Studying the Bible can be great fun! I love the way its language can be played with through puns, reversals and word games. The Bible is full of the most delicious stories and visual jokes. If you doubt me, have a look at Jonah – a marvellous storybook of reflections on the life of a prophet! Another great example is the story of Adam and Eve – the word for Adam is a close relative of the word Adamah, meaning ground, earth. Yes, Adam was formed from Adamah. You can see how that joke works.
When I studied Hebrew – not exactly an easy proposition, but still, very rewarding – us students were asked to block-colour certain words through a text. Suddenly, visually, you could see how the language shaped the story. It made studying it as enjoyable as a game of Scrabble!
In English, the Bible has given us many words and phrases we still use today. In fact, I suspect it is one of the reasons people so enjoy reading the Authorised Version, the King James translation. For scholars, that translation is full of errors but it has a familiarity that is attractive to lay people – think how many of us can repeat word for word the birth of Jesus narrative without prompting – that’s partly because so many of our carols quote this version but also because for nearly four centuries it was the standard readings at Christmas. Commentators say there are about 38 well-known phrases that we still use today: Bite the dust (Psalm 72: 9), The blind leading the blind (Matthew 15: 13-14), By the skin of your teeth (Job 19:20), and so on. Can you think of any others – if you get stuck, have a look at the website www.unlockingthebible.org where you will find a long list of examples.
These days, translations of the Bible are either as good an exact translation as the scholars can make – accurate but often lacking in artistry – or paraphrases of the text, where the meaning is conveyed more generally which helps with our understanding, even if the translation is not so accurate. For Sunday worship I vary between the New Revised Standard Version (a word for word translation that is precise but leaden) and either The Message – racy and alive but full of Americanisms – or The Living Bible translation which is colloquial but leans towards an ‘evangelical’ flavour.
One of the dreams of Luther and the other Reformers was to make the Bible available and accessible to ordinary people, so they could read the text for themselves. But I wonder how many of us take up that challenge and enjoy the experience.
Martin