Unit 15 · Text, Transmission and Translation

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient manuscripts found in eleven caves near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947. Over the following decade, Bedouin searchers and archaeologists recovered fragments of roughly nine hundred separate manuscripts. Most are small pieces, some no bigger than a fingernail. A few are nearly whole scrolls.

About a quarter of the scrolls are copies of books of the Tanakh. Scholars have identified fragments of every book except Esther. The rest are other writings: prayers, rules for a community, commentaries on prophets, and books later left out of the Jewish canon. Most are in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, and a few in Greek. Scholars date them, by handwriting and by carbon testing, from about the third century BCE to the first century CE.

Who put them there is still debated. Many scholars connect the scrolls with a Jewish group that lived at Qumran, often identified with the Essenes described by the ancient writers Josephus and Pliny. Others argue the caves held books brought from Jerusalem for safety before the Roman war of 66–70 CE. Either way, the scrolls give readers a window into the text of the Tanakh a thousand years before the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles that survived elsewhere.

The best-known scroll from Cave 1 is the Great Isaiah Scroll, which scholars label 1QIsa-a. It holds the whole book of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters, written in fifty-four columns on seventeen sheets of leather sewn together. Unrolled, it is about 7.3 meters long, roughly the length of a school bus’s front half. Scholars date the copying to about 125 BCE, give or take a few decades.

What does the scroll show? First, that the book of Isaiah already had the shape it has today more than two thousand years ago. Chapters 1 to 39 and chapters 40 to 66, which many modern scholars think come from different times, sit together on one scroll with only a small gap. Second, that the text was already very close to the one Jews read now. A reader who knows the medieval Hebrew text can read this scroll without much trouble.

The differences are real but mostly small. The scroll uses more vowel-letters, extra letters that hint at pronunciation, so many words are spelled longer. Some words are switched or dropped. In a few places the wording differs in ways readers care about. Isaiah 53:11, for example, includes the word light, so the servant sees light, where the later standard text has no object for the verb. Scholars weigh such cases one at a time.

Today the scroll is kept at the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and a high-resolution image of it can be studied online. Jewish tradition does not treat the scroll as a rival to the received text. It plays no role in the synagogue. For historians, though, it is the most important witness to how a prophetic book looked in the late Second Temple period.

Put the Great Isaiah Scroll beside a printed Hebrew Bible and the first lesson is stability. Over roughly eleven centuries, from about 125 BCE to the Aleppo Codex around 930 CE, copyists carried the book of Isaiah forward with remarkable care. Scholars who count every difference find that the great majority are spelling, and most of the rest do not change the meaning. This is why the Qumran finds strengthened, rather than shook, confidence in the received Hebrew text.

The second lesson is that the text was not frozen. Other Qumran scrolls show more variety than the Isaiah scroll. Some copies of Jeremiah are close to the Hebrew text we have; others are shorter and ordered differently, like the Greek Septuagint. A copy of Samuel from Cave 4 preserves lines about King Nahash of Ammon that the received text lacks. A Psalms scroll from Cave 11 orders the psalms differently and includes songs not in the book of Psalms.

Scholars describe this period as one of textual plurality: several forms of some books circulated side by side. By about the second century CE, one form, the ancestor of the Masoretic Text, had become the standard among Jews. The Masoretic Text, or MT, is the Hebrew text as fixed and annotated by the Masoretes of the early Middle Ages, and it is the text every synagogue scroll and every Jewish translation follows. Jewish tradition holds this text as authoritative; historians study how it came to be so.

By the third century BCE many Jews lived in Alexandria, the Greek-speaking capital of Egypt, and fewer and fewer of them could read Hebrew. In that setting the Torah was translated into Greek. Tradition dates the work to the reign of Ptolemy II, around 250 BCE. The other books followed over the next century or two. The whole is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy, and is often written with the Roman numeral LXX.

The name comes from a legend told in the Letter of Aristeas, a Greek text from perhaps the second century BCE. It says King Ptolemy asked the high priest in Jerusalem for scholars, and seventy-two elders came, six from each tribe, and produced the translation for the royal library. Later tellings, in Philo and in the Talmud, add that the translators worked separately and yet agreed word for word. Historians read the letter as a story told to honor the translation, not a report.

