The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

by Aviya Kushner

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart—and was therefore surprised when, while getting her MFA at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Old Testament and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story to a new emphasis on the topic of slavery, the English translation often felt like another book entirely from the one she had grown up with.

Kushner began discussing the experience with Robinson, who became a mentor, and her interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. She began what became a ten-year project of reading different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world in the footsteps of the great biblical translators, trying to understand what compelled them to take on a lifetime project that was often considered heretical and in some cases resulted in their deaths.

In this eye-opening chronicle, Kushner tells the story of her vibrant relationship to the Bible, and along the way illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture’s most important written work. A fascinating look at language and the beliefs we hold most dear, The Grammar of God is also a moving tale about leaving home and returning to it, both literally and through reading.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Judaism, Memoir, Theology, Language, Jewish

Audiobook

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. Her debut poetry collection, WOLF LAMB BOMB (Orison Books, 2021), was named a "New and Noteworthy" book by The New York Times and won the 2021 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry. Her first book, The Grammar of God: A Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau), was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a Sami Rohr Prize Finalist, and one of Publishers' Weekly's Top 10 Religion Stories of the Year.

She is The Forward's language columnist and is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Follow her on Twitter @AviyaKushner.

Reviews

[❀Aimee❀ Just one more page... · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book wasn't exactly like I expected, but I enjoyed it. While there certainly was discussion about Hebrew grammar and differences between the Hebrew and current versions, the book was much more than this.

This was also a memoir of the author's life and family. It was her musings on what faith means to her and those in her life. There was discussion about how translation often meant death for the translator throughout history.

The chapters each broach a different theme in the Hebrew Bible. She then starts with a discussion about the passage and how it differs from other translations. Then she goes into a discussion of what that verse has meant for her in the past and what she thinks now. Interwoven with these things are her memories of family and thoughts on faith. There is a lot of discussion of WWII and how it impacted her family specifically.

Themes discussed are: Creation, Love, Laughter, Man, God, Law, Song, Memory.

The book felt like a discussion with a friend - meandering and interesting. The journey was more important than the end result. I really would love to have a meal with the author and her fascinating family (and mother who studies archaic languages).

This actually inspired me to purchase a few of the books she references to get a new fresh read of the Bible I grew up with.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Marlee Pinsker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a good book changes the way you see the world for a few days, and sometimes a really good book changes the way you see the world for a long time. This book knit some important things together, and in so doing, slipped me an important puzzle piece of understanding which I will carry with me.

One reviewer wrote that this book does not frame quarrels to win them. It points out different roads to travel in understanding writings that were originally written in Hebrew and later changed somewhat as they made their ways into other languages. So I now understand them a bit differently, reading them in both the Hebrew and the English and looking in a more nuanced way.

Aviya takes us into her own family in the US and then to her grandfather's house in Israel. She takes us to Germany with her twice. I am grateful for all of these trips and thank her for everything she has shared with me.

[Tim Larison · Rating 4 out of 5]

The English Old Testament is a source of inspiration for millions of people. But what if the English translation deviates from the original Hebrew meaning throughout the text? That’s the premise of Aviya Kushner’s new book The Grammar of God: a Journey Into the Words and Worlds of the Bible.

Kushner grew up in a Jewish household and was raised reading the Bible in its original Hebrew language. When she started reading the English translation of the Old Testament “many times (I was) saddened at what had been misrepresented or obscured in moving the words from the Hebrew to the English, from the ancient to the more contemporary,” she writes.

I liked the examples Kushner gave of subtle differences in meaning between the Hebrew and English verses. “The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is not nearly as straightforward in Hebrew as in English,” she says in one instance. “In biblical Hebrew, there is a gaping difference between the verb ‘to kill’ – laharog – and the verb ‘to murder’ – lirtzoach; the Hebrew word used in the Ten Commandments is ‘murder’, yet the commandment is frequently mistranslated as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This word choice matters because there are acceptable forms of killing in the Bible (such as self-defense).”

Kushner recalls her mother’s interpretation of the original Hebrew in other parts of the book. Take the first verse in the Bible. “It all comes down to how you read that one word,” her mother says. “Do you read the verb in the first line as bara, in the past tense, so that it means ‘In the beginning God created,’ or do you read it as bro , the infinitive, so that it reads ‘In the beginning of God’s creating’?” The message of God creating all the time, including now, is quite different than a God who created heaven and earth eons ago and then was His work was largely done.

Kushner is sympathetic to the translator’s task. “It is not easy to make a language come alive for someone who does not speak that language; it is a challenge to rename the seemingly familiar and name the unfamiliar. The effort often results in clumsiness and misunderstanding,” she says. Grammar of God is not meant to be a new version of the Old Testament based on the original Hebrew language. Rather, with a few strategic examples, Kushner made me aware of how Biblical translation is not an exact science. If the Bible (specifically the Old Testament) is an important part of your faith tradition, I recommend reading The Grammar of God for new insights into this sacred text.

[Moshe Mikanovsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the combination of a book highlighting differences between the original Hebrew bible and it's many translations which the author researched for years, woven with her own memories of her childhood, family, studies and the city and faith she was brought up in.

On the other hand, if I had to rate just the audio book that I listened to, I would have maybe given it 1 star. Do yourself a favour, do not listen to the audio version! Pick up the book and read it. Two main reasons for this. First, in each section there is an original Hebrew verse and about 5-6 different translations from different sources. It is very hard to compare their differences in your head while listening to them be read one after the other. It would have been much easier to see them laid out on the page one next to the other.
But, and even more importantly, although Kristen Potter does a great job with the English portion of the book, she butchers the Hebrew! Her reading of the Hebrew words is so wrong and so bad that it defeats the entire purpose of the book, where the author grew up with Hebrew as her mother tongue, where the subject of the book is grammar and is about translation from it to English. It is such a shame, and I feel that probably Ms. Kushner didn't listen to this version, otherwise she would have cringe, roll her eyes and shake violently like I did whenever the narrator uttered an Hebrew word.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was a disappointment, mostly because I was expecting something completely different. The book is billed as 'a journey into words and worlds of the Bible,' and starts off strong discussing the issues with translations, but ends up really being nearly completely a memoir. The author writes aesthetically pleasingly, but content is seriously lacking. Kushner mentions time and again the intensity of her research and the revelations she's had over the past 10 years while compiling this book...but other than a few very brief passages glossed over at the beginning of each chapter, she shares almost nothing of the actual research with the reader! The book might be good for a book group, or to get one interested in real research, but if you're looking for a scholarly work and not just a feel good memoir, look elsewhere.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted so much to love this book, and there is much to greatly admire here: Kushner's writing is lovely, often poetic, and her goal to read the Bible in various English translations to see what she could learn based on her fluent knowledge of Hebrew was a daunting task. Perhaps too daunting -- in laying out the literal translation from the Hebrew next to selected translations in English, she shows how often, the Hebrew is translated inaccurately. Often this is because a single word covers a concept, or is simply so nuanced as to defy simple translation. This is where the book shines, where she discusses the nuances of the Hebrew, and shows how much is lost, not only in the words but also in the pacing of the narrative, through translations.

