20070828

I don't know why those who write against the lunacy of the KJV-only proponents never got around to asking me for an infallible argument demonstrating that the KJV is far from perfect and, indeed, a deeply flawed translation of holy writ. All they had to do was ask. But no. They struggled along for years—with solid arguments, sure, but without that One Argument that Would Rule Them All and in the Darkness Bind Them.

Your mouths water. I can tell. So here it is.

The phrase, "from whence," is used 27 times in the KJV.

An obvious imperfection. The arguers work is done. With something so glaring as this faux pas, one need not even refer to the fact that the KJV translates Passover as "Easter."

Queen for a Night

Somehow the conversation come up that there was a movie playing around that was about the events of the book of Esther. I hear it's pretty accurate for a romantic comedy. Well, I don't know if it's all that comedic, but I do hear they made Xerxes into a nice guy, so I figure that "romantic comedy" is probably pretty fitting.

Anyway, I think the film's called One Night with the King, but I keep getting mixed up and calling it Queen for a Night. Probably a matter of six in one hand, half-dozen in the other. In any case, this serves, I think, to highlight some of the weirdnesses of the story of Esther.

I'm not really sure where to begin, but let's talk essentials. Mordecai. Essentially a pimp? Who whores his cousin out to the king, knowing that he'll think she's hot and that maybe this could work to someone's advantage somewhere down the line. Esther. Essentially Xerxes's flavour of the night? With how often she saw the king and what a big deal it was when she did, we can assume that she was just one in a cast of thousands.

Let's forget about the weirdness of Mordecai grooming his cousin who he cares for like a daughter to be meat for the Persian king. Let's try not to think about how one might prepare a girl to really excel at that position.

What I'm curious about is how Mordecai can justify his action in light of his religion. Under the Mosaic covenant, the children of Israel were forbidden to intermarry with the pagan. That was a very bad thing and caused, really, the downfall of the nation. So, what is Mordecai thinking, by preparing his Jewish cousin to be bed-buddies with the king of the pagan empire? I can think of only two probable conclusions: a) he was a bad, bad man whose inadequacies we gloss over because we're willing to let the end justify the means in this case; or b) the Mosaic covenant was no longer applicable, as the Israelites had already received the final execution of its sanctions.

Anyway, I'd like to raise a toast this Valentine's Day to Esther: Queen for a night. Or three. Suffice it to say: cultures are weird.

Redaction

If by any means I may provoke to emulation my flesh, and might save some of them. For if the casting away of them the reconciling of the world, what the receiving, but life from the dead? For if the firstfruits holy, the lump also: and if the root holy, so the branches.

So I know this guy. I run into him a time or three a week. And on rare occasions, while looking over his shoulder, I see into his Bible. (I know, huh. Such a Peeping Tom!) And this is where the funny begins.

Sure there's all kinds of highlighting, underlining, and marginalia (though I have yet to see a "man vs. nature" on the sidelines), but the real kicker is that every page is littered with words he has blotted out, stricken from the record. What began in a kind of mild shock (as in, "Wow, he must not have liked what Jesus said there!") has transformed into a giddy kind of amusement as the truth of the matter slowly has reached its dawning.

This guy I know, he's a big King James Version (KJV) fan. He may even be of the One True Bible (tm) fanclub, I'm not sure. In any case, those familiar with the KJV and its younger brother should know that both versions have a number of words italicized (or otherwise demarcated from the rest of the text - the BLB uses square brackets). This special notation is used (for reasons that escape me) to alert the English reader to the fact that the noted words do not appear literally in the original text but are only implied by the original text. It was a moment of high joy when it was discovered that these are the words that are blacked out.

It was even higher joy, a couple weeks ago, to hear him as he read from his Bible aloud. Skipping all the blacked-out words. Now the KJV is difficult enough for the contemporary ear to decipher when its grammatically sound. To hear the clipped staccato of this abridged version was more disorienting than watching the theatrical climax to James Cameron's The Abyss.

Now he's a nice guy and I imagine that what he's doing, he does with the best of intentions - being careful not to ad to the Word of God and all. But it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of the way foreign language translation works. It's pretty much a well-esteemed truth that an entirely literal translation of Scripture would be patently unreadable. This is because languages are not grammatical analogues of each other. This is why you'll hear twenty-three syllables on the Hong Kong crime drama you're watching and the subtitles will say something terse like, "I'm hungry!"

To use an example from one of the few foreign languages in which I possess a working vocabulary of more than thirty words, if i wish to translate, "No se" from Spanish, I'll simply say it means, "I don't know" or technically, "I do not know" (four words from two). If I were this guy, I would have to blot that down to something like, "Not know." Not only is this pretty inelegant, but as there's no attached pronoun, the statement is pretty ambiguous. Translation of something like "Me llamo El Dane" becomes more tricky. Though we would likely express the same sentiment in English by saying something like, "I am The Dane" or "My name is The Dane," a literal translation would run along the lines of, "I call myself The Dane." This guy's version would run: "Call myself The Dane." It's just too weird.

And it does exactly what he's trying to avoid: it distorts the meaning of the text.