By Robert Alter

There is a double impetus to my translation of the Hebrew Bible.

The first might be described as strictly literary, which is to say, an attempt to find workable English equivalents for the cadences, the expressive syntax, the sound play, the thematic shaping of narrative through strategic word choice, and much else in the Hebrew. The other impetus is an effort to render faithfully the semantic force of the Hebrew words. This second consideration brought me back as a translator to the ancient Near East.

The world view of the Israelite writers, in keeping with their historical setting, was anchored in the physical world and in the human body. With only marginal exceptions, they did not think abstractly, and they employed very few abstractions. A case in point is Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), surely the closest any book of the Bible comes to philosophic reflection. It begins, famously in the King James Version, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The sundry modern versions have not departed much from this word choice, though they may substitute “futility” or a similar term for “vanity” while still preserving the abstraction. The Hebrew, however, is more concrete, characteristically employing a metaphor based on physical reality to serve in lieu of an abstraction. The Hebrew says, as I have tried to represent it scrupulously in translation, “Merest breath, all is mere breath.” The insubstantiality of what a breathing person exhales, perhaps visible on a cold day as a wisp of vapor that immediately vanishes in the air, becomes an affecting image of what is futile, evanescent, lacking all solidity.

A recurrent phrase in Qohelet often linked with this one is the paired terms rendered in the King James Version as “vexation of spirit.” Both these English nouns are mistakes: the first misconstrues the Hebrew word, evidently seeing in it the root that means “bad,” while the second word erroneously applies the meaning the Hebrew word sometimes shows of “spirit” where the context clearly requires “wind.” (Note the characteristic move from the concreteness of the Hebrew to an abstraction.) Most modern versions get “wind” right but not the first word. It derives from a verbal stem that means “to herd,” and so the Jewish Publication Society’s rather conventional “pursuit of the wind” somewhat blunts the metaphor. “Herding the wind” is a striking figure of speech for futility, taking our own expression of “herding cats” to the second power. Herding, of course, would have been a familiar daily activity in the material world of the Israelite pastoralists, and strong or dry winds are something farmers and shepherds had to contend with regularly. It is a wonderful image of flailing actions that are altogether hopeless.

A central instance of the anchorage of the biblical world view in the body and concrete reality is the ubiquitous term nefesh. The seventeenth-century translators, following the use of anima in the Vulgate, represent it again and again as “soul.” Hebrew writers in Iron Age II had no notion of a soul, with its concomitant idea of a split between body and soul and its implication of the soul’s persistence after death. The core meaning of nefesh is “life-breath.” By an easy extension, it can equally indicate a person’s life. It also often has the sense of “essential self” and as such, when declined in the first-person singular, can be an intensive form of “I.” Through metonymy, it means “throat” or “neck” (the passageway of the breath); it can also mean “appetite” and, in a different direction, can serve as a term for “person.” Given this range of different meanings, I felt obliged to set aside my general commitment to repeating the same English equivalent for a given term and yield to the usually questionable practice of translating according to context. The various modern English versions of course do this, but, evidently feeling that no Bible should lack “soul,” they still allow the older English equivalent into their translations with surprising frequency.

Let me quote a full verse from Psalms (63:2) to illustrate how nefesh can be used with a startling bodily force that has not been registered in previous translations: “God, my God, for You I search. / My throat thirsts for You. // My flesh yearns for You / in a land waste and parched, with no water.” At first thought, it might seem bizarre for the poet to speak of the throat thirsting for God, but one can see in the poetic parallelism with “flesh” and the metaphorical setting in a parched desert that it is the sense of “throat” and not a more rarefied meaning of nefesh that the context requires. This is a small but vivid instance of how the Hebrew writers represented existential reality and even religious experience in the physical terms congenial to their culture.

I would add to this emphasis on the concreteness of the ancient Israelite imagination a brief comment on the kind of English style appropriate for conveying that world view. Most of the biblical texts were written in a language removed from us by almost three millennia. For this reason, the general push of the modern English versions to make them sound as though they were produced just yesterday, in a style compatible with the daily newspaper, leads to a grave misrepresentation.  Clearly, you can’t translate the Bible in archly archaic prose and poetry, but you can avoid using locutions that are gratingly modern. Biblical narrative in particular reflects a deliberately limited vocabulary, using relatively simple and dignified primary terms for almost everything, and this is perfectly feasible to reproduce in English.

Let me illustrate the pitfalls of doing otherwise. In the Jewish Publication Society version, Joseph is said to distribute “rations” in Egypt, the translators blind to the fact that he is not a modern army quartermaster officer but an ancient Egyptian vice-regent. The Hebrew term here, a specialized one for food that staves off famine, is, in the absence of an English equivalent for this specialized sense, most prudently rendered simply as “food.”  In the report of the sexual importuning of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39, the Protestant Revised English Bible has her say, “Make love to me.” This unfortunately sounds like a frustrated wife or eager mistress in our own world asking for sex. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “lie with me,” a phrase that works well enough in English and sounds reasonably appropriate for the ancient setting in which the story was written.

All translations of great works are of course no more than approximations of the original, in some places happy ones, in some necessarily imperfect. But respecting the sheer physicality of the Bible’s language together with a stylistic decorum appropriate to the Hebrew diction can help readers sense something of the world quite different from ours in which the Bible was created.

Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.