This fine book published by GlossaHouse offers good contributions to biblical translations. Its authors, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a Reformed pastor and scholar of classical Hebrew, seriously engage with contemporary exegetical literature in order to provide their readers with a good English rendering of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 – 12:9, accompanied by comments upon selected phrases. The volume consists in three sections: ‘Before the Translation’ (pp. 1‐16), ‘The Translation’ (pp. 19‐38), ‘After the Translation’ (pp. 39‐313). In the first, some general criteria inspiring the version are given: the newly crafted translation is aimed at public reading and private worship, is conceived in a substantial continuity with the Tyndale Bible and the King James Version, is willing to mirror the Semitic original albeit highly mindful of the style and pace of the English text. The translation itself unfolds with paragraph breaks which reflect the blanks left in the Masoretic Leningradensis Codex, comprises three Hebrew traditional titles (bereshit at the head of Gen 1:1, nóach before 6:9 and lek‐leka before 12:1), nicely italicises verses opening new sub‐sections (2:4; 5,1a; 6:9a; 10:1; 11:10a). The third section of the book contains more detailed justifications of the criteria followed in the translation (‘To the Persistent Reader’, pp. 41‐64), ‘Notes’ (pp. 65‐200), some elements about the ‘Dramatis Personae’ (i.e. God, Adam, Eve, the serpent, Cain, Abel, etc., pp. 201‐206), a ‘Glossary’ with the Hebrew Texts, the old and modern translations and a selection of major ancient and modern interpreters (pp. 207‐222), a few recommendation for further readings (‘Of the Making of Books’, pp. 223‐225), ‘Abbreviations’ (pp. 226‐234), ‘Works Cited’ (pp. 235‐267) and indexes (pp. 268‐313).
For the purposes of the present review specific premises addressed ‘To the Persistent Reader’ and some selected notes to the translation are worth discussing. Bray and Hobbins acknowledge that each textual tradition, such as the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, has a coherence in its own, consider a variety of ancient reading (both within the Hebrew‐Aramaic and the Greek tradition), thus often referring to Qumran finds, the Samaritan Pentateuch, Aquila, the Targums etc., but opt to follow Codex L. As they write, ‘the differences between the other ancient textual traditions and MT can bring to light features of the MT that might otherwise remain unnoticed’ p. 43). With all its undeniable difficult or even corrupt readings, they want to show that MT is understandable and can be reproduced with precision. With different syntactical techniques the authors hence indicate when Hebrew varies the common word order, when it is elliptical, resorts to puns or is heavily repetitive so as to reveal an underlying theme. Keeping close to biblical wording implies full acceptance of its usages, even those judged as socially biased. Quoting Michal Fox – one of the many internationally renowned consultants of the two translators – it is thus made clear that ‘to eliminate gender‐specificity and bias from the Bible is grossly anachronistic and tidies up difficulties we should face’ (p. 49). Great care is rather deployed to help listeners to perceive Messianic echoes traditionally detected and resonances of phrases quoted in other parts of the Bible (New Testament included). In the wake of Old Greek double translations, a single Hebrew word is sometimes given two equivalents in order to capture the wider spectrum of references and connotations of the term: the serpent is for example ‘smooth and shrewd’ (Gen 3:1), i.e. astute as ‘arum suggests but naked as the closely attached adjective ‘erom explains. Some kind of sagacity is indeed exhibited where the reader is to tackle Masoretic qere / ketivs (i.e. words whose consonants point to a reading different from the one actually indicated by the vowel signs). In Gen 8:17 the archaic pronunciation hayetze’ and the more usual hotze’ (respectively marked by the ketiv and the qere) is for instance ‘brynge them out with you’.
By way of examples, some renderings merit credit. In Gen 2:7 we read: ‘The Lord God formed a man, of dust from the ground’. As it can observed, the Tetragrammaton is rendered according to the old Jewish‐Christian tradition and the assonance between ’adam and ’adamah lies in the italics (contemporary writers have resorted to ‘human from the humus’ or ‘earthling from the earth’). In Gen 3:20 and 4:1 we find analogously: ‘And the man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of the living’ (notice the characteristic use of the initial conjunction) ‘and she conceived Cain, saying “I gained a man through the Lord”’. The progenitors’ cursed son is then made ‘a trembler and a wanderer’ (na‘ va‐nad, Gen 4:12) finally dwelling ‘in the land of Wandering’ (Nod, Gen 4:16). A much more famous toponym is explained as ‘Babylon, for there the Lord scrambled the tongue of all the earth and made it babble’ (Gen 11:9). In order to remain faithful to the text established in past centuries, the tale comprehensibly opens with ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (instead of ‘At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth…’). Abram's call likewise has ‘I will magnify your name (…) he who invokes woe upon you will I curse, and in you shall all the families of the ground be blessed’ (12:2‐3): a quick link to Luke 1:46 is thus made clear, whereas the practice of mentioning a name in one's blessing (e.g. Gen 48:20) is eclipsed (for this reason J.P.S. Tanakh has ‘And all the families of the earth Shall bless themselves by you’). A further point where some distance from a classical rendering would have been important is Gen 1:21, where the mysterious presence of tanninim is certainly made irrelevant before the creative force of God, but nevertheless anticipates the experience of death and devastation in history, which cannot diminish the perfection of this world.
A tannin is not a whale, but readers will certainly have a whale of a time with this volume by Bray and Hobbins in their hands.