However, the book falls short in key areas. In trying to make this part memoir (a very understandable goal), I felt that some of the personal stories she tells to match the theme of the chapter simply were a stretch, didn't have enough connective tissue to really work. She writes lovingly about her family, but many of those passages simply didn't seem to fit.

I was also frustrated that Kushner seemed to be almost coy in stating what religious perspective she was writing from now, because it strongly affects how she herself interprets many passages or even entire books of the Bible. For example, when she discusses Psalm 42, which she does at length, she completely ignores what the major commentators agree was the overarching theme, which was the longing for the return to the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed. Yes, it is about longing for God, but in a very particular fashion. Readers unacquainted with the context about this psalm will therefore miss out on a crucial motif.

Additionally, in describing her family's life in Monsey, New York, readers could easily get the (wrong) impression that her family might be one of the only non-Hassidic families living there. I don't diminish or question her unpleasant experiences with some Hassidim there, but it was really unfair and misleading not to say that there are thousands of other non-Hassidic Jews also living in Monsey, and also unfair to define them only through very select anecdotes that show them in their least appealing traits. The Hassidim also perform great charitable works and contribute to the community in many other ways. I was sorry to see Kushner jump on to the popular Hassidim-bashing sport so common among Jewish writers today.

I found it increasingly difficult to get through the book because it so often seemed to lose focus through many of the anecdotes, and I couldn't help but get the feeling that just as the author noted her dozens of moves from city to city over the years, she is still perhaps looking for a comfortable place within the faith that she loves to really call home.

[Christina Dudley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! Could hardly put it down, in fact.

Raised in an Orthodox household, speaking Hebrew at home and school, Kushner first encounters the Bible in English in graduate school, and is repeatedly surprised by the translations and how they impact understanding of the text. She deals mostly in nuance, not in deal-breakers, but her discussions greatly enriched this English-speaker's appreciation. I found her treatments of creation in Genesis, the ten "commandments," and Isaiah 40 especially wonderful. And I actually felt, on the whole, the English translators made some pretty decent choices. The King James is occasionally objected to, but since so few people read the KJV any more (except for "Bible as Literature" classes), I found that kind of a straw-man argument at times. Anyway, I'd love to get my hands on some of the translations she cites!

The book is half memoir, and, like the best memoirs, a window into a culture and world you wouldn't otherwise experience. I was in tears during the last chapter about her grandfather.

Highly recommend.

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This relatively short book is a peculiar mix of personal memoir, insights into what is lost or modified in the Hebrew Bible's translation to English, and the history of Hebrew Bible's translations to English and other languages. The story continuously jumps between these aspects, but lacks depth in all of them.

[Lindsey Memory · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I was at lunch with a friend who teaches English— specifically religion in contemporary fiction— at BYU. I was fangirling over the fact that Marilynne Robinson was her dissertation adviser. I was also just enjoying learning how she (my friend) structures classes at a private religious university. She brightened up in particular while telling me about a new book she was adding to her syllabus, The Grammer of God. It was written by another student of Marilynne Robinson's. This was, obviously, enough to put it on my read list. A year or so later, an audiobook version came out and a few weeks ago, it arrived finally in my Libby app.

I want to start by saying that this is really complex book: the author has like six purposes she wants to accomplish and they are all interwoven together back and forth, back and forth, passionately and authentically, if at times a little incomprehensibly. It got a three star rating from me primarily because it is absolutely not well suited to the audiobook format, and also because it was so dense and academic. I got a little impatient sometimes getting through it. But I think it could be a four or five star book for anyone who is a real language nerd, or who is interested in world religions, or Jewish history.

The book is part memoir, part historiography, part grammatical textbook, part rumination on language and God and the history of spirituality, and most importantly, it is the author's personal attempt to reconcile everything she has learned about the differences in meaning that arise from translating The Most Talked About Text of all time: the Bible. This book/ this personal project of hers all started in graduate school, particularly In Marilynne's classes. The author, Aviya Kushner, was startled as she read (for class) the Old Testament in English for the first time. Coming from a devout Jewish home, she had studied, recited, and sung the Bible a thousand times over in Hebrew during her childhood. Almost immediately in her graduate class, she was struck by some clear changes in meaning and connotation that occured through the act of translation of the Old Testament into English. She was even more struck by the fact that no one around her noticed anything out of place at all by, say, the fact that the first three verses of Genesis in English are all one sentence in Hebrew.

Finding the differences and unpacking the changing meaning of the text as it passes from Hebrew to English became her professional passion, encouraged by Marilynne. The author discusses in particular how grammer (the ways the individual words are ordered, emphasized, punctuated, and related to one another) has an effect on the meaning. It is a super interesting concept, and she has done her homework (though I was distracted a few times by her hyperfocus on juxtaposing English and Hebrew, since I know the Greek, Latin, and Aramaic tranlations of the Bible all had their lasting effects).

My favorite two takeaways are that the original Hebrew of the Old Testament was much more physical, which made the text seem much more personal and relatable. e.g. "God of the long nose" is a phrase in Hebrew that translates into "longsuffering." She explains that when you are mad, you often flare your nose when you are trying to keep it together. The Judeo-Christian God clearly emotes-- He can get mad-- but His nose is long, aka hHe is patient. Endowed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints will get a TON of mileage on her chapters on the Creation story and Adam and Eve. Like, Adam's name in Hebrew means something like "The Earth." How might it change our experience of the story of Adam recieving his name to know that he was much more part of the Earth in the Hebrew version? The book also has a beautiful chapter on the phsyical agony of the enslaving of the tribes of Israel, which is captured well in Hebrew but erased in King James. You'll have to read it to get the full picture, I can't recount her arguments well.

The book closes with the author memorializing her grandfather, who escaped the Holocaust but lost his parents and all his siblings. He lost his faith then, but found it again when his wife died young of breast cancer. The author's memory of his embrace of the Hebrew versions of Isaiah and Psalms 42, and her contemplation of what those words might mean to humanity, is really lovely.

[Andrea Stoeckel · Rating 5 out of 5]

[ I received this book free from the publisher through NetGalley. I thank them for their generousity. In exchange, I was simply asked to write an honest review, and post it. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising]

[Another disclosure: I am a retired ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. I hold 3 Masters degrees, have studied history, language and entymology most of my adult life. I collect many of the books Dr.Kuschner cites both within the text and her endnotes.]

" The Grammar of God is not a scholarly work but a personal one, a Hebrew speaker’s response to the Bible in English. It is a book I now realize, after more than a decade of wrestling with these texts, I had to write —because nobody else can write how you view your home except you."

