Parallel Lines

The last several articles have examined various English translations of the Bible, but how do they compare to one another? Let’s take one Scripture citation and see how it looks in various popular translations available at your local bookstore.

The Test Case – Rom 1:17

Here is a hyper-literal, word-for-word translation from the Greek:

For God’s righteousness in it is revealed from faith to faith, as it has been written, “But the righteous by faith will live.”

Paul is talking about how the gospel reveals God’s righteousness. There are only two main issues in translating this verse (in bold above):

1. What does “from faith to faith” mean?
2. In Paul’s quotation from Hab 2:4, does “by faith” describe how one becomes “righteous” (option A) or how the righteous “will live” (option B)?

King James Family

(KJV) For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written. The just shall live by faith. 

(NASB) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” 

(NRSV) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

(ESV) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

The KJV here is a very literal translation with no archaic language to confuse the modern reader.

The NASB translates “righteous” instead of “just” in the Habakkuk quotation. “Righteousness/righteous” better reflects the use of the same Greek root word than does the “righteousness/just” combination in the KJV. The NASB also inserts the word “man” (that’s why it is in italics) after “righteous,” probably because readers expect “righteous” to be an adjective and not a noun.

The NRSV translates “through faith for faith” and the ESV “from faith for faith” but these are only slight variations and neither really tries to interpret the phrase.

All versions choose option B for the Habakkuk quotation with some version of the “just/righteous will/shall live by faith”.

Just as train tracks seem endless, so do the number of new English translations of the Bible.

Catholic Translations

(NJB) For in it is revealed the saving justice of God:  a justice based on faith and addressed to faith. As it says in scripture: Anyone who is upright through faith will live.

(NABRE) For in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous by faith will live.”

The NJB is clearly a thought-for-thought translation and not a word-for-word one. It translates the Greek dikaiosynē theou as the “saving justice of God” and expands on that in the cryptic middle term with “a justice based on faith and addressed to faith.” It chooses the word “upright” in the Habakkuk quotation, in which case it would have been better to translate dikaiosynē theou as the “uprightness of God” to preserve the connection. The NJB translates “as it is written” with the more interpretive “as it says in scripture”.

The NABRE and the NJB are similar to the phrasing of the King James tradition with two exceptions. First, they place the verb “revealed” before the “righteousness of God” instead of after. Second, both follow the ambiguous word order of the Greek in the Habakkuk quote instead of choosing between option A or B.

Protestant Translations

(NIV) For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

(CSB) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

(CEB) God’s righteousness is being revealed in the gospel, from faithfulness for faith, as it is written, The righteous person will live by faith.

(ISV) For in the gospel God’s righteousness is being revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous will live by faith.”

The NIV (and CEB and ISV) introduces the word “gospel” so the reader isn’t confused what the pronoun “it” refers to. The NIV also repeats the word “righteousness” in the middle part and is more interpretive with “by faith from first to last.” Paul would certainly agree that salvation is a matter of faith from start to finish but that is not a literal translation.

The CSB is very close in wording to the very literal ESV but the Common English Bible (CEB) and International Standard Version (ISV) go a different route by translating “God’s righteousness” instead of “righteousness of God”; this is a more natural way of describing a possessive in modern English. They both use the present tense (“is being revealed”) rather the perfect tense (“is revealed”) to capture the idea that God’s saving righteousness continues to be revealed whenever the gospel is preached. The CEB, though, is unique with the translation “from faithfulness for faith”, which to my ears is not much of an improvement in clarifying the meaning.

All these versions choose the traditional option B in stating that it is by faith that the righteous will live.

In Summary

Hopefully, this side-by-side comparison of more than a dozen different translations gives you a flavor for how translators go about doing their work. Sometimes they have to make a choice between leaving a confusing word or phrase in place or try to clarify it for the reader. Other times, the verse is ambiguous or has two meanings, only one of which can be captured in English. 

Which of these versions speaks to you?

Dr. Strangeverse

or: How the Southern Baptists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Inclusive Language

Every year for the past several years, the best-selling biblical translation has been the New International Version (NIV), first published in 1978 (with a minor revision in 1984). A product of Evangelical scholars, it is a fresh translation from the original languages and not a revision in the King James tradition like its competitors, the RSV or NASB. How does it compare?

