As I’ve previously mentioned on this blog, for the last eight years I’ve used the NRSV as the standard English Bible translation in the college courses I teach. Throughout that whole time, however, I’ve found that students sometimes have difficulty understanding the English of the NRSV; with unnerving frequency the NRSV translators chose to use less familiar English words when more familiar ones would do. The NRSV has some very strong points in my opinion, but it doesn’t really qualify as colloquial English for ordinary readers.

This semester I have been exploring the use of the TNIV as an alternative to the NRSV. The TNIV tends to be much more readable than the NRSV, and that is a big mark in its favor. Zondervan graciously sent me an examination copy of the TNIV Study Bible, and I’ve been linking the students’ reading assignments to the Bible Gateway TNIV resource.

Yet my experience using the TNIV in class over the last few weeks has been less than satisfactory. The problem, simply put, is that the TNIV translators seem comfortable with simply altering the text when the actual Hebrew text does not suit their theological outlook. They don’t rewrite whole passages willy-nilly, of course, but they do “spin” the semantics and even add words that completely change the meanings of entire sentences or passages.

In the last week and a half I’ve been teaching from the Latter Prophets in class, so here are some prime examples.

(1) Jeremiah 7:22-23

In Hebrew:

כי לא־דברתי את־אבותיכם ולא צויתים ביום הוציא אותם מארץ מצרים על־דברי עולה וזבח כי אם־את־הדבר הזה צויתי אותם לאמר שמעו בקולי

A fairly literal translation of this long complex sentence would read:

For I did not speak to your ancestors and I did not command them in the day when I brought them from the land of Egypt concerning matters of burnt offering or sacrifice, but rather this word I commanded them, saying, “Listen to my voice …”

For those of you unfamiliar with Hebrew syntax, the word pair כי אם (ki ’im), which I have translated above as “but rather,” introduces the positive alternative to a negative statement that was itself previously introduced by לא (lo’), translated above as “not.” In other words, a sentence with the structure לא … כי אם has a “not this … but that” logic. Jeremiah 7:22–23 flatly makes the claim that God did not give commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but rather about obedience. Of course, this does not quite square with Leviticus, and whether Leviticus is historically inaccurate or whether Jeremiah is spinning history to make a point is something that has to be determined through exegesis and interpretation. The syntax, however, is not at all equivocal: not about sacrifices, but about obedience, did God issue commands at the time of the exodus.

The TNIV translators, however, apparently can’t stand the idea of Jeremiah disagreeing with Leviticus, so without any warrant in the Hebrew text or in Hebrew syntax they add one small English word that completely changes the sense of the entire passage:

For when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them this command: Obey me …

By just adding just one little word, the TNIV translators have just completely reversed the claim that Jeremiah is making. I just really wish they hadn’t done that; it makes this passage basically unusable unless I explain to the students how the TNIV has mistranslated the passage. One of the reasons I’ve been experimenting with the TNIV is that I don’t want to have to take up valuable class time “translating” between NRSV English and their everyday spoken English, but I also don’t want to spend valuable class time having to explain why their TNIV is translated incorrectly.

Note: The following comments on Isaiah 7:14 are marred by hasty and incorrect grammatical analysis. Don’t trust anything I say in the marked-out section. Instead, see the comment below by Peter Kirk to find out why I was dead wrong … at least on the grammar.

(2) Isaiah 7:14

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the TNIV treats this one no better than the original NIV, but it’s still a pain when you’re trying to get your students into the mindset of the Syro-Ephraimite crisis (c. 735-732 BCE) and their translation makes them think of Christmas. The Hebrew text reads:


הנה העלמה הרה וילדת בן וקראת שמו עמנו אל

I should say that I have no objection to the evangelist Matthew (or “Matthew” if you prefer the “scare quotes”) quoting Isaiah 7:14 from the Septaugint and applying it to the birth of Jesus, but I do have a problem with translators acting as if the Hebrew text read the same as Matthew’s quotation. Again I will offer a more literalistic translation:


Look, the young woman has conceived and she will bear a son and she will call his name Immanu-El.

