Translation

Does Isaiah Predict the Virgin Birth?

Against the modern consensus, a close study of Isaiah 7:14 suggests the prophet directly predicted a virgin birth in the distant future.

When Christians celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating the miraculous birth of a child to a young woman who was a virgin—according to the New Testament (Matthew 1:18–25, Luke 1:26–38). The Gospel of Matthew specifically connects this birth with a prophecy given by Isaiah (7:14) that “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matt. 1:23).

But debates have raged for centuries over the details in Isaiah 7, especially around the translation of the key term “virgin.” This translation debate goes back at least to the second century with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr (Dialogue 68.7; 84.3) and remains with us today. It was a flashpoint when the RSV came out in 1952 because it printed “young woman” in the main text and relegated “virgin” to a footnote. Conservatives at the time panned the translation for this and other issues, accusing it of liberalism. But, by the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators that the Hebrew word ʿalmâ in v. 14 does, in fact, mean “young woman” and does not necessarily indicate a virgin.

By the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators.

The firm position of modern scholarship raises real questions. If the consensus is correct, then why did the Greek translator in the second century BC employ a Greek word that clearly means virgin (parthenos) in Hellenistic Greek? And was Matthew misled in thinking that this text predicted the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth?

The spectrum of views

For a commentator such as Hans Wildberger—at one end of the spectrum—a contradiction between the Old and New Testaments is no problem:

the traditional interpretation of the church, based upon Matt. 1:23, takes the עָלְמָה/ παρθένος [ʿalmâ/parthenos] to be Mary and Immanuel to be Jesus. In some quarters, it is still considered correct today, even if there are certain reservations and an awareness that Isaiah would have not been able to anticipate the specific way in which the predictions would be fulfilled.¹

For an interpreter such as James M. Hamilton, Jr.—a conservative at the other end of the spectrum from Wildberger—one must find a satisfactory way to hold to the unity of the Old and New Testaments. He correlates Immanuel with the son born in Isaiah 8:1–4 and believes that the text of Matthew can be explained satisfactorily as a typological fulfillment.²

The consensus, however, has been challenged recently by the linguist Christophe Rico who has applied modern semantic theory to the study of ʿalmâ.³ Exhaustive analysis from modern linguistic methodology reveals that the word can only mean “young virgin.” But, before exploring that, we first need to appreciate the context of Isaiah’s prophecy.

Isaiah’s context

The brief conversation recorded between King Ahaz of Judah and Isaiah is a pivotal point in the narrative plot-structure of the Old Testament that causes the tree of the Davidic dynasty to be cut down. In the Old Testament, kings and kingdoms are portrayed as stately trees.⁴ The Assyrians are pictured as lofty trees in Isaiah 10:33–34 and in Isaiah 11:1, we come to the first reference of the stump of Jesse.⁵ This text employs an identical metaphor to show that the kingdom of the House of David is a tree cut down; all that remains is a stump.

Characteristic of Hebrew literature is to treat topics recursively. An opening section may go around a topic followed by a second section on the same topic, from a different angle or perspective or point of view. Although the sections are presented sequentially, they function like the left and right speakers of a stereo system, giving full Dolby Surround Sound, so to speak. Thus, “the whole truth” is presented in a full-orbed and three-dimensional way.

The prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 comes from the third repetitive section of Isaiah where he promises judgement for covenant breaking (idolatry and social injustice) and looks beyond the judgement of exile to a coming king who would restore a righteous Zion. There are three panels that portray the coming king: (1) Immanuel Section (Isa. 7:1–8:18); (2) Mighty God Section (Isa. 8:19–10:19); and (3) Shoot from Stump of Jesse Section (Isa. 10:20–11:16). In these three sections prediction of a coming king in the distant future is contrasted with imminent destruction and exile brought by the Assyrians as the Lord’s instrument of judgement. In Isaiah 10:5 Yahweh calls Assyria the rod of his anger that is employed against Judah.

“The Prophecy of Isaiah” (1778 –1779) by Francisco Bayeu. Museo Nacional del Prado

The background of the Immanuel Section is the awakening of the Assyrian giant and the beginning of Neo-Assyrian domination in the ancient Near East (744–612 BC). Syria with its capital in Damascus joined forces with the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital in Samaria to create an anti-Assyrian coalition. They wanted Ahaz, King of Judah to join them, but he refused. The plan was to eliminate him and put a puppet in his place. It looked like the end of the Davidic Dynasty! The paragraph in Isaiah 7:10–16 comes as Isaiah meets Ahaz while he is out inspecting his city’s source of water and preparing for a siege. Isaiah promises him deliverance if he will rely on Yahweh alone and ask for a sign: anything at all in the universe.

The answer given by Ahaz appears pious, but is insincere and completely lacking in covenant loyalty to Yahweh. He declares that he will not put the Lord to the test (Isa. 7:12). It may seem that Ahaz is acting very piously by refusing to put God to the test, but in reality, he is demonstrating that he is a willfully unbelieving man. He has already decided what he will do. He is going to hold out against a siege from Syria and Israel and become a vassal of the King of Assyria in order to get the alliance of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria (Syro-Ephraimite Coalition) off his back.

In view of Ahaz’s refusal to trust the Lord, Isaiah announces in vv. 17–25 that Judah will soon be overrun and devastated by that very Assyria which Ahaz has foolishly decided to turn to for help. Set in between the Threat to the Davidic House in vv. 1–9 and the Announcement of Desolation by Attacking Armies in vv. 17–25 is the paragraph in vv. 10–16 where Isaiah presents the Immanuel Sign.

The Immanuel sign

We come now to Isaiah 7:13–16 which speak of the Immanuel Sign. These verses are the heart of the section. Verses 1–12 lead up to them and vv. 17–25 which follow indicate the results of Ahaz’s decision. From the New Testament, we know that this prophecy finds fulfillment ultimately in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:21–23), but what is the meaning of the prophecy according to the Book of Isaiah and in the time of Ahaz?

When Matthew and the other writers of the New Testament say that a particular prophecy in the Old Testament is fulfilled, they do not discuss how to interpret the text in the Old Testament. Some prophecies are what we might call direct prediction, and some involve typological prediction, which means that events or people in the Old Testament serve as a model or pattern for what will happen in a greater event or person at a later time and so are said to foreshadow or predict the later event or person.⁶ When an Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled, the authors in the New Testament do not pause to say explicitly whether it is a direct prediction or a typological prediction.

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

It is impossible in a brief space to describe and assess all explanations given in the history of interpretation for Isaiah 7:14, but some of the most common ones are as follows:

Immanuel is Hezekiah and it is simply a wife of Ahaz who will bear a son.
Immanuel is Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz mentioned in Isaiah 8:1 and so it is a wife of Isaiah who will bear a son.
Immanuel is a son born to an unknown woman who was a contemporary of Isaiah.
Immanuel is the Messiah born to a virgin in the (distant) future.
A birth contemporary with Isaiah is a model or type of the future birth of the Messiah.

Each interpretation depends heavily on how certain issues are handled. The first three options can be firmly rejected and the reader is referred to the excellent critique of Gary Smith in his Isaiah commentary.⁷ Furthermore, careful analysis shows many differences between Immanuel and 8:1–4. These differences mean that the child born to Isaiah’s wife is best considered a harbinger of the future miraculous birth announced in 7:14.

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

It is not always possible from a modern English translation to track the pronominal references in Hebrew throughout the brief segment of vv. 10–16. Verse 10 begins, “And Yahweh continued to speak to Ahaz saying…” This introduction clearly marks the beginning of a new segment of conversation or discourse. The conversation partners are clearly identified as Yahweh and King Ahaz. From the context, the mediator of the message is Isaiah the prophet; he is the one through whom these words are presented to Ahaz.

Verse 11 continues, “Ask for yourself a sign from Yahweh your God. Make it deep to Sheol or make it high above / upwards.” These three clauses contain imperative verbs—all second person masculine singular in form, as well as two pronouns, also both second masculine singular. Clearly, these commands are issued directly and specifically to Ahaz. It is Ahaz who is to ask for a sign.

Verse 12 contains the brief response of King Ahaz: And Ahaz said, “I will not ask nor will I test Yahweh.” The verbs are first person common singular in form and Yahweh is referred to in the third person since the medium between him and God is the prophet.

Verse 13 continues the conversation by the simple verb “And he said.” This is obviously Yahweh / Isaiah speaking and giving a response to the answer given by Ahaz. The quoted speech begins as follows: “Hear, O House of David, Is it too trivial for you to weary humans that you must also weary my God?” The two verbs, “hear” (שִׁמְעוּ) and “you must weary” (תַּלְאוּ) are second person plural in form. The one pronoun employed with the infinitive “to weary” is also second person plural. Yahweh/Isaiah is no longer addressing Ahaz directly or specifically; he is addressing the entire dynasty of David: past, present, and future—the whole family line or House of David.

“King Ahaz sacrifices his son to Moloch” by Rombout van Troyen. Image source

The pronoun in verse 14 is also second masculine plural in form. The sign in verse 11 was offered specifically to Ahaz. Ahaz declined. In spite of Ahaz’s response, Yahweh gave a sign. The sign he gave was for the entire family line of David and is therefore not at all tied to the time of Ahaz.

Verses 15–16a go on to speak about the promised child. Then remarkably, verse 16b switches back to second masculine singular in form. The translation of this sentence is problematic, but it clearly is addressed specifically to Ahaz.

This analysis of the pronouns resolves one very important issue: the sign given in vv. 14–15 is not necessarily for Isaiah’s contemporaries or time. It is a sign that spans the entire history of the remaining Davidic family tree, an issue to be clarified in the prophecy in Isaiah 11:1.

