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And God Said: How Translations Conceal The Bible's Original Meaning (2010)

by Joel M. Hoffman(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0312565585 (ISBN13: 9780312565589)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Thomas Dunne Books

review 1: I totally recommend this book, if you are interested in the Bible, Hebrew, or the subject of translation. The author has a very engaging style for an otherwise dry subject.I have never really delved into the Christian interpretation of the "Hebrew Bible", so it was fascinating to learn that some groups try to infuse certain parts with translations that validate the New Testament. (I'm not sure why they feel the need to do this, as these texts were written in very different time periods). In fact, one of the unintentionally hilarious Amazon reviews of this book started with, "Hoffman is a Jew, keep that in mind. He has willed himself not to accept the true Messiah." So many of the translations the author chose to examine are controversial, and people get very worked up abou... moret this kind of thing. I could begin to see why it is important to do the translation correctly.Two irritations: (1) reading the Hebrew words in transliteration was hard for me. I would have preferred they be written side-by-side in both alphabets. Perhaps they were in the printed book and not the Kindle version. (2) The author would mix English and Hebrew endings; i.e,, when pluralizing a Hebrew word such as 'yeled', he would call it 'yeleds" instead of 'yeledim'. This got to be really annoying after a while. Maybe it was done for accessibility reasons, but I find it hard to believe that the target audience for this book needed it to be dumbed down this way.And, quite honestly, the author's method for interpreting difficult words in the Bible is well-explained, but not really feasible for those of us who are non-scholars. It involves starting with a concordance to try to determine the meaning of the word everywhere it is used, but you really need to be well-steeped in the cultural background of the time and place the Bible was written to start making the educated guesses he does. His best advice, from the appendix, is to read the Oxford Jewish Study Bible, which has extremely useful margin notes on that very subject.
review 2: This book wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be. I love reading books about misinterpretations in the Bible. This book focused on mistranslations in the Bible and how those mistranslations change the meaning of the Bible. But none of the changes in meaning were too extraordinary, and the book was basically a step-by-step on how to translate the Bible's original Hebrew into English, which could get very dry and in-depth at times. I think I might have enjoyed the book more if it gave more examples of mistranslations instead of spending so much time talking about ... well about stuff that was kind of boring. I understand that it was important to explain why the mistranslations took place, but I didn't need to know every single detail. less

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