Writing anything requires a whole host of choices. We know and expect that, but it doesn’t keep us from questioning certain choices writers make.
For instance, in the masterpiece The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame has an odd and out of place seeming chapter which interrupts the flow of the narrative. It’s a dreamy, mythic chapter called “Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Its otherworldliness inspired a Pink Floyd album of the same name. It’s beautiful and yet the story, according to many readers, might be better off without it. But that’s not our choice. Grahame wrote it and decided to keep it. And so it inspires some to write music and others to stop reading.
What to include and not include is a constant choice for writers. (I’m still not sure that Wind in the Willows paragraph belongs in this post.) But the choices change when the writer is not so much a writer as an interpreter or translator of something written by someone else, especially when it comes to the Bible.
When I did my rendering of the Psalms for the Everyday Psalms book, I didn’t get to choose the content. It was chosen already. Thousands of years ago. And to be honest, there were many times where I scratched my head and thought, “Why is this psalm going in that direction? I never would go in that direction if I were writing it myself.” But it wasn’t my place to change the psalm. It was my place to follow the psalm, to submit to it, to understand its underlying logic, to embrace it, to pray it myself, and to restate it.
But while I didn’t get to choose the content, I got to make many other choices along the way. Some of them are in sharp contrast to what others have done with the Psalms. So, I thought I’d take a little time to explain myself here not having done so in the book itself (not wanting to bog down the introduction with lots of explanations).
1. Rendering the Hebrew acrostics as English acrostics.
I don’t know of a single English translation that has attempted to render the Hebrew acrostic psalms as acrostics in English. There is no explanation by any translation committee as to why they ignore this basic poetic formula for a handful of psalms. They simply don’t do it and put a little note at the bottom of the page to the effect that “This psalm is an acrostic in Hebrew.” I found that extremely unsatisfying.
Now, I understand that the Hebrew language only has 22 letters, while English has 26 letters. That’s an obstacle. Also, sticking closely to the text in translation while finding a word that starts with J or Q can be difficult and translators tend to be scholars, not poets.
Still, I found those unsatisfying arguments and not compelling at all. The acrostic formula is absolutely essential to each of the psalms that use it. If it wasn’t essential, they wouldn’t have used it! To ditch an absolutely essential element of a psalm is to fail as a translator. (OK. I’m being a little hyperbolic here.)
Most of the time, I made the 22-letter Hebrew acrostics into 26-letter English acrostics to give the A-to-Z feel of the original. With Psalm 119, I couldn’t do this, since there are 22 eight-verse stanzas, with each of the eight verses starting with the same letter. It gets an A-V treatment because I couldn’t do anything else. But even in that case, the reader gets the acrostic sense.
2. Rendering the divine Name as Yahweh instead of as “the LORD.”
Because of the Third Commandment, the Jewish reading tradition for centuries has been to say the word Adonai, which means Lord, whenever coming across the divine Name in Hebrew. This tradition may go all the way back to the Second Temple period following the Exile. The third of the five books within the Psalter seems to be very intentional in avoiding using the divine Name at all, preferring the more generic word Elohim (God or gods) instead. Christian Bibles have generally incorporated this reading tradition in their translations, inserting “the LORD” in all caps when encountering the divine Name.
In Eugene Peterson’s first version of The Message: Psalms, he went with the personal name Yahweh every time the divine Name was in the text. That had such a significant impact on me personally in my own praying that I was disappointed when that was changed in subsequent editions and throughout his rendering of the rest of the Old Testament. When I asked him about it, he said there was significant pressure put on him to make the change.
While I appreciate the Jewish perspective on the Name, especially with the desire to not take the Name in vain, I believe there is a loss in relationship when it’s not used. Using LORD instead of Yahweh is the use of a title instead of a name. That is a major relational change.
When my wife was delivering our second child, the doctor who was on call was someone we knew from church. So, as she approached the end of her labor, my wife said to him, “Dave, are you praying for me?” It’s a question that would only ever be asked in that circumstance with a named doctor. She wouldn’t have asked, “Doctor, are you praying for me?” The difference is stark.
A named God is essential to our praying. It focuses our praying to a person, not to a concept of divinity. As has been noted elsewhere, “God” is not our God’s name. It, too, is a title. But Yahweh and Jesus, these are names. These are persons we are able to know, to relate with. Yes, this is divinity we are addressing, which is why we want to preserve the dignity of the names, not using them in empty, vain ways.
The intent of the Third Commandment is that we honor the Name, not that we avoid it. I submit that there is less honor done by avoiding saying someone’s name than in saying it respectfully.
Now, “Yahweh” might not be the correct way of rendering YHWH. I do know that it’s closer than Jehovah, since there is no J in Hebrew. Even “Jesus” is an approximation of what in Greek (the only renderings of his name we have) is “Iesou.” But does it really matter? We all answer to a variety of names. Depending on who I’m talking with, I’m either Pete or Peter. Those who want to be more casual and friendly with me call me Pete. Those who want to be more formal and respectful usually call me Peter.
So, I went with the most common and well-known rendering of the divine Name, adamant that we restore relationality as we do so.
3. Keeping each Selah but interpreting them by context.
The word selah is a bit of a mystery. We’re not exactly sure what it means or how it was used in the Psalms. But from my reading about it and my reading of the Psalms over the past 30 years, I’ve concluded that it denotes a break in the psalm. It may have included a musical interlude during the break, but even without music, it’s a place to pause before continuing.
