kw: book reviews, partial reviews, Bible translation, Bible interpretation, annotations, grammar
Did you ever wonder why so many verses in the Bible begin with the word "And"? It seems our grade school teachers spent tons of effort to convince us not to use run-on sentences, and then in the Bible (for those who read it), run-on sentences seem to be the rule! In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and to a lesser extent the Greek of the New Testament, it was accepted narrative style to begin many sentences with conjunctions as a way of maintaining narrative flow.
In Hebrew the mechanism is to prefix the first word of a sentence with the smallest Hebrew letter, vav, which looks like an apostrophe. Bible scholars over the years have overloaded this little letter with quite a bit of freight, but more careful scholars in recent decades have mostly "unloaded" it.
I read the Bible daily, usually a few Old Testament chapters and one New Testament chapter. I like to investigate various translations, which I tend to do every second year. The rest of the time I stick to the Recovery Version (RcV – see recoveryversion.bible to read the online text version or to order a print version that has study notes). RcV is the best Bible translation I know of.
In 2019 The Holy Bible, New English Translation (NET) was published as a single volume containing both Testaments plus about 60,000 notes of three kinds:
- TN, Translator's Note, which explains why certain words or phrases were selected.
- TC, Text-Critical note, which adds supplementary information regarding old versions and other translations, particularly when references to other works are more extensive than a line or two.
- SN, Study Note, which explains historical or cultural information that can help a contemporary person understand a passage better.
The Bible text plus the notes comprise 2,392 pages. The Old Testament was translated by fourteen scholars, and the New Testament was translated by five scholars. I note that nearly half of the translators were educated at Dallas Theological Seminary.
The typeface is small, so I realized that it would take 2-3 years, or more, to read the entire volume. I would need to plan ahead. I read a few verses and notes to "survey the landscape." I was immediately disappointed.
Some background: I learned the "gap theory" as a preteen, from my parents. Put simply, I learned that Genesis 1:2 is not a direct continuation of v1:1, but that an unstated amount of time passed. Later I obtained a Scofield Reference Bible (C.I. Scofield's student L.S. Chafer founded Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924), which has this note on the word "created" in the first verse:
But [meaning only] three creative acts of God are recorded in this chapter: (1) the heavens and the earth, v. 1; (2) animal life, v. 21; and (3) human life, vs. 26,27. The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.
That is the entirety of Scofield's Note 2. The next note describes "without form and void" as the result of judgment, referring to certain passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah, and to the "lamentation" sections of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, stating that their language "goes beyond the kings of Tyre and Babylon".
Still later I learned that Hebrew has more than one past tense, and that "created" in 1:1 is in a different past tense than the verbs in the rest of the chapter. Thus, to quote John Lennox of Oxford University, "What does the book of Genesis say about when the universe was created? Absolutely nothing!" These things were the common intellectual heritage of evangelical Christianity for at least two generations. In more recent years, "young-earth creationists" have taken over, in a politico-theological sense, a significant number of evangelical congregations and even schools of theology. It appears that their hyper-literalist ideology has infected this translation also.
The opening phrase of Genesis 1:2 in NET is, "Now the earth was without shape and empty,…". Note E, a Translator's Note (TN) on the word "Now" makes much of a peculiar interpretation of v1:1 as a title of what follows, rather than as a narrative element. Here the little letter vav is brought into service in an obsolete, overloaded way. Looking in my Hebrew-English Interlinear Bible I see that the word "now" in NET is a translation of vav, which is translated "and" in the King James Version and more than a dozen others, while about half so many use "now". Either is OK. More modern versions usually leave it out. That is also OK based on current English usage. But Note E goes into a long discourse based on this "vav consecutive", clearly seeking to deny any interpretation that allows a length of time to pass between these verses. Scofield's interpretation is thus disparaged.
Soon, reinforcements arrive: Note G, on "without shape and empty" specifically denies that this phrase could refer to a consequence of judgment. In particular, the translator states that it is "unsound" to refer the application of the phrase to judgment by Isaiah and Jeremiah, back to Genesis 1:2. I wrote a marginal note: "God is timeless".
After making notes on these matters I set aside NET for five years. In December 2024, planning my Bible reading schedule for 2025, I decided to begin to read through NET at a rate of about two pages daily, at the same time reading the New Testament, about a chapter at a time, in RcV. I set up a document to record notes.
Two days ago, having reached page 104, I finished reading Genesis and all its Notes. I decided to write this preliminary evaluation. In my own notes I find 35 comments, mostly about things I consider erroneous or misapplied. As I look them over, I think it is best to concentrate on only a few egregious matters. And first I wish to present three places where the NET translator(s) got something right that traditional Christianity has missed or gotten wrong. When I refer to other translations in bulk, it is based on a perusal of sections of Bible Gateway.
- Gen 2:4, Note M: a TN and SN explain the NET usage "This is the account…" in place of a literal translation "These are the generations…", pointing out that the Hebrew term has a more general application beyond recounting human genealogies. Most translations use "account", "records", "story", or "history", and these notes explain why.
- Gen 9:22, Note E: The TN and SN provide a good explanation, from grammar and context, to show that when Ham "saw the nakedness" of his father Noah, it is not a euphemism for committing incest. Ham was just a tattletale, and, as I have heard more than one teacher ask, "Why did Ham go into the tent anyway?" The strength of Noah's reaction indicates that this latter question has an answer that God has hidden from us.
