Patience with Job

A week or so ago I made so free as to suggest, in a comment on Pharyngula, that (any religious considerations to one side) nobody who loves the English language should fail to have read the bible in the Authorised Version. And that's very true. The KJV and Shakespeare are the bedrock of our tongue, as Luther's bible and Goethe that of modern German or Dante that of Italian. Browse through the KJV (okay, feel free to skip over the 'begats') and you will find, again and again, phrases that have become part of our common patrimony as anglophones.

But I don't want to come over as though the KJV were, y'know, divinely inspired or something. Anybody can have a go at the original text, and if they come up with something more powerful, more poetic than the KJV, well, fair play to them. (As it happens, actually, one can rarely if ever have a go at the original text; that's part of the problem we'll discuss below.)

Now, one of my favourite books in the bible is Job. And Job, in the Authorised Version, is hard going in places, but powerful stuff if one sticks with it. A few years ago, though, Stephen Mitchell proposed a radical new translation.

I use 'radical' advisedly. Mitchell has tried very hard to delve down to the very roots of the text to bring its sense across to us in modern English. Sometimes this entailed comparing various Hebrew texts. But often enough it meant comparing basic Hebrew roots with those of Arabic, Aramaic and other Semitic tongues.

A digression, if you will indulge me. Semitic languages work a bit differently to Indo-European tongues. One starts with a root of (usually) three consonants. Each root expresses a broad basic idea; that idea is made precise, and the root used to build verbs and nouns and what have you, by varying the vowels between the radical consonants (and also, as in our own languages, by slapping things onto the beginning or end of the word; but the changing vowels playing round unchanging consonants is key). Thus K-T-V broadly denotes writing; katav is to write, ketuba a written instrument (specifically, a contract; even more specifically, a marriage contract). You can see, I trust, how one would under this system develop a form of writing that used consonants only, as a sort of shorthand. And indeed, neither Hebrew nor Arabic uses vowels in its 'purest' written form; the vowels are added as something of an afterthought, in the form of little dots and dashes above and below the consonants, and (in Hebrew, at least) they're often left out altogether. The thing is, the vocalic system was developed many centuries after the purely consonantal alphabet; when one reads an ancient text with vowel points added, the pointings are often guesswork. And that can lead to subtle problems of translation.

As an example, consider Job 5:7. This verse is very familiar. You almost certainly know it, even if you don't know where it's from:

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

Mitchell notes that this is odd. It is weak, and seems in conflict with what was expressed in the preceding verse. He proposes instead that יולד be read not as yulad (as you will no doubt remember it from your Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) but rather as yolid, 'gives birth to' rather than 'is born unto'; this giving us, in Mitchell's version:

man is the father of sorrow,
as surely as sparks fly upward

But Mitchell does a lot more than that. In some places, he has subtly reordered verses; in others, he has unsubtly tossed out whole vast swathes that textual analysis shows to be later interpolation. He has also sought to undo subsequent clerical censorship of what is, after all, a pretty blasphemous j'accuse against God.

And he has done so with a strong sense for poetry. Majestic as the KJV can be, consider Mitchells's rendering of Job's famous curse:

God damn the day I was born
and the night that forced me from the womb.
On that day--let there be darkness;
let it never have been created;
let it sink back into the void.
Let chaos overpower it;
let black clouds overwhelm it;
let the sun be plucked from its sky.
Let oblivion overshadow it;
let the other days disown it;
let the aeons swallow it up.
On that night--let no child be born,
no mother cry out with joy.
Let sorcerers wake the Serpent
to blast it with eternal blight.
Let its last stars be extinguished;
let it wait in terror for daylight;
let its dawn never arrive.
For it did not shut the womb's doors
to shelter me from this sorrow.

(And he's just getting warmed up!) If you want to compare this to the KJV's rendering, you may go here.

Nor does Mitchell have much use for euphemism. Consider his God's boasting about the Behemoth:

Look now: the Beast that I made:
he eats grass like a bull.
Look: the power in his thighs,
the pulsing sinews of his belly.
His penis stiffens like a pine;
his testicles bulge with vigor.

Compare that with the KJV (his 'tail', how are you!).

Finally, consider how Mitchell renders Job's last speech to God, after Job has seen our material world for what it is--and the author of Job knew, millennia before Richard Dawkins, that 'things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous--indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose'--and nonetheless concludes that existence is good:

I know you can do all things
and nothing you wish is impossible.
Who is this whose ignorant words
cover my design with darkness?
I have spoken of the unspeakable
and tried to grasp the infinite.
Listen and I will speak:
I will question you: please, instruct me.
I had heard of you with my ears;
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.

That last couplet is a fundamental change from that given in the KJV.

Mitchell's Hebrew scholarship is profound, but he is, so far as I can tell, neither Jew nor Christian. His religious tradition, insofar as he fits within one, seems to be that of zen Buddhism. I am no Buddhist but a Christian; yet Mitchell's conception of God resonates strongly with my own.