Revised New Jerusalem Bible, review

As a young man raised in a Christian home, I became enamoured of The Jerusalem Bible, a translation based on La Bible de Jérusalem, published in France in 1956. I had tried such paraphrases as J. B. Phillips' New Testament in Modern English and Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible. In fact, I had received a copy of the latter at Christmas 1970 and read it from cover to cover over the next six months or so. I was so put off by its obvious anachronisms and excessive literary breeziness that I quickly abandoned it for something better. The Jerusalem Bible (JB), published in 1966, seemed an obvious alternative. It reads very well and has a certain literary quality that appealed to me. I found it intriguing as well because it included those extra books in the Old Testament that Protestants group together as part of the Apocrypha.

However, the JB's renditions of some passages seemed dubious. For example, Philippians 2:12 was rendered "work for your salvation in fear and trembling," suggesting that salvation is something we can accomplish or at least co-operate in bringing about. Most other translations render this as: "work out your salvation in fear and trembling." Proverbs 31:30 reads: "Charm is deceitful, and beauty empty; the woman who is wise is the one to praise," whereas every other translation reads: "a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." Why on earth would the translators omit a reference to the Lord from this passage, which is found even in the Latin Vulgate? Well, we go to footnote h for an explanation:

'the woman who is wise' corr.; 'the woman, the fear of Yahweh' Hebr. The Hebr. gloss, incorporated and developed by the Greek ('a wise woman will be praised—the fear of the Lord, that is the thing to boast of') seems to show that the scribes understood this whole passage allegorically as a description of Wisdom personified, cf. 8:22 +. This would make it an apt conclusion to the book.

However, the second edition restores the original text: "the woman who fears Yahweh is the one to praise." The restored text then directs us to footnote i:

This eulogy of the perfect wife may have been understood as an allegorical description of personified Wisdom, see 8:22e, as an amplification in Gk seems to suggest ('A wise woman will be praised—the fear of Yahweh, this is what must be extolled.'); and this would explain why this poem, a very fine one in any case, finds its place as the conclusion to this book.

Moreover, the editors of the first edition freely rearranged the material within books to conform to speculative theories on the original order of the text. For example, in the book of Hosea the JB's editors placed the first three verses of chapter 2 after chapter 3, assuming that its subject matter better fit in this spot. Most famously, the JB rendered the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH as Yahweh throughout the Old Testament, a practice continued in the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB, 1985), despite the fact that observant Jews haven't pronounced the name since the Babylonian exile and the exact pronunciation is now unknown.

When the NJB was published, it pulled back from some of the more questionable renderings. Hosea 2 was returned to its canonical place in the text. Philippians 2:12 was corrected. A modest introduction of gender-inclusive language was introduced, but not in a way that substantially altered the meaning of the text. The use of Yahweh continued in this second edition of the JB.

What distinguished both of these editions was not so much the translation itself as the rather extensive textual apparatus accompanying it. Unlike most published Bible translations, the text was printed in single column format with two columns of footnotes placed beneath the text on the facing page. These notes reflect the orthodoxy of the historical-critical method as applied to the Scriptures, including an effort to distinguish amongst the traditional four sources in the Pentateuch according to the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis. Also known as the Documentary Hypothesis, this approach discerns four authorial schools: the Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D) in the first five books of the Old Testament. The footnotes tend to reflect a naturalistic cosmology.

I have recently received a copy of the reader's edition of the Revised New Jerusalem Bible—in effect, the third edition of the JB. I've not done an exhaustive exploration of this edition, but from what I see thus far, the translation appears much less paraphrastic than its two predecessors. Not only has it pulled back on some of the more imaginative renderings of the first edition, but it has even dropped the use of Yahweh for the Divine Name, returning to use of the LORD, as in most other English translations. Henry Wansbrough explains in the Foreword: "Jewish sensibilities have also been honoured by rendering the sacred Name YHWH as 'the LORD' rather than by a (dubious) rendering of the pronunciation." For some reason it took them 55 years to figure this out and to make this move.

The Psalms

What most interests us here, of course, is the Psalms of the JB and its successors. In the first edition, the JB renders Psalm 7:3-4 as follows: "Yahweh my God, if I ever soiled my hands with fraud, repaid a friend evil for good, spared a man who wronged me . . . ." The second edition reads: "Yahweh my God, if I have done this: if injustice has stained my hands, if I have repaid my ally with treachery or spared someone who attacked me unprovoked . . . ." In both cases, a footnote explains the phrase I have italicized:

The law of talio, see Ex 21:25f, required that good be rendered for good, evil for evil. The text must not be watered down as in the versions 'if I requited with evil the man who wronged me', or (following the Aram.) 'robbed (my persecutor)'; the morality of the Gospel is yet to come, Mt 5:38seq.

The use of Hebrew words for God is notable at the beginning of Psalm 91 in the first edition:

If you live in the shelter of Elyon and make your home in the shadow of Shaddai, you can say to Yahweh, 'My refuge, my fortress, my God in whom I trust!'

The NJB changes the wording somewhat, but retains the Hebrew words, meaning "the Most High" (Elyon) and "the God of heaven" or "the Almighty" (Shaddai).

Remarkably, none of this makes its way into the third edition, the RNJB. Here is Psalm 7: "If I have done this, O LORD, my God, if I have paid back evil for good, and have plundered my enemy without cause . . . ." And here's the beginning of Psalm 91:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, and abides in the shade of the Almighty, says to the LORD, 'My refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust!'

These are rather large differences, and they bring the Psalms back into territory familiar to us from the other more staid versions of the Bible. Here is Wansbrough again: "A further major change has been the incorporation of the Revised Grail Psalter (widely used in English-language liturgies) as the translation of the Psalms; for this we are grateful to Abbot Gregory Polan and his team." I've written on the Grail/Gelineau Psalms before in this space, and as recently as last year. I might add that the prose texts are again in double-column format, while the poetic passages are on single column pages.

Final comments

I will make two final comments on the paperback reader's edition now in my possession. First, because the volume runs to 1,564 pages, the publisher uses exceedingly thin paper stock. This causes a significant degree of bleed through of print from the other side of each page and even from the pages beneath. It is worse if the print on the opposite side is in boldface. This difficulty can be mitigated to some degree by inserting a blank sheet of paper behind the page being read. Nevertheless, for someone like myself with less than 20/20 vision, this makes the volume too difficult to read at any length. Perhaps other editions of the RNJB do not suffer from this defect, but I have not seen these.

Second, I wonder whether subsequent editions of the Jerusalem Bible might do well to drop revised, new, and any other qualifiers and go with, say, Jerusalem Bible, 4th edition. One cannot continue to multiply adjectives indefinitely.

The RNJB is published by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., although I don't see it on the company's website. It is available from the standard online vendors. My copy took just over two months to arrive from Ireland, because of the Canadian postal strike, but others should receive theirs more quickly.