The Basic Bible
The Bible: a New Translation in Basic English. (Cambridge University Press. 12s. 6d.)
THE New Testament in Basic English has been available to the general public for some years, and readers who are sufficiently interested in the matter are already familiar with it. The Old Testament, naturally, has taken much longer, and all who have shared in its production are to be congratulated warmly on the completion of their work. For it is a great achievement, and must have presented difficulties at many points. It is true that the vocabulary available for the Bible includes iso words in addition to the 85o normally employed in Basic, and that special terms (chiefly •names of plants and animals) are permitted, being printed in italics when they first occur in any passage. But the general limitations are still applicable. Only 16o of the i,000 words are adjectives, and the eighteen per- missible verbs do not include " hear " and " know," terms for which the translators must often have longed. Shortage of adjectives is not so serious a handicap in the Old Testament as it is in the New, for Biblical Hebrew uses only a small number, and those the most obvious. But to express ideas with only eighteen verbs, including auxiliaries, is a task' which calls for intelligence and not merely for ingenuity.
Further, free composition in Basic is a comparatively simple matter. It may not be possible to express finer distinctions, but a writer need seldom or never be baffled in an attempt to express his general meaning. Translation, however, is another matter, especially when it aims at keeping fairly close to the original. And this work is not a "modern" version in the sense in which the term can be applied, for example, to that of Dr. Moffatt. In some curious fashion it suggests the atmosphere of the A.V., though it is much simpler and easier to read. It is, indeed, surprising to find that it does not jar on us more than it actually does. There are, of course, innumerable places in which the limitations of Basic neces- sarily produce awkward expressions and clumsy sentences, but they arc much fewer than might have been expected a priori. Perhaps the Psalms suffer most ; it would be very difficult to chant them in this.version. Some of these blemishes might have been avoided by the use of
more modern phrasing. We might have had " looking up " for "lifting up his eyes" (e.g. Gen. 32:0, and " I will become his father " for " I will be to him a father " (II Sam. 7:14 and similarly elsewhere). Today there is no reason why we should retain phrases like " Now it came about," " burned with fire," " give ear to the voice of . . . ." Sometimes the sense of the original might have been more accurately brought out in both parts of the Bible. The retention of " testament " in narratives of the Last Supper tends to obscure the essential continuity between the Old Covenant and the New. Surely " play-actors " or " stage-players " is nearer to the original sense of " hypocrite " than " false ones " ? In Ez. 18:20 "person," or perhaps " It is the sinner himself who . . ." should certainly have been substituted for the misleading " soul." Less serious, but still badly misleading, is the retention of " mercy " for the Hebrew hesed. Sometimes long paragraphs might have been broken up ; Eph. t is an outstanding example. On the other hand we often have to welcome a correct rendering, e.g. in Ru. I :17, and in many places the translation is both happy and accurate, e.g. Gen. 16:x4, Job 19:25-27, Is. 49: 23, 52 :14b, and practically the whole of Ez. i—to take only a few instances.
The attitude of the translators to textual criticism appears Inconsistent. They might often have used the LXX with advantage, as in Jer. 4: t t and Ps. 19:4. When faced with unintelligible Hebrew they sometimes emend conjecturally (e.g. in Am. 6:12) and sometimes leave a blank indicated by a series of dots. In a version not intended for well-trained students, this latter course can hardly be recommended.
Special attention should be called to two or three other weaknesses. In view of the public to which this version is primarily addressed, prose translation should have been arranged in continuous para- graphs, not in separate verses. The splitting up of narratives and speeches into these apparently independent sentences is one of the great obstacles to intelligent reading of the Bible. In other cases, especially in the Prophets (Ezekiel is the worst sufferer, though Jeremiah is also badly affected), it looks as if the reader were to take as a continuous whole a series of utterances which originally had little or no connection with one another. And in the poetic sections, including much of the Prophets, some attempt should have been made to show that parallelism which is the basis of all Hebrew verse structure.
These are matters which may possibly be considered in later editions. For the present we can only say again that this transla- tion is a remarkable and valuable piece of work. We may reason- ably hope that it will introduce the Bible to numbers of readers, both abroad and in this country, to whom the traditional versions
are practically a sealed volume. THEODORE H. ROBINSON.
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