- Gen 38:9, Note b: NET translation of the key phrases is "whenever he [Onan] slept with his brother's wife, he wasted his emission on the ground". The TN and SN note that this was a repeated practice, and that Onan didn't masturbate but indeed had sex with Tamar, but performed coitus interruptus, or withdrawal, to keep her from becoming pregnant. The crusty old term "Onanism" is a misnomer.
Now to a few less helpful items:
- Firstly, something that isn't theologically negative, but I find annoying: Several notes on each page say that something was done—leaving a word out, adding a word, substituting a name for a pronoun or vice versa, or rearranging phrases—for "stylistic reasons" or, more rarely "for clarity." It would have been far better to state in the introductory text that "many" instances of stylistic or clarifying rearrangements and substitutions took place, and that a convention (I'd have recommended a special character such as §) is used to mark such cases. This would have shortened the volume by several percent!
- Gen 4:1, Note T: Where a literal translation would have, "I have acquired a man by Jehovah", NET has "I have created a man just as the Lord did". Regardless what weasel words fill the TN and SN in Note T, this is the worst possible rendering of the phrase. It doesn't even qualify as an interpretation. It is too awful to simply call "wrong".
- Gen 6:5, Note G: TN equates "heart" with "mind". The rest of scripture makes clear that "heart" is all of the soul (mind+will+emotion) plus the conscience. The mind is included, but is not the whole of it. This misconstruction confuses numerous spiritual gems.
- Gen 6:9, Note C: Noah was one of a very few who "walked with God". Thankfully, the NET text is correct, but the Note dilutes it to mean "had cordial relations with". Does the NT equivalent, "walk in spirit" (or "walk by the Spirit") fall to the same low place in NET parlance (I don't know, I haven't looked for it yet)?
- Gen 12:8 and many other places; also Note P: Literally, Abraham "called upon the name of Jehovah." NET text is "worshipped the Lord". The Bible does not waste words. There is a perfectly good Hebrew term, "worship the Lord", but to discard "call on the name" by narrowing its meaning to "worship" is a travesty of a powerful spiritual matter.
That is enough to make the point. The background and agenda of at least some translators is all too visible, which sometimes leads me to doubt that some of them are genuine believers. As Jesus said to certain ones, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that testify of Me, but you do not come to Me that you may have life."
To go on to another matter than stifles the usefulness of many notes. I collected certain grammatical terms as I read. There is no hint of explanation of any of them. First, here is a list of Hebrew terms and a brief meaning for each:
- hiphil - a verbal stem in Biblical Hebrew that expresses causative action.
- hitpael [properly hithpael] - a verb pattern in Biblical Hebrew that expresses reflexive actions, such as "to do something to oneself". It's one of the seven major verb patterns in Hebrew.
- hophal - the passive form of the Hiphil stem formation.
- niphal - a verb stem in Biblical Hebrew that can express a variety of actions, including passive, reflexive, or middle voice. Another of "the 7".
- piel - a verbal stem formations, signifying an intensified or causative action of a verb.
- pual - a verbal stem, the passive voice of the Piel stem.
- qal - the simplest and most basic verb stem, representing a straightforward action or state without additional nuances like causation or intensity.
- qere - the "read" version of a word, indicating the pronunciation that should be used instead of the written form ("ketiv") which may appear different in the text due to scribal tradition.
- wayyiqtal [properly wayyiqtol] - a verb form that indicates a simple action that was completed in the past.
Secondly, while I have a Classical education, the following English terms were new to me; these are in the order I found them:
- jussive - a verbal form expressing a command (whatever happened to "imperative"?).
- preterite - a verbal form that denotes events that were completed in the past.
- disjunctive - expressing a choice between two mutually exclusive possibilities.
- deictic - a word or expression whose meaning is dependent on the context in which it is used.
- concessive - a conjunction, preposition, phrase, or clause describing a state of affairs that might have been expected to rule out what is described in the main clause but in fact does not.
- hendiadys - the expression of a single idea by two words connected with “and,” such as nice and warm.
- proleptic - to anticipate or assume that something in the future is already happening.
- pleonastic - using more words than are needed to express an idea, such as "free gift". A fancy word for "redundant" or "verbose".
- gentilic - a word that describes a group of people based on their national, tribal, or racial affiliation.
- antimeria - using a word in a different part of speech than it's typically used in.
- enclitic - a word pronounced with so little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word, such as n't in can't. A fancy word for a contraction.
- protasis - the clause expressing the condition in a conditional sentence.
- elative - a grammatical case which indicates that something comes from somewhere, someone, or something else, as in "out of Africa".
- locative - a grammatical case which indicates that something is somewhere, such as -side in oceanside.
- substantival - having the function of a noun or noun equivalent.
- desiderative - feeling or expressing desire.
I note that I got a red "misspelt" flag on only two of these terms, so they are nearly all in Blogger's spelling dictionary.
In my future reading—I plan to finish it all—I will restrict my notes to the most egregious examples, and of course to notes that teach me something or provide a great explanation of some Biblical puzzle. I may post an update to this review in 2-3 years, but I think this is enough to make clear why I do not recommend this to someone uneducated in Biblical principles of interpretation. There is too much here that will either weaken one's faith or that waters down valuable spiritual lessons that the Bible seeks to teach.
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