Rewriting...

This guy has just released a new translation of Books of Moses--the first five books of the Bible. I'm not sure what to think, but just not knowing where this guy is coming from theologically/spiritually makes me a skeptical until I know more about him. According to CNN,

A professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Alter says since he has never found a biblical translation that he liked or could recommend to his comparative literature students, he decided to do his own, starting with the story of Genesis and ending with the death of Moses.

His argument is that past translations either get the Hebrew wrong or mangle the Bible's syntax or lose the power of the work or even are so up-to-the-minute that they become too conversational to be accurate or interesting.

He was also determined to get back into the book every single "and" that other translators left out, saying that part of book's majesty is built by its use of repetitions.

The 1611 King James version, perhaps the most famous book ever written by a committee, may reach poetic heights, but Alter says it is fraught with "embarrassing inaccuracies" and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones.

Here's an example of how this translation differs:

"Reading through this book is a wearying, disorientating and at times revelatory experience," said noted author John Updike in a review of Alter's 1,063-page translation of "The Five Books of Moses" (Norton) for the New Yorker magazine in which he complained about page after page of footnotes that often explain obscure points.

Updike also took exception to some of the translation. For example, he is a lot happier with the King James version in which "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water" than with Alter's version of the same sentence: "God's breath hovering over the waters."

But Alter, in an interview with Reuters, said he used the phrase "God's breath" rather than the "spirit of God" for a simple reason: "The Hebrew word means life's breath, a constant moving of oxygen in and out. The body-soul split of early Christianity is something not imagined in the early Hebrew."