The Septuagint mattered enormously. It was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews for centuries, and it became the Old Testament of the early Christian church. When the New Testament quotes Scripture, it usually quotes the Greek. Over time, as Christians adopted the Septuagint, Jewish communities returned to the Hebrew, and new Greek translations closer to the Hebrew were made by Jewish translators such as Aquila in the second century CE.

For students of the text, the Septuagint is a witness in its own right. Because the translators worked from Hebrew manuscripts older than any we have, their Greek sometimes shows what their Hebrew said. Where the Greek differs from the Masoretic Text, a scholar asks: did the translator have a different Hebrew, misread it, or choose to interpret? The Qumran scrolls often help answer, since some of them agree with the Greek against the later Hebrew.

Anyone who reads Jeremiah in Greek and in Hebrew notices at once that they are not the same size. The Greek Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter, and the oracles against foreign nations, which come at the end of the Hebrew book, sit in the middle of the Greek one. Fragments of Jeremiah from Qumran Cave 4 show that a shorter Hebrew form once existed too. Many scholars think the Greek translates an earlier edition of the book and the Hebrew a later, expanded one.

The Septuagint also numbers the Psalms differently, joining and splitting a few. From Psalm 10 to Psalm 147 the Greek number is one lower than the Hebrew. Catholic Bibles long followed the Greek numbering; Jewish and Protestant Bibles follow the Hebrew. The Greek collection also holds books outside the Jewish canon. Among them are Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira, and longer forms of Esther and Daniel.

Then there are single words. The most discussed is Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word almah means a young woman of marriageable age. The Septuagint rendered it with the Greek parthenos, which usually means virgin. The Gospel of Matthew quotes the Greek. Jewish translations render the Hebrew: the JPS 1917 says the young woman, and so does the NJPS. Christian translations divide; the King James says a virgin, while several modern Christian versions say young woman with a note. The next chapter returns to this verse.

After the Babylonian exile, many Jews spoke Aramaic, a language close to Hebrew and the common tongue of the Persian Empire. When the Torah was read aloud in synagogue, a translator would render each verse into Aramaic so that everyone could follow. These spoken translations were eventually written down as the Targums, from the Aramaic word for translation. The Mishnah already describes the practice: one verse of Torah, then its translation, verse by verse.

The best-known Targums are Targum Onkelos on the Torah and Targum Jonathan on the Prophets, both edited into their present form in Babylonia by about the fourth or fifth century CE. Onkelos stays close to the Hebrew but softens language that gives God a body. Where the Hebrew says God’s hand or God’s anger, Onkelos often speaks of God’s word or God’s presence. Rashi cites Onkelos constantly, and traditional printed Bibles set it beside the Hebrew.

The Samaritan Pentateuch is different in kind. The Samaritans are a community, still living today near Nablus and in Holon, who hold only the five books of Moses as Scripture and worship on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. Their Torah, written in an older Hebrew script, differs from the Masoretic Text in about six thousand places. Most are spelling and grammar. Some agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, which suggests an old shared source.

A few Samaritan readings reflect the community’s beliefs. In Deuteronomy 27:4 the Masoretic Text says the altar is to be built on Mount Ebal; the Samaritan text says Mount Gerizim. The Samaritan version of the Ten Commandments adds a commandment to build that altar on Gerizim. Scholars debate which reading is older in each case. What is not in doubt is that a community’s text and a community’s practice shaped each other, as they did for Jews, Christians and Samaritans alike.

Hebrew is written with consonants. A Torah scroll today, like the scrolls at Qumran, has no vowels at all. A reader who knows the language supplies them, the way an English reader can read a sign that says PLS CLS DR. But two words can share consonants and differ in vowels, and a text read in public across many communities needs a fixed pronunciation. The Masoretes met that need.

The Masoretes were families of Jewish scholars, most famously in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, who worked from about the seventh to the tenth century CE. Their name comes from masorah, tradition, the handing-down of the text. They devised a system of dots and dashes, the vowel points, written above, below and inside the consonants, that fixed how every word is read. A related system of marks, the cantillation accents, fixed how the verse is chanted and where its phrases break.

