Jun 22
A tense debate
On Better Bibles Blog Peter Kirk draws attention to changes in the ESV, currently being listed carefully by Rick Mansfield. On his own blog Peter has a bit of fun with the replacement of wizards by necromancers. He is right, generally to describe most of the changes Rick has so far listed as trivial. They are often simply grammatical corrections.
There is, however, one change that I regard as no-trivial. The revision changes the text of Genesis 2:19.
(First edition) So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
(Revision) Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
With this change the ESV aligns itself with the existing NIV translation by making a significant tense change. All other translations I am aware of agree with the earlier version, and against NIV and ESV(2007). This includes LXX (which uses an aorist). I’d be glad to hear from strong Hebraists about this, but as far as I can see, this is a rather unusual way to translate the verb.
I may be unduly cynical, but have to ask: is this an attempt to unify Genesis 1 & 2 as a single narrative? Is that “had formed” meant to imply that this refers back to the sixth day order? God creates animals then humans. This single “had formed” presents chapter 2 as a detailed exploration of the events of the sixth day.
Taken together the divine fiat of Genesis 1 stresses the transcendence of the Creator. The anthropomorphic pottery of Genesis 2 brings God’s immanent involvement to the foreground. Eliding these stories together seems to do violence to both of them.
Have we got here in this “had formed” a theology of what sort of book the Bible ought to be, or Mosaic authorship, determining what the text is meant to say, instead of a straightforward translation of what it does say? I only ask, but it seems an important question to me.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I’m not a strong hebraist but I do recall an article in the Tyndale Bulletin in the mid to late nineties dealing with the tense here and (if I remember rightly) showing how & why it can be a pluperfect translation. Might have been a full article or a dissertation abstract.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Indeed this change in Genesis 2:19 is not trivial. TNIV, not surprisingly, has the same rendering as NIV. There is indeed nothing in the Hebrew to justify the past perfect in NIV and the new ESV. You are certainly not the first to suggest that this was done only to harmonise with chapter 1; see for example this discussion from 1999, in which I was involved. Here we see another example of ESV moving further from the literal translation principles it claims and more into theologically loaded interpretation.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Just tracked it down - it’s an article titled THE WAYYIQTOL AS ‘PLUPERFECT’: WHEN AND WHY in Tyndale Bulletin 46.1 (May ‘95), pages 117-140, by C John Collins. Hope that helps.
June 22nd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Peter, thanks for the reference to the previous debate. Richard, thanks for your comments: I refer you to Peter’s reference, where the B-Hebrew list discuss it, and I think, the weight of opinion tends to confirm my view that an English pluperfect is a bit odd.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Doug,
I don’t think the B-Hebrew discussion Peter linked to references Collins’ work. Another discussion on that list does, however, and does so in a positive way - http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2000-September/008514.html
(sorry in advance if that link doesn’t work but I have even less HTML than I have Hebrew!)
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Thanks, Richard. As far as I can see, there is general agreement that a pluperfect (I’m not fully comfortable importing English/Western terminology to this) is a relatively rare use. The question between Hebraists is how rare, and under what circumstances (some would say, if any) it can or should be used. I don’t know enough to adjudicate that debate for myself. (I do note the weight of English translations of every theological hue is against the pluperfect.)
I would, however, say that, as far as I can see, the narrative sequence of this passage makes the English past simple a far more natural translation, and that a pluperfect translation does seem to me to be driven by a harmonising instinct. The Vulgate and LXX show that a simple past is not conditioned by a version of the documentary hypothesis, but a pluperfect may be conditioned by the desire to reject it.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Hi Doug,
Yes, I think I agree with you about the narrative sequence of the passage; I’m quite comfortable with a past simple as an English translation. I wanted to point out Collins’ work because I don’t think the translational choice of a pluperfect (to continue to use that term - wrongly, I accept) is necessarily as theologically-loaded as Peter suggested.
[btw, really enjoying your blog]
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 pm
I prefer literal translations, and thus would not have made but the change the ESV translators did.
But, let me ask this: does it make an exegetical difference?
As a matter of traditional exegesis, would one suppose that the fact that Genesis 2:7 occurs before Genesis 2:19a implies that the events of Genesis 2:7 were meant to occur before Genesis 2:19a? I know that this is not a principle of Talmudic exegesis (which explicitly disclaims that Biblical verse order necessarily indicates monotonic temporality); I had assumed (but don’t know certain) that it was not a principle of traditional Christian exegesis either.
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Thanks again Richard.
Iyov, my view (a majority one?)is that in Gen 2, God creates a human, then tries to find this human a companion by making assorted animals. But this gives a different order from that in Gen 1, where the animals are made before humanity. My point is that the pluperfect “had formed” is an attempt to claim that the order in Genesis 2 is in fact the same order as Genesis 1, and all God is doing in 2:19 is bringing previously made animals to the human. I think this violates the narrative and is exegetically significant.
June 22nd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I found the reference (thanks to Wikipedia, of all places): Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 7a: Ein mukdam u’meuchar baTorah — there is not “earlier” and “after” in Torah.
June 22nd, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Thanks. That’s interesting.
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
Richard, thanks to the link to a b-hebrew post by my old friend Kimmo Huovila, who knows what he is talking about here. Thanks also for Iyov’s intervention. My conclusion would be that the verb form does not in itself have a pluperfect meaning, but in the context that is not ruled out, and also the assumption should not be quickly made that these events are intended to be sequential. So I would tend to suggest that an English past perfect (as in NIV) is reasonable in a translation which intends to be somewhat meaning based, but not in one like ESV which claims to be literal.
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:29 am
I am not a Hebrew scholar; therefore, I can comment only as an observer of what I believe to be a linguistic change, now heading across the Atlantic this way.
The misuse of the past tenses is quite common in the US. Listen to TV interviews of US citizens on news channels or listen to witness evidence on ‘Judge Judy’, etc., etc., and you will hear frequent misuse of past tenses from both ‘educated’ people and those who may not have so benefited. You will hear ‘I had gone out’ instead of ‘I went out’; or ‘I had received the …’ instead of ‘I received the …’ when no emphatic phrasing was required by the circumstances.
It’s only a thought, but the question is worth asking whether a syncretistic line is being taken to attempt to merge the original with how the translators perceive it would have been phrased had it been written today.
Others more qualified might have a view. I would be glad to hear.