TRANSLATING THE BIBLE
SIR,—Canon Ellison takes me to task for lendering the last words of Judges, " when men lived by the best light they had." The passage, he says, "does not mean that in Israel's iron age folk acted conscientiously, but they did as they pleased." I think his interpretation sins against the context. The point is not that the Benjamites did as they pleased ; on the contrary, their debauch was punished by a massacre. The point is that it was an age of rough justice ; because there was no king to give him redress, the Lcvitc must go round attracting public sympathy. The conscience of Israel was roused, and they did what seemed to them the right thing to do
But this is a matter of opinion. The Canon is on less sure ground when he tells us that the Vulgate was " too much influenced" by the Septuagint. The old Latin psalter was too much influenced by the Septuagint, and St. Jerome left it unaltered ; we revised it the other day. But all through the rest of the Old Testament, I should say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the Vulgate agrees with the Massorctic Hebrew as against the Septuagint Greek.—Yours faithfully, R. A. KNOX.
Previous page
