Is the Bible what we think it is?

One womans obsession with

Biblical translation leads her to Geneva, Spain, France, Italy,
England and Israel and The Iowa Writers Workshop..
On September 8, Spiegel & Grau is publishing THE GRAMMAR OF GOD: A Journey into the
Words and Worlds of the Bible, the first book from Aviya Kushner.
The book has an unusual genesis, coming to life during the years she studied nonfiction writing
with Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In Robinson's two-semester course on
the Bible, Kushner encountered that work in English for the first time, an engagement that, with
her teacher's encouragement, eventually grew into this book. It is both a personal narrative and a
political commentary...

THE GRAMMAR OF GOD illuminates relevant issues in todays cultural

conversation:

Creation Myth / Evolution: The grammar of The King James Bible

puts creation firmly in the past tense with the word created. That
makes it sound as if God created the world and the creation process is
over. In Hebrew, the verb created could be read as either past tense
or as the infinitive form of the verb, opening a door to a new
understanding of evolution.

Slavery / Mans relationship to God: In the King James Bible, the

work that the slaves in ancient Egypt are forced to endure is called
"rigour"; a more accurate translation of the Hebrew would be
something like "back-breaking labor." This translation affects our
understanding of Gods relationship to humanity.

The Ten Commandments vs. The Ten Talking Points: In Hebrew,

the word that is translated as commandments, dibrot, comes from the
verb ledaber, which means "to talk." The Ten Commandments, then,
are more like "talking points" or a conversation between God and the
people rather than commandments from on high. What might be
different if Christians were taught the commandments as a
conversation?

The phrase because the Bible says so is used tirelessly to validate ones opinion on
highly contested social issues. In THE GRAMMAR OF GOD, Aviya Kushner asks the
important question: Which version of the Bible is being quoted?
Aviya grew up in a traditional Jewish, Hebrew speaking household- in which the Hebrew
Bible was so integral to the fabric of family life that it was discussed and debated daily.
She had never encountered an English translation of the text until enrolling in Marilyn
Robinsons Bible course at the Iowa Writers Workshop. There, in the silence of the
cornfields, Aviya read the English version of what she knew by heart. And to her great
surprise, she recognized very little of it.
Fascinated and frustrated by what had literally been lost in translation, Aviya became
obsessed with the nuances of translation. She began a ten-year worldwide collection of
Bibles. For example, in Geneva, she hoarded Bibles in hotel drawers; in Iowa Aviya
found the Football Coachs King James Bible, highlighted with passages that explained
their relation to the sport of life. As she discussed her project, she realized that most
Christians are unaware of the ways that differences in translation can change meaning.
Translators word choices have, in fact, been the very reason for some of our greatest
cultural misunderstandings that have affected widespread Christian beliefs. But her
translation project also opened her up to a new way of understanding the book she
thought she knew.

A conversation with Aviya Kushner, author of THE GRAMMAR OF GOD: A

Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

Q: Translators have always been drawn to the Bible. Why should we nontranslators care about the Bible?
A: The Bible is one of the few books that both deeply religious and very secular people
read. Its very difficult to have zero contact with the Bible. If you read Shakespeare, or
Milton, or Yehuda Amichai, or if you spend some time with Lincolns speechesyou are
experiencing the Bibles influence. Any reader, of any genre, should care about the Bible.
I realized that ignoring translation was ridiculous, because the story of the translation of
the Bible is in many ways the story of Western culture. The Bible influences literature
very deeply, and it also influences law and ideas of morality. All of these seemingly
technical questions affect our public and private lives, and define
how we view man and God. At the very least, we should be aware of them. We should
recognize that the translation in our hands affects what we think and what we believe.

Q: How did Marilynne Robinson persuade you to write a book about your obsession
with the Bible?

A: I was taking a course in The Bible with Marilynne Robinson at The University of
Iowa, and I was just astonished at what The Bible was in English. As a Hebrew reader
who had grown up in the Jewish community, I realized that what I thought the Bible was,
and what most Americans thought, were two very different things.
In the town I grew up in, no one read the Christian Bible. The New Testament was
literally not allowed in peoples houses, and none of the neighbors had a Protestant or
Catholic translation of the Bible in the house. I felt transgressive in that class in Iowa, but
I was so curious that I took notes on what surprised me. These notes became letters, then
essays, then my graduate school thesis. One day Marilynne said, to my surprise this
will be a book.

Q: Do you believe the Bible will survive as an important text in an increasingly

secular culture?
A: Absolutely. I often ask myself why the Bible, of all ancient texts, is still with us. No
other ancient text has permeated wider culture the way the Bible has. Why is this? I see
two reasons, and neither is overtly religious.
First, the Bible is actually many books at once a story of the creation of the world, the
history of a people, a book of law, a book of songs, a poetic text, a philosophical treatise,
as well as several intricate family narratives. And the Bible manages to be a personal
book, probably because many of the plotlines are so incredibly intimate. Even if you do
not see the Bible as holy, it is still a major text in Western culture that has shaped so
much of literature and thought.
The second reason is that people cannot stop translating the Bible. The constant
translation and re-translation of the Bible keeps the text alive, and with us. I did not feel
this when I started this project; in the beginning, all I noticed were the losses. All I could
see was what translators erased. But as the years passed, I realized translation and
survival are linked, and have probably always been.

