Hebrew Gospel Pearls Special – Tricks of Translation 2

You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Keith: It’s almost impossible. Tell me this, Nehemia, even in 2002, when you’re opening the Hebrew Bible and you’re translating from the Hebrew Bible, what do you have to do? You’re putting it in a language that I understand. And there are sometimes, say “sometimes…”

Nehemia: Sometimes.

Keith: … that even in English you can’t completely explain everything that’s happening in Hebrew.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, the Special Edition. With today a special guest. That’s right folks, I’m here with Nehemia Gordon, who is Dr. Nehemia Gordon. But we have a real special guest in the studio today, the man that actually said yes when we launched Hebrew Gospel Pearls. And who is that man? What is his name?

Nehemia: Michael Rood!

Keith: Michael Rood is actually in the house, folks! And so, it’s exciting for us to be able to do this episode with him here. He’s been with us. And again, we talked about 20 years ago… how did I meet you, Nehemia Gordon? I met you because Michael said, “There’s a man named Nehemia Gordon from the Hebrew University that I want you to meet.” And I met you. And as a result, life changed. I’m so blessed. Michael, thank you for being here. Thank you for being here.

We’re going to continue on The Tricks of Translation. Nehemia, the second verse… do you know you let me pick the verses? I got to pick the verses!

Nehemia: I did know!

Keith: The first one I picked was on the double portion, and we did a phenomenal thing. We were both surprised by looking at the Big Book, using the tools, finding out what it says, and therefore understanding what it means.

But now we’re going to go to one that I think is a little more… I want to say the word difficult, in my opinion.

Nehemia: Well before we get to that, can you explain what “tricks of translation” are? Because this is Hebrew Gospel Pearls, and we’re going to start talking about a verse in the Book of Hosea. So how do we get from Hebrew Gospel Pearls… Why are we looking at these examples?

Keith: Well, you did a phenomenal job. You gave us the big picture. Tell us what the big picture is.

Nehemia: I want you to share some of it, because you came up with the idea of Tricks of Translation, which is a beautiful concept.

Keith: I’ve got to be honest with you. I didn’t ever tell you this. You know how we do confession sometimes?

Nehemia: Oh, no!

Keith: I’ve got to tell you something.

Nehemia: Confession of the lips.

Keith: So, I did an SNL (Shabbat Night Live) series, and it’s called Why not Jesus? And the third episode is Translators’ Tricks.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: But I thought you wouldn’t go with that, so I said, “I’ve got to change it to Tricks of Translation.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: But what I did in that series, around the name Jesus, was to be able to find out how translators make these tricks.

Now, we’re going to do something special. We’re going to do a third episode on how we can get to the name Yeshua, and how they used those tricks. Together we’re going to do that. But again, why is it so important? Because when we’re looking at the Bible, I think most people would say this; I think most people would say that we realize today that as a result of switching the language… not switching, having the language of Hebrew, getting it into English… there’s going to be some, what we call inconsistencies.

But what I think I liked was the explanation of “the translator is a traitor”. Now I want to talk about that for a second, because it’s almost impossible… tell me this, Nehemia, even in 2002, when you’re opening the Hebrew Bible and you’re translating from the Hebrew Bible, what do you have to do? You’re putting it in a language that I understand. And there are sometimes, say “sometimes…”

Nehemia: Sometimes.

Keith: … that even in English, you can’t completely explain everything that’s happening in Hebrew.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, there are instances where, if you translate literally, you’re actually missing what it says.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: And there are many instances where, if you translate it not in a literal way, you’re going to lose the flavor of what it means.

Keith: Exactly.

Nehemia: And that’s why the Italians have this expression, “the translator is a traitor”, which sounds much better in…

Keith: Could you say it again? Would you say it in Italian? Because I love how you say it.

Nehemia: Well, in my broken Italian, traduttore, traditore. Which literally means – well, what I’m told it means is, “the translator is a traitor.” And it’s a play on words, because the words sound like each other.