Questionable Translation Choices

According to the Preface of the NIV, its translators strove for both accuracy and readability, but also “the translators were united in their commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word in written form.” This commitment has sometimes led to some questionable translation choices.

For example, Deut 1:1 in the RSV reads, “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness…” Since we know from the Bible that Moses was not allowed to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, referring to the wilderness as “beyond the Jordan” or “across the Jordan” means the reference point of the writer was Palestine. This doesn’t pose a problem unless one is committed to the tradition that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, which includes Deuteronomy. Translating the phrase as “in the desert east of the Jordan” eliminates the difficulty and the NIV is the only major translation that makes this choice.

How about an example from the NT? 1 Pet 4:6 in the RSV reads, “For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead…” Is this a callback to 1 Pet 3:19 in which the risen Christ preaches to “the spirits in prison” since the time of Noah? Perhaps. But a key Evangelical belief is that salvation comes from a conversion experience and there is no possibility of that after death. The NIV removes any ambiguity in the passage by translating “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.” Most scholars would agree that “the dead” in this verse were alive when the gospel was preached to them and have since died, but that commentary should be placed in a footnote and not embedded into the translation.

I even referenced a dubious NIV translation in Genesis in a previous article. There are so many harmonizing and theologically-motivated translations in the NIV that at least one website is devoted to keeping track of them. The sheer number of examples leads one to suspect the motivations of the translators.

Furor Over Inclusive Language

In 2005 a new version of the NIV was released with inclusive language. Called Today’s New International Version (TNIV), it went over about as well as New Coke. Evangelicals were the target audience for the NIV and the publishers underestimated the attachment that audience had for the NIV and its willingness to accept gender-neutral language. The main complaints were places where the translators had changed 3^rd person singular pronouns to plural (“he” and “his” to “they” and “their”), “brothers” to “brothers and sisters,” “son” to “child.”

After the outcry, the translators recalibrated a bit and released a new version of the NIV in 2011, ending further publication of the 1984 NIV and the TNIV at the same time. Evangelicals were still not pleased. Reaction among the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, was to denounce the updated NIV and request that their LifeWay stores stop selling it, a request that the trustees of LifeWay decided to ignore. But it really didn’t matter because by then the Baptists already had their own translation of the Bible.

The iconic final scene from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) as Major Kong (Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb down to its intended target. Introducing inclusive language to the NIV had a similar impact.

The Baptist Bible

The Southern Baptists had been thinking about their own translation from the late 1990s. Biblica, the organization holding the copyright on the NIV, provided exclusive publishing rights to Zondervan Publishing House in exchange for covering the costs of the initial translation. Therefore, if the Southern Baptists wanted to use NIV text in their Sunday School material, they would have to pay Zondervan for licensing. Add to this economic issue the rumors of gender-inclusive language in future versions of the NIV and the Baptists sought to develop a translation that would be under their control. The result was completed in 2004 and named the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) after Holman Bible Publishers, the publishing arm of LifeWay Christian Resources.

One feature of the HCSB was to sometimes use “Yahweh” for the divine name YHWH where it appears in the Hebrew. So, for example, Ex 15:3 is rendered, “The Lord is a warrior; Yahweh is His name.” Use of gender-neutral language was conservative in the use of pronouns but more gender-neutral than the 1984 NIV in other places (e.g., in Rom 3:4 where the NIV reads “Let God be true, and every man a liar” the HCSB reads “God must be true, even if everyone is a liar”).

A major revision to the HCSB, simply called the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) was released at the beginning of 2017. One of the main changes – other than the name – was to revert back to the use of “the Lord” instead of “Yahweh” in the 645 instances where it had been used previously in the HCSB. Also, the CSB increased the use of gender-neutral language. While masculine pronouns were still retained, in verses like Rom 8:29 where “brothers” appeared in the HCSB, the CSB translates as “brothers and sisters” thus bringing it a step closer to the 2011 NIV that the Southern Baptists found so objectionable:

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (NIV2011) 

For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers. (HCSB) 

For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (CSB)

It’s Not Liberal, It’s Biblical

This grudging acceptance of more gender-inclusive language has not gone unnoticed by the press. When The Atlantic trumpeted in an article that “Southern Baptists Embrace Gender-Inclusive Language in the Bible”, Southern Baptist scholars rose up to explain that the CSB is not really gender-neutral or gender-inclusive. It's like after years of condemning gender inclusivity as liberal and unbiblical, conservative theologians are now defending the changes as a better reflection of what the Bible actually says.