This is a book about a subject most "gentiles" who are not detailed in scholarship might not be all that interested in. Dr. Kushner, a highly educated , well travelled author and poet encounters Marilynne Robinson, the author and educator when she begins graduate classes in Iowa. Her work on her thesis becomes this book: part memoir, part grammer study, part love song to her past and exploration of her future while being grounded in her present, as she talks about wanting to give English translations focus by locking her Hebrew Bibles in her trunk and how she, her brother and their Saba Shumel sing Isaiah 40 that echos all around them in the hills of Israel.

After Saba passes, Kushner states that she will "honor his faith by investigating it; I will respect his endurance; and I will let him teach me something— anything— one last time."

Part memoir, part grammer, this is the fulfillment of the promise she made. And as much as I avoid grammer as it tends to give me headaches, I understand that without the foundations, we really can't embrace the lives that are built upon them.

[Simcha York · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the author's own admission, Aviya Kushner's The Grammar of God was written as a personal rather than an academic work. And the result, while it is unquestionably learned, gains a lot of power from the author's emotional relationship to the study of the Hebrew Bible and her experiences with it in English translations. The Grammar of God is a thoughtful and engaging exploration of what is lost or transformed when Tanakh is translated from Hebrew into other languages, including English. It provides a glimpse of what happens when the nuances of meaning of particular Hebrew terms and the untranslatable ambiguities of Hebrew grammar that have played critical roles in how these ancient texts are read are rendered into another language.

And, while Kushner's discussions of the ways in which issues of translation often have an effect on the way the Bible is understood in English—sometimes in ways that diverge profoundly from readings of the work in Hebrew—is fascinating, much of the force of the book comes simply from the love and appreciation the author has for her subject matter and the anecdotes and family biography which she brings to the fore in order to help us understand how writings that are more than 2000 years old can continue to inform one's life and help us to make sense of a sometimes very dark world.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many readers the thought of reading a book on biblical grammar and the importance of language in shaping how we view scripture would not be an appealing thought. Such readers would miss a truly lovely and thoughtful book, though, in that the author manages to make such subjects warm and inviting, gives a deeply personal discussion of matters many people find dull and wearisome, and manages to have some important insights in terms of how we wrestle with scripture. The book gains most of its warmth from being the exploration of the Bible in English from the point of view of a Jew who speaks Hebrew as a native language and who brings a certain poetic sensitivity to the task of biblical understanding, which allows her to grasp differences in how the Bible is read in different languages, and how the different languages shape the worldview and perspective of those who read it. The book is rich in biblical text as well as a worthwhile approach to the texts it deals with, and in showing how differently people deal with something because of how they speak and write and read and think, the book offers insights that are worthwhile far outside the field of biblical studies, even to the way in which we live our lives. As a work of biblical criticism [1], this book and this author have a lot to offer, and let us hope that she writes many more books of equal sensitivity and depth.

The roughly two hundred pages of this book are divided into nine chapters that deal with different matters: creation, love, laughter, man, God, law, song, memory, and how it never ends. The book as a whole begins with a story of how it began and how the author came to study the Bible in English given her Jewish background, and ends with acknowledgments and two appendices showing the different numbering of commandments and the different arrangement of the books of the Bible in different traditions. The chapters themselves are well-organized also, with the opening page of the chapter showing a page of the Tanakh in Hebrew, and then following with a word-by-word literal transliteration and translation of the Hebrew, and then a series of English translations in different translations to contrast the Hebrew with the English. The text that follows generally goes into further detail about the distinction between these passages in Hebrew and English, comments about the passages in Hebrew and English commentary and how they reveal differences in the mindset between people using different languages. The result is not overdone but is instead is extremely touching and thought provoking.

What makes this book a special pleasure are a combination of two factors that other authors would do well to emulate where possible. For one, this book offers an insightful perspective in taking what many of its readers will find familiar yet viewed from an alien perspective, namely the original language of the Tanakh and how Jewish practice has often been shaped by the differences between Hebrew and other languages like Greek, Latin, or English. For one, the Hebrew is often highly layered and ambiguous [2] while the English gives an appearance of being sharply defined, which leads to differences in how these passages are often read. The Hebrew invites dialogue, conversation, and discussion as the ambiguities and possibilities are teased out, while the English tends to create the illusion that there is one way for these passages to understand rightly and a lot of wrong ways, which tends to lead to a less charitable view of one's conversation partners when there are disagreements about interpretation. The second particularly notable skill that the author brings to this material that really makes it an amazing book is the fact that the author includes so many thoughtful and intimate personal comments that make the text warm and friendly, and sometimes deeply melancholy given the author's family history in Hitler's Germany [3].

[1] See, for example:

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[2] See, for example:

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[3] See, for example, the following comments:

"To my chagrin, I soon learned that this frightening and depressing combination of great knowledge and ugly death appears not only in the lives of the rabbis but also in the lives of Christian translators. William Tyndale, whose translation is the foundation of the King James Bible, was strangled and his body burned at the stake. The remains of John Wycliffe, who also worked on an early translation of the Bible into English, were exhumed and thrown into a river. Translation, like scholarship, has long been a life-threatening enterprise. Making something understandable to the general public has meant risking everything, even, as in the case of the great Rabbi Akiva, one's skin (xv)."

"But the conflict between art and faith is not, I have gradually decided, just a Jewish issue. It is not about that line between graven images and an unseeable God. Instead, it is the very idea of belief that is a problem for a devoted artist. Belief implies acceptance. An artist is different--a questioner in the heart, not necessarily a believer. An artist does not accept first and do next, as the Jewish people supposedly did at Sinai (97-98)."

"With the snafu over the ad, my father taught me what he has always taught me: how to ignore the disapproval of the world, no matter how loud it is. He taught me how to listen to myself, and how to hear that same thing in other people and places: the quiet beating of the individual heart (138)."

"For as long as I can remember, he [the author's grandfather] has loved color and line, painting and sketching. Since no one else in my family does, I think this love of his went directly into me. I, too, am obsessed with color, moved and motivated by it. I sometimes cry in front of beautiful paintings, and like him, I need to look at them every so often to feel alive, connected to those who came before me (171)."

"What he was telling me was: I have a granddaughter; I alone, among my brothers, have lived. I have endured. And I know, as the oldest of five, that the last thing an oldest sibling wants is to be the last one left (186)."

