I worked on the translation while flying to Los Angeles last week, and when I reviewed my work on Genesis 1:20, I was startled to find that my first attempt went so far in the direction of brevity that it excised whole chunks that exist in the original. Too much was lost. So I threw it out and began from scratch.
The first attempt:
He spoke of animals That the sea make them And the sky make them The beasts of the sea And the birds of the sky and many of all And so they came, and He could see that all was fine
The new version:
God said, "Sea seething with creatures birds flying over Earth, on Heaven's face" He made Leviathans All creatures seething in the sea by their kindred Every winged bird by its kindred He could see that all was fine
The key to these verses is the Hebrew root, שׁרץ. It occurs several times. First, it’s the root for the primary verb, יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ. Then it’s a noun, שֶׁ֖רֶץ. Finally, it returns in a verb, שָׁרְצ֨וּ. In the lexicons1 and in the English Bibles, it’s almost always given in these verses as some version of swarm or teem. (The NKJV take on this verse is lovely and a rare improvement on the old KJV: Let the waters abound with an abundance.) But it doesn’t necessarily have the sense of slimy creatures. The root shows up in Exodus 1:7 to describe the fecundity of Israel: וּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל פָּר֧וּ וַֽיִּשְׁרְצ֛וּ (roughly: and the sons of Israel were fruitful and multiplying).
I chose to translate the first instance as seething in order to get the assonance with sea and to express how crowded these verses (and the waters and air they describe) are with moving, hectic, unreasoned life. One of the difficulties in translating Hebrew is that in order to approximate the syntax, you are forced to add a lot of additional words and thus lose the brevity and tempo. Translating into verse helps with this somewhat, but when there’s no way around it I’m willing to sacrifice some of the syntax out of fidelity to those other (neglected) elements of the language. For example, here’s the second half of verse 21:
וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם
I could translate this in the “usual” way as something like: …every ensouled living, moving creature, which the sea seethes with, according to its kind. That off the cuff translation is close to the KJV: …every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind. Both increase the number of words by more than half, whereas my translation (All creatures seething in the sea / by their kindred) matches the original word count.2 The word creatures is forced to do a lot of work. Mostly I mean it in the sense of creatura or κτίσμα, but the connotation of monster, à la Creature from the Black Lagoon, is not inappropriate here.
More soon. And if this approach to Bible translation interests you, please share with friends and
For fans of dictionaries, here are the lexicon entries (the first two from the inimitable Dictionary of Classical Hebrew and the third from the ol’ BDB):
Plus, Seething/sea. In/kindred/winged/kindred.
Interesting. "Swarm" and "teem" do not to my mind carry "the sense of slimy creatures".