Keith: It’s Italian, right?

Nehemia: It’s Italiano, as far as I know.

Keith: Now, Nehemia, I know we talked about this earlier, but you did learn a little Italian because you were at the Vatican.

Nehemia: I was at the Vatican. I was actually in a number of places in Italy. I was in Ferrara.

Keith: Ferrara.

Nehemia: And I was in Venezia, in Venice.

Keith: Roma?

Nehemia: And then I was also in Roma. I’ve been in Rome twice.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, I went and ordered my cappuccino, per favore. And yeah, I learned all kinds of phrases like molte grazie, “thank you very much”. And that’s pretty much the extent of my Italian. Thankfully, most people, at least in Rome, understand English.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the “translator is a traitor”, there’s this concept in translation… there are a number of concepts, and they’re sometimes difficult to distinguish. But there’s a concept in translation which is called, “false friends”, and I think it’s a great concept to talk about today. We have Michael Rood in the audience, and Michael Rood is a true friend.

Keith: Amen.

Nehemia: For me, for you. I’ve actually known Michael longer than I’ve known Keith.

Keith: That’s a long time!

Nehemia: And I consider him a true friend. But “false friends” is this concept in language when you have a word that appears in multiple languages, but it has different meanings in those other languages. And I’ll give you an example. Here’s a great example between English and Spanish. I live in the greatest Spanish speaking country in the world – Texas.

Keith: Did you call it a Spanish speaking country?

Nehemia: It is! And in Spanish there’s – and I apologize for the Spanish speakers, because I don’t actually speak Spanish – but in English, if you say, “a woman is embarrassed”, what do you mean? She’s ashamed.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: If you say in Spanish, “she’s embarrassed”, embarazada, or however it’s pronounced, it means “she’s pregnant”. And there’s no question that those two words come from a common linguistic origin, but they mean completely different things. Why do they mean different things? We could look into the reasons, it’s a bit complicated, but the point is that this is a very common thing, where you have a word that’s common to two different languages and it means completely different things. And they’re not completely different. Maybe a woman gets pregnant when she wasn’t supposed to be, and so she’s embarrassed. Maybe that’s the origin. I actually don’t know. I’m not an expert on the origins of English or Spanish words.

But I could tell you in Hebrew, we have examples of that between Hebrew and other Semitic languages. And here’s where things can get complicated, where the translator can be a traitor. We have in Hebrew the word lechem, which is, for example, in the name of the place, Beit Lechem, “House of Bread”, lechem in Hebrew means “bread”. Well, the same exact word in Arabic, lahm, it’s the same three-letter root, same word, there’s a slightly different pronunciation, lahm, doesn’t mean “bread”, it means “meat”. So, there’s an example of a false friend, where it means one thing in one language, but another thing in another language.

There they’re very closely related. They’re so closely related, where there’s passages in the Tanakh where it talks about somebody eating bread, or lechem, I should say, and it’s clear in context they’re eating meat. And why is that? Because lechem means, if you look at all the Semitic languages, you find out lechem really means – not in Hebrew or Arabic, there it means “bread” and “meat” – but the primary meaning in Semitic languages is “a basic food substance”.

So, if you’re an Israelite dirt farmer who grows grain, your primary food substance is wheat. If you’re an Arab shepherd out in Arabia who doesn’t have any land where he can grow wheat because it doesn’t sustain that kind of agriculture, it sustains sheep and goats, your primary food substance is meat.

Now, if I come along and I try to translate Beit Lechem, and I translate it – because maybe I don’t know Hebrew that well, maybe I’m an Arab translator – and I translate it “House of Meat”, am I wrong? Well, I don’t know. Beit Lechem might be a Canaanite name. And now you’ve got to ask the question, what does it mean in Canaanite?

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: Does it mean “house of bread” or “house of steak”?

Keith: Steakhouse!

Nehemia: Steakhouse, right. And so, that’s where language and translation is really complicated.

