(originally posted at wycliffe.ca on 2015-12-01)
Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Listen to me! Each of you should return to your mother’s home! May the Lord show you the same kind of devotion that you have shown to your deceased husbands and to me! May the Lord enable each of you to find security in the home of a new husband!” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept loudly. (Ruth 1:8-9 NET)
I've been through the book of Ruth with at least eleven translation teams in the past couple of years. It helps that I was one of the few available translation consultants who can read Hebrew, and it helps that Ruth is one of the easiest Old Testament books to translate. It's a nice, simple story, and it's short. The only real difficulty is the term "kinsman-redeemer". Or so I thought . . .
This summer, one draft I was checking had this in Ruth 1:9: "Then after Naomi hugged and kissed them, they cried loudly as they were very sad."
I pointed out to the team that the original only has them kissing, not hugging and kissing. Why did they add the hugging?
The translator explained to me that people in his culture rarely kiss in public. It's just not done. You'd never see a mother-in-law kissing her daughters-in-law goodbye. In order for the action to be understood in the translation, he felt they had to add something.
Now, the NET Bible translators apparently also felt they had to add something. The Hebrew says "she kissed them", and the NET translated it "she kissed them goodbye". That little addition helps the reader understand what's going on. Fair enough.
Do you see any difference between what the NET Bible did and what this translation I was checking did? They both added something to help the readers.
What's different is that if you were to imagine the scene, the scene described in Hebrew is identical to the one described in the NET Bible: Naomi kisses her daughters-in-law, and the kiss means "goodbye". (Though the Hebrew doesn't spell that out, it's clear enough in the context of the story).
But the scene you'd imagine upon reading the translation I was checking includes Naomi hugging them as well, which makes it different. They really had added something that's not in the original, and they were claiming that something happened which, as far as we can tell, didn't actually happen.
Why they made this addition raises the question of how far a translation should go in trying to help its readers enter into the story. There's a linguistic distance between ancient Hebrew and the languages we read today, and that's why we translate, but there's also a cultural distance between the lives of the people described in the stories and our lives today. How much of that cultural distance can we bridge in translation? How much should we?
More and more I'm convinced that a translation should not "help" readers by bridging that cultural distance. If the Bible says Naomi kissed her daughters-in-law, even though we might shake hands, or hug, or wave, it's better to translate "kissed". If the readers are caught off-guard and think "that's strange", that's good. We need all the reminders we can get that the Bible wasn't actually written with us in mind,[1] by people whose lives are similar to ours, who lived just down the street or around the block, a decade or two ago. Their lives were different, their world was different, and God in His revelation to them met them where they were. The more conscious we are of that, the better we can understand what He said to them, in their circumstances, through the Bible. And only once we've got that as our starting point can we begin working out what He's saying to us, in our circumstances, through the Bible.
So, no matter what we, or others around the world who are only just now receiving a translation of the Bible, would do, Naomi kissed her daughters-in-law goodbye, Ruth lay down at Boaz's feet (Ruth 3:7), Paul said to greet fellow Christians with a kiss (2 Cor. 13:12 and 1 Thess. 5:26), he insisted on men praying with lifted hands (1 Tim 2:8), he argued with people who insisted women cover their heads (1 Cor 11),[2] Abraham's servant put his hand under Abraham's thigh (Gen. 24:9), Jesus washed his disciples' feet (John 13:1-17), and all sorts of other things happened in the Bible that don't happen in our cultures simply because those actions aren't normal or meaningful in our cultures, and they were in theirs. We can be grateful for the presence of these actions in the Bible, because they help us remember that the Bible wasn't written to us. (I'd say it was written to ancient Israelites and the first Christians, and also that it was written for us.) We need to be careful not to think we know what it's talking about when we might be making assumptions based on our own culture and perspective. We need all the reminders we can get to approach interpreting the Bible with care.
After I wrote this, I came across this article in the International Journal of Frontier Missiology which goes more in depth on the issue of problems that arise when we assume the Bible is talking about something we're familiar with when instead it's dealing with categories in the original cultures that don't exactly match our categories.
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