The Bible in Living English by Steven T. Byington

1599 Pages·2005·15.99 MB·English

THE BIBLE
IN LIVING ENGLISH
Translated by Steven J. Byington
This Bible has been printed as its translator, Steven T.
Byington, prepared it. The spelling of names, choice of
words, sentence structure and punctuation are according
to his typewritten manuscript.
Chapter and verse divisions are largely the same as in
other translations. But it will be observed that, in some
places, the verse numbers are not in numerical order, or
a certain verse number may not appear at all. Frequently
the reason is explained in the Marginal Notes.
COPYRIGHT, 1972
by
WATCH TOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY
OF PENNSYLVANIA
Total printing as of 1981:
225,000 Copies
PUBLISHERS
WATCHTOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK, INC.
International Bible Students Association
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.
Made in the United States of America
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
When I began making this translation, the chief topic of a preface would
have been the reasons why a new translation of the Bible should be made.
At present its first duty is to tell how this one differs from other new
translations now extant.
The central purpose of this translation, the reason for which it exists,
is to put the Bible into living present-day English. Such was the motive of
William Tyndale when he made the translation which, with some revisions,
is now in general use; and the same reasons which made his work necessary
make the like work necessary today. If the Bible is worth much for the
man on the street, it must speak to him in his language. A man who was
brought up on the Bible and Shakespeare should presume himself in-
competent to perceive how far their language is a foreign language to most
people today.
In general, the Bible is not an archaic book except so far as it is foreign.
In general, the original Hebrew and Greek was living Hebrew and Greek
when it was written down. No doubt there are cases where the original has
a word which was archaic when it was written, and in such a case an
archaic English expression will be appropriate; but such cases are ex-
ceptional.
But I say "put the Bible into" such language. I conceive that the Bible
does not consist only of the gist of what the prophets and apostles said, but
includes also their way of saying it. To say in my own words what I
thought the prophet or apostle was driving at would not, to my mind, be
real translation; nor yet to analyze into a string of separate words all the
implications which the original may have carried in one word; the difference
between conciseness and prolixity is one difference between the Bible and
something else. So far as a translation does not keep to this standard, it is
a commentary rather than a translation: a very legitimate and useful form
of commentary, but it leaves the field of translation unfilled. I think some
recent translations have not sufficiently resisted these temptations. Un-
doubtedly a translation cannot in these respects be perfect, and these are
matters in which the work of limited human powers is sure to be even
less perfect than it might and should be; but at least I have kept these
aims before me. I have felt that the familiar old version set about the
right standard for the degree of literalness.
The new official Revised Standard Version has taken the view that the
New Testament was written at a time when the Greek language was no
longer used with precision by ordinary people, so that an attempt at great
precision in translation is superfluous, and a rather free translation may
rightly be used for the sake of smooth English. My view, on the contrary,
is that everything in this world has a cause; when anybody uses one word
and not another, there is always a cause for its being this word and not
that; and it is a translator's business to come as near as he can to the
ideal of always recognizing the cause and reproducing the effect. The person,
educated or uneducated, who uses one word without discrimination of its
strict meaning will use another word with very strict discrimination, and
the word that he does not discriminate is likely to be discriminated by his
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next-door neighbor. And the effort to gain smoothness by abandoning pre-
cision is not favorable even to English literary style: it tends toward
monotony; it tends to lose the sharp flavor that the original got by choosing
an unobvious word; and of course, when the original expressed an epigram-
matic significance in crabbed language because no other language would
have expressed it without prolixity, the insistence on smoothness tends to
lose this significance. Phrases in my translation which look like fanciful
attempts to decorate my style are likely to be simply careful attempts to
reproduce the original with unwonted precision. Even where a distinction
between two forms of expression means no more than that different forms
are habitual to different writers, or that a writer varied his form for the
sake of avoiding monotony, the distinction should not be abandoned without
considering what could have been done to keep it.