Two families of Tiberian Masoretes, Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, differed in small details. The text of Aaron ben Asher, of the early tenth century, became the standard. Maimonides, writing in the twelfth century, praised a codex checked by Ben Asher as the model he used for his own Torah scroll. Other systems of vowel marks, from Babylonia and from the Land of Israel, were used for a time and then fell out of use.

The Masoretes did not invent the pronunciation; they recorded the reading tradition their communities had inherited. Jewish tradition holds that the reading, like the letters, goes back to Sinai. Historians see in the points a snapshot of how Hebrew was read in Tiberias around 900 CE. Either way, the points changed the Bible forever. Every printed Hebrew Bible, every translation since the Middle Ages, and every student’s first Hebrew lesson rests on the Masoretes’ dots.

Around the text on the page of a Masoretic codex runs a second text in tiny script: the masorah. The notes in the side margins, the masorah parva or small masorah, tell the reader how many times a spelling appears in the Bible. The notes at the top and bottom, the masorah magna or large masorah, list where. At the end of each book stand totals: the number of verses, the middle verse, the number of words and letters.

The point was to make copying checkable. If a scribe knows that a certain word is spelled without a vowel-letter exactly four times in the Torah, and lists where, a wrong spelling stands out. If the count of verses in Genesis comes out wrong, a verse has been dropped or doubled. The Talmud already records scholars who were called counters because they counted every letter of the Torah, and it notes the middle letter, middle word and middle verse of the Torah.

One class of note deserves its own mention: ketiv and qere, what is written and what is read. In more than a thousand places the Masoretes preserved the consonants of the received text but marked in the margin a different word to be read aloud. Sometimes the ketiv looks like a scribal slip; sometimes the qere avoids a coarse word or a divine name. The scroll keeps the written form; the reader follows the margin. The tradition chose to record both rather than erase either.

A scroll is written on one side, unrolled to read, and used in synagogue. A codex is a book of pages sewn at the spine, written on both sides, easy to open to any place and to fill with notes. Jews began using the codex for the Bible around the eighth or ninth century CE, keeping the scroll for ritual reading. The great Masoretic codices are the fruit of that change.

The Aleppo Codex was written in Tiberias around 930 CE. Its vowels and masorah were added, tradition and most scholars agree, by Aaron ben Asher himself, which made it the most authoritative Hebrew Bible in existence. It passed to Jerusalem, was carried off by Crusaders and ransomed, reached Cairo, where Maimonides is believed to have consulted it, and was kept for six centuries in the great synagogue of Aleppo in Syria. In riots in Aleppo in December 1947, the synagogue was burned. The codex survived, but about a third of its pages, including nearly all the Torah, were lost. What remains is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The Leningrad Codex was completed in Cairo in 1008 CE by a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob, who says he copied from manuscripts corrected by Ben Asher. It is the oldest complete Masoretic Bible that survives. It came into the collection of Abraham Firkovich and is now in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, keeping the name it acquired when the city was Leningrad. Because it is complete, it became the base text of the standard scholarly edition, the Biblia Hebraica, from 1937 on.

Neither codex is used in synagogue; ritual reading is always from a scroll. But a scribe writing a scroll, a printer setting a Hebrew Bible, or a JPS committee checking a verse all depend on them. The chain of authority runs back through these two books to the Masoretes of Tiberias. Jewish tradition sees in them the careful preservation of a text received. Historians see the earliest complete evidence of the Masoretic achievement.

Textual criticism is the study of a text’s witnesses, manuscripts and ancient translations, to work out how the text was transmitted and what its earliest recoverable form said. It is not criticism in the sense of finding fault. A textual critic asks simple questions. Which reading do the witnesses support? Which reading best explains how the others arose? Which errors do copyists usually make?

Deuteronomy 32:8 is a favorite example. In the Masoretic Text, the Song of Moses says that when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, He set their borders according to the number of the children of Israel. In the Septuagint the last words are according to the number of the angels of God. A small Hebrew fragment from Qumran Cave 4 reads sons of God. Many scholars think sons of God is the older reading. It may have been changed because it seemed to speak of many divine beings, and the Greek translators may have softened it to angels.

