The Bible: Prophets Paraphrased

THE BIBLE

The Rev. John Bertram Phillips of Dorsetshire has a rare and felicitous talent: he can make St. Paul sound as contemporary as the preacher down the street. Seeking to “transmit freshness and life across the centuries,” Phillips produced a New Testament in Modern English that abandoned archaisms in favor of unadorned clarity and read more like Lord Jim than King James.

Phillips’ version, unquestionably the most comprehensible of recent Bible translations, has sold more than 4,000,000 copies since the first part of it was published in 1947, and hundreds of British clergymen even use it for church worship.

His New Testament was such a success, Phillips admits, that people pestered him to try the Old as well. Now Macmillan has published in the U.S. Phillips’ first attempt to put the Hebrew books in English, a translation of Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah and Micah called Four Prophets ($3.95).

“Tensed Muscle.” Phillips, an Anglican minister who resigned from his London parish in 1955, found the Old Testament much tougher going than the New, which was written in free and easy colloquial Greek that is akin in spirit to modern English. No Hebrew scholar, he discovered that almost every letter was a “tensed muscle” and that the style of the Old Testament possessed a “monolithic grandeur,” requiring a language “which is both dignified and authoritative.”

Phillips’ low-keyed prose does not match the stately measures of King James’s scholars for beauty, but more than compensates by often making clear what they had transliterated word for word from the Hebrew. The King James Version makes Amos 4:6 sound like a fluoridation spiel, translating it: “And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities.” Phillips recaptures the original sense with his phrasing: “It was I who gave you hungry mouths in all your cities.” And in Micah 6:16, where the King James has the Lord meaninglessly warning “that I should make thee a desolation, and the inhabitants thereof an hissing,” Phillips has the sensible “and they compel me to bring you to ruin, and make your inhabitants an object of scorn.”

Brisk English. Some Scriptural experts complain that Phillips’ concern for sense rather than literal accuracy produces paraphrase rather than translation. Nonetheless, his method produces particularly happy results in Hosea, a puzzling book with a notoriously corrupt Hebrew text. Freely transposing sentences and phrases, Phillips produces line after line of brisk English that enlightens where the King James Version confuses—and probably makes more sense than the original. Sample comparative verses from Hosea:

KING JAMES 4:12 My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them: for the spirit of whoredoms has caused them to err, and they have gone awhoring from under their God.

PHILLIPS My people! Asking advice from a piece

of wood

And consulting a staff for instructions! It is the spirit of lust that has led them

astray, And they have left their God, to follow

the paths of unfaithfulness.

KING JAMES 7:8 Ephraim is a cake not turned.

PHILLIPS

Ephraim is half-baked—scorched on one side and uncooked on the other!