Some translations keep the selahs in the text. Others, like the NIV, footnote them at the bottom of the page they should be on. Initially, I did what Eugene Peterson did and kept them out of my renderings completely. But then I went back through every psalms where they occur and considered why they might show up in the places where they are included in the Hebrew text and all of a sudden I realized how important they are.
These pauses are essential to the flow of the text. In some cases, they are hard stops where the reader/pray-er is instructed to not continue before taking time to reflect on what’s just been said. At other times, the psalm will make an abrupt shift in direction and a pause is needed. Sometimes, the psalmist is so worked up, he needs to take a breath and calm down, a breath we need too.
So, not all of the pauses are the same. And I tried to interpret each one’s role within the context of the psalm it’s found in.
4. Getting rid of verse numbering.
Nothing slows down Bible reading more than those little numbers before each verse. Really. They don’t seem to be that big of a deal until you remove them. And once they’re gone, reading becomes much smoother. Also, they weren’t there in the original text.
Ditching verse numberings makes is far harder to compare my renderings with other translations. I think that’s an additional benefit, though it might frustrate readers who want to think through the rendering choices I made. I apologize for the frustration I may have caused, but only a little bit.
I have not done a traditional translation and don’t really want to be compared with one. So, let’s move to that issue.
5. Rendering instead of translating the text.
I explain a little bit of this in the intro to Everyday Psalms, but I can take a little more time to expand on it here.
I am not a Hebrew scholar and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m a well-educated Christian who has taken Hebrew and can use Hebrew tools well. I’m also a person of deep faith who has a long immersion in the book of Psalms, having made them a regular part of my praying for more than three decades. This long familiarity with them has used several different versions over that time and compelled me to do my own.
As I did my renderings, I intentionally avoided calling them translations. My goal has never been to do a word-for-word translation. I think that’s impossible task, especially when it comes to poetry. Languages have uniquenesses to them which makes a lot of word-for-word translation a tenuous venture. If we could do one, there wouldn’t be as many translations as we have. In fact, if you want to have a good feel for the range of options that all translators have, just put five translations of the Bible next to each other. Their differences don’t represent differences in the quality of translation, rather they represent the range of possible meanings.
But when we get to poetry, we’re dealing with issues of communication that are of a completely different nature. Poetry breaks all kinds of rules and it does so intentionally. Sometimes the only way to convey both an idea and a feeling at the same time is to do something strange with the words. Sometimes a poet will bite off words and spit them at the listener in small bits. Sometimes a poet will use grandiose imagery. Sometimes a poet will use assonance, pairing two words that sound similar but have vastly different meanings. Sometimes a poet will rhyme or use alliteration, playing with sounds and voicings. In all of these cases, the word-for-word translator simply can’t succeed. None of this translates from one language to another, especially when following a rigid word-for-word rule.
What I’ve tried to do is be as faithful as possible to two things: the ideas and the feelings the psalmists are trying to communicate. Word-for-word focuses on ideas at the expense of feelings. I wanted to get both right. And that meant abandoning word-for-word and seeking to understand each psalm as a whole before doing anything else with it. If I could understand it with my mind and feel it with my heart as a whole, then I would have a sense of why certain words and images were used and could render them with words and images in English that have roughly the same ideas and feelings in my current context.
As I did this, I had to fight against a trend in modern English toward abstraction. Hebrew is a very concrete language, with words tied to the physical world. English used to be the same, but over time words that used to elicit a mental image have turned into abstract ideas not tied to any image at all. I wanted to restore the concreteness of the Psalms by inserting easily visualized images where readers might brush past an abstract word.
For instance, the word “meditate” in Psalm 1 has a visual image for the Hebrew mind of chewing on something repeatedly like a dog does with a bone. But I wanted that day and night meditating on God’s Word to be a bit more everyday than that. So, I rendered it as such:
Fill yourself with God words.
Make them your morning meal,
Your snack, your lunch, your supper,
Your steady diet.
Eat them. Take them in. Digest them. Be nourished by them. And do so over and over and over again. This is the sense of meditating on God’s Word the psalmist had in mind. And so, instead of just a few words, I used four lines of words to convey it. Instead of suggesting we come back to God’s words throughout the day, I list all the meals, doing the repetition in the rendering of the psalm.
6. Getting rid of the indented parallelism style of poetry.
One of the key features of much (not all) Hebrew poetry is the use of parallelism.
Lines are paired together, the second repeating much of what is included in the first but in different words. Often times, the second line will repeat while expanding on the first line. The second line is indented below the first line in most translations. For instance, here’s Psalm 24:1 —
The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it
“Earth” and “world” are definitely parallel, two words meaning the same thing. But then the “everything” of the first line is matched with and focused by “all who live” in the second line. We humans are included within the “everything” of the first line, but we might miss that if we focus on the “everything” around us. So, David is specific in the second line, making sure that we know that all of humanity belongs to God. Yahweh isn’t just some regional deity that can be ignored while you worship whatever other god you want. No, the whole earth is his and all of the people in it, including those who worship other gods.
Once you notice such parallelism in the Psalms, you see it everywhere in its poetry. And the indented second line helps highlight it.
But that indented second line makes for bad reading. Just like the verse markings, it slows down the eye and the mind of the reader. And frankly, it’s not necessary as a means of highlighting parallelism. Simply rendering the parallelism as such takes care of that. So, I figured I’d get rid of the visual speed bumps caused by the unnecessary indenting.
Questions?
If you have questions about any of those choices I made or about any others not covered in this post, please do ask me about them in the comments below.