Jewish tradition reads the received text. Rashi explains children of Israel as the seventy who went down to Egypt, matching the seventy nations of Genesis 10. The rabbinic reading and the historical reading are answering different questions: one asks what the verse means in the Torah as received, the other asks what the earliest copy said. A student in a public school can learn both and keep them straight.

A few working rules guide textual critics. The harder reading is often earlier, because copyists tend to smooth. The shorter reading is often earlier, because copyists tend to add. A reading that explains the others is preferred. None of these is a law; each case is weighed. For most of the Tanakh the witnesses agree, and the work concerns spelling. For a few hundred verses, the questions are real and open.

Printing reached the Hebrew Bible late in the fifteenth century, and the decisive edition came from Venice. Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp, published a first Rabbinic Bible in 1517 and a second, far more careful, in 1524–25. Its editor was Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah, a Jewish scholar from Tunis, who gathered manuscripts and reconstructed the masorah from them. The Rabbinic Bible set the Hebrew text in the middle of the page with Targum Onkelos and the commentaries of Rashi, Ibn Ezra and others around it.

Ben Hayyim’s text became the received text of the Hebrew Bible for the next four hundred years. Christian scholars used it too; the translators of the King James Version worked from editions descended from it. Its page layout became the model for the Mikraot Gedolot, the great rabbinic Bibles still printed today, in which a student reads the verse and a thousand years of commentary on one opening.

In the twentieth century editors went back behind Bomberg to the manuscripts. Biblia Hebraica in its third edition of 1937 and its successor, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia of 1977, print the Leningrad Codex with notes on variants. The Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem builds its edition on the Aleppo Codex. Israeli editions such as the Koren Tanakh and the Jerusalem Crown likewise follow the codices. The differences among all of these are small; the Masoretic tradition is one.

So the text today is a meeting point. A Torah scroll in a Chicago synagogue is written by a scribe following rules that go back through the Rabbinic Bible and the Masoretes. A scholar’s edition prints the same consonants with a note wherever Qumran or the Greek differ. A translation committee sits between them. Jewish tradition holds the text it received; the history of that text is something anyone can study.

Open the Tanakh in two English versions and the first sentence already differs. The King James Version of 1611 begins, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and so does the Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. But the New JPS of 1985 begins differently: When God began to create heaven and earth. The Hebrew is the same seven words. What changed is how the translators read the grammar of the first word, bereshit.

Rashi, in the eleventh century, had already argued that bereshit means in the beginning of, so that verse 1 is a clause leading into verse 2, not a complete sentence about a first act. The NJPS committee followed that reading of the grammar. The King James followed the older tradition, shared by the Septuagint, of a full sentence. Neither is a mistranslation. Each is an interpretation of ambiguous Hebrew, made in English where the reader cannot see the ambiguity.

That is the rule for every verse. The Hebrew has no capital letters, so a translator decides whether a word like spirit is a name. It has few punctuation marks of the modern kind, so a translator decides where a sentence ends. Its verbs mark aspect more than tense, so a translator decides whether an action is past or ongoing. Every such decision is a reading, and a reader who knows only English is reading the translator’s reading.

In Isaiah 7 the prophet speaks to King Ahaz of Judah, who is frightened by two kings marching against Jerusalem, around 734 BCE. Isaiah offers a sign: a young woman is pregnant and will bear a son named Immanuel, God is with us, and before the child knows right from wrong the two kings will be gone. In its setting the sign is about the next few years of Ahaz’s reign. The Hebrew word for the woman is almah, a young woman of marriageable age.

The Septuagint rendered almah with parthenos, a Greek word that usually means virgin. The Gospel of Matthew, quoting the Greek, read the verse as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus. From then on the verse belonged to two communities reading it two ways. Christian translations, from the Latin Vulgate to the King James, wrote virgin. Jewish readers, including Rashi, insisted the Hebrew says young woman and that the sign is about Ahaz’s time.

The JPS 1917 committee, translating for Jews, wrote the young woman. The King James wrote a virgin. Neither committee was careless; each was faithful to a tradition of reading. In 1952 a Protestant translation, the Revised Standard Version, also wrote young woman, and some readers publicly burned copies in protest. That reaction shows what is at stake in a single word: not grammar only, but which community’s reading a Bible will carry.