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Having addressed who Isaiah’s audience is, we must consider the difficulties in the second half of v. 14. The first five words form a verbless clause: “Look! A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” The verbs “conceive” and “bear” are in fact participles. The helping verb “to be” required by English has to be supplied from the context. One could translate the clause with present progressive tenses in English: “A virgin is conceiving and bearing a son.” Or one could construe the participles as describing a future, as is normal syntax in Hebrew: “A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Both options are grammatically possible.⁸ It is the nature of Hebrew prophecy, however, for a prophet to describe what he has seen in his vision using a past or a present, even though the vision applies to the future. Here since the following finite verb is future, a future tense is probable. And it is a young virgin who conceives.

The next verb is wəqara’t (“and you will call”). First this is a waw-consecutive Perfect and must be translated as a future tense. Thus, construing the preceding participles as future is also highly probable. Second, the verb could be second person feminine singular or third person feminine singular: “You shall call,” addressing the virgin, or “She will call,” where the referent is the virgin. The former seems contextually out of place and the latter is contrary to practice in a patriarchal society. There is, moreover, a problem in the transmission of the text which we must discuss.⁹

The Masoretic Text, best witnessed by the Aleppo and Cairo Codices, is supported by the Jewish Revisers Aquila and Symmachus and the Aramaic Targum.

The opening of Numbers in the Yonah Pentateuch (14th c.), showing its ornate micrography. BL Add MS 21160. Public domain
The Extraordinary Hebrew Text behind Your English Bible
The Masoretic Text is the fruit of the genius of Jewish textual scholars who codified the pronunciation of the Hebrew text.
Kim Phillips

Yet the Great Isaiah Scroll from about 100 BC attests wqr’ (וקרא). This is a third masculine singular verb either Qal or Pual. If the former, it is an indefinite subject verb functioning as a passive; if the latter, it is automatically passive. Variation plagues the witness of the Septuagint and Old Latin. The critical edition by Ziegler gives second person singular but the manuscript support is largely hexaplaric which suggests influence from Aquila and Symmachus. Some Greek manuscripts have kalesetai (καλέσεται “he/she will call”) which could be a translation of a text exactly like the Isaiah Scroll. There are also manuscripts which have a second person plural, but this might be a spelling variant. Finally, some manuscripts have a third person plural, but may be influenced by the New Testament.

The reading that best explains how the others arose is the third person singular passive. Similarly in the Old Latin, the oldest strand of text has the third person singular passive but some later manuscripts attest second person singular or plural as in manuscripts of the LXX. Jerome’s Vulgate is plagued by the same variants. The Syriac Peshitta clearly supports the Great Isaiah Scroll. There is, therefore, very early witness for a text with an indefinite subject like the translation in Matthew and this is supported by the Isaiah Scroll and Syriac and possibly Septuagint (and Old Latin).

The reading in the Masoretic Text could be an error of adding a tau from the previous verb and could have occurred equally in the Paleo-Hebrew script or the later Aramaic Square script. In any case, as noted, a second person singular or third person singular is not contextually suitable. The reading best attested is that of the Dead Sea Scroll supported by the LXX (and Old Latin), Syriac Peshitta and Matthew’s Gospel, while the reading of Aquila, Symmachus (= Jerome), Masoretic Text, and Targum is most likely secondary.

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

There is a consensus among scholars today (regardless of whether one is conservative or liberal) that the word ʿalmâ (עַלְמָה) means only “young girl” or perhaps “young woman” and does not necessarily entail virginity. Four arguments are normally used to support this view: (1) an argument based on etymology; (2) an argument that there already exists in Hebrew a word for virgin in the word bĕtûlâ (בְּתוּלָה); (3) an argument that assumes the word ʿalmâ in Proverbs 30:19 refers to a girl who is not a virgin; and (4) an argument from Jewish tradition—both ancient and reliable—that does not permit an equation between ʿalmâ and parthenos, the Greek word for virgin.

But, as mentioned, the consensus has recently been challenged by Christophe Rico. His work represents the first comprehensive and exhaustive research done on the basis of modern linguistic semantic principles.

The consensus has recently been challenged.

The first argument that has been used to support that ʿalmâ does not imply virginity is based on the etymological background of this word. Rico’s analysis, particularly of Ugaritic, shows that the argument of the consensus is faulty in etymology. At any rate, arguments from etymology are at best secondary and do not necessarily determine meaning. (The English word “nice” comes from Latin nescius and means “ignorant.” This is no indication of its meaning today.)

The second argument that has been given as an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin relates to the Hebrew word bĕtûlâ. The fact that there is already a word in Hebrew for virgin is an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin. Study of usage shows that the word bĕtûlâ indicates a virgin regardless of age, whereas the word ʿalmâ denotes specifically a young virgin.¹⁰ The following evidence from Rico shows that it is common to have both words in many languages and that it is possible also in Semitic languages.¹¹

	“Young girl”	“Young virgin”	“Virgin”
Russian	devuška	devica	devstevenica
Classical English	girl	maid	virgin
Classical French	jeune fille	pucelle	vierge
Classical Spanish	muchacha	doncella	virgen
Catalan	noia	poncella	verge
Classical Italian	giovinetta	pulzèlla	vergine
Japanese	shōjo	otome	shŏjo
Arabic	fatâ’ah	bikr	‘adra’

Languages like Hebrew that lexically distinguish “young girl,” “young virgin,” and “virgin”

The third argument that scholars have regularly used against the view that ʿalmâ means “virgin” rests on the interpretation of Proverbs 30:19. This is the only instance of the word where “young woman” and not virgin is either the necessary or best suitable meaning. Yet it is unwise to rely on this verse since it contains a problem in the history of the transmission of the text.¹² The textual evidence is summarized as follows.¹³

30,19 cor בעלמיו [C] G Syh Th Aq Syriac Vulg T // err-graph: Sym M בעלמה

This can be simplified into the following table:

“in a maid” (בעלמה)	Symmachus, Masoretic Text
“in his youth” (בעלמיו)	Greek, Theodotion, Aquila, Syriac, Origen’s Hexapla, Latin Vulgate

What this means is that the following manuscripts support the reading “in his youth” (בעלמיו): the Septuagint (G), the Jewish revisions of the Septuagint by Theodotion (Th) and Aquila (A) made before 120 AD, the Syro-Hexapla, the Syriac translation (S) coming from the Second Century, the Latin Vulgate (Vulg), based on a Hebrew Text from the Fourth Century AD, and even the Aramaic Targum. Alternately, only two witnesses support the reading “in an ʿalmâ” (בעלמה): the Masoretic Text attested from about 900 AD and Symmachus (S), a Jewish revisor from perhaps 200 AD. The difference between the readings is a hē for ʿalmâ at the end of the word while a combination of waw and yodh ends the word reading “in his youth.”

Anyone familiar with the Herodian script of the Dead Sea Scrolls would know how easy it is to confuse these two paleographically. The reading that has the earliest support widespread among six witnesses and also best explains how the less meaningful reading in Masoretic Text arose is “in his youth.” In any case, it is unwise to claim a text that is uncertain in textual transmission as a strong argument against ʿalmâ as “young virgin.”

The following image shows how easily hē (ח) and a combination of waw (ו) and yodh (י) could be confused in the Herodian script.

From column 1, line 18 of “The Community Rule” (Serekh Hayahad, 1QS). Image source

There are other problems with the Masoretic Text. The preposition bə (בְּ) meaning “in” is not normal with the word derek (דֶּ֫רֶךְ “way”).¹⁴ Moreover, the clause in Proverbs 30:19d in the Masoretic Text breaks the obvious poetic pattern as pointed out by Rico:¹⁵

Eagle               Aerial Pathway
Snake             Terrestrial Pathway
Ship                 Aquatic Pathway
Youth             Developmental Pathway
Adulteress      Ethical Pathway

The “way of a man in a young woman” as in Masoretic Text does not fit this sequence.

The fourth argument that scholars have often used to argue against interpreting ʿalmâ as “virgin” has been based on Rabbinic tradition. Rico shows, however, that because the phonological difference between the consonants ʿayin and ġayin was lost in Hebrew already in the Second Century BC, analysis of the word ʿalmâ in both Rabbinic and Christian circles is frequently based on a popular etymology (the hidden young girl) and is erroneous. Before the coming of Jesus of Nazareth whom the Jewish tradition rejects as fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, the Septuagint got the translation of Isaiah right. Nonetheless, roughly one-third of medieval rabbis, including Rashi and Ben Gershon, do ascribe the meaning virgin to the word ʿalmâ.¹⁶

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

Two verbs are crucial to our understanding of the entire passage from 7:1–25. They are in 7:6 and 7:16. Most lexica derive these forms from the root qwṣ (קוץ) meaning “to be disgusted, feel loathing.”¹⁷ The form in v. 6 is usually analysed as a Hiphil Imperfect and the form in v. 16 as a Qal Participle. The lexica argue that “be in dread” (Qal) or “frighten, terrify” (Hiphil) is an appropriate secondary sense for these two texts. The ESV is a good example of translations that illustrate this:

6. Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it,”
16. … the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.

An exhaustive analysis shows a better solution: the root is probably qyṣ as in Old South Arabic and not qwṣ.¹⁸ Therefore, both the form in v. 6 and the form in v. 16 are Qal and mean “cut” or better “break, split,” hence “tear apart, demolish, destroy.” (This resolves the problem of a form in the Hiphil that is apparently not causative.) As some lexicographers have already realised, this meaning fits better in v. 6. It also fits better in v. 16, as Zorell recognised,¹⁹ depending on how we render the relative sentence. The meaning is to break or destroy in both passages. This proposal is supported in antiquity because for Isaiah 7:6 Symmachus uses klaō (κλάω “break”) and Theodotion has koptō (κόπτω “cut down” » “destroy”). Thus, the meaning of break » destroy for qyṣ was known in antiquity. We will see next how a better meaning for this verb affects interpretation of Isaiah 7:16.