Over the past couple of articles examining the King James tradition and Catholic versions, we’ve seen how biblical translations have always been controversial. From arguments over what sources to use to arguments over whether translators are attacking Christian theology, every movement towards more accurate and inclusive translations was initially met with resistance and a demand to restore traditional language. But when we see a major conservative denomination like the Southern Baptists relax a bit on the use of gender-neutral language, perhaps the culture wars in this area may be drawing to a close.

All in the King James Family

The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible was not the first English translation from the original Hebrew and Greek (that honor goes to the work of William Tyndale), but it has become the best-known. It was translated by a commission appointed by James I of England and authorized for use in the Church of England in 1611, replacing the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and the Geneva Bible (1560). Also called the Authorized Version (AV), it had an immense influence on English literature and the wording of its verses have become immortalized in our culture. Among some, however, the KJV has become so sacrosanct that it is akin to blasphemy to either change it or question its inadequacies.

The Early Revisions

But the inadequacies of the KJV are legion. It wasn’t an entirely new translation; much of the English phrasings can be traced to earlier editions (for example, 1/3 of the NT is worded exactly like Tyndale’s). The Greek basis for the KJV was the Textus Receptus (TR), a compilation of a half-dozen inferior Byzantine manuscripts collected by Erasmus in 1516 and slightly corrected by others.

By the late 19th century, the evolution of the English language and discoveries of more ancient texts demanded a revision to the KJV. Published in 1885, the Revised Version (RV) was a product of mostly British Protestant scholars. It used a Greek text based on older Alexandrian manuscripts instead of the later Byzantine manuscripts reflected in the Textus Receptus. The RV also retained archaic terms from the KJV like aforetime, howbeit, must needs, etc.

A separate version of the RV with readings preferred by the American translators on the team, the American Standard Version (ASV), was released in 1901. One of decisions of the Americans was to translate the name of God (YHWH) in the OT as “Jehovah”. Judged too literal, the ASV never seriously challenged the KJV in popularity.

King James I of England and VI of Scotland, after John De Critz the Elder (died 1647)

No Longer a Virgin

Recognizing the deficiencies in the ASV, in the mid-20th century the National Council of Churches authorized work on another revision of the KJV. Called the Revised Standard Version (RSV), it was released in 1952. It reverted to the practice followed in the KJV of translating YHWH as “the Lord” but retained the antiquated second-person pronouns (“thou, thee, thy”) and verbs (“art, hast, didst”) in conversations directed towards God.

The RSV was mostly well-received among mainline Protestant churches, but it was also attacked vigorously by more conservative denominations. While some of the complaints related to the RSV not using the TR as the Greek base for the translation of the NT – something that would also apply to the RV and ASV – the main charge was that the RSV denied the virgin birth with its translation of Is 7:14:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (KJV) 

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman′u-el. (RSV)

I have previously discussed the differences in the Hebrew and Greek translation of this verse. “Young woman” reflects the Hebrew but it doesn’t square with Matthew’s prophetic citation of Isaiah in Mt 1:23. The RSV translation of Is 7:14 does not cast doubt on the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus because that is still clear in both Matthew and Luke.

A Conservative Reaction

Conservative denominations wanted an alternative to the RSV and got it in a revision to the ASV called the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Released in 1971 and updated in 1995, in addition to restoring “virgin” to Is 7:14, it also restored some theological terms like justification, sanctification and propitiation that had been downplayed in the RSV. Here’s an example of Rom 3:25:

whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; (ASV) 

whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; (RSV) 

whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; (NASB)

You can see how the word “propitiation” in the ASV was changed by the RSV to “expiation” and then restored to “propitiation” by the NASB. The NASB also followed the reverential tradition of capitalizing deity pronouns even though that was lacking in earlier translations.

