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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good idea gone astray,
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This review is from: Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) (Old Testament) (Hardcover)
This translation of the Old Testament (aka Hebrew or shared Scripture) grows out of a well-founded desire - to bring to the English reader a specific aspect of the Hebrew text, the ability to recognize the repetition of words and word-roots. This is an important element of understanding the original text - allowing the reader to develop an ever more precise understanding of the way the term is used in Hebrew. Ideally, this would slowly build in the mind of the reader a semantic web of Biblical Hebrew.
Unfortunately, this text fails because of false assumptions about the nature of language: (1) a word in one language translates into a single word in another language. So if an Eskimo language has 32 words for snow so does English. Or if English uses a single word "rocket" to mean both a plant and a mechanical device that goes upward at great speeds, so does Hebrew. Or if one language uses inflexions, another position, a third agglutination, a fourth particles to specify time, voice and number they all require the same number of words to say something like "she might have fled." (2) the meaning of words is static over time - has "gay" always meant both an emotion and a sexual preference? (3) if words share a root, they share a meaning. This is closely related to assumption two. Consider the following English words derived from the same Indo-European root: iris, iridescent, vinegar, vicar, wicker, wattle, witch ... In Werner's notation of added/missing words and measures of consistency, she needs to look a bit deeper and consider the words not at the grammatic level but at the semantic level to account for differences in vocabulary and grammatic structure. She needs to look a words not at the morphological level but as units of meaning to allow for multiple meanings of a word and for changes of meaning over time. On the positive side, Werner's noting of doubling (repeating a word), hyphenation (use indicating single'double Hebrew word, etc. and leaving certain words in the Hebrew does give added value to her text. This value would be enhanced if she specified which Hebrew and Aramaic texts she is deriving her notation from. (My usual test for the Masoretic text (Gen. 4:7-9) is inconclusive in this translation.) With additional work focusing on the domain of meaning of a particular word and, perhaps, semantic webs, this translation has potential.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TRANSLINEAR BIBLE A MAJOR TRIUMPH! PRICELESS!,
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This review is from: Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) (Old Testament) (Hardcover)
Total satisfaction with every aspect of purchasing this very enlightening book! The entire purchasing experience was one of my best...arriving in the mail before expected and so much more than anticipated. This TRANSLINEAR BIBLE is revolutionary. An incredible treasure has been given to the world through this ANCIENT ROOTS BIBLE! A trustworthy, superb and unique translation, faithful to Hebraic language & thought patterns, you will also discover that the actual physical book is beautiful to behold and a pleasure to hold while you are either reading or studying. Clear type. Wonderful font size. It also has an appealing cover that invites the reader to explore inside to relish familiar scriptures with ancient insights and to unearth sweet riches. In my personal evaluation, after researching the biblical texts as a pastor for over forty years and owning 8,000+ books in my library I would have to say of the ANCIENT ROOTS BIBLE what A. Frances Werner herself writes concerning the Torah's essence in her characteristic elegant style and literal vocabulary, using the words of the Psalmist, that it is my honor to say that the ANCIENT ROOTS TRANSLINEAR BIBLE is "sweeter than the honey nectar of the honeycomb" Ps. 19:10b (ARTB). I have chosen to make her website [...] my Home Page on my computer so that I can quickly access the concordance and other helpful features she makes available. Hope it comes out in genuine leather some day. The words printed at the bottom of the front cover capture what I am hoping this review says in just a sentence: "Find out what you've been missing." A must have!!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Can you really explain the Bible?,
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This review is from: Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) (Old Testament) (Hardcover)
In discussions of Bible translations there is an underlying assumption that we can know what was meant in the original language and on that basis express this meaning in an accessible way. But think about it: even translating let's say a Harry Potter book from English to German, the translator cannot know always 100% what the author had in mind. There are flavors of words and expressions that are uniquely English, even British. So the translator in the best case guesses right and happens to find a parallel expression in the target language.
But what if you have a book like the Old Testament, written by many authors, a long time ago? Let's say you decided to "give up" on the idea that you could guess right. You also give up beforehand on the attempt to find good accessible modern expressions to represent any guesses as to what the text means. Instead you decide to use a kind of coded consistency: if one word is used in 150 different contexts, maybe actually meaning different things (but you ignore that for the moment, since that would lead you back to guessing), then you make sure that the English translation uses exactly one and the same word for each of those occurrences. Even if the result is awkward. If any extra words need to be added that weren't there in the original you keep these to a minimum. You furthermore do not try to add into the mix your own theology. Something like this seems to lie behind the ARTB and gives this Bible translation its peculiar power. It doesn't replace the more fluent and poetic translations that we already know, the NKJV, the NIV, and so on. If you want an easy to read Bible the ARTB one is not a good choice. If you are searching for a freshness in the text, seeing it again for the first time, and being shocked at certain familiar phrases sounding very different, then this Bible does that for you. I find that I am truly amazed reading a chapter from Genesis or a well-known psalm. Lot's wife did not get turned into a "pillar" of salt, no she got turned into a "garrison" of salt. At least that is the Hebrew word being used. Now yes, maybe the original author did actually mean "pillar" if he could speak English, but we don't know. What we do know is that the word that elsewhere in the Bible is used for garrison, here is used to describe what Lot's wife turned into. Or what about the first line of Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd"? In this translation it says, "Yahweh feeds me." That is so different. God feeds me, He is not a concept, His care is active. I didn't believe at first that the Hebrew actually had these possible meanings, but with a concordance and a dictionary and an interlinear Bible I have to admit that these translations are probably good. Not "better", since they lack the poetic flow and the evocative imagery of the KVJ/NIV. But good, instructive, tantalizing, and prodding deeper research into the meaning of the words. It creates an effect of a deeper meaning shining out, not poetic, but more like metal ore shines out of hard stone. This Bible is like a mining tool, a simple one, since it does not require lots of notes and explanations. You get the plain text with only a minimum of commentary. I love to see the silver and gold sheen of an inner sense lighting up in the verses.
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