he Hebrew language, on the whole,
is a poetic language. By poetic, I am not referring to just the
book of Psalms and other passages that have a high degree of lyrical
quality. Rather, the entire language, even in long sentences of
prose, is chock full of a poetic structure adding incredible depth
and meaning to every passage.
What exactly is meant by poetic might need some defining. Hebrew
poetry bears little resemblance to the works of Donne, Herbert
and Herrick. There is no meter, nor does it depend upon rhyme1.
The poetry is “an elevated style, a harmony and parallelism
of sentences, a sonorous flow of graphic words, an artificial
arrangement of clauses, repetitions, transpositions, and rhetorical
antitheses, which are the inmost life of poetry.”2 The poetry
of Hebrew is a rhyming of ideas through the structure of a sentence
or sentences.
This poetic structure in many places adds to the meaning of the
text. In Jonah 1:3, the author uses an obvious chiasm3 to stress
how Jonah’s action is a fleeing from the Lord that takes
him
. . . to Tarshish, away from the face of the Lord
down . . .
. . . to Tarshish
down . . .
. . . to Tarshish, away from the face of the Lord.
And the chiasm communicates the rebellious nature of Jonah’s
flight in a very vivid sense.
Normally, poetry cannot be translated from one language to another
without losing the structure and feel of the original poem. For
instance, while translating the prose of Pushkin, the great Russian
poet, the translator laments that Pushkin’s real genius,
his poetry, is inaccessible to us. “As a poet Pushkin is
untranslatable: the exquisite beauty and the austere simplicity
of his verse cannot be rendered into a foreign tongue. Every word
of his poetry is so perfect in its context that it is impossible
to replace it by any other.”4 Frequently, poetry in other
languages is brought across into English prose, translating the
essential gist of the words, but shedding the poetic structure
that the piece originally wore. Bayard Taylor describes this effort.
“To attempt to represent poetry in prose is very much like
attempting to translate music into speech.”5
But Hebrew poetry, using neither rhyming nor meter, lends itself
to translation in a way that few other languages can. For instance,
the chiasm in Jonah 1:3 is easily reflected in English, because
meter and rhyme are not necessary to preserve the poetry. The
repetitions, the transpositions, and parallels that make up Hebrew
poetry are all easily brought across into the English. However,
our modern translations rarely seek to bring these nuances over.
(The Jonah 1:3 chiasm is imperceptible in the NIV.)
Another aspect of Hebrew poetry given in the earlier quote is
the “graphic words”. Hebrew is particularly fond of
personification. The bad weather in the first chapter of Jonah
doesn’t begin with “and a low pressure system on the
north end of the sea brought on high winds and swells to thirty
feet.” Rather the Lord “throws” a storm to the
sea. (This throwing works in another chiasm opposite the sailors
throwing Jonah to the sea.) When the storm starts getting really
bad, it “comes and storms against them.” The overall
picture is described graphically by the Hebrew, and frequently
diluted in the English.
Hebrew also relies heavily on idioms that are ignored in their
English translations. The word most often translated “anger”
in Hebrew is actually an idiom referring to the heat of one’s
nose. When God is angry it says that His “nose is hot”.
A patient man is then one who has a long nose (it takes a long
time for the heat to reach the rest of his face).
Perhaps this sounds as if I’m going a bit too far, but please
wait, I’ve got a point to make. Hebrew uses these tools to
teach us something. For instance, the Hebrew words for forward,
backward, right and left, are all the same words for East, West,
South, and North respectively. The Hebrew orientation is always
to the East. These untranslated idioms have all sorts of implications,
particularly when a passage is packed with typology. And, in a
very nerve racking way, when one experiments with the idea that
there is a significance to the East, the interpretations of men
like James Jordan start to sound far less strange.
The idea of our Bibles bringing across this high-octane Hebraic
sense remains a strange thought, but we have one of two options:
do we let our language shape our Scripture or do we let Scripture
shape our language? The chiasms, repetition, personification,
and idioms of Hebrew are, in many passages, essential to understanding
the point of the text. Ought these things to be brought across?
This isn’t a question of making English into Hebrew (a translation
will always be necessary), but rather one of letting Scripture
mold our minds. And this isn’t the first time this question
has been raised. The King James translators worked hard to preserve
the rhythms of the Hebrew and also brought across many of the
idioms. We often don’t notice that this was done, because
the idioms that were brought across are now our idioms. The King
James translation had a profound impact on the English language.
In a sense they cut our minds into a Hebraic shape. But in our
current quest for relevance and our desire to appease the pagans
whose judgments we fear, we have abandoned these Hebraic roots.
Instead of shaping our world with the pattern of Scripture, we
have done the opposite. And, like the Ninevites, we no longer
know our right from our left, our even which way is forward.
1 Terry p. 90
2 ibid
3 ibid
4 Schwandt and Futato
5 Natalie Duddington laments
6 p93