Return of the Textus Receptus

While conservative in some ways, the NT of the NASB – like the RSV – was not based on the TR but on a critical Greek text giving preference to the oldest Greek manuscripts. In practice, this meant that certain verses and sometimes entire passages were relegated to footnotes because they were not found in the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts. Compare 1 John 5:7-8 in the KJV and the NASB:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. (KJV) 

For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. (NASB)

To devotees of the KJV removing the words in bold from the passage was part of a satanic plot to eliminate vital Christian doctrines such as the Trinity. Since modernizing the Elizabethan English of the KJV was a laudable goal in and of itself, a new modern-English translation using the same Hebrew and Greek source of the KJV was published in 1982. This translation eventually came to be known as the New King James Version (NKJV). In the passage above, the only noticeable difference in the NKJV from the KJV is replacing “Holy Ghost” with “Holy Spirit”.

A "family tree" of the KJV showing its various revisions through the years. The Living Bible was a paraphrase of the ASV, but the NLT was a true translation in the style of The Living Bible. The NIV is an example of a translation created outside the KJV tradition.

All-Inclusive

As mentioned above, the RSV retained the “thou” pronouns and verbs when referring to God, so one goal for its revision was to eliminate them. Another goal was the elimination of masculine-oriented language when the source language was gender-neutral. For instance, in 1 Cor 6:18, the RSV (and all the other translations mentioned so far) reads “Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body.” The Greek word behind the bolded word is anthropos, which is Greek for human.

The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), published in 1989, attempted to correct these defects. 1 Cor 6:18 in the NRSV reads “Every sin that a person commits is outside the body”. Sometimes it gets awkward. The RSV renders Gal 4:7 as “So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.” The NRSV translates it: “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” While it is laudable to be inclusive, Paul had just written in 4:1 that “heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves.” In modern English, the word child conjures up the image of an underage minor more than it does a mature adult. So it’s a work in progress.

Not surprisingly, just as the release of the RSV prompted the conservative NASB as an alternative, publication of the NRSV prompted a conservative alternative called the English Standard Version (ESV), released in 2001. The ESV – as the NASB before it – has as one of its goals retaining theological terminology like redemption, regeneration and reconciliation. Another goal was to be more constrained in the use of inclusive language. The ESV rendering of 1 Cor 6:18 is almost exactly like that of the NRSV, whereas Gal 4:7 is almost like the RSV. Is 7:14 is translated with “virgin” and 1 John 5:7-8 follows the RSV and NASB.

This brief tour through several of the biblical translations in the Tyndale-KJV tradition illustrates how some revisions are driven by changes in languages and discoveries in ancient manuscripts. Others are in reaction to real or perceived attacks on biblical doctrines or preferred readings.

In my next article, I will discuss translations outside the Tyndale-KJV family, especially Catholic translations.

Be Not Straitened in Your Bowels

Giving Bible-related talks at my church over the years, I’ve been asked lots of questions about bible translations. In part two of my series The Bible: An Owner’s Manual, I’ll address three of the most frequently-asked questions.

Why are there so many translations?

The Wikipedia article on English Bible translations lists almost 120 different versions. More than twenty on the list pre-date the 20th century but forty different translations (some of them revisions of existing translations) were released in the last 20 years. Some of these are niche translations without widespread use, but it is probably safe to say that you could walk into any well-stocked Christian bookstore today and find bibles in 20 or more different translations.

A selection of just some of the many Bible translations into English currently on the market.

The main reason given for the plethora of translations is that the English language changes over time and words fall out of use or take on new meanings.

The “king” of Bible translations is the King James (KJV). Authorized for use in the Anglican Church by King James in 1611, it has had a tremendous influence on the English language, but its archaic language is sometimes incomprehensible to the modern reader. For example:

Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I cut off:
him that hath an high look and a proud heart will not I suffer. (Ps 101:5)

Here is that same verse in the New King James Version (NKJV), a 1982 revision of the KJV that updates the language and grammar while preserving the style of the original:

Whoever secretly slanders his neighbor, him I will destroy;
The one who has a haughty look and a proud heart, him I will not endure.

But you don’t have to wait 400 years to see how a language can change. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) came out in 1952 and Psalm 50:9a reads: “I will accept no bull from your house.” This was slightly modified in the NRSV (1989) to eliminate the snigger-factor: “I will not accept a bull from your house.”