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

The last half of Isaiah 7:16 is translated in the NRSV as

For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted (תֵּעָזֵ֤ב הָאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר אַתָּ֣ה קָ֔ץ מִפְּנֵ֖י שְׁנֵ֥י מְלָכֶֽיהָ)

Instead, we propose, along with Murray Adamthwaite,²⁰ “the land which you (Ahaz) are tearing apart (by your unbelieving policies) will be ridden of the presence of her two kings.”

The pronoun “her” on the suffixed noun, “her kings” must refer to “land” since the pronoun is feminine singular. So, the two kings are the king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the king of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The two kings cannot be the King of Israel and the King of Aram, the two kings in the Syro-Ephraimite coalition, because they are not the kings of one country. This could only be said of the territory known as Israel after the time of Solomon. Thus, the interpretation of the NRSV is highly unlikely because it contradicts the grammar of the text.

6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

Insufficient thought has been given by interpreters to the statement that the child born to the virgin will “eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” First, refusing evil and choosing good is connected to the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:9, 16. It refers to making moral choices on one’s own and hence refers to the age of accountability.²¹ In biblical culture, this is around 13 years old, the time of a boy’s Bar Mitzvah in later Judaism.

Nogah Hareuveni has best explained “eating curds and honey.”²² Curds are a product of pastoralists, those who herd flocks of goats or sheep and cattle. Honey comes from bees and refers to the forests as opposed to cultivated land because honey bees flourished in the wild. In the land of Canaan there was always a struggle over the use of land. Pastoralists, those who grazed animals, would look for uncultivated areas for pasturage. Farmers, on the other hand, were terracing the hillsides and turning areas that grew wild into cultivated fields and vineyards. What Isaiah is saying is that the region will be so devastated by the Assyrians that there will be few farmers and the cultivated fields will return to regions left to grow wild. This would allow bees and pastoralists more territory.

So, eating curds and honey is not a statement of blessing, but rather a sign of devastation and judgement in the land. The fact that the child will eat curds and honey means that the land will be dominated by pastoralists and not farmers. This is an indication of the devastation and destruction resulting in exile and the conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Therefore, a person reduced to eating curds and honey is a person in exile, not a person enjoying the good life. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.²³

In the case of Jesus, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.

The larger literary structure

The interpretation proposed fits the larger literary structure better since Isaiah 7:14 is construed as a prediction of the distant future.²⁴ First, it is the normal pattern of the author to place predictions of events to be fulfilled in the far future side by side with predictions of events to be fulfilled in the near future. There are three panels or sections announcing the coming king: (1) the birth of Immanuel in 7:10–17, (2) the gift of the son El-Gibbor (Mighty God) in 9:1–7, and (3) the future reign of a shoot from the stump of Jesse in 11:1–9.²⁵ In each case, these predictions of the far future are placed side by side with predictions relating to the near future, such as the invasion of the Assyrians in 8:5–8. Note that in Isaiah 8:8, the country of Judah is designated as Immanuel’s land. Such a designation would be appropriate for a king or even Yahweh himself—El Gibbor! Also note that the third section on the coming king predicts a shoot from the stump of Jesse. The shoot comes from the stump of Jesse because what is needed is not another David, but a new David!

Conclusion

Textual analysis has shown the original text of Isaiah 7:14 may be even closer to the citation of Matthew than what we have in the Masoretic Text. Moreover, Proverbs 30:19 does not support the view that ʿalmâ is only a young woman and not necessarily a virgin. Semantic analysis of all instances demonstrates the meaning “young virgin.” In the larger structure of Isaiah, we see a switching back and forth between promises for the distant future and promises for the near future. The exegesis points to an interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 as a direct prediction for the distant future.

The coming king predicted in Isaiah 7–12 is associated with the end of exile. In Isaiah, this end of exile is also clearly correlated with the forgiveness of sins, the renewing of the covenant, the rebuilding of the temple, and the return of Yahweh to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people. This is a great harbinger of the birth of the child that first Christmas.

Notes

1
Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1–12: A Commentary, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 308 (italics his).
2
James M. Hamilton, Jr., “ ‘The Virgin Will Conceive’: Typological Fulfillment in Matthew 1:18–23,” in Built Upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew edited by Daniel M. Gurtner and John Nolland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 228–247.
3
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14: « ‛Almâ » et « Parthenos » dans l’universe biblique: un point de vue linguistique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2013). English Translation and Updated Version: Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020)
4
See William R. Osborne, “Trees and Kings: A Comparative Analysis of Tree Imagery in Israel’s Prophetic Tradition and the Ancient Near East,” Ph.D. diss. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015.
5
Isaiah 6:13 is difficult to interpret but may contain an earlier reference to the cutting down of the tree of the Davidic dynasty/kingdom.
6
See discussion in Peter J. Gentry, How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017).
7
Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39 (NAC; Nashville: B&H, 2007), 201–211.
8
See P. Joüon, Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1923), § 121e and Christo H. J. van der Merwe, Jackie A. Naudé and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (Second Edition; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 187–88.
9
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ‘almâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 189–196.
10
For the evidence, and analysis of that evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14.
11
The charts are adapted from Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 45–46.
12
This problem is not treated in Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. Tome 5: Job, Proverbes, Qohélet et Cantique des Cantiques. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en cooperation avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, Hans Peter Rüger et James A. Sanders. Edited by Clemens Locher, Stephen D. Ryan and Adrian Schenker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2015).
13
This codification and nomenclature is derived from Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de L’ancien Testament. 1. Josué, Juges, Ruth, Samuel, Rois, Chroniques, Esdras, Néhémie, Esther. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en coopération avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, H. Peter Rüger, coéditeur, James A. Sanders, coéditeur (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982).
14
Jenni, in his magisterial research on the prepositions, classifies Proverbs 30:19 as a locative use of beth. Nonetheless, he finds only one other occurrence similar to Proverbs 30:19 and it is not a precise parallel. See E. Jenni, Die hebräischen Präpositionen, Band 1: Die Präposition Beth (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1992), 52–69, 171–174, 195–197, # 2315.
15
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 57.
16
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 66–82.
17
So BDB, KB3, DCH, Ges18. BDB = Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1907); KB3 = L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1997); DCH = Clines, David J. A., ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 9 vols. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993–2016); Ges18 = R. Meyer, H. Donner, and J. Renz, Wilhelm Gesenius Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18^th Edition (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
18
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 209–212.
19
F. Zorell, ed., Lexicon Hebraicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989).
20
Murray R. Adamthwaite, “Isaiah 7:16 – Key to the Immanuel Prophecy,” The Reformed Theological Review 59.2 (2000), 65–83.
21
W. M. Clark, “A Legal Background to the Yahwist’s Use of ‘Good and Evil’ in Genesis 2–3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969): 266–278. See also H. Blocher, In the Beginning (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), 126–133.
22
Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage (Kiryat Ono, Israel: Neot Kedumim, 1980), 11–22.
23
In the New Testament, when Jesus reached the age of accountability, he informed his parents, Joseph and Mary, “Do you not know that I must be concerned with the affairs of my Father?” (Luke 2:49). Three panels or sections in Isaiah 7–12 focus on the coming king. If Isaiah 7:14 is a prediction of the distant future and the birth of a future king, then the age of accountability is fitting and relevant in this prophecy.
24
See Peter J. Gentry, “The Literary Macrostructures of the Book of Isaiah and Authorial Intent,” in Bind up the Testimony: Explorations in the Genesis of the Book of Isaiah, edited by Daniel I. Block and Richard L. Schultz (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2015), 227–254.
25
See Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 136–156.

Suffer Not a Witch to Live?

Biblical exegesis and Bible translation both played a role in the rise—and demise—of witch hunts.

Daniel N. Gullotta

The portrayal of witches in movies and TV often conjures up images of medieval settings, seen in comedies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, fantasy series like Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, or more serious movies like In the Name of the Rose and Black Death.

These depictions usually show women in black robes riding broomsticks, linking witches to a world of swords and bow-and-arrow warfare, often viewed as remnants of the inaccurately labeled “dark ages.” However, witch-hunting as we understand it was a far more modern phenomenon than many realize, and this is reflected even in English Bible translation.

The famous witch trial scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The rise in witch-hunting

Contrary to the medieval image, the most intense period of witch-hunting coincided with the rise of the early modern world, particularly the 15th and 17th centuries, which witnessed the most intense witch-hunting in history. An estimated 100,000 individuals in Europe and colonial America were prosecuted for witchcraft between 1400 and 1775, with around 50,000 facing execution. Historians debate the various and overlapping sources contributing to the rapid increase in witch-hunting, pointing to factors such as the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, changes in European economic and social life, new ‘modern’ criminal procedures, and the growth of nation-state power. Alongside these factors, biblical exegesis and, with it, Bible translation played a crucial role in both supporting and condemning witch-hunting.

Witches in exegesis and translation

Biblical exegesis significantly influenced the perception and prosecution of witchcraft during the Reformation. One of the key biblical passages often cited in witch trials was Exodus 22:18, which in both Tyndale and the King James Bible reads, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” In this verse, taken from the Hebrew Bible, the key term “witch” was translated in the Septuagint as pharmakos (φάρμακος), a Greek word that can refer to poisoners or those who practice nefarious arts with drugs, poisons, and medications. The Vulgate, a Latin translation made by Jerome in the fourth century, also reinforced this interpretation.

Likewise, the Bishops’ Bible (1602) includes a note stating: “The word in Hebrew signifieth a sorcerer or enchanter, or anyone who, through devilish means, harms livestock, crops, or people.” But in the Reformation period, translations varied, and exegetes debated the exact meaning of the term.