Keith: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: And it is, because you’ve different languages with different meanings. There’s a famous example of something we call, “lexical division”. Lexical division is this idea that you’ll have a word that has multiple meanings in each language, and in the other language it has multiple meanings. And it’s not always a one-to-one correspondence.

And so, the famous example is the word in Hebrew, kadur, it means “a ball”. But it also means “a pill.” An aspirin would be called a kadur. But kadur also means “a bullet”. So, the famous apocryphal story is the Israeli soldier is in the bus station and he sees this foreign tourist, this poor woman, she’s holding her head in her hand, and it hurts so much. And he walks up with his M16, and he says, “Eh, what you need is a bullet for your head.” And she’s horrified, she’s about to get killed, she thinks. And what he really means is, “she needs an aspirin”.

Keith: Right!

Nehemia: So, translation is a complicated thing. And then when you add to that that people have agendas… say “agendas”.

Keith: Agenda.

Nehemia: Now it gets really complicated.

Keith: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, I want us to look at the verse that you brought up. It was your idea.

Keith: Before we look at that, one of the things that people… and I actually have to go back to our special guest here, Michael. Twenty years ago, when I went to his apartment, he was in the back and he was studying his Bible. Studying his Bible, studying his Bible; I call him “the original Bible thumper”, thump, thump, thump, studying his Bible.

But what Michael would always do is that he would always have more than one translation. And one of the things that I really learned from that, and continually tell people, and we’ve talked about it – even when you don’t have the Hebrew text, sometimes you can find out what the problem is just by looking at translations. In other words, if you have the NIV and the KJV, the NASB and the RSV, and you’ve got two, that’s why… I don’t know if you noticed, Nehemia, you’ve never watched it. So, we did here at A Rood Awakening, the Jonah Series. Have you watched it?

Nehemia: Never heard of it.

Keith: A Deep Dive into the Book of Jonah.

Nehemia: Were you in that?

Keith: Yeah, absolutely! So, what we did, every single episode, 13 episodes, we asked people to always have two versions. And what I used, actually, was the NIV. I call it “The Nearly Inspired Version”, and the JPS. Now, if there’s ever a season 2, if there’s ever a season 2, those translations are gone.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: I’m only going to use one English translation.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Keith: What is it going to be?

Nehemia: The Big Book.

Keith: Somebody say, “the Big Book”!

Nehemia: The Big Book.

Keith: Why? Because I’m going to be able to look and see what the issues are. That’s what I love about what he does here, he says that he based his translation on the best… and I want you to tell us why, before we go on. Why did he say he bases it, in 1853, on the best German scholarship? What was that? What was going on there?

Nehemia: So, this is Rabbi Leeser. That’s his name?

Keith: Yes. Isaac Leeser.

Nehemia: Isaac Leeser. And I actually hadn’t heard of him until you brought him to my attention.

Keith: Tell us again what he did, because you learned something from me. Come on, so what did he do?

Nehemia: So, he is the first one to translate… he did a lot of things. He actually wrote dozens of books.

Keith: Dozens of books.

Nehemia: And he came to the US at a time when there were no rabbis who were trained in the US. If you were a rabbi, you were trained in Germany.

Keith: That’s right.

Nehemia: Because that’s where Jewish scholarship… and it’s kind of hard to believe…

Keith: Isn’t that amazing.

Nehemia: It’s hard to believe with what happened a hundred years later, but the center of Jewish scholarship in the entire world was in Germany. And also, the center of Biblical scholarship, of non-Jewish scholarship, was in Germany. And so much so that when I studied at Hebrew University in the 1990s, they used to have a joke, and the joke was that the earliest Semitic language is German. And what they meant by that is, all of the great scholarship written on Semitic languages is in German. I had to take Germanit Le’matchilim, German for Beginners.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And to get my master’s – that was for my BA – I had to take Germanit Le’mitkadmim, Advanced German. Because you couldn’t have a degree in Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem without advanced German. The other joke is that Hebrew University was the last surviving German university in the world. And what they meant by that is a lot of the people who established the university were refugees from Germany, from Europe, bringing over the German system of meticulous scholarship. And whatever you say about the Germans, they have a culture of meticulousness.