But this principle of keeping to the original writer's form of expression
permits, and even demands, a departure from what is ordinarily under-
stood by literalness when his form of expression was dictated by some con-
straint in his language, and English is exempt from that constraint. Thus,
Hebrew and Greek, like most languages, are much less thorough than
present-day English in distinguishing between such forms as "walks" and
"is walking." It is the translator's business to make the distinction, even
though the imperfection of the ancient languages requires him to make it
more or less by guess; if he fails to make it he is not using twentieth-
century English but sixteenth-century English, and is obscuring the sense
as the original did not obscure it. If Hebrew has no way to say "never"
except by just saying "not," then where I find "not" in Hebrew I am right
in saying "never" if it seems preferable in English; for the Hebrew writer
had used the only way he had to say "never." I might well have said
"never" in my Old Testament oftener than I have. If in order to express
the idea of "servant" and cover both sexes the Hebrew has to use a separate
word for each sex, then my proper translation for the Hebrew combination
of two nouns and an "and" is the one word "servant," not a lengthening
of the English by prefixing to "servant" another word to indicate the sex
(which the Hebrew does not do) and saying "manservant or maidservant."
The test is generally whether the English, translated into Hebrew or Greek,
would have had to give what the Hebrew or Greek writer wrote. This also
is a principle hard to live up to, but I have aimed at remembering it.
Our knowledge of Hebrew is to a considerable extent dependent on
traditions which are by no means free from error. So is our knowledge of
New Testament Greek, slightly, and so are our habits of translating New
Testament Greek, not so slightly. One of the commonest tendencies to error
has been the tendency to forget the specific meaning of a word and to
substitute, by guess, a broader meaning which is broad enough to cover
whatever that word can probably have meant. Thus our Hebrew dictionary
gets an oversupply of loose synonyms for broad meanings with a tendency
toward the abstract, and an undersupply of distinctive terms for specific
things. For instance, the Hebrews were troubled with lions, and had a good
vocabulary for lions; they had a specific name for a young beast that was
about as formidable as any in a fight, but yet was readily distinguishable
from an adult. Considering the way in which lions grow, this can hardly
be other than the male that has reached full size but has not yet got its
mane; it is then two years old. If our forefathers had found these creatures
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in America, they would probably have said "two-year-old" unless they were
able to borrow an Indian word. Our traditional rendering is the loose
"young lion," which often looks as if it meant a mere cub. "Two-year-old"
gives the conception more accurately; and, as in the case of most words,
the more accurate rendering is the more picturesque, though in part of the
poetical passages "young lion" may stand. Generally the attempt to recover
the specific meaning of a word by comparing the passages in which the
word is used is more or less uncertain; but, considering the general course
that tradition has followed, the cumulation of loose broad synonyms has
seemed to me so very unlikely to be right that the chance of being right in
recovering the specific sense has really been the more probable chance.
Where good American usage and good British usage are known to differ,
as between "rareripe" and "rather ripe," I have been American. Apart from
any reasons for thinking that America is now best entitled to set the
standard of the English language, I have done this because American is
the language I know. If I had tried to follow British usage, the result
could only have been a patchwork product. In one respect, at least, it is
historically impossible for British English to be as good a language for
translating the Bible as American English. For the scene of a great part
of the Bible lies in a semiarid cattle country such as never existed in the
British Isles, so that the English language never had an opportunity to
acquire words for the conditions of such a country till the English race
spread to America, South Africa, and Australia. If my translation ever
comes to be reprinted in South Africa (an event of which there is no
immediate prospect), the editor of the South African edition is hereby
authorized to say "veldt" where I have said "range," and sometimes where
I have not, and similarly to make my "arroyo" into a "spruit."
Many critics will find it hard to bear that in addressing God I have said
"thou" in the New Testament and "you" in the Old; they will say I ought at
least to have been uniform. Perhaps I ought; but my feeling was that the
New Testament men had nearly the same feelings as we have about address-
ing God, but the Old Testament men, those of them who had most to say
to God, such as Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, had not such feelings
as lead us to give God a special pronoun. Really, Exodus 33:11 is a formal
notification that it would be mistranslation to make Moses use one pronoun
in speaking to God and a different pronoun in speaking to Joshua. No
doubt I could reasonably have handled some of the latest parts of the Old
Testament as I handled the New, but it seemed less conveniently practicable
to draw the line between parts of the Old than between Old and New.
As to the Old Testament name of God, certainly the spelling and pro-
nunciation "Jehovah" were originally a blunder. But the spelling and the
pronunciation are not highly important. What is highly important is to
keep it clear that this is a personal name. There are several texts that
cannot be properly understood if we translate this name by a common
noun like "Lord," or, much worse, by a substantivized adjective.