A public-school student does not have to decide who is right. What a student can do is state each reading accurately: the Hebrew word, what it means in the rest of the Tanakh, what the Greek did with it, and how Jewish and Christian readers have understood the verse since. That is the discipline this course asks for, and Isaiah 7:14 is the clearest place to practice it.

Genesis 1:2 describes the earth before creation with a Hebrew phrase of two rhyming words, tohu va-vohu. The words are rare; tohu means emptiness or waste, and vohu appears only beside it. The King James wrote without form, and void, a phrase that entered English. JPS 1917 wrote unformed and void. NJPS 1985 kept unformed and void. Each of these gives the sense and lets the sound go.

Two modern translators went the other way. Robert Alter, in his translation completed in 2018, and Everett Fox, in The Five Books of Moses of 1995, each chose a pair of English words beginning with the same sound, so that an English reader hears the echo of the Hebrew pair. Their choices differ, but their aim is the same: to carry the poetry, not only the meaning. A reader who compares all five learns something no single version can teach.

This is why serious study uses more than one translation. The course text is JPS 1917, because it is a Jewish translation in the public domain, and because its English, close to the King James, lets a student hear the older tradition. Beside it a student can set NJPS for clearer sense, Alter or Fox for sound, and the King James to see what English literature inherited. Where they agree, the Hebrew is plain. Where they differ, there is something to learn.

None of this makes translation hopeless. Most verses of the Tanakh are narrative and law, and their sense crosses into English well. The hard cases are poetry, wordplay, and a small set of words that hold whole ideas. The rest of this chapter looks at those words, and at the people who have sat at the translator’s table.

The Jewish Publication Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1888 to publish Jewish books in English. American Jews had used Isaac Leeser’s translation of 1853, the work of one man. Or they used Christian Bibles, with the Christian order of books and Christian readings of verses like Isaiah 7:14. The Society decided a new translation was needed. After a first attempt book by book, it appointed a committee in 1908.

The editor-in-chief was Max Margolis, a Hebrew scholar born in Lithuania who taught at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. The committee of six who reviewed his drafts included rabbis and professors from Reform and traditional backgrounds, and Cyrus Adler chaired its board. They agreed to take the English Revised Version of 1885 as their base, keeping its language where it matched the Hebrew and revising wherever Jewish tradition or the Hebrew required. The work took seven years and appeared in 1917.

The result reads much like the King James: thee and thou, shall and hath. But it follows the Tanakh’s order and its 24 books, ends with Chronicles, uses the Hebrew verse numbering, renders almah as young woman, and consults Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Kimchi throughout. Its preface says the translators aimed to combine the spirit of Jewish tradition with the results of biblical scholarship. For most of the twentieth century it was the English Bible of American synagogues, and it remains in print and freely available.

By the 1950s the 1917 English sounded old, and scholarship on Hebrew had moved. The Jewish Publication Society began a new translation. The Torah appeared in 1962 under Harry Orlinsky, a professor who had also served on the Protestant Revised Standard Version committee, the only Jewish scholar to do so. The Prophets followed in 1978 and the Writings in 1982, and the whole appeared as one volume in 1985, the NJPS, or New JPS Tanakh.

The committee’s method was different. Where 1917 kept the word order and rhythm of the older English, NJPS aimed at idiomatic English, translating the sense of a Hebrew sentence into the sentence an English writer would use. Thee and thou are gone. Where the Hebrew is uncertain, a footnote says Meaning of Hebrew uncertain. Where the Hebrew can be read two ways, a footnote gives the other. Rashi and the medieval commentators are consulted, but so is the study of related languages such as Ugaritic and Akkadian.

The gains are clarity and honesty about doubt. The costs are the ones every idiomatic translation pays: the reader cannot see the Hebrew word order, repeated words are sometimes varied for English style, and a phrase that once echoed the King James no longer does. NJPS is the translation printed in most American non-Orthodox synagogue Bibles today. Because it is under copyright, this course describes it but quotes only JPS 1917.

