TOP STORY: A NEW BIBLE TRANSLATION: In the beginning, there were many different words

c. 1996 Religion News Service BOSTON (RNS)-Everett Fox was 21 when he decided to translate the first book of the Hebrew Bible into English, and he approached the project with the audacity of a graduate student undaunted by King James. The grandeur of the 17th-century King James Version-translated by a team of 47 scholars-had made […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

BOSTON (RNS)-Everett Fox was 21 when he decided to translate the first book of the Hebrew Bible into English, and he approached the project with the audacity of a graduate student undaunted by King James.

The grandeur of the 17th-century King James Version-translated by a team of 47 scholars-had made it the definitive English Bible for generations. But Fox was drawn to a little-known German translation by 20th-century Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig that was as jarring as the King James was elegant.


Buber and Rosenzweig had tried to preserve the rhythms and nuances of the Hebrew text through the use of repetition, allusion, alliteration and wordplay. Unlike most translators, they had not smoothed over rough passages or covered up enigmas. Awkward passages retained their awkwardness. Paradox pervaded their biblical text.

Twenty-seven years, three children and a Ph.D. later, Fox has completed not just one but five books of Moses in The Schocken Bible, a new, critically acclaimed translation modeled loosely on the controversial Buber-Rosenzweig Bible.

“I was supposed to hand in the manuscript in 1984, so I’m a little behind,” Fox said, smiling at the memory of a decade of missed deadlines. And if the tall, bearded scholar had his druthers, he might have spent another year or two wrestling with the text.

Written to be read aloud, Fox’s translation captures the rhetorical structure of biblical language, presenting “a Hebraic voice” in “English dress.” To the uninitiated, the results may seem odd, even startling. Noah’s ark is not a boat, Fox noted, but a box or a chest. And Moses does not speak of himself as a stranger in a strange land, but as a sojourner in a foreign land. Even the familiar phrase, “In the beginning,” is cloaked in new vestments:

“At the beginning of God’s creating

of the heavens and the earth,

when the earth was wild and waste,

darkness over the face of Ocean,

rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters … ”

Fox hopes this encounter with the unfamiliar will inspire readers to rethink the meaning of the ancient text.

He first encountered Buber’s work while majoring in Near Eastern and Judaic studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. Raised in a household more concerned with “Jewish feeling than observance,” Fox had become enamored of Jewish culture during Hebrew school and studies with his synagogue’s rabbi in New York City.

By the age of 14 he wanted to be a rabbi, a calling that would soon be rivaled by his love of conducting. Music, more than prayer, brought out the mystical feeling the rabbis described. While some religious boys studied Torah at yeshivas, Fox practiced violin at New York’s High School of Music and Art.


At Brandeis, Fox focused his studies on classical Jewish text and modern Jewish thinkers. They mirrored his own struggle to embrace Jewish life-including keeping the Sabbath and following dietary laws-without abandoning the intellectual world of music, art and philosophy.

“The possibility of moving in both worlds presented itself for the first time,” Fox recalled. “Buber and Rosenzweig were European intellectuals who were grappling with issues of Zionism and interpersonal relationships in addition to issues of text. Buber was not an observant Jew, but someone who found the ancient texts and traditions compelling. Rosenzweig became profoundly immersed in Jewish text and observance in his late 20s, but he didn’t abandon the modern world.”

Fox felt an “emotional stake” in Buber and Rosenzweig’s work by the time he found a copy of their Bible in the Brandeis library. “It was almost lost to history,” he said of the work started in 1925 and completed in 1962. “So I got the crazy idea that I would try to preserve it by producing an English version of their German translation.”

Using a copy of a Hebrew text from the early Middle Ages, Fox stuck closely to his predecessors’ methods. Translations of phrases, lines and verses, they wrote, should mimic the syntax of Hebrew, and words should reflect root meanings. They had not hesitated to create their own words if they would help retain the meaning of the original Hebrew, and Fox took similar license with the English-until he showed an early draft to a colleague who could barely decipher the text.

“It was gobbledygook,” Fox recalled. “I had really started to create my own English.” He opted for a less radical approach that would be “more merciful to the reader.”

While honoring ambiguity he would strive for clarity.

