The Contemporary Torah: a gender-sensitive adaptation of the JPS translation

PREFACE

Translation is an abbreviated form of exegesis: exegesis that does not have the space to explain or justify itself. —Adele Berlin The present translation adapts the New Jewish Publication Society (njps) version only with respect to social gender.1 To keep the presentation simple, this edition recasts the invaluable footnotes of the njps translation committee as endnotes; such notes are now called out in the translation via asterisks (*). As revising editor, I have added new endnotes that relate to social gender; such notes are called out via circules (°).2 THE NEED FOR A GENDER-SENSITIVE VERSION My adaptation effort has followed the pioneering trail of the translation committee that produced njps. The driving force behind njps was the late Harry M. Orlinsky, who served as editor-in-chief of its first section, The Torah.3 He stated with justifiable pride that njps was “the first translation of the Hebrew Bible that went behind all previous translations”—looking afresh at the original Hebrew text, in order to take full account of the tremendous advances in knowledge about the ancient Near East made possible by the modern study of the distant past. At the same time as it drew upon the findings of history and science, it took stock of those traditional rabbinic interpretations of the biblical text that accorded with the translators’ plain-sense approach. Orlinsky explained that njps relied rigorously on philology: “the meaning and nuance of every word and phrase and verse, in context , was considered anew and carefully before its equivalent in the idiom of the English language was decided upon.” Its translators did The Need for a Gender-Sensitive Version v PREFACE not strive, as some do, to show how ambiguous the original text is, nor to convey how the text made meaning via rhetorical strategems . Rather, their aims were to convey the plain-sense meaning; to value clarity of expression; to employ idioms familiar to the contemporary audience; and to emphasize a religious message. That distinctive set of characteristics has made njps the ideal basis for a gender-sensitive translation. Inherent Strengths of NJPS In 1969, Orlinsky authored another pioneering work, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (1969)—“the first time that a committee responsible for an official translation of the Bible [had] attempted a public and systematic exposition. . . of its labors and reasoning.” Shortly thereafter, he began to address a new topic in translation: gender. Lecturing widely, he would point out that the best-known Bible versions had too often rendered certain Hebrew nouns mechanically as referring to men—thus making women appear relatively invisible. For example, the Decalogue in the classic King James Version (kjv) of 1611 had God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers (’avot) upon the children” (Exod. 20:5) even though logic dictated—and other biblical passages indicated—that also in view were mothers and their sins. Orlinsky saw such customary renderings as misrepresenting the biblical text; and in his view, the solution lay in a contextual, idiomatic approach to translation— of which njps was the exemplar. (njps reads: “visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children.”) He would reiterate that its philological approach has no inherent ideological bias, but rather “seeks to determine within the context and in the light of pertinent data elsewhere in the Bible and in related extra-biblical societies what the author meant to convey.” Where the Torah’s language suggested a neutral sense, njps avoided misleadingly ascribing gender, not only by rendering inclusively some “male” nouns, but also by rendering masculine inflections and pronouns idiomatically rather than literally. Thus, for example, what kjv had rendered as “thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause” appears in njps as “you shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes” (Exod. 23:6). vi The Need for a Gender-Sensitive Version PREFACE  the contemporary torah In short, njps inadvertently led the way among contemporary translations in “gender-sensitive” rendering. Limitations of NJPS Despite its overall strengths, the gender ascriptions in njps can still be called into question on a number of counts. I will now discuss, as two distinct categories, how njps handled the biblical text’s references to human beings and to divine beings.4 references to human beings Like every translation, njps contains some internal inconsistencies . For example, njps renders ’avot in the same phrases and in similar contexts using terms with differing social...