I suspect there is also a monetary incentive in cranking out new translations. According to a recent survey from the American Bible Society (ABS), 87% of households own a bible. Most homes have more than one copy and 20% own more than five. Yet even with this sort of saturation, 10% of adults purchased a bible in 2016. Twenty million bibles – from study bibles to family bibles to pocket bibles – are sold every year. The bible business is big business and just as Microsoft keeps cranking out new versions of Excel and Word to encourage sales, publishers need new translations of “the Word” to hawk as the latest and greatest.

What makes one translation different from the others?

In the field of translation, the two philosophies are formal (or verbal) equivalence and dynamic (or functional) equivalence. Verbal equivalence (word-for-word) seeks to reproduce in modern English the words in the original language. If the same word order in the original is retained, this can give a wooden, “Bible English” feel that makes it hard to read. Dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought) seeks to translate the functional meaning of the original language, expressing the thought in contemporary language.

Let’s take an example from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. In the KJV:

O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels. Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged. (2 Cor 6:11-3)

Huh? An enlarged heart and straitened bowels? Let’s see what the same passage looks like in the NKJV:

O Corinthians! We have spoken openly to you, our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections. Now in return for the same (I speak as to children), you also be open.

This is a bit more understandable. In the ancient world, “bowels” (or “guts”) were the seat of strong emotions (hence, “gut feelings”). The KJV translated literally, but doing so here would make the modern reader think of constipation. To avoid such a misinterpretation, the translator has to use a different word like “affections” to get Paul’s original idea across.

As we see from this example, it’s not a black/white situation. Even a translation that strives for literal accuracy will have to, at times, be less literal in order to preserve understanding. If readability, not literalness, becomes the primary concern, then translators can make the Bible sound more contemporary. Here is the same passage in the Good News translation (GNB):

Dear friends in Corinth! We have spoken frankly to you; we have opened our hearts wide. It is not we who have closed our hearts to you; it is you who have closed your hearts to us. I speak now as though you were my children: show us the same feelings that we have for you. Open your hearts wide!

In my opinion, a free translation such as this avoids the stilted “Bible English” of the NKJV and sounds fresh. Reading this, I can easily hear Paul’s voice pleading with the Corinthians for reconciliation.

Which translation should I use?

Although there are dozens of English translations of the Bible available on the market, according to the same ABS survey mentioned above, 31% of Bible-readers prefer the KJV. The NIV, which is the top-selling translation each year, is second with a 13% preference.

But it would be foolish to purchase a KJV or NIV simply because those are the most-used or the top-seller versions. Some translations are intended for study and use in worship services, while others are intended for reading and devotional use. The translation you use should fit the purpose for which you intend to use it.

If your goal is an in-depth study of the Bible, then you want a more literal translation like the NRSV, the New American Standard Bible (NASB), or the English Standard Version (ESV). When the original Hebrew or Greek is ambiguous, these translations should be as well. You don’t want the translation to “clear it up” because then you will be getting what the translators “think” is the meaning of the passage.

But accuracy is bought at the price of readability. A literal translation could become very tiresome to read over a long stretch, particularly if you are constantly having to consult the footnotes or a bible commentary to make sense of the text. If you want to be able to comfortably read a book or chapter in the Bible and have a general understanding of its meaning, then you want a looser translation like the GNB or the New Living Translation (NLT). The Contemporary English Version (CEV) is written at an elementary reading-level and the Common English Bible (CEB) is written at a middle-school level; both are perfect for readers with limited English skills.

Many translations (NABRE, NIV, NJPS) will be somewhere in-between: literal where possible, but free when necessary.

There’s no perfect translations, so it is best to compare the same verse in different versions to get a sense of the original. Ideally, having separate literal and interpretive translations gives you the best of both worlds. I own a dozen bibles in ten different translations but the ones I turn to the most are the NRSV and the GNB; the NRSV for its accuracy and the GNB for its readability.

In my next article, I’ll dig a little deeper into some of the translations currently on the market.

Lost in Translation

There’s an old Italian expression “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”), meaning that a bad translator can ruin a great piece of literature. When we look at the very familiar story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a lot of what we think we know about this story is wrong because of how the story has been traditionally translated.

For example, “everybody” knows that man was created first. When God saw that it wasn’t good for the man to be alone, he sought to create a helpmate for the man. God created animals and brought them to the man, but they would not do. So God removed a rib from the man and created a woman from it.

