The Word: On the Translation of the Bible
John Barton
Allen Lane, £25, 320 pages
The tricky business of translating sacred scripture from the original into other languages is older even than Christianity itself. The book of Nehemiah suggests that when the Jewish exiles were able to return from their long captivity in Babylonia in the 5th century BC, the Levites orally translated the Torah so that the ordinary people could understand it. It may be that the Hebrew of scripture had become the learned language of bookish specialists; an extempore rendering into the Aramaic lingua franca of the Persian period Levant was necessary for public comprehension.
