W.D. McHardy; Noted Bible Translator

W.D. McHardy, 88, noted Bible translator who helped produce the New English Bible in 1970 and later headed the team that wrote the Revised English Bible. McHardy, a leading Hebrew scholar who taught at Oxford, was deputy director of the New English Bible project, a 25-year endeavor that resulted in 1970 in the first completed official translation since the King James version of 1611. It strove to put the Bible into simpler, more modern language but was considered outmoded by the time it was finally finished because it was still using the traditional “thou” instead of “you” and “man” or “men” for human beings of either sex. When the New Testament portion was released in 1962, T.S. Eliot roundly criticized it, saying that it “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.” A later version, the Revised English Bible, published in 1989, attempted to eliminate gender-specific language. The latter effort was a more ecumenical endeavor, involving Roman Catholic scholars as well as literary advisors, such as the poet Philip Larkin and novelist Mary Stewart. Among its most striking changes was replacing “the valley of the shadow of death,” which McHardy said was a misreading of the original Hebrew, with “a valley of deepest darkness.” On April 9 in Cullen in northeast Scotland.