In 1925 two German-Jewish thinkers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, began a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. They believed that the Bible was meant to be spoken and heard. Earlier translations, including Luther’s, had in their view smoothed it into good German prose and lost the Hebrew’s voice. Their aim was to make German do what Hebrew does. Keep the word order. Keep repeated words repeated. Break the text into breath-units, lines the length of a spoken phrase.

Rosenzweig, already ill, died in 1929 with the work at Isaiah. Buber continued alone, through his emigration to Jerusalem in 1938 and the destruction of the German-Jewish world for which the translation had been made, and finished it in 1961. He called the completed work Die Schrift, the Scripture. Readers still find it strange and powerful: German that sounds like Hebrew.

Everett Fox, an American scholar, applied the same principles to English. His The Five Books of Moses appeared in 1995, followed by The Early Prophets in 2014. Fox prints the text in lines, not paragraphs, keeps Hebrew names in Hebrew form, so Moses is Moshe and Isaac is Yitzhak, and lets a Hebrew word that repeats ten times repeat ten times in English. His translations are used in classrooms where teachers want students to hear the text’s structure.

The Buber–Rosenzweig–Fox approach is one answer to the question this chapter keeps asking. If translation must lose something, what should it keep? JPS 1917 kept the tradition of English Bibles. NJPS kept the sense. Buber, Rosenzweig and Fox kept the sound and the shape. A reader can hold all three answers and choose the one the moment needs.

Chesed is one of the most frequent words in the Tanakh’s poetry and one of the hardest to carry into English. It names loyal, active kindness inside a relationship: what a person does for family, ally or covenant partner because of the bond between them. Ruth’s care for Naomi is chesed. God’s steadfast love for Israel in the Psalms is chesed. The prophet Hosea says God desires chesed and not sacrifice. JPS 1917 renders it mercy, kindness or lovingkindness as the verse seems to ask.

Tzedek, with its relative tzedakah, names what is right: justice in a court, fairness in weights and measures, righteousness in a person. In later Hebrew tzedakah came to mean giving to the poor, since the rabbis saw such giving as justice owed, not charity offered. English splits the idea. Justice sounds like courts; righteousness sounds like personal goodness. The Hebrew holds both in one word, so a verse about tzedek in the market is also a verse about tzedek before God.

Micah 6:8 puts the two words side by side. The prophet asks what the LORD requires and answers, as JPS 1917 has it, to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. In Hebrew the second phrase is to love chesed. A reader of the English sees mercy and may think of pardon. A reader of the Hebrew hears the whole cluster: loyalty, kindness, the duty of a bond. That is why a study Bible glosses the word, and why this course teaches it.

In Genesis 2:7, as JPS 1917 tells it, God forms the human from the dust, breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human becomes a living nefesh. The 1917 English says living soul, following the King James. But nefesh in the Tanakh is not a soul separate from a body. It is the living being itself, the throat that breathes and hungers, the self. Animals are nefesh too in Genesis 1. Later English translations often write living being for that reason.

Ruach means wind, breath and spirit, and the Hebrew does not choose among them. In Genesis 1:2 a ruach of God moves over the waters: the King James wrote Spirit of God, JPS 1917 wrote spirit of God with a small s, and NJPS wrote a wind from God. Each is a reading. In Ezekiel 37 the prophet calls to the ruach to breathe into the dry bones, and the chapter plays on all three senses at once, wind, breath and spirit, in a way no English can follow without a note.

Shalom is usually translated peace, and peace is not wrong. But the Hebrew root means wholeness and completeness. To ask after someone’s shalom is to ask how they are; to pay shalom, in Exodus 21 and 22, is to make restitution in full. Peace in English suggests the absence of war or of noise. Shalom in Hebrew suggests the presence of everything that should be there. A reader who keeps that in mind hears the greeting shalom, and the prayer for shalom in the synagogue, differently.

The word torah comes from a Hebrew root meaning to point out or to teach. In the Tanakh it can mean a single rule, a body of instruction, or the whole teaching of Moses. Proverbs speaks of the torah of a mother. Psalm 19 praises the torah of the LORD as perfect, restoring the soul. In later Jewish usage Torah means the five books, and then the whole of Jewish teaching, written and oral.