Q: This book is both a personal narrative and a Biblical commentary. Why did you
feel you had to include yourself in the book?
A: My major challenge was making tiny grammatical moments interesting and relevant
to someone who did not know Hebrew. I needed to show why grammar matters. From the
beginning, balancing the personal and the Biblical was the hardest part of this book. I did
not want a dry, technical book on grammar; I wanted it to be aliveto catch the
conversation of home, the way the lives of the commentators were also often the stories
of families, and I wanted to show why so many people were so passionately attached to
this text. I thought it was important to catch the liveliness of real-life conversations about
the Torah, to reproduce why people cared.

I also wanted the reader to feel the heft of time. Its important to realize that many
commentators spent thirty or forty years on their Biblical commentary: so of course to
them it was a personal quest. It was not a technical pursuit, but a passionate affair, as
anything lasting that long has to be. I thought back to what Rabbi Muschel said but the
Hebrew is so personal! and I wanted to make it personal for the reader of English too.

Fourteen Ways of Thinking About the Bible in Translation and Why It Matters:
1. Biblical translation has been a dangerous pursuit for centuries. Translators have been
burned at the stake and their remains have been exhumed and thrown into a river.
Clearly, the powers of the past felt threatened by translation and by translators.
2. Both Jews and Christians have a long history of translationand a history of
discomfort with translation.
3. America is far more secular than it used to be, but the Bible is still widely read by both
religious and secular people, and by educated and uneducated people. In this sense, it is a
cultural connectora common touchstone.
4. Translation, by necessity, selects one meaning for a word or passage. But a key beauty
of the Hebrew Bible is that it has multiple meanings.
5. Biblical Hebrew grammar is complex and important. Sadly, its intricacies rarely cross
over into English.
6. Names in the Hebrew Bible are crucial, but they are not translated. Adam, for instance,
comes from adama, the word for earthbut mans connection to earth doesnt come
through in English.
7. Most translations into English do not reproduce commentary, a major aspect of Jewish
tradition and an essential path to understanding the text. By contrast, many Hebrew
editions include commentary tracing back to the first century and continuing through the
19th or 20th century. There is a difference between reading one voice and multiple voices.
8. Understandably, most people who are fluent in Hebrew do not spend years reading
translations into English. But for those who do venture into reading translations, there is
often a sense of loss.
9. There are a huge number of translations into English of varying quality. Some were
made by scholars, others by people with a clear religious viewpoint, and others by lay
people who fell in love with the text.

10. Some translations are the work of a lone translator, but many of the most famous
translations like The King James and The Jewish Publication Society translations are
the work of a committee. Anyone who has ever served on a committee can imagine the
negotiations. In some cases, these committees left accounts of their deliberations, which
can be illuminating.
11. The story of the Bible in translation is very much a story of re-translation. Many
translations have been revised over the centuries, and it can be fascinating to see what
changed from 1917 to 1985, or from 1609 to 1750.
12. Writers have long been obsessed with the Bible. Its not just Milton in English, and
Amichai in Hebrew, who both weave the Bible into their work. Isaac Asimov and C.S.
Lewis wrote books on the Bible, too.
13. Politicians often quote the Bible, but rarely credit the translator. College syllabi are
full of translationsyet translation is rarely discussed. It is dangerous to ignore the
bridge that brought the Bible to us.
14. Above all, the history of the Bible in translation is the story of Western culture. For
the good or for the bad, the choices translators made have shaped what we think and
believe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: AVIYA KUSHNER has worked as a travel columnist
for The International Jerusalem Post, and her poems and essays have appeared in The
Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, and The Wilson Quarterly. She
teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is a contributing editor at A Public Space and a
mentor for the National Yiddish Book Center.

ADVANCED PRAISE FOR THE GRAMMAR OF GOD:

Aviya Kushner has written a passionate, illuminating essay about meaning

itself. The Grammar of God is also a unique personal narrative, a family
story with the Bible and its languages as central characters.Robert
Pinsky
Kushner is principally interested in the meanings and translations of key
Biblical passages, and she pursues this interest with a fierce passion. . . . A
paean, in a way, to the rigors and frustrationsand ultimate joysof trying
to comprehend the unfathomable.Kirkus Reviews
A remarkable and passionately original book of meditation, exegesis, and
memoir. The biblical passages are of a piece with stories of Kushners is to

take us very near to the text, breathe into it, and give it a new life.
Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus