There
is an urgent need for a distinctly Christian Old Testament in Hebrew;
the Hebrew source of the Septuagint should be reconstructed, says Israel
Shamir.
Translating the Bible into Hebrew
By Israel Adam Shamir
[A Talk at Rhodes Conference, 8-12 October 2009]
They say that at a press-conference before departing
from Israel, President George W. Bush was asked: “What impressed you
most of all in Israel?” The Texan replied: “The Bible in my room. It was
in your tongue! Despite the wars and terrorism, you did not begrudge the
effort and translated the Holy Bible into Hebrew in such a short time!
That impressed me the most”.
Besides ridiculing proverbial Texan ignorance, this
Israeli joke aims to remind us that the Old Testament was written in
Hebrew, and every Old Testament book that you find in your hotel room is
a translation from the ancient Hebrew text. There is a far-reaching
implication: the Jews are the guardians and keepers of a primary sacred
text of Christendom. This implication is subliminally or even
consciously accepted by the West.
The consequences of this implication go far beyond
textual details. India’s Brahmins are guardians of the Vedas, and this
brings them influence, money, ministerial positions. Likewise in the
West, the Jewish guardians of the Scripture possess by this right such
extraordinary influence – totally out-of-sync with their demographic
numbers – that can’t be explained in any other way.
Money, clannishness, media ownership – all are
frequently mentioned among the reasons for this disproportionate Jewish
influence. Here's the problem, though: This influence is greatest in the
US in particular and in the West in general. The Jews of Serbia and
Greece, of Turkey and Syria, of India and China are not poor either, and
are no less clannish, but they are much less influential. We may propose
a different reason, then: the Texan-Israeli joke wouldn’t have been
immediately understood in these countries, because for Muslims, for
Hindus, for the Chinese as well as for Orthodox Christians, Jews have no
sacred function – they are not the guardians of a holy text.
Non-Christians have their own scriptures. And for Orthodox Christians,
the Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek text composed some two
hundred years before Christ and one thousand years before the present
Jewish Bible (called MT, Masoretic Text) was completed.
Though the schism between the Eastern and the Western
churches is usually connected with the filioque controversy, the
true bifurcation point between the Christian East and the Christian West
is located in their choice of the primary text (aside from the New
Testament). Westerners (Catholics and Protestants) use the Old Testament
they translated from the Jewish MT; Easterners use the Greek text as the
original. This is an extremely important difference. When St Paul said
that the opposites are united in Christ, he mentioned man and woman, Jew
and Hellene (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, the ideal Jew and Hellene are as
opposed to each other as the ideal man and woman, and the Jewish and
Hellenic texts are equally opposed to each other. Moreover, translations
from either of these texts carry the imprint of the original spirit with
them. The Hellenic spirit found its expression in the Septuagint, while
the Judaic spirit was expressed in the Masoretic Hebrew text, the MT.
Christianity as a whole treads a narrow path between its Judaic and
Hellenic tendencies, which are locked in an eternal fight like the Yin
and the Yang. Their choice of primary text for the Old Testament caused
the Eastern churches to favour the Hellenic, and the Western the Judaic
tendency.
Before continuing, a full disclosure: until fairly
recently, I was not aware of the problem, and like everybody else, I
thought that the Old Testament in every language was a translation from
the Hebrew MT original. A few months ago, I visited Moscow where I
thoroughly enjoyed the fabulous hospitality of the Muscovites, who can
turn every friendly meeting over a couple of vodkas into a Platonic
symposium – a banquet of reason and a celebration of the soul. Once, my
friend Michael, a Moscow University teacher, told me that a famous
Starets wanted to receive me. “Starets,” the Russian equivalent of Greek
gerōn, or “elder”, means, in Eastern Orthodoxy, a monastic spiritual
leader – a charismatic spiritual guide who can aid others in attaining
spiritual progress and success, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica tell us.
The Starets is well known in Moscow as a confessor and heart-reader – a
man who understands the human soul and its way to salvation. I was
immensely touched and flattered by the invitation, for people normally
wait months on end to see him and receive his blessing. Though I have
met with princes of the Church – with bishops and cardinals, with the
monks of Athos and Jerusalem – the elders are the hidden heart of the
faith.
We drove out of Moscow to the monastery at four a.m.
The road was empty, and there were only a few pilgrims in front of the
monastery waiting for the heavy gates to open. This is neither the time
nor the place to relate everything that happened at this meeting, but
I’ll tell you the most important thing: the Starets told me of his
desire to publish the Old Testament in Hebrew, corrected in accordance
with the Queen Elizabeth Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church. At first,
I was deeply shocked and confused. The Queen Elizabeth Bible (1751), or
the QEB, is a translation, and a translation of the Greek translation
into the Old Church Slavonic. Wasn’t this rather too daring a project,
to correct the original according to a translation? Its scope would
eclipse any post-modernist project!
Here another, even fuller disclosure is called for:
the idea of translating a translation or even reconstructing the
original according to a translation was not totally foreign to me.
Translations are not machine-made neutral reproductions; they carry with
them the twin loads of the original culture and of the translator’s
culture. A translation can be translated. I was aware of this complexity
- some years ago I had translated the Odyssey into Russian from
the English translations of Lawrence (1932) and Rieu (1946) instead of
from the Greek original. (It was published by Aletheia, the
Heidegger-inspired St Petersburg publishers of Greek classics in AD
2000). I did it that way in order to convey Jorge Luis Borges’ idea that
for the modern reader Joyce’s Ulysses precedes Homer’s Odyssey.
The English post-Joyce translations of the Odyssey carried this
subliminal message, and I tried to preserve it in my translation into
Russian. (More on this in Russian on
http://www.israelshamir.net/ru/odysseia0.htm
)
The longer I considered the words of the Starets, the
more sense they made to me. Practically, he was proposing to reconstruct
the H70, the lost Hebrew original of the Septuagint, while using the QEB
to select between numerous versions. You will see soon why this could
begin the reversal of a long-term Judaisation and degradation process,
and start the healing of the schism between the West and the East, while
at the same time helping the Jews to overcome their hubris and to make
peace with the nations. The Jews have translated the Bible into the
languages of the nations in order to influence them; the world is
indebted to them, and it's time to pay them back by giving them the true
original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, free from censorship and
later additions, just as it was read in the days of the Second Temple.
Why will this bookish project influence the real
world? Sacred matters influence our world far more than is acceptable to
admit in polite society. The dummies believe that all things are done
out of pecuniary considerations, but in truth, it is spiritual authority
that decides. The world based on the Jewish Bible is not the same as
would be a world based on the Greek Bible. Its priorities would be
different. Even the texts themselves are different. The Hebrew text used
today by Jews (and by tiny communities of Hebrew-speaking Christians),
usually called MT (Masoretic text) is not the same text that was read by
Christ and His apostles.
If you open the New Testament you’ll see that its
references to the Old Testament do not fit. For instance, Matt. 12:21
quotes Isaiah: “in His name will the Gentiles trust”. But if you look up
Isaiah 42:4, you’ll see something completely different: “the isles shall
wait for his law”. Or (Acts 7:14) Stephen says "seventy-five" souls went
down to Egypt with Jacob. But look up your Old Testament (Gen. 46:27;
Deut. 10:22) – it says that only seventy people went to Egypt. This does
not mean that the translators of King James, or any other translators of
the Old Testament, made a mistake. They translated correctly, but from
the wrong version, from the MT, while Jesus, His apostles and the New
Testament writers in general had read and quoted the Septuagint (LXX) or
its Hebrew Source (H70).
The transposition of the MT in place of the
Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70), making it the source for
all subsequent Western translations, was the biggest coup the Jewish
scholars ever pulled off, and this is the deep-lying cause of
Judaisation of the West.
The MT is not particularly old. The oldest complete
manuscript of the MT – The Leningrad Codex (1008) - is just over a
thousand years old, whilst the LXX is much, much older. The LXX
translation was created in a very different era – not only before
Christ, but even before the Maccabee revolt. In those days, in the third
century BC, the Hellenistic world embraced Palestine, Egypt, Syria and
their neighbours. The Jews were integrating well into this Hellenic
world, and the long struggle between the two spirits of the ancient
faith of Israel had just started:
One was the inward-looking nationalist exclusivist
spirit. It claimed private ownership over the Divine Law and exclusive
access to the Creator for the Chosen of Israel. A stranger reading the
Law was to be executed. A translation of the Bible into Greek was a most
serious sin, equivalent to fashioning a golden calf (Ex 32:4), they
said.
The other spirit proclaimed universality and led to
Christ. The Law and God’s mercy were to be given to all.