The note in the 1602 Bishops’ Bible explains the meaning of “witch” in Exodus. This image shows the revisions made for the King James Bible, a translation that eschewed such interpretive notes. Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician and chief surgeon to the Duke of Cleves, argued that Exodus 22:18 had been mistranslated. In his work On the Tricks of Demons (De praestigiis daemonum), Weyer contended that the passage condemned poisoners, not witches. He concluded this after consulting rabbinical commentaries as well as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin editions of Exodus. This interpretation challenged the prevalent belief in witches’ supernatural powers and the necessity of their execution.

The Geneva Bible (1560) labeled the woman in 1 Samuel 28:3–25, the Witch of Endor, as “a woman that hath a familiar spirit” and “a witche.” Martin Luther’s German translation used the term Zauberin (sorceress) and later editions used Hexe (witch). These translations reinforced the belief in the existence and malevolence of witches. In contrast, earlier commentators, including Thomas Aquinas, often denied any supernatural power to the Witch of Endor, viewing her as a clever illusionist or a conduit for demonic activity, rather than possessing inherent powers.

The most notorious text associated with witch-hunting is the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), commonly known in English as The Hammer of the Witches. Authored by the German Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, with possible assistance from Jacob Sprenger, the Malleus argued that witches were real and dangerous agents of the devil. The text used biblical references, including the story of the Witch of Endor, to support its claims. It dismissed earlier interpretations that minimized the witch’s powers, asserting instead that witches acted at the devil’s behest, shedding innocent blood and revealing secret things.

Critics of witch-hunting

Despite the widespread fear and persecution, there were notable critics of witch-hunting from both Catholic and Protestant circles. These critics raised legal and moral objections to the methods used in witch trials, such as reliance on gossip, weak evidence, and the use of torture during interrogations. Johann Matthäus Meyfart, a Lutheran professor, warned of the potential for abuse in such trials, suggesting that prosecuting the innocent could endanger the salvation of those involved. He urged Christians to trust in Christ’s judgment at the Second Coming rather than relying solely on the legal system.

The English Puritan Reverend John Gaule criticized the infamous witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, decrying the ungodly scenes of torture inflicted by Hopkins and his associates. German Jesuit Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, who witnessed several witch-hunts, condemned the violence against innocent victims, noting that many were forced to confess under torture. Spee’s stance was supported by Jesuits Adam Tanner and Paul Laymann, who also denounced witch-hunting in their works on moral theology. Laymann, citing Christ’s teachings in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matt. 13:24–43), argued that it was better to let some guilty individuals go unpunished than to condemn the innocent unjustly.

Conclusion

While 19th-century historians viewed the decline of witch-hunting as evidence of diminishing religious influence, it is crucial to note that many critics of the trials were devout Christians. They acknowledged the reality of witches and the power of the devil but questioned the competence of governments and churches in conducting trials, the obvious bias in such proceedings, and the theological justifications behind them.

These criticisms were rooted in a Christian perspective that opposed the troubling beliefs and violent actions of their contemporaries, highlighting the complex interplay between biblical exegesis, translation issues, and the persecution of alleged witches. Given that witch trials are still happening in the world, we must recognize the high stakes involved in accurate and ethical Bible translation and interpretation in addressing and preventing such injustices.

Why We Worry When Choosing a Bible Translation

The ‘paradox of choice’ explains why Christians worry so much about picking the wrong translation. What can we do?

Peter J. Gurry

By far the most common question I get asked about Bible translation is What’s the best one? What I’ve noticed is that, very often, the question comes with a hint of worry—worry that, depending on my answer, the person may discover they’ve been using a second-best translation. And when it’s God’s word we’re reading, no one wants to settle for second best! The anxiety is understandable.

But can anything be done about it? Are those without knowledge of Greek and Hebrew simply doomed to always second-guess their translation choice? How much should we worry that we’ve picked the wrong translation?

How much should we worry that we’ve picked the wrong translation?

So many options

Before we go further, we need to consider the historical conditions that lead to our question. For much of history, the ordinary Christian couldn’t ask it at all since he either had no direct access to the Bible, couldn’t read it, or couldn’t afford to own one. One further reason is that for many, in the past and still for some today, their native language only has a single Bible translation.

Of course, for those of us living in the modern West, things are quite different. We can download Bible apps at no cost and then choose between any number of translations.

At Biblegateway.com you can, right now, choose among over 60 English translations. There are twenty for Spanish, five for German, and four for French. Given the size of the Bible and the amount of work required to make a translation, this is a huge abundance and a remarkable testament to our Christian heritage.

The reign of the King

There was a time when each of these languages was dominated by a single Bible translation. In English, there was a period of over 250 years when the King James Bible reigned as the Bible of the English-speaking world. In Spanish, the Reina-Valera had an even longer run and, in German, the Luther Bible had an equal or greater effect in German than the King James had in English.

Decoration from the title page to the New Testament. Illustration by Peter Gurry.
Seven Common Misconceptions about the King James Bible
The most widely read English Bible translation has sprouted a series of fictions about it. It’s time to prune them.
Timothy Berg

The long reign of these translations makes us wonder: is it good to have so many? Were we better off when we all read the same Bible? There can be little doubt that having a single, shared translation comes with significant benefits. In his book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, Mark Ward discusses five of them, and I’m sure his list could be expanded.

He notes how even the late atheist Christopher Hitchens saw the problem. Writing in Vanity Fair for the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Hitchens complained that the proliferation of Bibles means “there will no longer be a culture of the kind which instantly recognized what Lincoln meant when he spoke of ‘a house divided.’ The gradual eclipse of a single structure has led, not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.”

One of the biggest losses when translations proliferate is the loss of a shared reference point.

He’s not wrong. One of the biggest losses when translations proliferate is the loss of a shared reference point across an entire language. When we all share the same Bible all our theological debates have to be hammered out on the same anvil. There’s simply no option to object, “But my Bible says…” Sectarianism isn’t impossible, but it is harder when we all use the same Bible.

The blessing of abundance

But for all the benefits of a single translation, there are also drawbacks. Without anything else to compare it to, readers of a single translation are left in the dark about difficult translation decisions where differing interpretations of the original are possible. Marginal notes can alleviate some of this, and the King James translators certainly used them. But notes are a limited tool, and most readers in my experience blissfully ignore them.

One of the benefits of multiple translations is that it makes Bible readers more aware that what they are reading is a translation.

For all the problems that come with “but my Bible says,” one of the benefits of multiple translations is that it makes Bible readers more aware that what they are reading is a translation and not the original. They may then be further inclined to compare translations and become more discerning readers.

The fourth-century church father Augustine (354–430 AD), whose own ability in the original languages was limited, realized some of the benefits of using multiple Bible translations. In his classic book on Christian interpretation he wrote this:

In this matter [of learning unknown idioms], too, the great number of the translators proves a very great assistance, if they are examined and discussed with a careful comparison of their texts.
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.14 [21]

Augustine is saying that having multiple translations can help the reader who’s tripping over an unknown idiom. That’s still the case today. Where one translation is opaque another may come to the rescue with clarity. This is especially true for first-time Bible readers who may stumble over any number of unfamiliar terms in a verse like Romans 3:21. In the NASB it reads:

But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.

A turn to the NLT offers clear interpretations—and they are interpretations—for each of the key terms:

But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago.

For some readers, the NLT will prove to be, as Augustine said, “a very great assistance” in understanding these biblical idioms.

The precedent for plurality

Besides noting the benefits and drawbacks of multiple translations, there is also the importance of precedent. This is especially the case in English where Christians sometimes think that our modern proliferation of translations is completely new. It isn’t. English has had multiple translations before. Miles Coverdale (1488–1569) was one of the great heroes of the English Bible and he knew this well.

Coverdale is the unsung hero of the English Bible. He produced several important translations in his lifetime. Image source

His most famous Bible was his first. Finished in 1535, it has the distinction of being the first complete, printed English Bible. Given that he based it on the work of William Tyndale and made use of other Bibles in German and Latin, it’s not surprising that he felt the need to defend the value of multiple translations in his preface. In doing so, he appealed to precedent. And he had plenty of it to appeal to. He wrote:

Whereas some men think now that many translations make division in the faith and in the people of God, that is not so: for it was never better with the congregation of God, than when every church almost had the Bible of a sundry [= different] translation.¹

Coverdale goes on to cite examples from both Greek and Latin, drawing special attention to the case of the Greek Septuagint, which was revised three separate times.

For Coverdale, the existence of multiple translations was a blessing. It was evidence that God “hath opened unto his church the gift of interpretation [= translation] and of printing.” He praises God that there are so many capable of doing the work of translation. If only such eagerness for new translation hadn’t died with Augustine, Coverdale says, the church in his day might not be in such need of reform.

In all this, Coverdale was frank about his own limits as a translator (he did not know Greek and Hebrew). As a result, he offers a refreshing call for teamwork in the task of translating. Not every translator will hit the bullseye every time, he says, but we shoot better when we shoot together. Where one misses, the others should encourage rather than criticize out of envy or spite.

Coverdale has hit on an important point. Today, the proliferation of English Bible translation can, at times, encourage competition rather than collaboration. This can happen whenever Bible readers—or Bible publishers—exaggerate the differences between translations in their effort to identify “the best” one. This can also lead us to needlessly denigrate other translations.

This hardly means endorsing every crackpot translation. There really are bad translations. But our mainstream, evangelical translations are good. Where they differ, it is usually a matter of legitimate difference in how to interpret the original or in the audience they are trying to reach or in their translation philosophy. To be sure, not every difference in translation is inconsequential. Some really do matter. But, on the whole, we benefit from having multiple archers shooting at the same target.