Keith: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: So, that’s what he means by that.

Keith: So, he’s saying, “I’m bringing the best scholarship from Germany to help me in this translation into English.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Again, the first translation for Jewish people who only read English. And he said, “Listen, you’re only reading the King James Version.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: “And I want you to be able to read from a Hebrew base, but based on the scholarship that was in Germany.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: So again, 1853, real quick now, Nehemia, and I’m throwing all kinds of softballs at you.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: But what was happening at that time? I mean, around that time, in the middle 1800’s.

Nehemia: Did you ever see the movie, The Frisco Kid?

Keith: Let me tell you something great about you, Dr. Gordon.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Keith: I try my best to catch you off, and I can’t catch you off ever. You’ve got a story for everything, “You know, there’s actually this. And there’s that.” So, tell me about 1853 and The Frisco Kid.

Nehemia: So, it’s a beautiful movie, The Frisco Kid, and it’s about this rabbi in Lithuania who goes over to San Francisco at a time when there’s this burgeoning Jewish community, and they don’t have any rabbis because there are no rabbis, there are no natively trained rabbis in the United States. So, they bring him over from Lithuania, and it’s his adventurous traveling across the United States, and through, really, the Wild West in many cases.

And so, why is it set in that period? It’s actually set in around 1848-1849. Because what happened was the Gold Rush, and people started flooding to California, flooding into the United States, flooding over from Europe. There’s all kinds of persecutions of Jews happening in Europe, and all of a sudden you have Jews who are coming over the United States. There had been Jews before, but they started coming in massive numbers to where, by 1875, they had to establish the first Jewish seminary for rabbis in the United States, which was in, of all places, Cincinnati. And why Cincinnati? Because at the time, Cincinnati was the industrial center of the world. Certainly, outside of England it was the industrial center of the world. And a lot of Jews were involved in that. A lot of Jews were involved in the Gold Rush.

And so, in 1853 this rabbi realized, “Okay, it’s not just a few hundred merchants who are based in different cities around the US,” which had been the case. You had Jews who were in New York and in Charleston, South Carolina, but it was in the hundreds. Now, all of a sudden you get thousands, tens of thousands of Jews who are flooding into the United States, to the point where there are famous stories that during the American Civil War, you had Yiddish-speaking regiments. And why Yiddish? Because that was the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and they were so fresh off the boat when they arrived in Kansas, they were speaking to each other in Yiddish as they were fighting in the Civil War.

So you had these massive numbers of Jews who start to come over. The really big numbers begin in 1880, but already by this time you have a lot of Jews, and the problem is, if you’re a Jew in the United States, what Bible can you read?

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: Well, the King James Version, that’s what’s available.

Keith: That’s it, that’s it.

Nehemia: And he’s saying, “We Jews should have our own translation based on the most advanced and knowledgeable scholarship of our time,” which was the scholarship of Jews and non-Jews in Germany.

Keith: I’ve got to tell you something. I’m talking to a very dear friend, he says to me, when I show him the Bible, it says, “Holy Bible”. I think we have a picture of this, actually, that was taken yesterday. It says, “Holy Bible” on it, and he says to me, “It’s the Holy Bible.” And I told him the whole story. I said, “It’s Rabbi Leeser,” I told him it’s the first one for the Jews.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: He said, “Does it have the New Testament in it?”

Nehemia: And what’s the answer?

Keith: Of course it doesn’t have it. It’s the Big Book!

Nehemia: Right, right, because it’s made by a rabbi.

Keith: Exactly. It’s made by a rabbi. But isn’t it interesting – it’s called “Holy Bible”.