The Septuagint translated torah with the Greek nomos, law, and the Latin and English Bibles followed: the law of the LORD, the law of Moses. Law is not wrong; much of the Torah is law. But law in English suggests courts, penalties and a code, and the word carried into Christian writing a picture of Judaism as a religion of rules against a religion of grace. Jewish scholars from the nineteenth century on have pointed out that torah as teaching, instruction and way is closer to what the word does in Hebrew.

JPS 1917 still writes law, following the older English. NJPS often writes teaching, and its Psalm 19 has the teaching of the LORD is perfect. Alter and Fox make similar choices. A student who reads law in the course text can hold the Hebrew in mind, and can notice that Jewish tradition itself calls the study of these books not law school but Torah study, learning. The word chosen in translation shapes the image of a whole tradition; that is the largest reason translation matters.

The same lesson applies to mitzvah, commandment, which in Jewish life also means a good deed done because it is commanded, and to brit, covenant, which JPS 1917 renders covenant every time but which English readers may hear as a mere contract. In each case the translator can only choose a word. The reader must learn the rest.

In Exodus 3, at the burning bush, Moses asks what he should say when the Israelites ask the name of the God who sent him. The answer, as JPS 1917 has it, is I AM THAT I AM, and then a four-letter name related to the Hebrew verb to be. That name appears more than six thousand times in the Tanakh, more often than any other name. It is written in every Torah scroll. And for at least two thousand years Jews have not said it aloud.

Jewish tradition holds that the name was pronounced only by the high priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur. After the Temple’s destruction the pronunciation was no longer taught, and the Mishnah lists one who pronounces the name as written among those who forfeit their share in the world to come. In reading, Jews substitute Adonai, my Lord, and in ordinary speech many say HaShem, the Name. The Masoretes marked the four letters with the vowels of the substitute word as a reminder. Some Jews extend the care to English and write G-d.

Translations followed the reading, not the writing. The Septuagint wrote Kyrios, Lord. The King James wrote the LORD in small capitals wherever the four letters stand, and Lord in ordinary type where the Hebrew says Adonai. JPS 1917 kept that convention, and this course does too. NJPS keeps the LORD as well. A few Christian and scholarly versions transliterate the name with vowels; Jewish translations do not, and Fox writes YHWH, the four consonants alone, so that a reader sees a name and says the substitute.

For a student, the practical rule is simple. When the English says the LORD in capitals, the Hebrew has the four-letter name; when it says God, the Hebrew usually has Elohim; when it says Lord, the Hebrew has Adonai. Knowing that, a reader of JPS 1917 can see which name a passage uses. That matters in Genesis, where scholars have long noticed that some passages prefer one name and some the other.

Ask three questions of any Bible on a shelf. Who made it? For whom? Why? The King James was made by about fifty Church of England scholars for the English church and crown in 1611, and it reads Christian theology into some verses of the Tanakh. JPS 1917 was made by a committee of American Jews for American synagogues. NJPS was made by Jewish scholars for a community that wanted modern English and modern scholarship. Fox translated for readers who want to hear the Hebrew. None of these is neutral; each is honest about its purpose.

Who is at the table matters in other ways. Until the twentieth century almost every published Bible translator was a man; the JPS committees of 1908 and the 1960s had no women. Recent Jewish translations and commentaries have changed that, and some, such as the 2006 Contemporary Torah from JPS, revisit the rendering of gendered language about people and about God. Whether such changes are faithful or unfaithful is debated inside Jewish communities, as it is inside Christian ones. A student can report the debate without joining it.

For whom also shapes the page. A synagogue Bible prints the Hebrew and English facing each other, with the weekly readings marked. A scholar’s edition prints notes on variants. A children’s Bible retells. An interfaith edition may print Jewish and Christian readings of a verse side by side. In Chicago, a student can find all of these within a few miles: in synagogue libraries, at the Newberry Library, at the university libraries, and in the Spertus Institute’s collection.

So the last skill of this unit is a habit. When you read a verse in English, ask which translation it is, when it was made, and by whom; check the Hebrew word if it matters; and, where readers differ, say who reads it which way. That habit is not suspicion. It is what respect for a text looks like when the text has been translated for two thousand years.