The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation
by Everett Fox

Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

This unique translation of the Pentateuch, done by a Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, was modelled after a German translation done on similar principles by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber (published in several parts from 1933 to 1939). ⁽¹⁾ Fox explains in his preface that he sought to follow the principles expounded by Rosenzweig and Buber, ⁽²⁾ and "to draw the reader into the world of the Hebrew Bible through the power of its language." Like the earlier German work, Fox's translation "tries to mimic the particular rhetoric of the Hebrew whenever possible, preserving such devices as repetition, allusion, alliteration, and wordplay." The impossibility of doing this in natural English idiom leads Fox to present some renderings which stretch the limits of the English language. He translates the Hebrew word for "generations" as "begettings," "altar" as "slaughter-site," "offering" as "grain-gift," "bed" as "place-of-lying," etc. Fox provides some notes to help the reader through some of these renderings, but warns the reader that he must "be prepared to meet the Bible at least halfway and must become an active participant in the process of the text, rather than a passive listener."

Below is a sample of the text with its notes. The text is formatted as poetry (even though this portion of Genesis is not in poetic form in the Hebrew text) because Fox wishes to present the narrative in an "oral form." This is one of the principles of the Buber-Rosenzweig approach: In ancient times the Bible was not so much "read" as "spoken and heard," and many of its rhetorical features go unnoticed when it is printed as ordinary prose. In the passage below, the rhythm of the lines may help the reader to notice such things as the repetition of the sentence "Thus the two of them went together" in verses 6 and 8. This repetition is a meaningful rhetorical feature because it frames, and hence draws attention to, verses 7 and 8 as being especially significant.

Genesis 22:6-12

6, 8. Thus the two of them went together: Between these two statements is Avraham’s successful deflection of Yitzhak’s question, and perhaps the hint of a happy ending.

7. fire: I.e., a torch or brand.

8. see-for-himself: Or “select.” See the name of the mountain in verse 14, “YHWH Sees.” offering-up,/ my son: One might read it with a dash instead of a comma, to preserve what may be an ironic answer.

10. slay: A verb used to describe animal sacrifice; the throat is slit.

Fox's use of hyphenated phrases seems to be modelled after the German habit of compounding nonce words, a device used frequently by Buber and Rosenzweig in their German translation. The results seem less stange in German than in English, and it may be questioned whether such "strangified" English gives the reader a true impression of what in Hebrew is really quite ordinary. James Kugel, another Jewish scholar who has written extensively on Hebrew poetry and the problems of translation, criticizes Fox in these words: "It may be fun for readers who don't know Hebrew to imagine that they are somehow getting closer to the original through such contortions, but actually the opposite is true. This style of translating only succeeds in making the language sound bizarre." ⁽³⁾ It should be understood, however, that Fox's purpose here is to give readers a sense for many things in the ancient Hebrew text that cannot be translated into idiomatic English, and his foreignizing translation does partly achieve this purpose, if the reader is prepared to meet him halfway.

Fox continues to work on translations of other portions of the Old Testament, and in 1999 he published a translation of 1 and 2 Samuel in the same vein. The publisher, Schocken Books (now a division of Random House), has projected a complete Old Testament, to be known as "The Schocken Bible."

1. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift. Zu verdeutschen unternommen von Martin Buber gemeinsam mit Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1933-1939)

2. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936). An English translation has been published as Scripture and Translation, edited and translated by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

3. James L. Kugel, The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader's Companion with New Translations (New York: Free Press, 1999), page 16.