[John Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, it is a mix memoir of a lady who grew up in a Jewish household and reflections on certain passages of Hebrew Scripture and how it is changed in translation to English. I like how she brought to light how the Hebrew is often ambiguous resulting in centuries of lively debate, while in English, the translators choose one interpretation over another, and the English reader has no idea a choice was made. An example is in Genesis 1:1-2, it can be interpreted as saying “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And now the earth was formless, and void...” or (if I recall right) “In the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless, and void”. If I understand correctly, in Hebrew, the grammar is such that it could be either and there is no grounds to dogmatically assert one over the other. But English translators almost always choose the former, rather than the later, I imagine because it is more in line with the doctrine of “Creation Ex Nihilo”

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading The Grammar of God. Not something I would normally pick up my own, I followed the monthly book club read for May. After reading the book it should inspire many to look into reading passages of the Old Testament. The meaning of darkness and light and how it ties into sight in Genesis and what sight means. Eve sees the Tree of Knowledge and the effect that has on her life. Cain hides from the sight of G-d. Sight related instances reference what G-d has asked of man and what man has ignored. For me one of the highlights of the book is the time that the author spends on the story of Abraham, Sarah and Issac and the insight she gives to Sarah reaction to becoming pregnant at her age, what her laugh means and Abraham's demeanor in general. I appreciate that Kushner changes things up, giving antidotes about growing up in Monsey N.Y. her relationship with her family. On a personal note this had added meaning as I also grew up in Monsey probably 17 years before her and as she discusses the changes of the areas, I related to those changes and remembering even further back when the town was not a Jewish Enclave and there was a degree of Antisemitism that prevailed.

[Katie Krombein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this little book. I could feel her love for the word, for beautiful words, exuding through her writing. I loved thinking about scripture in different ways with a great awe for the text and the weightiness of history woven through.

p. xiv: Books choose their writers, I now believe, and not the other way around; I suspect my teacher already knew that. And she asked me to keep one thing in mind: even if the translation was inaccurate at times, and contained errors, she wanted em to remember that the Bible in English is holy to millions and millions of people.
I kept my teacher's directive in mind for yours. I knew how much she loved the Bible, how much the English version of it meant to her. I knew that for her it was the Bible, not a translation. And gradually I realized that I could not read the translations without remembering the great Hillel on the roof of the yeshiva, as an older man, and all the other stories and cultural breadcrumbs of my life. I could not explain what Hebrew was without writing who I was and where I came from. The translation is holy to millions, but so is the Hebrew I was born into.

p. xviii: Some of the most politically charged issues of our time are rooted in biblical translation. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," for instance, is not nearly as straightforward in Hebrew as it is in English. In biblical Hebrew, there is a gaping difference between the verb "to kill" -laharog-and the verb "to murder"-lirtzoach; the Hebrew word used in the Ten Commandments is "murder," yet the commandment is frequently mistranslated as "Thou shalt not kill." This word choice matters because there are acceptable forms of killing in the Bible (such as self-defense). As I read and reread familiar passages in translation, wondering what effect one word choice might have over another, I realized that defining murder is both an ancient and a contemporary question. Many of us are still talk about about what constitutes a just war; when, if ever, the death penalty is acceptable; and when, exactly life begins. When life starts and what murder means are moral questions but also questions of language, because they involve defining the exact boundaries of individual words. When the Bible was translated, these questions of language became questions of translation.

p. xxi: But perhaps the biggest surprise was the lone voice of the Bible I encountered in English. While it is possible to read the Hebrew Bible with just the text-what is called the pshat, literally "the simple or the plain"-that is not how I usually read it, and that is not how it is generally taught in yeshiva classrooms. In school, as a child, I read the Torah from books called mikraot gedolot-"great scriptures," also called the Rabbinic Bible in English-volumes in which each page is crammed with commentary surrounding the text of the Bible in different languages, scripts, and fonts. ....Everything was up for discussion, and from my earliest memory I was taught to demand a second opinion, and a third, and a fourth, to cross borders of time and language in order to hear those multiple voices. The Hebrew text I grew up with is beautifully unruly, often ambiguous, multiple in meaning, and hard to pin down; many of the English translations are, above all, certain.

p. xxii: The difference is especially apparent when it comes to narrative arc, or the basic elements of how we tell stories. Contemporary readers crave a familiar shape to our stories, with a clear ending: introduction of problem, heightening of problem, resolution of problem. That format was created by the ancient Greek dramatists. But the Bible is different: whether a Hebrew or English reader, you'll rarely find tidy stories with logical A to Z progressions in the Bible. The rabbis, who developed certain klallim, or "rules of reading," explain this through what they call ein mukdam u'meuchar baTorah, a notion that flouts our contemporary sense of order and time: that literally , there is no early and no late in the Torah. ...According to this klal, the events in the Hebrew Bible are not always written in the order in which they occur; just because an event is written about after another one does not mean it chronologically follows it.

p. xxviii: For those for whom grammar is a list of rules-charting verbs and memorizing exceptions-grammar might sound boring. My mother taught me that grammar is more than that; it is a window into how a group speaks to itself, structures its own thoughts, and defines its world.

p. xxx: Hebrew was not spoken regularly for nearly two thousand years; as a spoken language, it was dead. But throughout the long exile that stretched from the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, biblical Hebrew, what religious Jews call lashon hakodesh-literally, the holy tongue-was the preeminent language of Jewish scholarship and prayer. Over two thousand years, additional forms of Hebrew developed alongside biblical Hebrew, such as medieval Hebrew. Many of the most beautiful prayers are actually medieval poems, some written by rabbis with double lives as both poets and biblical commentators. Hebrew was also part of the various Jewish languages that developed in exile; the best-known are Yiddish, a thousand-year-old mix of German and Hebrew, and Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, a melange of Spanish, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with some Arabic, Turkish, and Greek influences, which developed after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Then, about 130 years ago, despite the usual pattern of ancient languages evaporating along with their speakers, Hebrew began to revive as a spoken language. It is the only example in all of history of an unspoken language becoming a mother tongue again.

p. 11: In Hebrew, vowels-dots and dashes located above, beneath, and inside letters-frequently determine meaning. And Rashi claims that in Genesis 1:1, the vowels should have been rendered differently. This complaint isn't unreasonable. In the medieval era, and in our own, typos and human errors were not unheard-of phenomena. Then as now, they can be both irritating and critical, prompting irate letters to the editor-and pages of biblical commentary, which is pretty much what Rashi is doing in his commentary on Genesis 1:1.
Rashi, in the eleventh century, can argue that the vowels are wrong because he knows that written vowels were added to the text only in the eighth century, and before that, the reading of the text was passed along orally, from teacher to student, parent to child, and perhaps around tables like the one we are eating at right now. Rashi uses his deep knowledge of the text, of all that comes after Genesis 1:1, to help him, just as a modern reader might use past experience to flag a typo. In this case, Rashi thinks there should have been a dot above the verb instead of lines beneath it. It is the verb, and more specifically the grammatical state of it, that determines a world of meaning.

p. 13: For as long as I can remember, my mother has been trying to convince us that grammar is a universe, and that the tiniest parts of grammar tell a story. "It is impossible to read a word without its neighbors," my mother says to us. "You have to read the first line next to the rest."