The paradox of choice

But, if Coverdale is right about the benefits of multiple translations, why do many of us feel so much angst when choosing a translation? Why is there so much pressure to have the best one?

One reason is what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice, and it’s one that Coverdale did not anticipate. The paradox, as Schwartz explains it, is simple: “Though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”² Instead, the explosion of choice, he argues, often leads to dissatisfaction, regret, and paralysis. More becomes less.

Every car shopper has felt the problem. When you leave the house, you are content to find a good, reliable car to get you to and from work. But when you arrive at the lot and look out across the sea of endless options, you quickly begin to feel that you absolutely must get THE BEST car. Details you weren’t even thinking about before—color, trim, electronics—suddenly become deciding factors.

The smaller the differences are between options, the more anxiety we feel in choosing between them.

What’s true of cars is true of translations. The more choices we have, the more we feel compelled to get the absolute best one. And just like with cars, it’s sometimes the case that the smaller the differences are between options, the more anxiety we feel in choosing between them. It’s no longer enough to have a literal translation; we must have the most literal. But then we wonder if what we really need is the most accurate. Or, should we get the most accurate and most readable? As the options grow, so does the fear of picking the wrong one.

To solve the problem, we might even exaggerate the differences in order to help make the decision easier. After all, a choice between good and bad is much easier to make than one between good and good-in-a-slightly-different-way. It certainly doesn’t help that publishers sometimes leverage this anxiety in their marketing. The website for the recent NRSVue, for example, calls it “the most meticulously researched, rigorously reviewed, and faithfully accurate translation on the market.” (I’ve yet to see a new translation marketed as “accurate enough” or “pretty readable”!)

How to avoid paralysis

So, what can we do? Of the suggestions that Schwartz offers, I think the ones that apply most readily to choosing a Bible translation are these: reduce your options, be content with “good enough,” and be grateful.

1. Reduce your options

When you reduce your options, it makes the decision feel less momentous. There are any number of ways to do this with translations. The simplest is to adopt the translation your church or denomination uses. If you trust your church or denomination enough to be a member, it makes sense that you would also trust their choice in translation. So, pick theirs and be done.

Another way to narrow your choices is to pick a translation that descends from a trusted tradition—that of the KJV, for instance. These include the NKJV, ESV, NASB, and NRSV. If readability is most important to you, then pick one with a focus on that like the NLT, NIV, or maybe the CSB. If you preach regularly, you probably want something more literal like the ESV or NASB that lets you, as the preacher, explain the text.

2. Be content with good enough

If this still leaves too many options, ask yourself if you’re making perfection the enemy of the good. I think many Christians who are worried about choosing the “wrong” translation need to hear that any mainstream, evangelical translation is going to serve them very well. They are all very good—even if they are good in different ways.

If you already use the NIV or the NASB, ask yourself why you feel the need to switch. Is there really something wrong with your current translation? Or, have you fallen prey to the comparison trap? If so, it may help to remember that you can always supplement your main translation with others by using any number of free online resources. I highly recommend it.

3. Be grateful

Finally, I think the best way to overcome the paradox of choice is to turn angst into gratitude. Behind the problem is a blessing: we have so many good English translations to choose from! Most Christians in history, and many Christians around the world still today, do not have the rich legacy of Bible translation we have in English. We should be enormously grateful for this heritage. Instead of worrying about choosing the wrong translation, most of us should just be grateful we have a choice at all.

As Coverdale realized, we should not take it for granted when those with gifts in the biblical languages use them to produce good translations. “Ye ought rather,” he writes, “to give God high thanks therefore, who through his Spirit stirreth up men’s minds, so to exercise themselves therein.” Today, we have more reason than ever to give God such “high thanks.”

Notes

1
Taken from Alfred W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1902), 203 (spelling updated). Also available in updated spelling in Gerald Bray, Translating the Bible from William Tyndale to King James (London: Latimer Trust, 2010), 69.
2
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 103.

The First Parallel Bible

Origen’s six-columned Old Testament, produced in the second century, was a monumental achievement in the Bible’s history.

John D. Meade

Last month, the papers from the Text & Canon Institute’s first academic colloquium were published as The Forerunners and Heirs of Origen’s Hexapla. Thanks to our supporters, the book is available open access. This article is written to introduce Origen’s work and to celebrate this milestone.

Sound Bible study often requires careful comparison of different translations. After strewing different translations over a desk and reading each one individually, one wishes for a more organized tool to ease comparison.

Parallel Bibles like this one remain popular with serious Bible readers. Image source

One could consult a volume like the NIV, KJV, NASB, Amplified, Parallel Bible for such a purpose. With each version in its own column to be read from top to bottom and the verses arranged in parallel fashion, one can simply compare the different translations. The bible software user can create their own parallel bible by opening and arranging windows however preferred. With so many translations, a vast amount of knowledge must be collected and organized so that it works for the user.

The history of parallel bibles shows a human impulse for ordering textual knowledge. The late Renaissance Polyglots (multi-language Bibles) were products of this tendency. Biblical scholars produced monumental editions in international cooperation in Alcalá, Spain (Complutensian Polyglot; 1522); Antwerp, Belgium (The Antwerp Polyglot; 1572); Paris, France (The Paris Polyglot; 1645); and London, England (The London Polyglot; 1658). The culmination of these great Polyglots, Brian Walton’s London Polyglot, contained biblical texts in nine languages assembled in parallel: Hebrew, Samaritan, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian. But where did this idea to produce such Bibles come from?¹

There were Medieval precursors to these massive tomes, but even these appear to owe their inspiration to the work of a classically Greek trained catechetical instructor from Alexandria, Egypt named Origen.

Who is Origen?

Origen is best known today as a philosopher or theologian. But both his followers and detractors note that he was trained thoroughly in grammar or philology and devoted himself to this discipline. Origen did not just know his parts of speech. Rather, training in philology meant that he was a diorthōtēs (διορθωτής) or a corrector of copies of ancient books as well as an exegete of those same texts. Thus, he collected many copies of the scriptures and even evaluated whether they belonged to the accurate, old, or majority copies. Likewise, he collected the various translations of the Scriptures and evaluated their “expressiveness” and clarity or whether a version was enslaved to the Hebrew idiom.

As Origen studied the copies of the books of the Old Testament, he described his work in terms of classical Greek philology:

I found that the discord (between the copies) could be healed, if God grants, by using the rest of the editions as a criterion. For by making a judgment, based on the rest of the editions, concerning ambiguous texts in the Seventy [= the Septuagint] due to the discord between the copies, I kept the accord among them. I marked with an obelos some passages not in the Hebrew because I was not reckless to remove any of them. And I added some passages with asteriskoi in order that it might be clear that I added passages not in the Seventy from the rest of the editions agreeing with the Hebrew. (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14)

Elsewhere, Origen says the Greeks called the critical signs asterisk (※) and obelus (—) referring to the tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians who had accomplished similar textual work on the copies of Homer’s Iliad (Origen, Epistle to Africanus 7). Thus, Origen as a philologist created scholarly editions of the biblical books. Furthermore, just as the Alexandrian grammarians produced commentaries on their texts, in various places in his sermons and commentaries Origen also recorded variants or differences between copies and translations and offered his readers solutions. Perhaps Origen, but more probably his followers, began to use the margins of manuscripts to record valuable comments known as scholia on the texts.

Codex Marchalianus, showing the scholia in left margin for Aquila, Theodotian, and Symmachus. Vat.gr.2125 f. 184

Thus, although Origen is most known for his theological and philosophical work, he was first and foremost a philologist and textual critic. He, therefore, left copies of his critical editions for his followers to consult and use in the library at Caesarea. Eusebius, the fourth-century Church historian, informs his readers that Origen left behind copies of his Hexapla (HECK-suh-pluh) “six-fold” or “six-column” Bible and another edition which was later called the Tetrapla (te-TRUH-pluh) or “four-fold” edition.

What was the Hexapla?

Since a few church fathers described the Hexapla in some detail (Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus), Origen must have compiled (not authored) such a magnificent and complex text requiring his followers to explain and interpret it. The six-column work in Hebrew and Greek probably had no exact precedent, even though other bilingual (Greek and Latin), literary, multi-column texts probably existed around Origen’s time.

Interestingly, Origen nowhere calls his massive textual construct “the Hexapla.” The term comes from Eusebius. In the first mention of this text, Eusebius says, “Having collected all of these (editions), he divided them into sections, and placed them opposite each other, with the Hebrew text itself. He thus left us the copies of the so-called Hexapla.” Other church fathers describe the work similarly, and there are a few fragmentary manuscript remains of the Hexapla, mostly Psalms, which do afford some evidence to aid the reconstruction of the columnar layout of the Hexapla: (1) Hebrew, (2) Hebrew in Greek transcription, (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) Septuagint, (6) Theodotion.

A copy of Origen’s Hexapla in multiple columns in the undertext of a palimpsest in the Cairo Geniza. Cambridge Taylor-Schechter 12.182

This six-column text of the Old Testament would have granted Origen and his followers access to the Hebrew and to the most significant Greek translations of the day. A user of this text could read vertically any one version from top to bottom or all six versions from left to right across the entire spread of a folio in the codex.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. If one of those texts was shorter or longer (like in the case of the Book of Job), a reader of the Hexapla would be able to observe the additions and omissions plainly. Furthermore, at disputed places like Isaiah 7:14, the reader of the Hexapla would immediately grasp two different translations of the Hebrew: (1) the Septuagint’s “behold the virgin (parthenos)” and (2) the Jewish Revisers’ “behold the young woman (neanis),” a difference still reflected in Bible translations today.

