What did I think I was doing? Learning a new tongue at age 60? I had played at Hebrew for many years. My discipline was surely lacking, but the work was needed in me, so I began. Now I am 73, barely a teenager. I have finished my translation of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.
As the reader and writer, I will say with the copyists, חזק
The Hebrew canon contains 305,368 words give or take a few, because I have joined some together, and separated some apart, and I have added a verse and adjusted a few words based on information from the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it is 99.9% The Leningrad Codex in 929 chapters and 23,196 verses + 1, the missing Nun verse in Psalm 145. My text came from tanach.us using the web-service that they support.
The English contains 12000 or so distinct English lemma forms, about three times the count of Hebrew stems. The number of words in the English is about 608,000, just under twice the Hebrew word count.
Now for the corrections. Now for the testing. Now to see if I can read it without the Hebrew and see if it still makes sense to me. And of course, adjust it where necessary. But what is necessary? That is one question among many.
Foreignness
English is my first language. Being Canadian, I also learned French from childhood. In school, I also learned Latin, but far from well. Hebrew is thoroughly foreign to me, but there are some connections. Like Latin, the word order is different from what the English take for granted. Like Latin too (and a bit in English and French), Hebrew has verb forms, the bane of those who learn by rote. I knew that I could not start with paradigms.
I knew from amo, amas, amat, that this was a very bad way of learning a language. So I ploughed straight in and just kept reading. Now if I look back at word forms, I can see where the conjugations are, and indeed some of them follow the rules I might have learned the old way. But many do not, particularly in the Psalms which is where I began.
Names
Names will remain a problem. Transcription is an issue. Even when I am 'finally' done with this Bob's Bible, I will probably not do the automated transcription of every name, though in principal, with the whole word by word translation in the database, it could be done. But the result might be worse for the reader than what I have now. As it stands, there are surprises in almost every chapter that has names. Somewhat randomly, I have translated the name, whether of a person or location. And most people don't read these anyway.
Wordplay
Having started with the Psalms, I was always looking for wordplay. I have not been disappointed anywhere. Wordplay is there in the acrostic poems, in alliteration and assonance, and, as it turns out, particularly in names. So in Micah 1:14, we can read, the houses of I-Will-Lie will be a lie for the kings of Israel. There are so many, you will need to read them and chuckle. Even in the long lists of names you will find some gems.
Concordance
I wanted to be consistent, but eventually, I was forced to break consistency because language doesn't work that way. I did, however, follow rules of concordance. For each Hebrew stem, I made and enforced a rule with software to not allow the same English lemma form to map back to two differing Hebrew stems. Of course, I was not totally successful.
Prepositions and other language elements were impossible to put into a one-to-many mapping. Some classes of common human actions, go, come, bring, and so on, were also too awkward to disallow a many-to-many mapping. But a very large proportion of words have succumbed to the rule of one-to-one, or one to many. I have never used many-to-one except where there is a legitimate homonym or a reason based on wordplay. And the exceptions are defined. My glossary is available and will be refined as time passes.
Music
The entire text is set to music. It is not possible to translate into English without losing information. But the language of music imposed on the text can be rendered into a Hebrew score without losing anything. The music is in the text itself as hand-signals. The music can be read by a computer program to produce the score, given a key. The key inferred by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura is a key that opens the lock of the accents in the text to both beauty and transparency. There is nothing close to it that does it better.
I have produced the scores with an automated Hebrew libretto underlay for every chapter. Bob's Bible is suitable for a libretto in English (most of the time). I have retained Hebrew word order wherever I could. Partly I did this for the music, but also to retain the foreignness of expression to a non-Hebrew speaker.
Theology
Here is trouble. How is the Bible used? It is often used to hurt others and to bring them into subservience, something done even by those who think they are well-meaning. I conclude that the Bible is not always used as it should be, to free the down-trodden, and to bind up wounds. But in theology, who is correct about God? And how do they justify themselves?
I know my God well enough to have taken some risks. There are many English words that I have not had to use at all in my translation. And some I have used but rarely. Like appease or propitiate or obey. I allowed appeasing of Yahweh only from a pagan speaker. I did use obey for a rare stem. It occurs only three times. And to follow my rules, I could not use it again for some other stem. Instead of obey, I have retained the Hebrew construction hear with the voice of the other. That kind of hearing leads to engagement rather than subservience. Our theology in words tends to lead to a visual understanding rather than relational through the ear.
I also had no occasion to use any of the following words: law, soul, loving-kindness, punish, atonement, repent, and dominion. There are probably more that I have not noticed. I do not feel poorer for my avoidance of these loaded words. I did not set out with this in mind, but in the act of imposing rules of concordance, these concepts just fell off the table entirely. I have noted particularly that punish is used for a half-dozen different stems in traditional translations based on the King James Version, and none of these stems has punish as its primary sense. The 17th century seems to have had punish in mind all the time. It is a human act to punish others. It is not a godly act.
Can you do theology without these words? I am quite sure you can. And it will be a more accurate view of God to the extent that God is given in this canonical text.
People write long polemical books and essays about this issue. All polemics miss the point. Words like inerrant, infallible, sola this, sola that, are distractions from our engagement with the Mystery. They are power plays. They are attempts at controlling what is not controllable by us.
The Scripture is rightly loved. It is like a beautiful musical instrument. To play on it requires good practice time. Neither the banging of children nor a perfection of technique will do on its own. Music is more subtle and not subject to our control. The wind blows where it pleases.
God is a musician, the artist inimitable, a scientist, one who tests all things. And, need I add, so should we be.
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