In modern terms, these are the spirits of
privatisation and nationalisation. The battle was fought in the three
seats of ancient wisdom, - Alexandria, Babylon and Jerusalem. Alexandria
was the most universalistic, Babylon the most proprietary – Jerusalem
was their battleground. In Alexandria, a happy synthesis of Jewish and
Hellenic ideas was reached in the translation of Seventy Elders
appointed by the High Priest. Thus came the revelation of Israel to the
world, preparing the way for Christ.
This translation was nothing short of miraculous. The
translators consisted of six from each tribe of Israel, making
altogether seventy-two. But the translation is called the Translation of
the Seventy because seventy is the numeric value of “Sod” – “Secret” in
Hebrew. The Seventy revealed the secret that the exclusivist Jews did
not want to share. “A curse upon him who reveals our secret to the
Gentiles”, they had written on the floor of the En-Gedi Synagogue. Three
times the daughters of Jerusalem were charged “not to stir or awaken
love until she pleases” (Song of Songs 3) and this meant “do not
disclose our secret to Gentiles”, says the Talmud. Furious at the
disclosure of the secret, the exclusivist Jews destroyed the Hebrew
Source of the Septuagint. Every single copy perished. In Jerusalem, the
nationalist Jews slaughtered the Hellenised proto-Christian Jews in the
Maccabean revolt.
With the coming of Christ, the free Judeo-Hellenic
spirit once again found its expression which was hated by the
nationalists, who embarked on the long road to regaining full control
over the Scripture. For hundreds of years, the scribes worked over the
Old Testament, taking advantage of its ambiguous consonant readings,
until they eventually achieved a text we know today. Its main paradigm
was changed: if the old text led to Christ, the personal/universal
Saviour, the new text implanted the nationalist concept of a messiah of
and for the people of Israel. The nations of the world were to be seen
as sinful semi-animals who had no access to God. The name ‘Jews’ stuck
with this small fanatic band, while the Hellenised Jews became known as
'Christians' and were no longer called ‘Jews’. What was previously a
battle between two schools of thought within the Judaic framework,
became known as the battle between Judaic and Christian spirits.
The exclusivist Jews could not destroy the Septuagint
– there were too many copies extant among non-Jews, and the LXX had been
spread around and had succeeded in bringing the nations to Christ. That
is why, in their attempt to force the genie of free spirit back into its
bottle, the Jews made - one after another - three translations of the
Old Testament into Greek to counter the LXX. These translations were
made from their proto-Masoretic version, and were quite tendentious.
“The Virgin” in the prophecy became “a young woman” in their rendering.
Since then, the Jews have made and/or influenced dozens of translations
into all languages, while ferociously defending their own Hebrew
version, the MT, as the only legitimate primary source.
The young church had not worried overmuch, as they
considered Hebrew only a language of the scribes, whilst cultured people
used Greek, and the local masses spoke Aramaic. The Church dismissed the
Hebrew version as an empty cocoon shed by a beautiful butterfly. LXX was
considered the God-inspired text, and on its basis, the New Testament
and the works of the Fathers of the Church were created. The Eastern
Orthodox Church still prefers the Septuagint to the MT, for the
translation of the Seventy Elders had been kept in the Church and by the
Church, whereas the Hebrew text had been kept and prepared by
anti-Christian forces.
When later Christian scholars became interested in
the Old Testament, and compared the Judaic translations with the LXX,
they unavoidably resorted to the Jewish Bible, for by that time the Jews
had the edited Hebrew manuscripts and tools for their interpretation. As
you will recall, the H70, the old Hebrew Source of the Septuagint had
been destroyed by the nationalists. A great scholar, Origen, therefore
turned to the Jews for advice, and they gave him plenty of advice - only
their advice was based on their understanding of their
text. Origen decided to improve the Septuagint and emended the LXX
according to the Jewish Bible of his day. Some of these emendations made
their way into the body of the LXX. Still, the
Eastern Church remained rather safe, for the Septuagint remained the
official version of the Old Testament for the Greek-speaking East from
Constantinople to Alexandria.
But the West did not read Greek. For a long while,
the West used the Old Latin translations from the Septuagint; the unity
of the Church remained strong, but the translations were weak.
Eventually Jerome, a wonderful man and a great
scholar, who lived for 34 years in Palestine, decided to correct the Old
Latin translations and update them. He even began his work using the
Septuagint. Afterwards, though, he followed Origen and turned to the
Jews for their advice and interpretation. That was his undoing. He got
carried away, and took the fateful step that made the West susceptible
to Jewish influence. He parted with LXX and made a brand new translation
into Latin – from the Hebrew Bible of his day, the proto-MT. The Jews
surely liked the result, but St Augustine was shocked by this deed, and
wrote in The City of God:
Although the Jews acknowledge this very learned
labour [of Jerome translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew] to be
fruitful, while they contend that the Seventy translators have erred in
many places, still the churches of Christ judge that no one should be
preferred to the authority of [the Seventy], and we ought to believe
that the prophetic gift is with [the Seventy].
