This is a book review I wrote 9 years ago and still very relevant today. The author wrote me at the time to say “Thank you for your thoughtful review of The Grammar of God. I feel you truly understood what I was trying to do!” -Aviya Kushner
The English Old Testament is a source of inspiration for millions of people. But what if the English translation deviates from the original Hebrew meaning throughout the text? That’s the premise of Aviya Kushner’s book The Grammar of God: a Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bible.
Kushner grew up in a Jewish household and was raised reading the Bible in its original Hebrew language. When she started reading the English translation of the Old Testament “many times (I was) saddened at what had been misrepresented or obscured in moving the words from the Hebrew to the English, from the ancient to the more contemporary,” she writes.
I liked the examples Kushner gave of subtle differences in meaning between the Hebrew and English verses. “The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is not nearly as straightforward in Hebrew as in English,” she says in one instance. “In biblical Hebrew, there is a gaping difference between the verb ‘to kill’ – laharog – and the verb ‘to murder’ – lirtzoach; the Hebrew word used in the Ten Commandments is ‘murder’, yet the commandment is frequently mistranslated as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This word choice matters because there are acceptable forms of killing in the Bible (such as self-defense).”
Kushner recalls her mother’s interpretation of the original Hebrew in other parts of the book. Take the first verse in the Bible. “It all comes down to how you read that one word,” her mother says. “Do you read the verb in the first line as bara, in the past tense, so that it means ‘In the beginning God created,’ or do you read it as bro , the infinitive, so that it reads ‘In the beginning of God’s creating’?” The message of God creating all the time, including now, is quite different than a God who created heaven and earth eons ago and then was His work was largely done.
Kushner is sympathetic to the translator’s task. “It is not easy to make a language come alive for someone who does not speak that language; it is a challenge to rename the seemingly familiar and name the unfamiliar. The effort often results in clumsiness and misunderstanding,” she says. Grammar of God is not meant to be a new version of the Old Testament based on the original Hebrew language. Rather, with a few strategic examples, Kushner made me aware of how Biblical translation is not an exact science. If the Bible (specifically the Old Testament) is an important part of your faith tradition, I recommend reading The Grammar of God for new insights into this sacred text.