p. 95: So why, then, is elohim in the plural in Genesis 1:1, when there is a singular word for God-eloha, the word used in Deuteronomy 32:15? Ibn Ezra then explains that "every language has a path of respect," such as the way a small child would address an adult. And in Hebrew, the path of respect is to address the great one-God-in the plural form. Biblical Hebrew isn't the only language that does this. Modern languages from French to Hindi use plural words like vous and aap as a form of respect.

p. 112: It is incredible that Hebrew, alone among all the ancient languages, was revived. That surprise is the unexpected subtext of the story of biblical translation: for twenty-two hundred years, there has been an effort to translate Hebrew texts because no one expected Hebrew to live again, as it has. The medieval translators and commentators couldn't imagine that, surrounded as they were by the threat of Crusades, the string of expulsions, the violent strains of Islam. Every European country I have visited in my efforts to understand the commentators' lives have gone through a period in which its entire Jewish population was expelled. The commentators were used to fighting for their lives.

p. 114: Still, the struggle with God, and the Bible's willingness to depict it, is what keeps bringing me back to my stacks of Bibles. I am moved again by Moses initially refusing God's call, and by Sarah laughing at the idea that God will give her a son, and by Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story that is part of every man and woman who has ever felt the need to claw against destiny, to insist on a different future than what God appears to be offering.

p. 126: The rabbis also have differing ideas on the internal order of the ten. Nachmanides explains that the first five are about the relationship between man and God, while the second five are about the relationship of man to man. Ibn Ezra's reading of the order is more nuanced and complicated. To Ibn Ezra, the division is not the traditional two-part man-God divide, but rather a three part progression of what makes a human being: heart and mind, speech, and action. The sayings begin with the heart and mind; one must believe in his heart that there is a God. Then they move on to speech-what not to say-and then to action, or how to treat fellow humans. But then int eh last five, the order reverses. It is action, then speech, then heart and mind. To Ibn Ezra, then, the order of the dibrot has a resonance, and when all are obeyed, they form a portrait of the ideal religious individual, someone whose heart, mind, tongue, and actions all work together.

p. 137: Only after leaving home and living in many faraway places do I understand what my mother said about her father-my grandfather Saba Shmuel. "I always knew he was my friend," she said. There is also what my father said about meeting that same man, my mother's father, for the first time. "He had so much respect for his daughter," Abba said, "I just couldn't believe it. I had never seen a father like that."

p. 138: With the snafu over the ad, my father taught me what he has always taught me: how to ignore the disapproval of the world, no matter how loud it is. He taught me how to listen to myself, and how to hear that same thing in other people and places: the quiet beating of the individual heart.

p. 140: And so my father showed us what I believe he believes: work is the reward of work, just as rest is the reward of rest.
These are the things that are rewarded in this world, the rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot, or Ethics of the Fathers, and these are the things for which a person gets the principal in this world. But the interest comes in the next world.
I sometimes wish that I believed without a doubt in the idea and ultimate power of God, the way so many of the people I have known believed. If I believed in that way, I would most likely believe in reward. I would most likely believe in a next world. Instead, I think the reward of living a just life is a just life. The reward of a father, I suppose, is to be a father. The reward of a daughter, I know, is to be a daughter.
The reward of reading is the experience of reading. And perhaps the reward of keeping the laws is just that, even though violation of those laws is not punishable in a clear way by a sitting court, the way, say, theft in New York City is clearly punishable by a local judge. Instead, Judaism expects a person to repent, to change on the inside, to develop an internal sense of justice. This is the opposite of the harshness some readers hear in the Bible; it is a call for personal responsibility. What Jewish law asks for can be heard in the verb vayedaber, "and he talked," the verb that opens the aseret hadibrot, the ten sayings that are translated as the Ten Commandments. It can be heard in the simple introduction-Ani adonai, I am God, which perhaps requires the listener to wonder who he is or who she is. How would I introduce myself to God, if I had to?
What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and God, and between man and man-but most of all, between man and himself. It's not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain, sometimes heard only by what Rabbi Soloveitchik so movingly called the lonely man of faith.

p. 162: I have known both belief and unbelief. I have experienced both sides of the dialogue, the faith and the questioning. I still remember that boy, how his voice rose. I remember how the psalm felt distant and close at the same time as he sang for both the boys and the girls, trying to represent all of us. His melody, and that young voice that knew nothing of what lay ahead, returns to me as I drive across the frozen plains of the Midwest, as I travel around the world with the little book of psalms my grandfather gave me. As time passes, I imagine another boy, my grandfather as a young man. The lone survivor of all his brothers, my grandfather lived a life that mirrored the history of the twentieth century. I know he asked these same questions in his life-Where are you, God? or When will I see God?-as Europe burned, and his brothers with it, their bodies shot and tossed into a large ditch of a grave they dog with their own hands. Surely my grandfather's soul was downcast, surely he wondered where God was and what God was doing then. For years he left faith, had no use for it. And yet, though as far as I know he never received a direct answer from God, he found a way to return. The psalm, after all its tantalizing twists inside the soul and outside of it, seems to predict this oscillating. It provides a space where we can question, even though it--tellingly--provides no answers. The speaker in the psalm, who was once so faithful and so joyful, as I imagine my grandfather was as a child, gets no answer, but he returns to faith anyway. As for us readers, even if we hear no answer to our own questions, this psalm, incredibly enough, asks us to sing.
I can still remember my grandfather singing loudly in his library. I can hear him praying early in the morning in his kitchen. How and why my grandfather sang in his library and in his kitchen is what is going on in the middle of this psalm, in its recounting of the dialogue deep inside the self, a particular kind of cleansing that is the child of question and song. What is worth singing about is deciding to live in a certain way despite all evidence to the contrary, despite all the knowledge that comes with time: this is what it is to be human, to hope, to believe, to be a repeater of psalms and a singer of them.

[Sarah Westfall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I moved slowly through this book, renewing it several times from the library, because it was one I needed to nibble rather than devour. The Grammar of God was one of those books that helped me step outside my own experience and understanding, in this case of the Bible and the complexity of translation and Jewish culture. The writing was lovely and engaging and personal, and while this book probably will not be a re-read, I am definitely glad to have sat with it over the last couple months.

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for everyone. But if, like me, you geek out on biblical Hebrew grammar and the finer points of translation, you will love this book. Part memoir, part biblical commentary, it is well written and not at all dry. (As an aside, it makes me wonder if there is a particular style that can be traced to the Iowa Writers Workshop, because there's something here that reminds me of Ann Patchett.) Just as history is written by the victors, Scripture is written by the translators. Each English translation of the Bible - Kushner compared many different ones - makes choices that subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) diverge from the sense of the Hebrew. If you've ever wondered how the study of Torah can encompass so many layers of meaning, this book is a good place to start looking for the answer.