It is customary for the preface of a new translation of the Bible to say
that this translation is to be used only for certain limited purposes, and
for most purposes the old version, or a conservative revision of it, should
still be preferred. I say the contrary: I sincerely recommend that my
translation be used in preference to the old for all purposes, under all
circumstances where mine is available. I do not say, observe, that mine is
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better than any other that can or will be made; neither do I say that it
is probable that mine will become everybody's Bible. What I have more
right to expect, and what I am bound to be content with, is that when a
Bible is made which shall be everybody's Bible, my work will have con-
tributed part of the material which will go into it; what I am here recom-
mending is that when a choice is to be made between mine and the old
version, and a version better than either is not available, mine be chosen
rather than the old.
It is time we were done with taking the old version as our standard. It
should be understood by everybody that where the present revised versions
and new versions agree with each other, as they do in a good many points,
these are presumably the genuine Bible and the old version is not. One
school of thought among us makes much of the texts which forbid man to
cut out any part of God's word. They do not seem to pay as much attention
to the fact that the same texts, and more texts, forbid us to add to it. Yet
it is with reason that the Bible has more to say against adding than against
subtracting, for certainly it is a grosser blasphemy to put forward our
own figments as God's word than to cut out parts of the word either by
"higher criticism" or, what is commoner, by merely not reading those
parts. The old version contains forged texts. The most glaring case is the
words about the three witnesses in heaven in 1 John 5:7. The translators
of the old version found these words in what they supposed was the original
Greek. But those words never were in the Greek till after the invention
of printing; we have a fair probability of being right in telling the name
and post-office address of the Englishman who put that forgery into the
Greek. There are other cases not quite so glaring, but not substantially
less certain. A man who uses the old version as his standard Bible has no
right to claim that he is treating the Bible respectfully as the word of
God.
The literary merits of the Bible are the work of the prophets and apostles,
and will remain in any reasonably faithful translation. The supposed ex-
traordinary superiority of the old version to other versions is largely a
matter of familiarity. Anybody who has for many years used the revised
version as his only habitual Bible, and then has occasion to reread the old
version, will see that when he thus comes to the old as an unfamiliar version
it falls short of its reputation. A man has a right to like the language of
the old version either just because of familiarity or because of a personal
taste for archaism; but this does not justify him in inflicting the old version
on those for whom archaic English slows up the understanding. In any
case, a new translator may claim it as his right that if the old version is
judged by its best passages, his own shall be judged by its best too; or
that if Ms is to be judged by its worst, these shall be compared with such
passages of the old as Genesis 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 16:14.
Like other translators, I have added some notes on places where the
text might have been differently translated, or where the ancient copies
differ from each other as to the original words. Among these notes, most
readers will perhaps think that in the Old Testament there are too many
which express doubt whether we have a correct copy of the original Hebrew,
or say that the translator has depended on a guess as to what may have
been the original Hebrew word, or that perhaps he ought to have depended
on a guess. This calls for some explanation.
As soon as the New Testament books were written, the Christians at once
began to make many copies of them, because many of the Christians could
read and they all recognized the value of such fundamental books. Con-
sequently we have many copies of those books, including a few copies that
are very ancient and very reliable, so that we know the exact words of
the New Testament with greater certainty than those of any of the other
famous ancient Greek and Latin writers. But the Old Testament books
were written when comparatively few people could read, and few copies of
them were made at first. And at first less pains than you might expect were
taken to make the copies accurate. Where one book of the Bible has copied
something out of another, we can often see, for instance, that Chronicles
has made a mistake in copying out of Samuel or Kings in one place, or
that in another place Chronicles had the word right but our copies of
Samuel or Kings have it wrong, a mistake having been made in copying
them at some time after Chronicles was written. Sometimes even intentional
changes were made. Jeremiah 8:8 says that in Jeremiah's time the com-
monly accepted copies of the law of Moses were so incorrect as to contain
substantial falsehoods; Jeremiah's words seem to mean that the false matter
had been willfully put in; and it would be hard to prove that our copies
of the law are not made from the ones that were commonly accepted in
Jeremiah's time. Professor Welch thinks Jeremiah meant that a certain
paragraph had been added by somebody, which had the effect of changing
the apparent meaning of several other paragraphs; and Professor Welch
thinks he can tell what the change was. That is for him to prove; in my
translation I have not attended to guesses of that sort.