Origen’s textual scholarship gave the church a real advance in knowledge of the biblical text in its several versions so that the reader of the Hexapla would know the similarities and differences between the church’s version and the Jewish versions used in the synagogue. But he probably had other reasons for producing this synopsis.

Illustration by Jordan Daniel Singer
The Legacy of the First Revised Bible Translations
The modern impulse to get the Bible right in translation has its roots in the Jews who revised the Septuagint.
John D. Meade

What was the Hexapla for?

Origen probably had many reasons for compiling the Hexapla. These include apologetics, textual criticism, exegesis, or perhaps even to learn the Hebrew language. A massive text like this cannot be reduced to any one purpose. But one significant reason for the Hexapla seems clear: it was a preliminary tool for a corrected text or diorthōsis. Origen used it to prepare a later, more accessible and economic critical text of the Old Testament with signs. This text was later called the Tetrapla, and it is probably the text that Origen described in his Matthew Commentary quoted above. This text contained only one column of text, but it would still give readers immediate access to the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek versions. A manuscript dated to soon after Origen’s death (P. Grenf. 1.5; 250–350 AD) containing a fragmentary text of Ezekiel 5:12–6:3 with asterisks furnishes the earliest material evidence for Origen’s second edition. This edition, or one based on it, must have circulated quite early, and it was still available to the Syriac Bishop, Paul of Tella, who translated it into Syriac in 616 AD (a text known as the “Syro-Hexapla”).

If Origen’s Septuagint version lacked text that was contained in the Hebrew, he would add Greek text from one of the Three Jewish revisers (normally Theodotion) to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew. These additional words or lines were marked with an asterisk (※). The ending of Job 42:16–17 illustrates the point. The original Greek translation of Job did not contain the text about Job’s death (“and Job saw his sons … and Job died old and full of days.”) found in the Hebrew. As the later manuscript below shows, Origen added those three lines from the Greek revision of Theodotion and marked them with asterisks so the reader would know the Hebrew was longer and the Greek had been augmented.

Asterisks in the left margin of Tyrnavos 25 (Rahlfs 788). Author’s image

Similarly, if the Hebrew lacked a word or verse that the Septuagint contained, Origen would not remove the Greek text, but would mark it with an obelus or a lance (— or ÷) to make the Hebrew omission known to Christian readers. Thus, the quantitative differences that would have been visually obvious in the columnar Hexapla would now be observed in a text that contained the critical signs. In this way, no text from either language was lost for the careful reader.

Furthermore, this Tetrapla or “four-fold” version contained exegetically and textually significant readings or scholia from the three Jewish revisers: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. This was important for the scholar who did not have access to these works independently, but now could access the more significant and interesting readings through the margins of Origen’s critical text. In this way, Origen and his followers could diffuse textual knowledge not only about the Hebrew text vis-à-vis the Greek but now also information about how contemporary Jews interpreted the Hebrew text in Greek, exegetical information that Christian interpreters also used and incorporated into their own commentaries.

The Hexapla, therefore, functioned as a necessary and preliminary tool for Origen’s later critical edition. Origen’s followers innovated and enhanced his critical edition, and they promulgated it in the early part of the fourth century.

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Origen’s philological work remains a reminder that early Christians adopted and innovated scholarly methods of their day for serious study of the biblical text. Part of the early Christian DNA, so to speak, was serious study of the manuscript copies of the Scriptures. This fact in itself justifies researching Origen’s textual work today and is a reminder that Christians should continue in this tradition of serious study of the biblical text.

Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament.

The papers from the TCI’s first colloquium were published in July and are available open access.

Besides this, Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament, giving us valuable knowledge of the state of the Hebrew text in Caesarea in the second and third centuries AD. There are precious few remains of Hebrew manuscripts from this period, but the remains of Origen’s textual work, even in Greek dress, provide us access to what form the Hebrew text had from this period. The Hexapla’s value on this point cannot be overstated.

Finally, the independent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are entirely lost to history. Almost all access to these works depends on the marginal readings that come from the Tetrapla or similar texts that were ultimately excerpted and quoted from the Hexapla. As such, retrieving and reconstructing Origen’s textual work gives us access to Jewish Greek exegesis of the Hebrew text from the 1st–2nd centuries AD. The readings of the Three give us significant textual information for reconstructing the text histories of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Greek translations.

The first parallel Bible in history witnesses to our desire to order textual knowledge. Although the methods for such organization change over time, the desire to know the Scriptures through intense study of their copies continues. Origen and his followers stand at the headwaters of this stream in which Christians still work today. As then, the goal today is to heal the discord between copies.

Notes

1
For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

Bible Translations Are for People

Accuracy is often thought to be the main criterion for good translation, but acceptability is just as important.

Drew Maust

On the more lighthearted side of the internet one finds the meme, “Americans will use anything except the metric system.” The earliest recorded illustration of this assertion is a sign which describes deer as the height of a bicycle and weighing as much as 800 hamburgers. As an American who has lived abroad for many years, I find this funny because it’s true. I readily admit my own inability to stop thinking in terms of (American) football fields.

A matter of taste

Why doesn’t the U.S. adopt the metric system? One may argue that it’s objectively better owing to its simplicity, consistency, precision, ease of learning, and worldwide adoption. Despite all this, we the American people are reluctant to adopt what may be perceived as a “foreign” system for fear of loss of identity or for financial reasons. Admittedly, it’s easier to keep using the system we’ve always used. So, for all the benefits of the metric system, it has yet to find wide acceptance among the average one-and-half-bicycle-tall American.

This situation stands in contrast to academic and scientific circles where the metric system has long been the accepted standard. We are then left waiting for the metric system to trickle down, if ever.

Here we find an analogy for the reception of the Bible. Advances in biblical studies are often slow to trickle down from the ivory tower to the page in the pew. Sacred texts like the Bible are notoriously resistant to change. People do not like when the Bible as they know it changes. As a result, translators sometimes avoid risk in favor of continuity with the past (tradition). In this, they are accountable to a variety of stakeholders, including a larger target audience and external partners like a publisher. Translators generally do not have total freedom to insist on what is arguably an objectively better translation, or one more precise, consistent, simpler, or representative of the latest scholarly thinking.

This interplay reveals that Bible translation is complex. It involves taste and could be likened to culinary art. Translation is both a human process and a tradition-laden, culturally mediated product intended for human consumption. To better appreciate this, let’s consider the example of “leprosy.”

The case of leprosy

“I once had leprosy” was not the comment I was expecting from the Cameroonian translator whose translation of the Gospel of Luke I was helping to check. You what now?! “Yes, many years ago I contracted leprosy… but I received treatment and was cured.”

In the Bible, we find multiple references to an unwelcome condition called tsaraat in Hebrew and lepra (or lepros) in Greek, traditionally translated “leprosy” (e.g., Lev. 13:2; Matt. 8:1–3). For decades, however, translators and biblical scholars have been itching to point out that the “leprosy” of the Bible is not what we today call leprosy or, more precisely, Hansen’s disease (see especially Hulse 1975). For example, under the entry for tsaraat, Cline’s Dictionary of Classical Hebrew emphatically states “not leprosy,” after providing the definition, “skin disease, with scaling as one of its symptoms.”

The reference work A Guide to Bible Translation cites “leprosy” as “perhaps the most significant case” of anachronism in Bible translation. As a result, some contemporary English Bibles now translate tsaraat as a “serious” (CSB) or “defiling” (NRSVue) “disease” where it refers, for example, to a skin condition in Leviticus. The NKJV and NASB, by contrast, are somewhat unique in continuing to use “leprosy” (or “leprous”), thereby favoring continuity with a centuries long legacy even if they may supply footnotes on occasion for clarification.

In the New Testament, the translation of lepra is slightly more complicated than we can explore in significant detail here. Nevertheless, it may be an exception that proves the point about continuity. Consider the recent NRSVue at Matthew 8:2 which leads the way towards healing potential mistranslation with its rendering “[person] with a skin disease,” thereby breaking with the “leprous” legacy of the KJV and its family of revisions the ASV, RSV, and NRSV.

Here, as is often the case in Bible translation, biblical studies was overruled by popular opinion (and pocketbooks).

On the other hand, most New Testament translations have been much slower to touch this issue. While a solo New Testament translation like Scot McKnight’s Second Testament (ST) can venture “a scaly-skin man,” those done by committee, like the CSB, are less willing to cleanse their translation (“a man with leprosy”), preferring instead to inform the careful reader via a footnote (“Gk lepros; a term for various skin diseases”). The CSB’s predecessor, the HCSB, had in fact experimented with “skin disease” in both the Old Testament and New Testament, but the CSB dutifully returned to “leprosy” in the New Testament in favor of more traditional language. Here, as is often the case in Bible translation, biblical studies was overruled by popular opinion (and pocketbooks).

Preferring ‘leprosy’ in Africa

When I’ve checked translation drafts of the Bible into African languages, all teams except one have preferred to translate tsaraat and lepra with traditional local terms for “leprosy.” Despite lengthy conversations about lexicons, anachronism, and accuracy, only one team decided to adopt a more general rendering like “skin disease,” and that was just for the Old Testament.

The reasons for this are many. First, there is personal experience (not unlike the appeal to bicycles and hamburgers): “We know this disease. Either we’ve had it, or we know someone who’s had it. We have a name for it, and it connects better than something generic and weak,” a translator might explain. It is worth noting as well that while leprosy is found the world over, those affected by it have not experienced the same level of stigmatization and ostracization everywhere. Contexts influenced by Islamic culture, for example, have been known to show greater tolerance towards those with the disease. Second, a traditional rendering maintains continuity with the millennia long tradition of “leprosy” which started with the Septuagint and passed to numerous national languages through the Vulgate. Third, in New Testament translation, it can sound ridiculous recommending against translating with “leprosy” when the Greek word is lepra; the cognate form betrays us even if the first-century meaning was more general. Lastly, it’s worth remembering that traditional local equivalents for medical conditions may be equally general in meaning as far as they may reflect a similarly pre-scientific understanding of observable conditions.