[Sarah Furger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the author, Aviya Kushner's journey through the Bible, translation, Judaism, and family. I learned so much about how the way I have been taught about the Bible and what it says affects how I see life, and also how much is lost in translation from Hebrew. Kushner's incredibly personal story is beautifully written, but it is her scholarly information about the Bible, and grammar and the choice of words in translation that I found most interesting. I highly recommend this to anyone even vaguely interested.

[Bill Mattingly]

Really enjoyed the book. I can't be too erudite as anything I write will be critiqued by my M.Div degree daughter. Of course I couldn't read the Hebrew, but I think it would be useful to many evangelical ministers who may have missed how our Bibles today were translated and in general came into being. A very readable history of the Old Testament, with the personal imput of a religious Jewish Woman of an Somewhat Orthodox Tradition.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you’ve lived in New York City your whole life, Walmart can seem like an import from a foreign country. The organizing power of bodega owners and small ‘mom and pop’ businesses has prevented the world’s largest retailer from opening a store within the five boroughs of the largest city in America. And to add insult to injury, the company is routinely knocked around in the local press, making the Big Apple one of the few places in the country where Congress is likely more popular than “Always Low Prices.”

For the many New Yorkers like me, though, who were raised in places other than the city itself, Walmart is not just usually one of the most convenient options for household resupplies, it’s also one of the cheapest. So when I moved to the Bronx in 2002 one of the first things I did was locate the nearest Walmart Supercenter, 30 miles up the New York State Turnpike near the town of Monroe. I remember actually looking forward to spending a Sunday in what, for me, was certain to be more like the suburban Midwestern city I grew up in than my new adopted home.

Except it wasn’t. I hadn’t even made it from the parking lot into the store when I saw them: large families of ultra-orthodox Jews, the men in black coats and beards, the women with shiny hair, and the children with cute curls adorning their ears. Once inside I realized they were speaking another language; one that sounded a lot like the German I understood. I offered a naïve greeting in German only to get a quizzical look in return. What I mistook for German was their Yiddish. It was the first time I had seen the ultra-orthodox in the flesh and blood. In this Walmart, it turned out, I was the foreigner!

I didn’t know it then, but the ultra-orthodox, or Chassidic, Jews out shopping on that Sunday live in the nearby towns of Kiryas Joel and Monsey. The latter is where Aviya Kushner grew up, “among all the little Chassidic sects,” as she says in her book The Grammar of God. Interestingly, though, her family was one of the few non-Chasid families in the town, a fact that made them as foreign to the majority of Monsey residents as I felt during my first months in the Bronx. “Only in a town as committed to exclusion as our town—exclusion from the rest of the world, and from the rest of the Jewish world—could a person as friendly as my father have so few friends,” she laments.

Despite its title the book is not all about biblical grammar; in fact, I’d say as much if not more is devoted to family stories and a memoir of Kushner’s own life experiences. This is fortunate because these tend to be the livelier portions of the book. Fortunate, as well, are we that she’s been well trained in the art of creative non-fiction. The early dramatizations of family dinners past—some from more than twenty years earlier—feel forced and self-conscious, but as a whole the splicing of personal history and biblical insight works to successfully draw in the reader to a world as surprising as it is real.

Surprising, for me, because I never considered the fact that the bible-loving, evangelical Christian families that I knew as a child had analogs in the Jewish community. The comparison is not perfect, however. Kushner’s mother, from a German Jewish family, was raised in Israel and seems to have never met an archaic near-eastern language that she can’t master. Her father, a mathematician and government scientist, is equally devoted to the bible. Just from that information alone, it’s tempting to suspect that Kushner and her four siblings enjoyed a slightly elevated version of bible study compared to the average fare young evangelical Christians in Iowa might get, at least in most cases.

Though hardly a student of the bible myself, I feel pretty comfortable in suggesting that most serious students of biblical Hebrew, or biblical translation more generally, won’t derive a large number of overwhelming insights from the book. For all her excitement and passion about foreign language grammars structuring alternative worlds, or alternative ways of thinking about the world, there’s no real ‘aha’ moment that emerges as the definitive example of what she’s writing about.

From experience, however, I know a little something of what she’s trying to convey. About a decade ago, a few years after that memorable trip up to the Walmart in Monroe, I learned Hebrew and moved to Israel—in that order. The Hebrew I learned is the modern variant, revived from it’s classical form by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the late 19th century. It took me about nine months of study—eight hours a day, five days a week—to have enough command of the language to speak, albeit a limited way, comfortably in a professional environment. Kushner grew up speaking it at home.

Unfortunately I didn’t, nor have yet to, master the language like a native speaker. This is part of the reason I had very high hopes for her book, especially after hearing her speak about it on an episode of a wonderful podcast series called New Books in Jewish Studies. I may be able to communicate in a couple of languages that are not my native tongue, but I’ve never managed to think, or dream, in them. My sense about Hebrew, though, is that it is a useful language to think in. It’s muscular tone, shorter sentences, and more limited vocabulary seem a useful way to think about goals and priorities, especially.

Thinking in Hebrew isn't my only limitation. I also cannot read Hebrew at any length without quickly wearying of the tedious endeavor. That’s meant that I’ve had to stick to short-form poetry. My favorite Hebrew poet is Yechuda Amichai. I like to read his Hebrew originals side by side with the various English translations. Over and over again, though, what I’ve come to realize is that the translations are never as satisfying as the originals. It really is a different poem, an altogether new creation in translation.

Now here’s the startling thing: the bible is poetic prose par excellence and more than two billion Christians around the world read it in translation! It’s something Jews rarely do, and Muslims never. And to make matters worse, as Kushner points out, those translations, at least into English, are quite incapable of communicating the ambiguity that’s inherent in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. In other words, almost a third of the world is reading a different book (at least one in translation) with more certainty than the original book ever intended to convey. The Grammar of God, in my opinion, is most interesting when Kushner addresses these macro-level problems. It's also amazing to learn about the rabbinical commentary that accompanies the Hebrew bible, and to know that quite often the rabbis of old actually do not agree on its meaning!

Most of her commentary, however, skews towards the micro-level. She goes into a lot of detail about the limitations of various English translations of the bible, from Genesis and Exodus to Isaiah and the Psalms. She also talks about the great fear that bible translators throughout history have lived with; when the stakes are so high, pain and violence seem often to follow. The more interesting politics, though she doesn’t plainly state it, is how translations like the King James version from 1611 might have been translated in such a way as to whitewash issues like slavery and forced labor. In one of the best chapters, on law, she notes that Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant readers cannot even agree on what the ten commandments are, or if they are really just sayings! As a reader I wish that she would have read herself into some of the more technical scholarship on these kinds of issues and then translated it into layman’s terms for those of us on the outside.

In thinking about how to categorize Kushner’s book, I kept thinking back to Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. If you like one of these books, you’ll likely at least appreciate the other. Both narratives use the leitmotif of texts, something that always appeals to readers, and then follows the author on various adventures. For Batuman it was New Jersey, Boston, Hungary, Palo Alto, Turkey, Russia, and Uzbekistan; for Kushner it’s Monsey, New York City, Boston, Jerusalem, Iowa, Chicago, Germany, and the Galilee. Of the two, I give the slight edge to Batuman, though I find Kushner’s subject slightly more relevant.

