Cleaning Up the Bible
Early scribal efforts to sanitize the biblical text were dilatory because the task was too great. Modern verbal vigilantes from time to time have sought to carry on the battle against crudity and vulgar language. The “authorized” English version of 1611 is replete with earthy language of Elizabethan times which disturbed genteel folk of the Victorian era. Since the text was not copyrighted, it was possible to alter it with impunity. One Dr. Edward Harwood in 1768 produced a Liberal Translation of the New Testament to “replace the bald and barbarous language of the old version.” Harwood thought to allure the “young and gay” by the innocent stratagem of “modern” style, but what he offered was inflated pomposity carried to ludicrous extremes. In America, shortly after the Revolution, Mrs. Sarah Kirby Tremmer, anxious to protect her children and others’ from bad language, deleted or obscured indecent expressions in the Sacred History to reduce the text by nearly half. Her commentary and notes made up for the loss by expanding the presentation to six volumes. Beilby Porteus, bishop of London, in 1796 supplied an index to lead the Bible reader to the good parts and away from the unedifying stuff by starring the best passages (sayings of Jesus, parts of Psalms and of Isaiah) and by marking with numerals 1 and 2 other parts fit to read. Unmarked parts, nearly half of the Old Testament and some of the New Testament, were to be avoided. The Porteusian Index thus, without deleting or changing a word or line, was censorious of half the Bible. There was, of course, the danger that a curious or perverse reader could invert the system and concentrate on the unrecommended parts.
Noah Webster, after achieving fame for his dictionary of decent words, decided that some of the indelicate language of the King James Version, especially words like “stink,” “stones” (for testicles), and “whoring,” required refinement. Webster’s sanitized edition was endorsed by the president and faculty of Yale and used for a time by some of the New England clergy, but was gradually abandoned for the old vulgar version.
Recent years have seen a spate of new English translations, some with notable bent toward euphemism and others with more contemporary concern for plain language. There is always the danger that overweening efforts to be frank may conjure up crudities that are imaginary. The most bizarre example of this is the New English Bible’s blunder in Joshua 15:18 and Judges 1:14, “she broke wind.” After the death of the proponent of this impropriety, the deodorized revision “she made a noise” does little to enhance confidence in the judgment of revisers. (See note below.)
The Bible is replete with puns based on assonance and multiple entente and many of them, even when (perhaps only partially) understood, are difficult or impossible to convey in terse translation. Appreciation of this problem increases as more is learned about Semitic languages and literatures. Puns and serious humor, often very earthy, are a vital feature of the Bible and a challenge to coming generations of translators and interpreters. See HUMOR AND WIT.
NOTE: The conclusion of Joshua 15:18/Judges 1/14, a verse identical in its two occurrences, reads in the New English Bible: “As she sat on the ass, she broke wind, and Caleb asked her ‘What did you mean by that?’ ” In the Revised Standard Version (Oxford Annotated Bible), the same Hebrew words are translated: “As she dismounted form her donkey, Caleb said to her, ‘What do you wish?’ ” The meaning of the Hebrew verb that begins the sentence, a verb that occurs in only one other verse in the entire Old Testament, must be determined from the two contexts. In this occurrence, does it mean “fart” (from atop her donkey) or “descend” (from her donkey)? That depends at least partly on how you hear Caleb’s question, just two words in Hebrew, meaning, literally, “What’s yours?”