The counterpoint about anachronism was not well received by one team, taken instead as an assault on the Bible. In a way, it is an assault on the Bible—the Bible as some have always known it, that is. The charge of anachronism puts into question sacred texts as fixed and never changing. And so, we start to see why Bible translations have not fully healed themselves of “leprosy.”

Acceptability

Though it sometimes surprises ordinary Bible readers, this polyphony of perspectives demonstrates that Bible translation is never as simple as transferring a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek lexeme from a lexicon to a lectionary. Translation helps series like the UBS Handbook and SIL’s Translator’s Notes recognize that more is at stake than simply finding the best, most technically accurate rendering.

Accuracy is but one part of this creative process we call translation; another is finding a translation that works, one that is acceptable to the translating community as a whole and meets agreed upon goals. Commenting on Leviticus 13, for example, the UBS Handbook notes that “in some modern versions… the word ‘leprosy’ is still used because the alternative is considered ‘too heavy’ or ‘too awkward.’” Reading this, we may wonder “too heavy, too awkward” for whom? For people. Too heavy for people to process (“malignant skin disease” [NEB]); too awkward for people to read (“scaly-skin man” [ST]). The criteria of heaviness and awkwardness are decidedly human-ward qualities.

“Leprosy” in J. B. Phillips’s *New Testament in Modern English*, rev. ed. (1972)

In her classic textbook for Bible translators, SIL senior translation consultant Katy Barnwell identifies the four qualities of a “good translation” as accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and acceptability.¹ From decades of experience, Barnwell wisely acknowledges that “a translation that for some reason is not accepted by the intended audience will not achieve its purpose, even though it is accurate, clear, and natural.”

This criterion of acceptability is enshrined in the Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible (1968; 1987) which states that “translations will be carried out in close cooperation, with the aim that the new text will be acceptable to, and be used by all Christians and Christian communities who speak the language into which the translation is being made.”

Similarly, the Forum of Bible Agencies International’s Basic Principles and Procedures for Bible Translation urges translators “to test the translation as extensively as possible in the receptor community to ensure that it communicates accurately, clearly and naturally, keeping in mind the sensitivities and experience of the receptor audience.”

UBS translation consultant Carl Gross even goes so far as to suggest that:

“acceptability” is a predominant criterion of translation… although it is seldom, if ever, acknowledged as such. In those instances where an accurate, clear, or natural rendering is deemed not to be acceptable to the receptor audience, this fourth principle comes to the fore and generally, if not always, carries the day.

So, we find in Bible translation a need for considerations beyond technical accuracy. The interconnected qualities of a “good” translation are regularly in tension; it is for translators to seek creative balance and compensate for inevitable translation loss. Where acceptability increases, accuracy may decrease and vice versa. This reveals the complex, Janus-faced nature of translation, being both source-oriented and target-oriented. On the target-oriented side, acceptability, naturalness, and clarity look to people while the criterion of accuracy looks to the source.

The interconnected qualities of a “good” translation are regularly in tension.

In other words, that which is acceptable, natural, and clear is largely determined in relation to the end user, the target audience. By contrast, accuracy, once defined by translation stakeholders, is largely gauged in relation to source material. Taken together, this means that even a translation with intentional misprints, such as the edition of the King James Bible prepared for King Charles’ coronation, can on occasion be considered more acceptable than one in which typos are corrected.

The ‘turn’ in translation

The 1960s represent a “turn” in the history of Bible translation on these issues as emerging translation studies gave rise to more target-oriented approaches. Historically, theologians and biblical scholars (as well as the earliest Bible translators) have been for the most part source-oriented, focused on the source text and on bringing the reader to the world of the Bible (what is sometimes referred to as a foreignizing approach). This approach prioritizes perceived accuracy but becomes myopic if it ignores the human participants in the process and fails to recognize their impact on and use of translations.

Today, we find in Barnwell that three out of four qualities of a “good translation” are target-oriented (clear, natural, and acceptable) while only one is source-oriented (accuracy). Yes, all translations represent a delicate balancing act and blend of these factors, but, in the end, translation is for humans not for translation’s sake. The goal is obviously not to produce the most technically accurate translation that no one uses! Translation scholar Gideon Toury therefore suggests that translations exist on a continuum running from “adequate” (adopting the linguistic and cultural norms of the source text) to “acceptable” (adopting the norms of the target text), but they cannot be wholly either or neither; there’s always a blend.

The four qualities outlined above are fundamentally subjective even if mixed with elements of objectivity (e.g., the quality of a recording in an audio Bible). Unsurprisingly, translation scholars continue to debate the qualities of a “good” translation as well as how to assess quality in translation. For example, some have suggested replacing the criteria of clear, accurate, natural, and acceptable with the criteria of trustworthy, appropriate, understandable, and appealing. Here “appropriate” supersedes “acceptable” to include the idea of “fit for purpose.”²

Regardless of terminology, we recognize the importance of laying out one’s criteria of evaluation and identifying implicit cultural values and expectations. Additionally, because the criteria of a “good” translation are still hotly debated, we may rightfully concede that there is no such thing as the “best” translation. Which artwork is best? What is the best meal? All translations can be evaluated by any number of criteria before being improved upon. Quality is a continuum. As a guide, we may aim for a consensus view in dialogue with relevant stakeholders.

Detail at Luke 1 from the earliest datable copy of the complete Bible in English (14th c.). Egerton MS 618 (f. 35v)
Five Decisions Every Bible Translator Must Make
Knowing the hard decisions Bible translators face inspires gratitude for our Bibles and encourages us to read them.
Peter J. Gurry

People win

Writing in 1960 on the question of “leprosy” in Bible translation, the medical doctor K. Gramberg expressed in alternate terms this tension in how to define a “good” translation:

What should count more, [the translator’s] responsibility as philologist and theologian, or Christian compassion for those who are shunned by society? Or does he agree with the linguist who wrote to me and said: “Even though this is a medical and social question of the greatest importance, the linguistic and theological factors cannot be neglected.” Is this entirely true? Is it absolutely impossible to rank Christian compassion above linguistic, historical, or theological motives for the sake of the happiness of so many tragic folk?

For some, like Gramberg’s linguist, maintaining “leprosy” in translation is preferable because it is perceived to be more accurate, which in this case may simply mean that it is a translation that maintains continuity with the past. For others, like Dr. Gramberg, “leprosy” is unacceptable, not only because of anachronism (accuracy), but because of its contribution in some contexts to the stigmatization of those affected by Hansen’s disease today.

For certain translators, as shown earlier, maintaining “leprosy” is acceptable because of its potential to connect with the target audience. This is in addition to a preference for continuity. By comparison, one doctor lauded the publication of the New English Bible (NEB) in 1970 as “an historic event” in part for the way it broke with the traditional “leprosy” rendering of the KJV and RSV in Leviticus, offering instead, “malignant skin-disease.”

Some others have suggested that the best way to handle tsaraat in translation is not to translate at all, but to transliterate, thereby forcing tsaraat into the target language.³ This approach has been tried and, in the case of Malay, has been found wanting for reasons of acceptability:

The old Malay versions rendered tsara’ath by kusta = leprosy. The 1939 version changed over to transliteration. But even pastors trained by that version’s translator have not accepted the change. They preferred kusta which did have a meaning to “tsaraath disease” which had none, and which they therefore had to explain again and again, usually by equating it with… kusta. So the means defeated the end!

What this comes down to is the difficulty of deciding, like in the case of the Korean translation of “leprosy,” “whether the Bible would take the initiative and lead the language of its users, or adopt the language widely used by the greater number of people.” Guess who most often wins? People! Because translation is for people.

Limits to acceptability

Are there limits to acceptability? Yes. Various stakeholders determine these limits. As a translation consultant who checks and approves translations of the Bible, to whom am I accountable? Personally, my loyalties are multiple: to God above all; my conscience; the biblical authors and scribes; churches who support my ministry; organizations with which I’m affiliated; the historical legacy of preceding Bible translators and translations; contemporary translators and translations; translating communities; and the global Church.

Ultimately, I am helping to prepare a meal that is not primarily intended for me. It needs to be acceptable while also conforming to best practices concerning quality, just like a commercial kitchen must meet certain base standards but is welcome to serve any food that is acceptable to customers. It is not for the customer alone to decide how or what they eat; the government and its regulatory bodies are designed to prevent customers from eating foods that are unhealthy or harmful.

Translation, like cooking, is an art with multiple correct or acceptable end products, depending on multiple factors including the customer, the occasion, and the purpose. Indeed, both the kitchen and the consumer have a role to play in the food that is prepared. Bible translation is not so different.

Consider again the multiple and diverse stakeholders participating in conversations about quality in Bible translation. When it comes to translating tsaraat and lepra, they can include doctors, scholars, stylists, farmers, grandmothers, people affected by Hansen’s disease, etc. These stakeholders can easily be forgotten in debates over Bible translation philosophy.

I am grateful for organizations and platforms that raise awareness about these issues since we all have a role to play in ongoing discussions about Bible translation and quality. As co-heirs of Scripture, we must value each other’s perspective, showing flexibility in matters of charity, and listening well to clearly articulated matters of conscience.

Bible translation, like cooking, is complex; it is art mingled with science.

Bible translation, like cooking, is complex; it is art mingled with science. Let us be mindful of meals we will not eat, for translation decisions, like food choices, do in fact involve the “happiness of human beings” as one author poignantly noted on the subject of leprosy in the Bible.