Nehemia: What else should it say? And I hear this a lot of times from people on the internet. They’ll say, “Oh well, the Bible’s very different from the Tanakh.” No. There’s the Hebrew Bible, or the Jewish Bible, which is the Tanakh.

Keith: That’s right.

Nehemia: I mean the word Bible… Christians don’t have a monopoly on the word Bible.

Keith: Exactly.

Nehemia: The word Bible comes from Byblos, which was a city on the coast of Lebanon where they made the first books.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: And it was called The Holy Bybliya, the Holy Bible.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: But for Jews, the Holy Bible is the Tanakh.

Keith: Right. So, Nehemia, now for the verse. Thanks for that. So, we’re looking at this verse, which I say was complicated… it was complicated for me. I want you to do me a favor.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I actually shut it already. Can you see how I shut it?

Nehemia: But you have a printout there.

Keith: I have a printout.

Nehemia: And I don’t even know what it says. I’m very nervous!

Keith: You don’t know what it says. So, what I want you to do is tap-tap for us.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Folks, this is the famous tap-tap. Give me two versions, any two English versions that you want…

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: …of Hosea chapter chapter 14:2 in English. It’s 14:3 in this Bible, and I think in the Hebrew text.

Nehemia: So, 14:2. And it’s interesting why there are different verse numbers because the chapters were established by Christians… let’s say out of certain books that had chapters. But mostly, like maybe Psalms had chapters. Actually, in some Hebrew versions, before the chapters were numbered there were considered to be 149 psalms. And it was 150 that was introduced in a later period. But then the verse numbers came even later for the Jews. You’ll have chapter numbers, but they don’t count the verse numbers. Hosea 14:2…

Keith: Which version?

Nehemia: Let’s start in the Hebrew, “Shuvah Israel ad Yehovah Elohecha ki kashalta b’avonecha.” Which means, “Return, O Israel, to Yehovah your God; for you have stumbled in your iniquity.” Verse 3, “K’chu eimachem devarim ve’shuvu el Yehovah”, “Take with you words, and return to Yehovah,” “imru elav,” “say to him,” “kol tisa avon ve’kach-tov” “forgive all iniquity and take good,” “u’neshalemah farim sefataynu.” And I won’t translate those last three words, because now we’re going to look at 14:2, that was 3 in the Hebrew, but 14:2 in the King James.

“Take with you words, and turn to the LORD, say unto him, ‘Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so we will render the calves of our lips.’” That’s King James.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: NIV – instead of, “so we will render the calves of our lips,” it says, “so that we may offer the fruit of our lips.” So, we went from “calves” to “fruit”. The JPS from 1985 says, “Instead of bulls we will pay (the offering) of our lips.” The words, “the offering” are in brackets. And then the JPS says… I love this, a little note, Note A, “meaning of Hebrew uncertain”.

Keith: I love it!

Nehemia: Which is kind of surprising because the meaning isn’t uncertain. So, what we have is two translations. Is it “the bulls of our lips?” Or is it “the fruit of our lips?”

Keith: And we went into, what I think, Nehemia… I love the process that we went into.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I think it was, again, hours of time where we started looking at sources and all of those things to get to this. We’re going to give you the Big Book version, if I can real quick. Or do you want me to hold off?

Nehemia: Before that, can we look at a few more translations?

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: So, Targum Jonathan is an ancient Jewish Aramaic translation, and it was translated by a man named Eldon Clem into English. And here he has, it’s a bit longer there, because it’s a paraphrase, but at the end he has, “And may the words of your lips be accepted before you as bulls are pleasing upon your altar.” In other words, the Targum’s explanation, and really what you see in the JPS is, “I’m offering prayers, but I can’t bring the bulls I need for atonement, so I’m offering lips in place of those bulls.”

Keith: Let me ask you a question. I want to ask you a question real quick.

Nehemia: Yeah?

Keith: Do you feel like we can complete it? Or do you want to switch? Do you want to go to the Plus? Or do you want to just go ahead? What would you like to do?

