The Jerusalem Bible

2080 Pages·107.878 MB·english

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THE JERUSALEM BIBLE
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General Editor
ALEXANDER JONES, L.S.S., S.T.L., I.C.B.
The list of all those who have helped in the preparation of this
Bible is too long to be given in its entirety. The principal collabora¬
tors in translation and literary revision were:
Joseph Leo Alston Anthony J. Kenny
Florence M. Bennett D. O. Lloyd James
Joseph Blenkinsopp James McAuley
David Joseph Bourke Alan Neame
Douglas Carter Hubert Richards
Aldhelm Dean O.S.B. Edward Sackville-West
Illtud Evans, O.P. Ronald Senator
Kenelm Foster, O.P. Walter Shewring
Ernest Graf, O.S.B. Robert Speaight
Prospero Grech, O.S.A. J. R. R. Tolkien
Edmund Hill, O.P. R. F. Trevett
Sylvester Houedard, O.S.B. Thomas Worden
Leonard Johnston John Wright
Basil Wrighton
THE
JERUSALEM
BIBLE
1966
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
Nihil Obstat: Lionel Swain, S.T.L., L.S.S.
Imprimatur: >I< John Cardinal Heenan
Westminster, July 4,1966
The introductions and notes of this Bible are, with minor
variations and revisions a translation of those which appear
in La Bible de Jerusalem published by Les Editions du Cerf,
Paris, (one volume edition, 1961, but modified in the light
of the subsequent revised fascicule edition) under the gen¬
eral editorship of Pere Roland de Vaux, O.P. The English
text of the Bible itself, though translated from the ancient
texfs, owes a large debt to the work of the many scholars
who collaborated to produce La Bible de Jerusalem, a debt
which the publishers of this English Bible gratefully ac¬
knowledge.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-24278
Copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd.
and Doubleday & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
The form and nature of this edition of the Holy Bible have been
determined by two of the principal dangers facing the Christian religion
today. The first is the reduction of Christianity to the status of a relic—
affectionately regarded, it is true, but considered irrelevant to our times.
The second is its rejection as a mythology, born and cherished in emotion
with nothing at all to say to the mind. What threatens the mother threatens
her two children even more seriously: I mean Christianity’s adopted child,
which is the Old Testament, and her natural child, which is the New. The
Christian faith, after all, has been able without betrayal to adjust itself to the
needs of succeeding centuries and decades. The Bible, on the other hand,
is of its nature a written charter guaranteed (as Christians believe) by the
Spirit of God, crystallised in antiquity, never to be changed—and what is
crystallised may be thought by some to be fossilised. Now for Christian
thinking in the twentieth century two slogans have been wisely adopted:
aggiornamento, or keeping abreast of the times, and approfondimento, or
deepening of theological thought. This double programme must be for the
Bible too. Its first part can be carried out by translating into the language
we use today, its second part by providing notes which are neither sectarian
nor superficial.
This twofold need has long been appreciated, and strong action was
taken in France when, under the influence of the late Pere Chifflot, Editions
du Cerf appealed to the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem to meet it.
This led to the production of separate fascicules with a full textual critical
apparatus for the individual books of the Bible, and with extensive notes.
Subsequently, in 1956, a one-volume edition appeared which came to be
known popularly as La Bible de Jerusalem: a careful system of cross-
reference enabled this edition to include all the information from the
fascicules which could be useful to the thoughtful reader or to the student.
This present volume is its English equivalent. The introductions and notes
are a direct translation from the French, though revised and brought up to
date in some places—account being taken of the decisions and general
implications of the Second Vatican Council.
The translation of the biblical text itself could clearly not be made from
the French. In the case of a few books the initial draft was made from the
French and was then compared word for word with the Hebrew or Aramaic
by the General Editor and amended where necessary to ensure complete
conformity with the ancient text. For the much greater part, the initial
drafts were made from the Hebrew or Greek and simultaneously compared
with the French when questions of variant reading or interpretation arose.
Whichever system was used, therefore, the same intended result was achieved,
that is, an entirely faithful version of the ancient texts which, in doubtful
points, preserves the text established and (for the most part) the inter-
100874
pretation adopted by the French scholars in the light of the most recent
researches in the fields of history, archaeology and literary criticism.
The translator of the Bible into a vernacular may surely consider himself
free to remove the purely linguistic archaisms of that vernacular, but here
his freedom ends. He may not, for example, substitute his own modern
images for the old ones: the theologian and the preacher may be encouraged
to do this, but not the translator. Nor must he impose his own style on the
originals: this would be to suppress the individuality of the several writers
who responded, each in his own way, to the movement of the Spirit. Still
less must it be supposed that there should be throughout a kind of hieratic
language, a uniform ‘biblical’ English, dictated by a tradition however
venerable. There is no doubt that in forfeiting this we lose something very
precious, but one hopes that the gain outweighs the loss. It would be arrogant
to claim that this present attempt to translate the Bible into ‘contemporary’
English cannot be improved upon, but at least (one believes) it is in this
direction that translations will have to go if the Bible is not to lose its appeal
for the mind of today.
The Psalms present a special problem for translators since, unlike other
parts of the Bible, the psalter is not only a book to be read but a collection
of verse which is sung or chanted. Moreover, many of them are so familiar
in their sixteenth century form that any change may seem to be an
impertinence. Nevertheless, here too the first duty of a translator is to
convey as clearly as he can what the original author wrote. He should not
try to inject a rhetorical quality and an orotundity of cadence which belong
more truly to the first Elizabethan age in England than to the Hebrew
originals. He must avoid the pure bathos of prosy flatness, of course, but
he will be aware that there is no longer an accepted ‘poetic language’
which can be used to give artificial dignity to plain statements. It would
certainly be dangerous to give the form of the translation precedence over
the meaning.
It is in the Psalms especially that the use of the divine name Yahweh
(accented on the second syllable) may seem unacceptable—though indeed
the still stranger form Yah is in constant use in the acclamation Hallelu-Yah
(Praise Yah!). It is not without hesitation that this accurate form has been
used, and no doubt those who may care to use this translation of the Psalms
can substitute the traditional ‘the Lord’. On the other hand, this would be
to lose much of the flavour and meaning of the originals. For example, to
say, ‘The Lord is God’ is surely a tautology, as to say ‘Yahweh is God’
is not.
An Index of Biblical Themes has been provided in this edition. It is not
a luxury or an afterthought; it is a key to a treasure, for the use of serious
readers and of preachers. It is for those who are not studying one single
book or passage but wish to find out what the Bible as a whole has to say
on a particular theological idea. Since the date and provenance of the
individual books will have been given in the introductions, this index will
be a guide to the historical development of biblical revelation, a pointer
to the raw material of a dynamic biblical theology. It is based on the simi¬
lar index in the Bible de Jerusalem but is considerably wider in scope. The
compilation of this index was undertaken as a labour of love by members
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