The TNIV reads:


The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

There are two issues here. One is the translation of עלמה (‘almah), my “young woman,” TNIV’s “virgin.” I don’t want to be too dogmatic about the semantics of עלמה; whether or not the word actually had the sense “virgin” is debatable, although in some of the very few cases where the word is actually used in biblical Hebrew, the term applies to young women who are arguably virgins. You can probably make that argument in at least four of the seven instances where the term actually occurs in the Tanakh. I suspect that such a sense cannot really be sustained in the two instances where the Song of Songs uses the word עלמה, but maybe an argument could be made. Biblical Hebrew has another word, בתולה (bethulah), that specifically means “virgin” and draws attention to the virginity; in fact, בתולה is related to the abstract noun in Hebrew for virginity, בתולים. Certainly, by using the word עלמה instead of בתולה, Isaiah (or the author of the book who crafts Isaiah’s dialogue) declines to specifically emphasize a virginal state on the part of the young woman to whom Isaiah refers. An עלמה is not definitely or clearly a virgin simply by virtue of the term, but she is definitely and clearly a young woman, according to the semantics of עלמה.

But the noun עלמה by itself is not really the key to seeing that this particular עלמה is not a virgin; that key, rather, is the verb form הרה. To oversimplify matters a bit for those of you who don’t read Hebrew, Hebrew verbs have two “aspects,” perfect and imperfect. Perfect aspect is generally used for actions that are completed from the point of view of the narration, and imperfect for those that are not yet completed from the point of view of the narration. Each of these can be “converted” into the other by the use of the conjunction ו, a usage called the “waw consecutive” (it also goes by other names). There are much more sophisticated ways of explaining all this, but that’ll do for the moment. In this sentence, we have three key verbs. The first, הרה (harah), is a perfect aspect form of the verb “to conceive, to become pregnant.” Since the verb is in the perfect aspect, with no waw consecutive affixed, this indicates that the young woman in question is already pregnant—and hence, no doubt, not a virgin. She has not delivered the child yet, as indicated by the use of ילד (yalad, “to bear, to give birth”) in the imperfect aspect (the affixed ו, for those of you wondering, is not pointed in the Masoretic Text as a waw consecutive, but as a simple conjunctive waw). Thus, the young non-virginal woman is already pregnant but has not yet delivered. But the TNIV obscures all this—screwing up the entire point of the sign in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite crisis and making students think that the real point is about Jesus.

(3) Isaiah 56:4–5

The TNIV (like the NIV) often goes in for phrase-by-phrase translation instead of word-for-word translation. In general, this is a laudable and highly responsible thing to do. In some cases, however, attempting to provide a semantically “equivalent” phrase ends up, shall we say, emasculating the text. (Okay, so there are probably ideological issues with my use of a maculine metaphor for a text; bear with me, and you’ll see why I chose that metaphor.) Here’s the Hebrew text:

כי־כה אמר יהוה
לסריסים אשר ישמרו את־שבתותי
ובחרו באשר חפצתי ומחזיקים בבריתי
ונתתי להם בביתי ובחומתי יד ושם טוב מבנים ומבנות
שם עולם אתן־לו אשר לא יכרת

Here’s the TNIV translation:

For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.

For the most part, the TNIV translation of this passage is excellent. But the last line changes a negative Hebrew statement into a positive English statement. That in itself is not a bad thing, but there is, well, a “double entendre” in the last line that the TNIV obscures. The Hebrew phrase אשר לא יכרת, the last line, means “that will not be cut [off].” This is perfectly understandable, and English reads will “get the joke” if they see it: “To the eunuchs … I will give an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” Why did the TNIV translators choose to obscure the pun? Were their evangelical sensibilities just too squeamish to preserve the Hebrew text’s double entendre? Or did they have some “nobler” purpose related to “readability” (though I don’t think I’d agree with any such argument)? Semantically, to “endure forever” and to “not be cut off” are similar enough that the TNIV doesn’t distort the semantic sense of the passage, but it does distort the aesthetics (and cheeky humor) of the passage and robs readers of a richer reading experience.

You know what I really want? A translation that has the readability of the TNIV without the theological baggage that distorts the text—but not one that does as far as, say, the CEV in simplifying its vocabulary. Does anyone know of such a translation? Does it exist? Have I just missed it? Or is it time for a new translation project (maybe without the word “Standard” in the name—you don’t actually become a “standard” by claiming to be such)?