For centuries, many – mostly men – have used the story that “everybody” knows as evidence to support the conclusion that women were subordinate to men. First place is superior; last place is inferior. Women were an afterthought of God, created only as a “helper” to men. Because the woman was formed from a piece of the man, she was dependent on man for her existence.

Well, it turns out “everybody” is wrong. And misleading translations are partly to blame. Let’s look at the three translated terms I mentioned above in my synopsis: “the man”, “helpmate”, and “rib”.

Let’s start with the word translated as “man”. In Hebrew, the word ’adam is used to refer to a human being or collectively to humankind. The traditional King James translation of Gen 1:26 is “And God said, Let us make man (‘adam) in our image.” In English, the word “man” stands for the collective “mankind”. Someone reading or hearing the word “man” might think it is referring to a male human being, but the rest of the sentence “and let them have dominion…over all the earth” makes it clear “man” is referring to “mankind” or “humanity”, and that’s how recent translations handle it.

What happens when we get to Gen 2:7? The traditional translation is “And the Lord God formed man (ha’adam) of the dust of the ground (ha’adamah)” (KJV). We have two translation issues: 1) using “man” to translate ha’adam (ha is the definite article in Hebrew, “the”) and 2) losing the pun between ha’adam and ha’adamah. It gets even worse when the KJV (following the LXX and Vulgate) begins translating ha’adam as a proper name, “Adam”, in 2:19 and onwards. Modern translations will use “the man” throughout because, until the creation of woman, the text is obviously talking about one individual and not a collective. If we want to preserve a gender-neutral translation (like the original Hebrew) and retain the pun, we could translate this verse as “YHWH God formed the human from the humus” or, my favorite, “the earthling from the earth”.

The next problematic translation is “helpmate”. Actually, KVJ translates Gen 2:18: “I will make him an help meet for him.” The odd word combination “help meet” became corrupted into “helpmate”. “Meet” is an old way of saying suitable, fitting, or proper: “make him a help suitable for him”. Translating the word as “helper” in modern translations isn’t much better. “Helper” implies a subordinate or apprentice, but the Hebrew word refers to a companion of equal ability, a partner. The animals could certainly be “helpers”, but not “partners”.


Bartolo di Fredi's "Creation of Eve"

This brings us to the word translated “rib” in Gen 2:21: “and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh” (KJV). Almost every version translates the word as “rib” but every other use of the word in the OT refers to the “side” of something (like the side of the Ark of the Covenant). If translated as “took one of its sides and closed up its place with flesh”, it implies considerably more surgery than the simple removal of a bone; something big is removed from the original human/earthling that leaves it utterly transformed.

Departing from the traditional translations allow us to see the story in a different way. YHWH God forms the first human – not the first man – from the dust of the ground. YHWH God also formed birds and animals and brought them to the human, but none of them were a suitable companion. So YHWH God removed one of the sides from the creature and fashioned a woman and presented it to the man. Only after the woman is created does the Hebrew text use words exclusively referring to “woman” and “man”: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman (’ishshah), because she was taken out of Man (’ish)” (Gen 2:23, KJV). In a real sense, “man” and “woman” were created simultaneously when YHWH God performed his surgery.

The following interpretation is consistent with the Hebrew text: The earthling was created as a sexually undifferentiated creature. Corresponding to Gen 1 where God differentiated light from dark, upper from lower waters, and so on, here YHWH God is differentiating male and female from the original unsexed earth creature. The earthling was the prototype human; the man and woman are human version 2.0. When the man and woman are together, the original unity is restored and they can function as one; the two become “one flesh”. And, keep in mind, that “one flesh” is referring to the Hebrew idea of the undivided whole of a living being, not just the material aspect of a body/spirit duality as in Greek philosophy and contemporary thinking.


Could this be what pre-Eve Adam looked like?

While doing research on this, I discovered that this is not a crazy modern conjecture. Jewish midrash (rabbinic commentary on the Torah) considers the possibility that the first human was created with male and female sexual organs on each side of its body. Called the androgyne in scholarly literature, this creature was split in half to create the first man and the first woman. This was a way to reconcile Gen 1:27 that said “male and female God created them” with the account in Gen 2:21 of how YHWH God fashioned a woman from one of the man’s “sides”.

Whether this interpretation is close to what the author intended or wishful thinking, I can certainly agree with what Matthew Henry (1662-1714) wrote in his commentary on the Bible:

“The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”