But we know from the ancient translations of the Old Testament into
other languages, especially into Greek, that in some places the men who
made those translations had a Hebrew text different from the one we now
have; and we can see that in some places they seem to have had the right
text, though in more places our Hebrew text seems to be right. But this
Hebrew text of ours has been through much trouble. The Jewish religion
has been persecuted by enemies who tried to destroy all the copies of the
Bible they could lay their hands on. King Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria
undertook to do this. There was a persecution under the Roman emperor
Hadrian; Professor de Lagarde guesses that Hadrian did a worse job than
Antiochus. Even the persecutions of the Jews by the Christians in later
times did some harm along this line. Meanwhile, the Jews reformed their
habits of copying, and began taking extraordinary pains to make all their
copies agree exactly with certain standard copies. Opinions differ as to
just how good these standard copies were; but by the Jews' own account
they were not absolutely faultless; and the rule of conforming all copies
to this standard had the effect of destroying all different copies which
might in some places have been right. The consequence is that in some places
we do have to see how well we can do with guessing. Sometimes the
Hebrew gives reason for suspecting a mistake in copying where no reason
is apparent in the English.
I have found in a copy of the English Bible a text where the word "book"
was misprinted "took." Suppose I were a missionary translating the Bible
into the language of some island; suppose the only thing I had to translate
from was this misprinted English Bible. Should I translate "took"? I
should not. I should know by the sense, and by comparing other texts
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where the same phrase was found, that this was a printer's error; and I
should translate "book." This would be a guess of mine. There are in the
Hebrew Bible some such slips which are preserved under the Jews' present
rule of exact copying, but which it is understood to be the business of
every user of the Bible to correct in his mind, or, if he reads aloud, in
his voice. But some cases are not so simple. There will be a text that every-
body agrees must be wrong; different students will make a dozen different
guesses as to what might have been the way it was originally written.
Somebody else will say that the chances may be five to one that the text
that comes to us is wrong, but they are ten to one that the best guess that
has been made is wrong, so that we have really more chance of being right
by not trying to guess even though we are fairly sure that there has been
some mistake in copying. Then they begin calling each other names: the
man who has made no guess says that the man who has guessed is treating
the Bible lazily, carelessly, disrespectfully, and the man who has guessed
says that the man who did not is treating the Bible lazily, carelessly, dis-
respectfully. Generally the accusation is false on both sides. Bach man
is conscientiously and carefully doing his best to have the genuine words
of the Bible as they were originally written, and often there is much to
be said on both sides. Of course there can be laziness either way: a man
can be too lazy to make a difficult guess when he ought to see that it is his
duty, or a man can lazily make a guess to get out of the trouble of under-
standing a hard text which he could have understood by putting a little
more work on it; and laziness is never the right way to study the Bible.
But most of them are working honestly and giving real help. At any rate
there is one good thing in having a Bible that tells you where guessing
is to be thought of: you may suppose that where it makes no note you are
sure enough; and you will find that after all most of the text is straight
and sure.
Sometimes a difference that seems very sweeping in English will be made
by a very little difference in Hebrew. You know that "feather" does not
look so much like either "leather" or "father" in French as it does in
English; and that the only difference in English writing between "nowhere"
and "now here" is the space between the words—and in ancient times the
separation between words was generally left to the reader's judgment. You
know that in some people's handwriting it is hard to tell "there" from
"then" or "these" or "three." If a sentence begins with one of these words,
the difference between these words may make a difference with the meaning
of the other words; the trouble you often have in the first reading of a
newspaper headline teaches you how much the meaning and connection
of the words may depend on the way you start to read the line. And the
Hebrew alphabet has at all times been much plagued with letters that
look almost alike. In my Hebrew Bible, which is on the whole the best that
I know of, the well-known words "blossom as the rose" are misprinted
"blossom with roses"; the difference is so slight a difference in the shape of
one letter that the proofreaders never noticed it. Luckily or unluckily, it
makes good sense either way: luckily, because no great harm comes from
reading it wrongly; unluckily, because the reader cannot see for himself
that this must be a mistake. And you positively have to get used to the
question whether to read "because" or "with me," they look so much alike.
Nevertheless, take a warning against books that tell you that the guess
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