living Translation. The reviewers are specialists in each of these areas: Joe M. Sprinkle, associate professor of Old Testament at Toccoa Falls College; Mark L. Strauss, assistant professor of New Tes- tament at Bethel Theological Seminary West; and Norman Carson, professor of English emeritus at Geneva College. The reviews have been edited for format and consistency, but overlaps among them have been allowed to stand. 456 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 40/3 once again “watchmen” (NLT). To the laughable renderings based on an ignorance of the Hebrew, such as the LB’s “Do not awaken my lover; let him sleep” (Cant 2:7), the NLT now gives reasonable interpretation (“Do not awaken love till the time is right”). In addition, the interpretative paraphrases are generally much more cautious. Ec- clesiastes is no longer explicitly written by “Solomon of Jerusalem, King David’s Son” as the LB claimed. The male voice in Song of Songs is now a “Young Man” rather than “Solomon.” Both these modi˜cations re˘ect scholarly evangelical reservations concern- ing Taylor’s previous views and a concern not to stray so far beyond what the text actually states. The angel interpretation of Gen 6:1–3 had been explicit in the LB (“beings from the spirit world”), but the NLT renders with the more ambiguous and pedestrian “sons of God.” The “tree of conscience” (Gen 2:17, LB) is now again the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (NLT). The speci˜c (and probably wrong) interpretation of 2 Kgs 3:27 that after seeing the king of Moab sacri˜ce his son as a human oˆering “the army of Israel turned back in disgust to their own land” (LB) is now re- placed by the more literal but somewhat ambiguous “The anger against Israel was so great, they withdrew and returned to their own land” (NLT). On the other hand, this translation is in some ways more bold than the older edition. It contains perhaps the most explicitly erotic rendering of Song of Songs of any major translation available, re˘ecting the scholarly trend to read the Song primarily as love poetry. The LB’s “palace” (1:4) that the feminine voice was brought into is now the young man’s “bedroom.” The veiled woman of 1:7 is no longer called a “vagabond” (LB) but the sexually charged term “prostitute.” The “beloved one” (male) who lies be- tween the girl’s breasts is now the girl’s “lover” (1:13), and the young man and she now lie together on the grass, rather than just she alone (1:16). The young woman brings her lover not merely “into my mother’s old bedroom” (LB) but “into my mother’s bedroom where I had been conceived” (3:4, NLT), a sexually suggestive rendering. Al- though the translators admit in a marginal note that the Hebrew is ambiguous, the NLT renders 6:12 with the explicitly erotic “Before I realized it, I found myself in my princely bed with my beloved one.” No longer is “love awakened” (LB) under the apple tree, but the young woman says to the young man, “I aroused you under the apple tree” (8:5, NLT). The metaphor of the young sister who is likened to a “wall” or to a “door” is paraphrased as meaning “chaste” and “promiscuous” (8:9). The NIV, in comparison, is more reserved: “chambers” instead of “bedroom” (1:4), “veiled woman” for “prostitute” (1:7), “our bed is verdant” for “we lie together in the grass” (1:16), “royal chariots” for “princely bed” (6:12), “roused you” (i.e. from sleep) for “aroused you” sexually (8:5), and “wall” and “door” (8:9). The NLT OT, though based primarily on the MT, does indulge in some textual criticism. Hence at Gen 4:8 the expression “Let us go out into the ˜elds” is adopted from the versions, but unfortunately no note indicates that this reading deviates from the MT. At Jer 27:1 Jehoiakim is corrected to Zedekiah, though this change is ex- plained in a note. Goliath is still more than nine feet tall in this version, though the footnote explains that in the Greek version (and it should add the text of the Dead Sea scrolls) Goliath is the still large but less colossal 6.75 feet tall. No mention is made of the widely adopted reading “light” in Isa 53:11 (LXX, 1QIsa), but 52:14 changes “you” to “him” on the basis of the Syriac. Psalm 22:16 retains the traditional rendering based on LXX, Syriac and some Hebrew MSS—“They have pierced my hands and my feet”—without a hint that this rendering is problematic and not based on the MT (cf. NIV fn., which observes that most Hebrew MSS read “like a lion” rather than “they have pierced”). It is estimated that as much as one third to one half of the OT is poetic. It is there- fore most unfortunate that the NLT regularly fails to print in poetic format many pas- SEPTEMBER 1997 BOOK REVIEWS 457 sages universally regarded as poetic in Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and many portions of the prophets. A signi˜cant exception was made for the entire book of Psalms, which is written in poetic format. Other exceptions were made where the text explicitly calls what follows a “song” or “psalm,” for prayers, and for certain rid- dles, blessings and poetic quotations (e.g. Gen 14:19–20; chap. 49; Exodus 15; Num 6:24–26; chaps. 23–24; Deuteronomy 32–33; Josh 10:12; Judges 5; 14:14; 15:16; 1 Sam 2:1–10; Isa 5:1–7). In an improvement over the LB, the bicolon structure of various Proverbs in the NLT have been restored so that anyone who wanted to could read them as poetry. Still, it is regrettable that all the poetic portions were not laid out as poetry. It may be true that laypeople do not much care for poetry, but they should be allowed to know when they are reading poetry and when they are not, since this af- fects interpretation. This decision sets this translation back more than two centuries, before the seminal work of Robert Lowth on Hebrew poetry. In this age of political correctness, it is both understandable and regrettable that new translations are obliged to make concessions to the feminist encroachments upon the English language. In Paul’s spirit of being a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greek, one arguably should be a feminist to the feminist.

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