If Batuman’s book wins the all-around, aided by especially high marks in humor, Kushner’s, hands down, wins the poignancy competition. Her writing about her trip with her mother to Germany in 1998 to see the house their (grand)father had grown up in (which coincidentally is directly across the street from a Walmart in a real foreign country!) before having to flee Germany at 23, never to see his parents or four younger siblings again, is heartbreaking. Kushner, Batuman, and myself—less than a year separate us—are of the last generation that will have known, as young adults, the people whose lives were changed forever, inalterably, by the Shoah. Kushner’s depiction of her grandfather is terrific, remarkable for its humanity and her devotion to him. I shudder to think about the time, in the not so distant future, when these accounts will no longer be possible. The Grammar of God is not a perfect book, but it’s definitely a pleasurable one, and worth reading. ©Jeffrey L. Otto, December 11, 2016

[Lynda Kraar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was amazing - Aviya Kushner is to be commended as a fresh voice that needs to be heard by uncovering the dialogue of Bible translations across the ages. Her perspective mirrors many of the daily "normals" of those of us whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

I only have one beef, which I have with so many audiobooks that cover Jewish/Israeli/academic topics. It would be a disservice if I didn't speak out about it: The voice actor.

We are blessed with a global community of academics who are versed in the Judaic languages, and who possess an expertise in Hebrew, Ladino and/or Yiddish. So why is it that voice actors on audiobooks can't do their research and acknowledge that they are getting it wrong? All of it, if not most of it? Geez, just take a highlighter, go through the book, and at some point say, "Hey, that's above my pay grade. I have to consult someone to help coach me."

This audiobook is another heinous example of a great academic with magical, enlightening observations, whose story is hijacked and disemboweled by the larger-than-life faux-pas of the voice actor. Even words in English. Can't you phone a friend? Get a lifeline? Ask a Jew? Why accept the gig if you are completely unfamiliar with the topic and uncaring about the content? Why let on? Doesn't the title, "The Grammar of God," a book about grammar, translation and liturgy, give you an inkling that this may not be your jam?

And "Mun-zee" for Monsey? You're kidding, right? Couldn't you find one person - just one - to give you some quality control direction, and make sure that you were correctly pronouncing the name of a municipality in the fourth most populated state in your own country?

So this is why I lost interest in this audiobook and almost deleted it. But out of my great respect to the author, I finished it. It's not my first rodeo with atrocious voice actors, but it needs to be publicly acknowledged.

By comparison, I recently finished the audiobook "Morningside Heights." There was a tough Yiddish passage toward the end, and someone in the audiobook production food chain there had the wisdom to hire a Yiddish speaker to read that lengthy Yiddish passage with the voice actor giving a translation voiceover. It was a great touch, and so respectful of the content of that book.

I feel that Aviya Kushner was completely disregarded by a voice actor who was ignorant of her subject matter, and who did not care enough to reach out when it was clear she was way over her head.

Gentle readers, are you experiencing the same with voice actors who are killing the spirit of some mighty great books out there? Let the authors and publishers know, or at least have your say on Goodreads. My two cents' worth.

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a Bookbub find I downloaded ages ago, only to forget it until I was in the middle of watching Professor Grant Hardy's Great Course series "Sacred Texts of the World." They seem to fit hand-in-hand with Hardy's discussions of how Christians adopted (and changed) the Torah. In this book, Kushner, who grew up speaking Hebrew and discussing syntax of ancient languages and dialects around the dinner table the way middle Americans discuss sports scores or The Batchelor, begins with her jarring experience of reading the Christian Bible in English for a lit class and realizing that the English translation was a loooong way from capturing what she knew the Hebrew version of the same verses to say. This led her on a decades' long study of English translations of the material.

I admit that Kushner lost me a few times in the book simply because I don't speak a second language and what I know about the Hebrew language would fit in a thimble. This can be some dense material when she really digs into it, but if you have some patience with her approach, she brings the point home. She probably upset a lot of the "literal word of God as written" people who will beat you over the head with their KJV if you dare question anything in it. (Good thing my grandmother's minister passed on years ago or this would have stroked him out.).

This was far more interesting than I thought it would be simply because of how something as simple as a verb tense change or a coloration of a phrase in a certain way can change the entire meaning of a sentence or even a story. And when that story is repeated so often that it becomes part of a culture, then that change affects society at a level we often don't even realize. Take for instance the change of a word that some experts translate as "service" into "warfare." Big difference between those two concepts. (No surprise to me that "warfare" was the English meaning. We seem to consistently go for the more aggressive and militaristic meanings of damn near anything.).

Toward the end of the book, Kushner veers away from the linguistics and scripture comparisons to more of a memoir about her family history with early 20th century Europe (especially Germany). With those parts, I felt the book lost its focus. Not that their story isn't interesting, but it felt like she had forgotten about the point of the first 75% of the book.

[Christina C · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give this book more than 5 stars I would.

Part memoir, part commentary, part translation history, this book traces the author's journey of growing up with the Hebrew Bible and discussing it (in Hebrew) around the family dinner table to her encounters with it in English for the first time as an adult. In each chapter she highlights a passage of scripture discussing the grammar, nuances, Jewish thought, and what gets lost in translation.

As a reader who is both Christian and has learned Hebrew as an adult to engage with scriptures in its original language this book was a breath of fresh air. I felt like I had found a friend: one who could share my shock at what is lost through translation, explain theories on why it was lost, share the depth and beauty of Jewish thought, and honor the reality that "there is no perfect translation, because there is no way to bring a text fully from one culture to another, one language to another, one person to another - but every translation attempts to keep a book alive." This truly is a book I will revisit as it fans the flames of my love for scripture and my fascination with translation.

[Josh Skaggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5—
This book was a pleasure to read. Its revelations weren't as loaded as I was hoping, but it was still worth the read. Kushner has a deep affection for the Hebrew Scriptures that beams through every chapter. Even though I sometimes failed to see what was so shocking in the translations she noted, I always appreciated her heartfelt excavations.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and insightful

[Sarah Kellogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a hidden gem and gift to anyone who loves scripture. Aviya was a student of Marilynne Robinson and took her Old Testament class. Robinson encouraged Aviya to write this book, which comes as no surprise to me. Both authors have an admiration for what lies beyond the surface of scripture and humanity's response.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Grammar of God. The book is broken up into digestible sections, each containing thoughts and insights from a Hebrew perspective on specific parts of scripture.

[Christina Pan · Rating 3 out of 5]

not as bad as i thought. georgetown's theology requirement is informative when relating christianity to the rest of humanity

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Kushner notes, the Bible occupies a large place in world culture. It is not only a source of moral guidance for many, but also, as she points out, “Some of the most politically charged issues of our times are rooted in biblical translation.”