The work took on an increasingly contemplative dimension, and he identified with a phrase in the diaries of Franz Kafka: “writing as a form of prayer.” Translation had become Fox’s prayer.


Whether the Bible was the word of God, however, remained for him an open question. Other Western religious traditions saw their texts as divinely inspired, and the Bible struck him “at the very least as one of the great translations of the word of God.” He liked to think of the text as “human beings making contact with the divine, a process he compared to composing. “If you listen to Mozart, it doesn’t sound like something that came out of somebody’s mind,” he said. “It sounds like dictation from heaven.”

In time he discovered his voice as a translator. While other scholars shied away from repetition, Fox deliberately repeated words-“like recurring themes in a piece of music”-to encourage the “listener to make connections between passages.”

He used the Hebrew names for biblical figures-Moshe instead of Moses-because they offered clues to personality traits. (Isaac is Yitzhak-or He Laughs.) He set the text in lines resembling free verse to give the sense of spoken phrases.

Soon Fox risked changing key passages etched in the mind of Bible readers. A world that was “without form, and void” in the King James’ Genesis, became a world that was “wild and waste,’ a phrase that captured the poetic effect of the Hebrew while conveying more closely the sound of primal chaos. The wind became the “rushing-spirit” because the Hebrew could be translated as both spirit and wind.

But each creative decision involved tradeoffs. Using a word in one part might preclude using it in another. Repeating key words might point to revealing linkages, but a well-chosen synonym might convey more depth of meaning.

The longer he worked, the more he appreciated the Bible’s layers. “God appears in so many guises as do biblical heroes,” he said. “They’re not whitewashed. They’re human. There seems to be a view of life that admits conflict instead of painting them in a rosy picture.”


While the Bible offered solutions, it also presented unresolved conflicts and paradoxes. “When Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden,” he said, “it’s tragic and consoling at the same time. I like this breadth of vision. It’s not always very comforting, but it’s real.”

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Fox’s translation got its first public hearing at Havurat Shalom, a progressive congregation in nearby Cambridge. “It clearly made people rethink the texts,” he observed.

His wife-to-be, Cherie Koller-Fox, then an educator and now a rabbi, began using the Bible in Hebrew School. She was delighted to hear children who had never heard the King James Version quoting from Fox’s Bible.

Buoyed by encouragement from friends, Fox signed a contract with Schocken Books to translate the first five books. Due in 1984, he completed the work more than a decade later. Only in the final stretch was he plagued by doubts. Had he missed important scholarship? Had he made mistakes? But after 27 years of text wrestling, he comforted himself with the assurance he could make changes in later versions of the text.

Biblical translation has always been risky, and Fox was prepared for mixed reactions. A 16th-century translator was burned at the stake for heresy. German writer Hermann Hesse loved Buber and Rosenzweig’s radical new translation; the Nazis called it another example of how Jews were destroying German culture.

A few critics have questioned Fox’s ear for English, but most have lauded the power of his language. Rabbi Harold Kushner called it “a stunningly impressive achievement.” British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes “read it with real excitement, like a wholly new real text.”And Harvard Jewish studies professor Jon D. Levinson said it gives “unparalleled access to the rhythms and wordplays of the original.”


Some 2,000 people came to hear the text read at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Actors, politicians and writers, such as James Earl Jones, Norman Mailer, Tammy Grimes-even former mayor Ed Koch-read from Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy at a Christmas-Hanukkah celebration last year. The New York Festival Chorus played Handel. The Persuasions played the Ten Commandments of Love.

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Once preoccupied with artistic and textual questions, Fox, now director of the Jewish Studies Program at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is focusing on the Bible’s moral dimension. “I’ve worked on the text all these years, now I ask myself: What is it telling us to do?”

The Bible, he believes, is ultimately “a call to action, less concerned with personal belief as much as personal and communal action, whether providing for the poor or hearing the oppressed. It’s not a comforting message in a consumerist society.”

Less gregarious than his wife, a longtime community activist, Fox struggles with how to combine a life of action with a life of the mind. Nevertheless, study remains for him a “gentle and rich act that can break the cycle of violence.”

And while he still thinks about conducting, he continues to tackle the biblical text. Music may be the language of his soul. But translation is his prayer. And even Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Fox said, lacks the “moral persuasiveness” of the Five Books of Moses.

MJP END LIEBLICH

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