Nehemia: I want to look at a few other translations before we go to the Plus.

Keith: Excellent.

Nehemia: So, the NASB of Hosea 14:3, that’s the New American Standard Bible. So, it’s 14:2 there, they have a different verse number. “Take words with you and return to the LORD. Say to Him, ‘Take away all guilt and receive us graciously, so that we may present the fruit of our lips.’” So, it’s “fruit of our lips.” There’s “bulls of our lips,” and “fruit of our lips”. “Calves” or “bulls,” same thing in the other one. And here, there’s a Note B, and it says, “As in ancient versions; MT” meaning the Masoretic Text, meaning the Hebrew Bible, “Our lips as bulls”.

So there, they’re acknowledging, “Yes, it says ‘the fruit of our lips’ in, quote, ‘ancient versions’, but it is ‘the bulls of our lips’ in the Hebrew Bible.” So, I want to read one rabbi… what he says. He explains what the Masoretic text means. We’ve kind of said it, but I want to hear what the rabbi says, and then we’ll go to the Plus version.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: Rabbi David Kimchi was a rabbi in Southern France from 1160 to 1265. He’s known as “RaDaK”. He says, “and let us pay for the bulls with our lips,” and he explains, “in place of bulls, we will pay with confession of our lips, for you want words of repentance more than sacrifice. The sacrifices are not effective without confession of the iniquity, as it says concerning all of the sacrifices, quote, ‘And he shall confess his sin.’” Which is a quote from Leviticus 5:5. Incidentally, that quote only appears in Leviticus 5:5. He says, “all the sacrifices”, but he quotes a specific verse. “There are similar things in other sacrifices,” that’s a direct quote.

So here is really the question that we’re going to answer in the Plus – what are these ancient versions that say, “the fruit of our lips?” And how and why are they different from what we have in the Masoretic Hebrew text, which has “the bulls of our lips”? Is there a different idea there, a different theology? Is there a different text there? And it’s really interesting, the answer, because it’s a subtle difference of really one letter. In fact, it could be the same letters, just dividing the words differently. But we’ll get to that in the Plus section!

Keith: So, folks, we’ve been talking about this for 32 episodes, Hebrew Gospel Pearls, public and Plus, one on Nehemia’s site, one on the BFA site. But now we are A.S. – After Saudi, after Sinai, and we’re going to do something that we just started this with this series, where it’s going to be on both sites. And you can go to Nehemias Wall… explain that to them really quick for those coming for the first time.

Nehemia: Yeah. Come to NehemiasWall.com and you can get access to the Plus episodes. You become part of my Support Team. You join and you can see not only what we’ve presented here, but the second half of the program, which will be Hebrew Gospel Pearls Plus.

Keith: And you can get all of this stuff that we’re doing with the Tricks of Translation. You don’t have to go back and forth. BFA International, you become a Premium Member. Those that are not able to afford that, we do have scholarships, but you have to go through an application process. We try to do the best we can to meet the needs of people who are not able to afford that.

But all of the information that we have, both episodes will be at BFA, both episodes will be at Nehemia’s Wall. And then, we’re hoping to do a third episode, which I’m very excited about, which will be at ARA (A Rood Awakening), SNL (Shabbat Night Live) in the spirit of Michael, sending it to the world. I’m very excited about that. Let’s say a prayer.

Nehemia: Yehovah, our Father in heaven, Avinu she’ba’shamayim, Father, I offer before You the fruit of my lips in place of the bulls that I’m not able to bring. And let us unlock the key to what it actually says in the ancient Hebrew texts. Give us the tools, the keys, the lock picks, let us break open the safes that have hidden these truths through translations for centuries, and get back to Your original word.

Keith: Father, thank you so much for history. Thank you so much for the wonderful way that You’re a maestro, that You’ve put together such a beautiful symphony of ministry and opportunity and of reach. Help us to continue to do Your will, Your way, just the way You want us to. In Your name. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen.

You have been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!