Adam Slipped His Wife a Fiver

     The Touchstone editors have been batting around the idea of a forum or a symposium on Biblical translation.  What do we make of the theory of "dynamic equivalence," and what exactly does that theory imply, linguistically and theologically?  What is the difference between a slavishly literal translation that actually distorts the text, and a faithful translation that attempts to render to the letter what is the letter's, and to the metaphor what is the metaphor's, and, at all times, to God what is God's?

     From my own point of view -- leaving aside the gnarly problems of theology -- the Biblical translator is in an enviable position.  He doesn't have to translate metered verse into metered verse; it's almost always prose into prose, and the rest of the time it's unmetered Hebrew poetry into prose, rhythmically separated into clauses.  He never has to rhyme (in fact, he'd better not fall into an unintended rhyme).  He can adopt whole passages intact from previous translations and earn praise for it; there is no such thing here as plagiarism.  He has 2000 years of tradition and hundreds of predecessors to guide him.

     I don't have a fully fleshed out theory of translation.  If I were pressed, I'd say that the virtue most required of a translator is a kind of reticence -- or you might call it a chaste restraint, or linguistic humility.  The translator should repeat the words of John the Baptist: "He must increase, and I must decrease."  That restraint will suggest that the translator ought rather to err on the side of literalness; he will sense how often there is something precious in the literal meaning of the text, and will not want to lose that, even when a figurative rendering seems clearer at first glance, and more natural for the receiving language.  For strangeness too is a teacher.

     To illustrate with a rendering that has ceased even to be controversial: most modern Bibles (I'm thinking here especially of the clunky, but by no means most politically correct, New American version, in the so-called Catholic Study Bible) have ditched the mysterious Hebrew verb and have substituted for it a plain English euphemism, thus: "And Adam had relations with his wife, and she bore him a son."  Had relations with -- what kind of language is that?  Well, it's clear enough; though how anybody could mistake what Adam had to do with his wife in order to beget a son, I can't tell.  But it's banal; the language of social science, perhaps; it is a clinical term, a way to avoid the old Anglo Saxon.  Its metaphorical reach, what little it has, extends to the half-heartedly personal, or to the world of business: Adam had something to do with his wife.  Adam entered into an S-partnership with his wife.  Or, perhaps for those evangelizing on the city streets, Adam slipped his wife a fiver.

     What is lost?  For starters, an entire world of thinking foreign to ours.  "Adam knew his wife, and she bore him a son."  That verb know -- no doubt the object of many jests over the centuries from twelve-year-old boys -- suggests a mystery and an intimacy that had relations with cannot touch.  It suggests that sexual love is, at heart, a matter of knowing, and there is no reason why that knowing must extend only to the body.  (Though it does at least that; it strikes me that the Hebrew children of old, living in tents from pasture to pasture, certainly "knew" what little boys and little girls looked like; but to "know" man or to "know" woman evidently meant something far richer.)  So to translate the verb in any other way than "to know" is to lose that Hebrew insight into the silent holiness of the love of man and woman; and that is to impoverish our appreciation of the word of God.

     That's a lot to lose; but there's more.  It is impossible to read Adam knew his wife without casting a backward glance at that Tree of Knowledge -- and that opens up a rich field for theology.  God had commanded Adam and Eve to do what Adam and Eve surely would have desired to do anyway: that is, to increase and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it.  Unless I'm missing something, there's only one way to do that: they had to know one another.  Evidently, then, the knowledge that God recommended to Adam and Eve is not the same as the pseudo-knowledge, the experience of having one's mind darkened, provided by their disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree.  And we can go further: since God has already promised that a snake-crusher will come from Eve's seed, the disaster brought on by the pseudo-knowledge will be repaired by One to come through the knowledge of the man and woman.  (In this regard, Genesis stands in severe contrast to Greek and Mesopotamian creation myths, wherein man is meant to reproduce so as to multiply workers to do the rotten work the gods don't like, or man may reproduce all he likes in some nut-eating fireless blockheaded "Golden Age," so long as he gains no real knowledge of anything.)

     And there's more still.  When Gabriel announces the great news to Mary, the young girl replies that she doesn't understand how that can be, since, as the New American Bible has it, she has no relations with a man.  It's the same clinical phrase; and I defy anybody to insist that something so flat and banal can possibly halt the reader in his tracks.  The original did just that (I am on spring break and do not have the Greek text with me, so I am going out on a bit of a limb here): I know not man.  Strange, sure.  And that's precisely the point.  Its very strangeness encourages us, as Luke intends, to connect this moment, the last in Scripture in which know will be so used, with that initial knowledge of man and woman after the Fall.  One could write a long, long time about that connection.

     I might add, by the way, that our schools peddle one sort of knowledge about sex -- the clinical, the businesslike, the fiver-slipping exchange in a dirty alley or maybe a boudoir in Scarsdale -- while suppressing entirely the sense of mystery and wise innocence that moved Mary to express her virginity thus: I know not man.  It is to create millions of experienced ignoramuses.  They have slipped a lot of fivers, and have never come to knowledge.