Kushner grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew, and she was surprised by many differences in the Bible she encountered when first reading it in English. She therefore decided to study the history and content of various translations stemming from the ancient Hebrew, and she quotes from a number of them to compare and contrast verses she has selected to highlight. In this book, she picked out eight short passages for analysis on the themes of creation, love, laughter, man, God, law, song, and memory. Her observations are fascinating.

Her biggest surprise, she relates, is that the Bible in English is reported in just one voice, and is presented as definitive. By contrast, the text of the Jewish Bible is presented in a plurality of voices. Segments of ancient text are surrounded by commentary by rabbis throughout the ages, spanning at least twelve centuries, in different languages, scripts, and fonts: “The Hebrew text I grew up with is beautifully unruly, often ambiguous, multiple in meaning, and hard to pin down . . .” She writes of what she learned from this early education in scripture:

“Everything was up for discussion, and from my earliest memory I was taught to demand a second opinion, and a third, and a fourth, to cross borders of time and language in order to hear those multiple voices.”

Jewish tradition eschews certainty, teaching that the Bible is a document from which understanding must be created through the human activity of debate and consensus. Early Jewish sages viewed the lack of “pure” or “objective” truth as positive: one must come to faith by active intellectual engagement.

One of the most famous stories from Hebrew commentary dates from the 2nd century CE and is known as “The Oven of Akhnai.” A acrimonious debate takes place over the meaning of a law, and is solved by the recognition that God has created all of these disparate voices and philosophies, so one of them cannot necessarily be considered more legitimate than any other. Specifically, the text of the story reads: “[T]hese and these [both] are the words of the Living God.” The story teaches that “God entrusted the Torah [the first five books of the Hebrew Bible] to the sages to administer and interpret, and they must render decisions according to the legal process, namely the decision of the majority.” ("Encircling the Law: The Legal Boundaries of Rabbinic Judaism” by Chaya Halberstam, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2009), pp. 396-424, online here.). But the Talmud replicates even rejected opinions, signaling they too are worthy of study. As the Jewish historian Gershom Sholem pointed out, "It is precisely the wealth of contradictions, of differing views, which is encompassed and unqualifiedly affirmed by [the Jewish] tradition." (Gershom Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism," 1971.]

Kushner tells us about one of the earliest Bible translations into English, the 1560 Geneva Bible. This Bible, that preceded the King James Version by 51 years, was the primary Bible of 16th-century English Protestantism. It was important for several reasons. It was the first time a mechanically-printed, mass-produced Bible was made available directly to the general public, and was used by William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, and John Knox among others. More significantly, it had a mix of text plus commentaries and marginalia, including verse citations that allowed the reader to cross-reference one verse with numerous relevant verses in the rest of the Bible. But subsequent political and religious conflicts resulted in a desire for a “definitive” text with meaning approved from the powers in charge.

This was not even possible with the early Hebrew Bible, because written vowels were only added to the text in the eighth century. Ancient Hebrew also has no periods, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks, questions marks, or quotation marks. Certain verb forms look identical without vowels distinguishing them. Thus, for example, in the Ancient Hebrew Bible, the words for sight and fear look the same without vowels. The only way to figure it out, the author avers, is through context: “This is what so many of the rabbinic commentators try to provide - a map of how to read a verse within a neighborhood of other verses.” Importantly, that very verb shows up differently today in different translations, resulting in radically divergent meanings for passages.

There is also the matter of what happens to Hebrew idioms in translation, as well as Hebrew names. The Hebrew name for Eve, the author explains, is Chava, which means “life.” It is difficult, she writes, to see the link between “Eve” and “life” in translation. The same is true of many of the names in the Bible - they often represent physical reality and emotional destiny. In translation, however, the names are usually simply transliterated, so their original meaning is lost, as well as their metaphorical import. [Whether intentional or not, this change served to undermine the views of philosophers like Spinoza who saw the Bible as a work of "literature" rather than as "divine."]

Analogously, there are words that don’t carry the same meaning in English as they do in Hebrew. “Thou shalt not kill,” she notes, is actually “Thou shalt not murder” in Hebrew. “Killing” is justified in certain circumstances; “murder” is not.

Kushner explains many such discrepancies in this short but informative look at the perils of translation, especially with modern Bibles representing translations of translations. We would do well to keep in mind, she cautions, that all translation is interpretation. Language is not only about grammar and vocabulary, which can supply their own ambiguities. It is also about nuance and culture, values and perceptions, and local and contemporary references. [In our time, consider the word “welfare.” It may mean something positive to one group of interpreters, and something negative to another.] Context helps dispel misunderstandings, but the political agendas of translators may perpetuate them.

Evaluation: This book conveys so much that is intriguing and revelatory, one can only regret it is so short. And yet, from the amount of scholarship necessary just for the few passages Kushner analyzes, it is clear it would take years to add more. But for what she does include, it should not be missed. The book is hard to find, but worth the effort.

Rating: 4.5/5

[Ron Tenney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not sure why, but I came back to this book this week. I loved it and got more out of it the second time. I think that the idea that a person could be so fascinated by just a few passages of the Hebrew Bible, to be willing to spend months considering, writing and re-read them, is somewhere between inspiring and scary. There is so much I want to know and learn about that to go that deep into such a tiny sliver of what is out there is crazy. Yet, I loved Aviya's passion and power of description. rt 8/30/2020
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This book is much more than an analysis of how Hebrew does and does not translate well into English. Though the common thread of each chapter is a detailed description of some passage of the Hebrew Bible and a review of how various translators have interpreted the words into English, the power of the book is Aviya’s well-told personal narrative. From her early childhood growing up in a Hebrew-Speaking Jewish family, to her travels, to her graduate studies, the story of her life is captivating. For me, the climax of her narrative is the chapter called “Memory”. Her relationship with her Grandfather, the sole survivor among his five brothers of the Holocaust was very moving. I read the words of Isaiah 40:1-2 with new eyes from now on.
Aviya Kushner is a marvelous storyteller and I am happy I had the chance to read her stirring words. The few select verses she chose to examine will always have greater meaning to me.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer, a word geek, a foreign language major and someone who reads the Bible daily, I found this book truly fascinating. I've studied a bit of Hebrew--enough to know the alphabet, to have memorized a few prayers and some words--and I often find myself researching what the Hebrew is in certain verses as well as checking out several translations to see how it is different or similar.

I think this book does an excellent job of showing just how rich the Bible, in this case the Christian Old Testament, is. I've been reading the Bible for years--sometimes as part of the Daily Office with given readings, and sometimes the entire Bible in a year. And it never fails to amaze me that I can find something new and interesting, or even relevant to my current needs, within it.

As the author notes--it is the most talked about, most written about, most studied, book in history.