Conclusion

Today, the Christian Scriptures continue on their trajectory towards accessibility for all people. The diversity and multiplicity of biblical texts and the versions they’ve inspired bear witness to the importance of the criterion of acceptability. Translation is for people. Bible translation exists because untranslated biblical texts are unacceptable to Bible consumers whose language repertoire does not include Hebrew and Greek or whose preferred mode of communication is oral or signed.

My late grandmother would not have accepted a single leaf of Codex Leningrad or Codex Vaticanus as her daily Bible; but she was right at home in the branches of her beloved KJV, a translation whose legacy continues to contribute to the happiness of human beings, anachronisms and all.

Notes

1
Katharine Barnwell, Bible Translation: An Introductory Course in Translation Principles, 4th ed. (Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2020), 36.
2
Sebastian Floor and Bryan Harmelink, “Multimodality in Bible Translation: Could It Contribute to Quality Assurance?” in Quality in Translation: A Multi-Threaded Fabric, ed. Stephen Watters and Reinier de Blois (Dallas: SIL International, 2023), 162–164.
3
Oliver W. Hasselblad and Olaf K. Skinsnes, “The Fullness of Time Has Come-Now Also for Leprosy” Notes on Translation 47 (1973): 12–15.

How Digital Apps Are Changing How We Read the Bible

Digital Bibles shape what we see—and don’t see—in the text and require us to be mindful of their power and peril.

John Dyer

Perspicuity is a fancy, hard-to-pronounce word that means just the opposite. In contrast to the complex, difficult-to-follow writing of academics, perspicuity means clear, direct, and understandable. The gist of the word is captured by the popular phrase “clear is kind” which applies equally to writing and personal relationships. Don’t beat around the bush. Just say what you mean. That is kindness.

The Reformers applied the concept of perspicuity to the Bible, saying that the most important ideas in scripture can be understood by any reader. That doesn’t mean that every part of the Bible is easy to understand (even Peter admits some things are “hard to understand” in 2 Pet. 3:16). It means that the essential things we must know—who God is, and what he is doing for us—can be picked up by individual readers. The Roman Catholic tradition, in contrast, argues that the scriptures need an official authoritative interpreter. The Roman Catholic Church calls its teaching authority the magisterium, explaining that it was passed from Jesus to Peter and the leaders of the Roman church.

A simple contrast between Protestant perspicuity and the Catholic magisterium on a non-essential issue would be a verse like Mark 6:4, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are His sisters not here with us?” Protestants would say that the most straightforward reading of this is that Mary and Joseph had children after Jesus who became his siblings. However, the magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic church is that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth and therefore never had additional children. This leads them to conclude that “the brothers” (ἀδελφοί, adelphoi) mentioned here are cousins or some other non-blood relative.

Dr. Dyer’s book explores the use of digital Bibles on Bible reading habits.

The digital Bible

So what does perspicuity have to do with digital Bible apps like Logos Bible Software, YouVersion, and biblehub.com?

In the book People of the Screen, I explore digital Bibles in depth, looking at how app creators view their craft and mission and collecting data on how everyday Christians use Bible apps in their lives. Before focusing in on perspicuity, here are a few things I found.

First, it turns out that, unlike the move from scrolls to the codex and the codex to the printing press, Bible apps aren’t replacing printed Bibles. Instead, my survey data indicates that most people use a mix of print and digital media depending on what they are trying to accomplish and what is available to them. For example, they like to use print for devotional and long form reading, their phones for shorter daily readings and quick lookups, and desktops for deeper study. The American Bible Society’s 2023 report confirms this overall trend with 69% of Bible readers using print in a given month and 50% using an digital Bible app (p. 149).

Bible apps aren’t replacing printed Bibles. Instead, most people use a mix of print and digital media.

In addition, digital media is enabling a return to the way people engaged with the Bible before the printing press, when people heard the Bible. From the time of Moses to the time of Luther, few believers had their own copy of the Bible and their only access to the Word was what they heard in church. Bible apps have made audio versions much more accessible, and many Christians report an uptick in listening to scripture as a mode of engagement.

If you’re a regular reader of textandcanon.org, when you think of Bible software, you might be picturing tools that empower in-depth study of the original languages and offer commentaries and other resources such as Logos Bible Software and Accordance. These apps were originally only available on desktop apps, but there are now many excellent study-oriented Bible apps available for phones and tablet. It turns out that the presence of these study apps might be reforming how average Christians understand the Bible and its understandability.

Illustration by Peter Gurry.
How Bible Software Solves Differences in Versification for You
Software developers have to account for different versification in how Bible data is both stored and presented.
Rick Brannan

Digital hermeneutics

As part of my study, I interviewed almost two hundred Bible readers and gave them an interpretive exercise to see how print and phone screen reading might differ.

At several churches, I split the audience in half, asking one group to read on their phones and the other group to read their printed Bible. I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Interestingly, two opposite trends emerged. The print readers said they felt Jude was about God’s judgment while the phone readers tended to emphasize God’s faithfulness. But then, on the second question, their answers seemed to split. The print readers, who felt the book was about God’s judgment, said they were encouraged by the reading. The phone readers on the other hand who said Jude was about God’s faithfulness, said after reading it that they felt discouraged and confused.

So what can account for that difference? Why is a judgmental God encouraging and a faithful God discouraging? As I looked through the interview data on how people spoke about their Bible reading habits and the digital age, some themes emerged that might explain this.

The free YouVersion App boasts 3,000 Bible versions in 2,000 languages.

First, while there are a few outliers that are print-only or digital-only, as I mentioned above almost everyone sees the value in using both mediums for different activities (print for devotions, phones for audio, desktop for study, etc.). Second, most people tend to associate certain characteristics with the medium itself beyond what the text is saying.

Over and over again, my interviewees would speak of a printed Bible as something they could trust, something that represented a faith they could literally pass on to the next generation. Someone might hold up a well-worn printed Bible and say, “This, this is what I believe.” On the other hand, when people spoke about Bible apps, they expressed appreciation for search functionality, audio Bibles, original languages, study notes, and so on. But they also tended to mention things like the distraction of notifications, the anxieties they feel when they read the news, and the pressure of social media.

Over and over again, my interviewees would speak of a printed Bible as something they could trust.

This recalls the Marshall McLuhan’s famous saying, “the medium is the message.” By this McLuhan meant several things, one of which was that a medium can influence how we perceive a message, much like tone of voice and body language when speaking in person. In this case, the medium of print itself sends a message of confidence, while screens seems to send a message of anxiety. It’s likely that we associate print with trust, but phones with all the complex emotions we experience on social media. It’s interesting to note that the text of scripture hasn’t changed at all, but when the medium changes, people perceive it differently.

These kinds of observations are also seen in “materiality of religion” studies which focus on how material objects have a representative power within a community. For example, some traditions carry a printed Bible through the congregation as part of the liturgy and others give a Bible to someone at key moments in their life. In these cases, the printed bible is functioning in an iconic way that a digital Bible cannot.

Secondary perspicuity

The people I interviewed also indicated, albeit indirectly, that the presence of digital Bible apps had altered their understanding of perspicuity. While most people associated print with more certainty and trust, they also spoke about how Bible apps gave them a unique confidence.

Some spoke of the familiar small group scenario where a member says, “I think it says somewhere in the Bible that …” but no one is sure. Bible apps, they went on to say, ensured that such a verse could always be found and verified or shown to just be a popular phrase but not something in the Bible.

Others discussed the role of Bible apps with study helps, saying that even the most difficult passage could be understood if one had the right app with the right resources installed. Long before Bible apps existed, Protestants and Catholics alike created printed Bibles with study notes and interpretive guides (e.g., the Geneva Bible in 1560 and the Douay-Rheims in 1582).

But unlike the static study notes around the printed text, Bible apps allow for an exploratory feeling. Several participants spoke of an endless experience of tapping words and going “deeper and deeper” to find the “original meaning” of the text. Some readers even said that after long periods of using apps, they found themselves wanting to tap on the words of their print Bibles when they didn’t understand something.

I call this phenomenon “secondary perspicuity” because the reader is still convinced that the meaning of the passage can be known—just as long as one has the right content downloaded. The digitally enabled Bible reader doesn’t need an authoritative Church to tell them what a passage means, but their understanding of the knowability of the text has shifted to include the necessity of outside helps and resources. This continues to evolve today with several new AI-generated Bible summary and interpretation tools, each of which reinforce the idea that the right tools can get us to the right answers, perhaps even apart from the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

The point here is not that Bible apps are bad or that we need to go back to print (or back to exclusively encountering scripture through public readings). It’s to recognize the very subtle ways that mediums we use shape and form our encounters with content. Neither print nor screen are neutral. Both form us and our communities, shaping what we see and don’t see in the text and about God. As we seek to encounter the one true God, let us continually be thankful for the good gifts of technology, but also mindful of its power and peril.

Topics

Levels

Translation

The spectrum of views

Isaiah’s context

The Immanuel sign

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Related

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

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6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

The larger literary structure

Conclusion

Notes

The rise in witch-hunting

Witches in exegesis and translation

Critics of witch-hunting

Conclusion

So many options

The reign of the King

Related

The blessing of abundance

The precedent for plurality

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The paradox of choice

How to avoid paralysis

1. Reduce your options

2. Be content with good enough

3. Be grateful

Notes

Who is Origen?

What was the Hexapla?

Related

What was the Hexapla for?

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Notes

A matter of taste

The case of leprosy

Preferring ‘leprosy’ in Africa

Acceptability

The ‘turn’ in translation

Related

People win

Limits to acceptability

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Conclusion

Notes

The digital Bible

Related

Digital hermeneutics

Secondary perspicuity

Conclusion

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