I’ve recently had reason to get aggravated again about the way some modern translations mistreat Ishmael and his kin, specifically in their translations of Genesis 25:18. In the English translation tradition, three renderings of the last clause of Genesis 25:18 compete for translators’ allegiance:

• … and they [the Ishmaelites] lived in hostility toward all their kin.
• … and they [the Ishmaelites] settled near all their kin.
• … and he [Ishmael] died near all his kin.

So which of these translations has the best claim to representing the author’s meaning? For a semi-lengthy discussion, please follow the “read more” link below.

The Hebrew text of Genesis 25:18 reads:

וישכנו מחוילה עד שור אשר על פני מצרים באכה אשורה על פני כל אחיו נפל

Some modern translators take the conjunction of נפל and על פני in the modern English sense of “fall upon,” as in, “raiders fell upon the caravan and stole all their spices.” Thus, for the second part of the verse, we get translations like:

And they lived in hostility toward all their brothers. (NIV)

With only slight variations in wording, the NASB, Message, NLT, NCV, HCSB, and the other members of the NIV family (NIrV, TNIV) all give their readers some variation of this translation.

Yet the Septuagint translators did not see things the same way:

κατὰ πρόσωπον πάντων τῶν ἀδελφῶν αὐτοῦ κατῴκησεν

As their use of κατοικέω to translate נפל shows, the Septuagint translators read this verse as a perfectly peaceable and fully geographical comment about the Ishmaelites’ residential zone. They did not impute intranecine hostility to the Ishmaelites, as do the modern translations quoted above. Among modern translations, the NJPSV, NRSV, ESV, and CEV (non-exclusivley, as I haven’t checked every single translation!) follow the Septuagint’s understanding of the Hebrew text and render the clause in question something like:

they camped alongside all their kinsmen. (NJPSV)

Jerome seems to have understood the Hebrew verb נפל as a specific reference to Ishmael himself, not to the Ishmaelites in general—it does appear in the masculine singular, after all. Thus in the Vulgate, we read:

coram cunctis fratribus suis obiit

Not surprisingly, the KJV and its modern “updates” like the NKJV follow the Vulgate, and give readers a clause resembling:

and he died in the presence of all his brethren. (KJV)

In light of the entirely peaceable Septuagint and Vulgate translations, why do several modern translations read hostility into the Hebrew text of Genesis 25:18? Admittedly, some biblical writers used the word נפל to denote raids, as in Job 1:15 (but not with על פני, for which see below). Also, to be fair to these translators, the highly-regarded Köhler-Baumgartner lexicon lists “to raid, fall upon” as a possible translation-equivalent for נפל. However, KB places this sense last in a list of eight possible senses for נפל, and its list of examples does not actually correspond to the meaning suggested. Thus, under the heading “to raid, fall upon,” KB includes the following (omitting redundant passages or those where the very presence of נפל depends on emendation):

Josh 11:7 — So Joshua and his army came upon them … and fell upon them (ויפלו בהם).

Judg 7:12 — The Midianites and the Amalekites and all the easterners camped in the valley (נפלים בעמק) like a swarm of locusts …

1 Sam 29:3 — Since he deserted (מיום נפלו) to me I have found no fault in him to this day.

1 Sam 31:4 — So Saul took his own sword and fell upon it (ויפל עליה).

2 Kings 7:4 — So now, let’s desert to (ונפלה אל) the Aramean camp; if they spare our lives, we will live …

Jer 21:9 — Those who go out and surrender to (ונפל על) the Chaldeans who are besieging you will live …

Jer 39:9 — Then Nebuzaradan, leader of the rab-tabachim, deported to Babylon the rest of the people who were left in the city, and the deserters who had deserted to him (הנפלים אשר נפלו עלו), and the rest of the people who were left.

In the examples given, only one verse uses נפל to mean “to raid” (Josh 11:7). Judges 7:12 narrates a hostile situation, but the sense of hostility comes from the context, not from the verb נפל, which simply relates to the aggressors’ geographical position. More verses use נפל to mean “to desert, surrender” than to mean “to raid, attack,” but I know of no English translation that proposes “they [the Ishmaelites] surrendered to all their kin” in Genesis 25:18!

One must also consider the use of על פני, which generally means “near” (some have proposed “east of,” but I think that gets too specific). Search Accordance, BibleWorks, or Logos for נפל together with על פני in the same verse, and then take out the verses where פנה clearly functions as a noun rather than part of a compound preposition, and the verses where נפל and על פני appear in separate clauses, and you will have only Gen 25:18 and—maybe—Jer 9:21; Ezek 29:5 left. In the latter two passages, the phrase על פני השדה appears; to me, it’s not clear whether we should read פני in these two verses as part of the compound preposition על פני or as a noun in construct with השדה — as “upon the field” or “upon the [sur]face of the field.” The decision doesn’t make much semantic difference, and certainly no possible way of reading Jer 9:21; Ezek 29:5 gives any warrant for reading hostility into the collocation of נפל and על פני in Genesis 25:18.

Maybe I should look at this differently. Might the compound preposition על פני carry a hostile connotation when its object is a person or group of people? This hypothesis is a little harder to test, since testing it requires combing through 207 biblical appearances of על פני, sorting out those where על פני is more preposition + noun than compound preposition, and so forth. I did the spadework while writing Dynamics of Diselection, and I discuss the results on pp. 71–73, in conjunction with the comparable phrasing in Gen 16:12: “he shall dwell (שכן) near (על פני) all his kin.”

Speaking of Gen 16:12, you wouldn’t think any translator could possibly turn שכן into “raid, attack.” True … but they can take שכן, which ordinarly denotes “settling,” “staying,” or “dwelling” in a particular place, then gloss it as “live” (as in “I live in Moorpark, California”), then slide over into the common English use of “live” to mean “behave” or “conduct one’s life”—a sense that finds very slim, if any, attestation in biblical Hebrew (see, for example, Job 29:25, “And I lived (ואשכון) like a king among them,” and possibly a few passages from Proverbs 1–8). Then Gen 16:2 can become:

… and he will live (שכן) in hostility toward (על פני) all his brothers. (NIV)

See also the NASB, NLT, and maybe the ESV (so ambiguous in English that I cannot classify it with confidence). NCV actually translates שכן as “attack,” with no lexical justification whatsoever, and the Message paraphrases “always at odds with his family.” The CEV manages to twist the phrase inside-out, and translates ועל פני כל אחיו ישכן as “[he] will live far from his relatives”!

Maybe a summary table would help at this point.

At least the NIV and other such translations consistently tar Ishmael and the Ishmaelite with the brush of hostility. I cannot fathom why the NRSV translators turned שכן into a term of hostility but translated נפל peaceably.

Between Gen 16:12, where שכן can hardly be mistaken for anything but “dwell, settle,” the Septuagint evidence, and the near-complete lack of demonstrable linguistic support for the “hostile” translation of Gen 25:18, I have to conclude that the peaceable translations get closest to the author’s lexical intentions. I also have to wonder where the hostility-imputing translation came from, and why it persists. My instinct tells me that stereotypes about Bedouin Arabas coming out of 19th-century Orientalism carry a lot of the responsibility here, but I do not have any evidence (yet) to support that thesis.