Contemporaries condemned Jerome, as they noticed that
he slowly began to appear more and more Jewish in his positions as he
got older and his Jewish friends began to have more influence. One of
his former friends, Rufinus, publicly attacked Jerome's Jewish leanings.
Jerome, in response to this work of Rufinus, freely admitted the truth
of Rufinus's claims. Jerome wrote in his own Apology: "There is nothing
to blame in my getting the help of a Jew in translating from the
Hebrew." He said that he “did not understand how Jewish interpretations
here and there would undermine the faith of Christians.” In this way the
Jews managed to plant the seed that would eventually blossom into the
acceptance of the Hebrew MT and the virtual abolition of the Greek
Septuagint, the authentic Christian Scriptures of Christ and His
Apostles.
A reason why Jerome, and Origen before him, accepted
the Jewish version was their lack of historical perspective. Perspective
in the visual art was discovered in 15th century, while the
historical perspective was not known until the seventeenth century.
Until that time, mankind was not aware of the torrent of Time. Don
Quixote considered Achilles and Hector to have been knights like himself
or like Lancelot. The Crusaders had thought the Muslim mosque of
Jerusalem was the Temple of Solomon. For Origen and Jerome, the Old
Testament was the Old Testament, and the Jews were the Jews. They did
not understand that the Hebrew text of the OT had been changed since the
days of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, when the Septuagint was produced. Some
of these changes were tendentious, others were due to scribal errors,
and still others were the result of misunderstanding.
Orthodox Bible scholar Nicolas Glubokovsky wrote:
“The Greek translation reproduced an independent Hebrew textual type
that was not severely censored and redacted by rabbinic authorities.
That is why LXX and MT do differ profoundly, and their readings of
messianic and Christian spirit are at loggerheads”.
Origen and Jerome believed the myth about careful
Jewish stewardship of the OT scrolls. They did not know that the Jews
had destroyed the manuscripts of other types. The Church had no such
practice, and at Jerome’s time there were “tot exemplaria paene quot
codices” — as many versions as there are codices. Islam, however,
followed the Jewish way, and all differing versions of the Koran were
destroyed, so only one type survived.
Jerome planted the seed of Jewish influence, and it
had made its major inroads by
the Ninth century, when the Vulgate of Jerome became universally
accepted. Still, the Old Testament was not widely read – Latin was not
universally understood and its influence remained somewhat limited –
that is, until the Protestants began to spread their translations of the
Old Testament in the vernacular.
The immediate result can be likened to an outbreak of
a long-sleeping disease: Previously unheard-of devastation and massacres
of civilians during the Thirty Years’ War were influenced by spread of
the MT-based vernacular translations, as the nations were infected by
its exclusivist nationalist spirit unknown in Europe until that time.
The King James Bible was translated from the MT, and the result was
amazing: the Brits began to consider themselves a racial new Israel of
the flesh, as opposed to the Church being regarded the New Israel of the
spirit. They fought the Church, and inflicted the ethnic cleansing
prescribed in the book of Joshua on their colonies in the New World.
They privatised the commons and turned ordinary British people into
paupers. The German Bible translated from the MT turned the Germans into
ferocious nationalists and eventually prepared the ground for Hitler.
Thus, the MT and its translations had an enormous, even magical, effect.
The petard placed in the second century below the walls of the Christian
society went off!
The Jews became the collective Merlin behind the
throne of a British King Arthur. People dissatisfied with this
pre-eminence of the Jews left Christianity for various heathen cults, or
became engrossed with the material side of the world. The
Judaisation of the West and the
degradation of its spirit accelerated.
Today, the translation battle continues as unabatedly
and as one-sidedly as ever. The Jews produce dozens of translations into
many languages, each more Judaic than the last. Some are openly Jewish,
like the Jewish Publication Society Bible, others are crypto-Jewish or
“Christian-Zionist”, like the Scofield Reference Bible that reduces the
Christian faith to ‘love of Jews and of the Jewish state”. This long,
hard work on these corrosive translations is the real Conspiracy of the
Elders of Zion.
