Psalm Translations Suck

I am disliking more and more the way the Psalms are mangled in our Bible translations.

When working with the Psalms in the Hebrew, one feature that stands out distinctly is a sense of rawness, not crude, but brutal and unfiltered honesty. The psalms are the direct outpourings of the hearts of the poets, and carry force and depth because of this.

However, this is lost in many translations in their smoothing of the text.

For example, we have Psalm 70, written by David. The content points to him being in quite some distress because he is being hunted down.

The first phrase of the Hebrew can be translated (and unusually directly) like this:

God, to deliver me,
Lord, to help me,
hurry up!

We can easily observe several poetic features which are present in the Hebrew (even if you can’t read it):

• The names of God come first in each clause.
• The parallelism between the first two lines is really, really obvious as they share the verb.
• The tone is simple and direct. There are only five Hebrew words here.
• The reader can see it as somewhat close to what they would say in such a situation. It isn’t Shakespeare.

But in these areas I have grievances with the translations I have around me.

My preferred translation, the ESV, puts David’s plea as follows:

Make haste, O God, to deliver me!
O Lord, make haste to help me!

The parallelism is preserved by keeping the verb constant, but this does sound (almost exactly) like Shakespeare. (read it aloud!) I think the eloquence harms this much – it sounds practiced rather than brutally honest, and the recognizability is completely lost.

The TNIV says thus:

Hasten, O God, to save me;
come quickly, LORD, to help me.

I actually don’t mind this one as much. The verb coming first helps the tone stay urgent, and the consistent sentence order helps it stay parallel. However, it still isn’t something I could envision myself saying.

And I shall include the Message’s version also:

God! Please hurry to my rescue! God, come quickly to my side!

I really have no idea where Peterson got those verbs from. Disregarding that (if possible), it is very recognizable and east to identify with.

I know I’m being very picky here, but because most people need a translation to interface with the Scriptures, it is so important that it be transparent and enjoyable.

Review: A Reader’s Hebrew Bible

I have studied Hebrew for about a year now after completing Calvin Seminary’s great online course, but one difficulty remains with my Hebrew-reading: vocabulary. There is almost absolutely no vocabulary crossover between Hebrew and English, so all vocabulary needs to be memorized. Many words appear a great multitude of times, making the effort needed to memorize them worthwhile. However, a substantial amount of the Tanach uses words that appear but a handful of times; these words are much more difficult to learn, and the unknown words need to be looked up either in a dictionary or by their rendering in a translation, neither of which is quick or ideal.

To attempt to solve this problem, A Reader’s Hebrew Bible was concieved. For words that appear less than 100 times, a definition is footnoted. Also, proper names that appear but few times are printed in gray so that they are not mistakenly interpreted as words. This volume struck me as a brilliant idea, and I bought one as soon as I could.

And it works just as I expected it to – vocab is mostly no longer an issue when reading it. However, many of the words appearing more than 100 times I never learned, and now feel a greater need to do so. Now also, I can see how helpless I am without an English translation in figuring out the grammar, as I have been depending too much on it.

This volume should help me bring my Hebrew level, in the short-term, to the point to which I do not need a translation to read the text. I also hope I will pick up some vocab from the footnotes so that I eventually will not need helps to read the text.

Unfortunately, there are a few cases I have noted where further editing needs doing. The first page of Esther suffers from a misalignment of the footnotes with the text. Curiously, Appendix A (a lexicon of the words appearing more than 100 times), has the entries sorted front-to-back in regards to the first letter, but has the entries underneath running the other direction. The typesetter, Philip Brown, has a list of errata on his blog.

However, these do not detract from the usefulness of the volume in the slightest. Thanks to Philip Brown and Bryan Smith for compiling this useful resource!