Russia was the latest to submit to the Judaising
influence of the MT translation. Until the
late 19th century, the Russians were exposed only to the QEB,
the Old Slavonic translation from the Septuagint, and they were pious,
religious, loyal to the throne. In the late 19th century, the
pro-British Masonic Bible Society had published a translation of the MT
into the Russian vernacular. Very soon, the Jewish influence in Russia
began to rise. However, the Russian Church did not accept this Judaised
Russian Bible for liturgical purposes, and continues to pray and read
from the QEB. This caused a tragic rift between the LXX-orientated
Church and MT-induced reading public, a rift that came to forefront with
the Revolution.
Let me add yet another disclosure: As an ex-Jew who
was received into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, I am acutely
and personally aware of the continuous struggle of these two spirits in
the world. Will the Christian world submit to Judaisation, or will the
Jews accept Christ? A few days ago, in a church in the Holy Land, I saw
a Bible in Hebrew published by a Christian society for the purpose of
bringing the Jews to Christ. However, the Old Testament had been
reproduced from the MT. If a Jew sees that Christians actually use the
Jewish text prepared by anti-Christian Jewish Rabbis, how can he ever
accept the Christian interpretation? The encounter of Jews and
Christians should bring Jews to the Church, not lead to Christians
leaving the Church in dismay.
Proselytising efforts usually fail because the Jews
consider themselves the guardians of the Scripture, while they should
be seen as keepers of their own distinct text on a par with the Aramaic
Peshitta, the Ethiopian Bible or the Samaritan Torah.
The MT is the petard laid centuries ago under the
besieged City of God’s fortifications. The reconstruction of the Hebrew
OT according to the LXX would hoist the Jewish sappers on their own
petard and relieve the siege. A truly Christian Hebrew Bible has now
become a distinct possibility. The H70, the Hebrew Source of the LXX,
can be reconstructed on the basis of the textological discoveries of the
last hundred years, with the help of the Qumran scrolls. We can do it –
we can do it fairly quickly and fairly accurately. We intend to do it,
with your help. Such a publication will become the turning point in this
millennial struggle. The battle will be carried into the adversary’s
territory for the first time since A.D. 128, when Rabbi Akiba’s disciple
and convert Aquila produced his Judaic translation of the OT into Greek.
If this project had been attempted by the young Church in the second
century, the Jewish influence today would be the same as the Samaritan
one – negligible. Now it is late, but not too late.
People who doubt the very possibility of
reconstructing H70 usually refer to the multiple interpretations and
versions within the sea of LXX manuscripts. These objections are not
sincere. The Church has an exact answer regarding interpretations and
versions, and we can trust Her inspiration. In our dark times of
confusion, we can follow the interpretation of the Queen Elizabeth
Bible, as I said in the beginning.
Why the Queen Elizabeth Bible, and not any other? Why
not the Greek text? The QE Bible was prepared in the least Judaised
country of the Christian world, in 18th century Russia, under the royal
protection of its least Judaised queen. Queen Elizabeth was asked to
permit Jewish traders to enter Russia, as they would bring her much
profit, and she replied: “I wish no profit from Christ’s enemies.”
Western ideas (and in their guise, Judaic influence) made few inroads
then. The QE Bible was edited by churchmen, not by scientists, and
edited within the full view of the Church tradition. The QE Bible can be
likened to a mammoth unearthed in the frozen tundra – its corpse
survived for millennia because it was protected by permafrost. One may
dislike permafrost and prefer the tropics, but permafrost is better for
preservation. Likewise, one may prefer more Westernised, more Judaised
Christianity, but if one wants to discover the pure old Hellene
tradition, one can turn to Queen Elizabeth.
The Septuagint has plural interpretations and various
versions. The QEB has the great advantage of being a single text based
on the LXX and fully approved by the Church. Its language is lucid, its
meaning is clear, and this allows us to find and reconstruct its lost
Hebrew source. (However, other possible approaches could be considered.)
The reconstruction of the Pentateuch can be completed soon – with your
help.
In order to receive a few chapters of our tentative
reconstruction of H70, send an email to
adam@israelshamir.net with subject H70.
Your contribution is tax-exempt in the US; for small contributions use
PayPal to the email above; for bigger contributions a bank account will
be supplied upon request.
Israel Shamir
Translator of the medieval Jewish work Sefer
Yohassin by Rabbi Abraham Zacuto into English, see
www.zacuto.org
Translator of Homer’s
Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses into Russian, see
www.israelshamir.net/ru .
Translator of SY Agnon
into Russian.
Edited by Ken Freeland, Texas