Translating Genesis

Yesterday, my friend Alexis and I got together to relive our time studying biblical Hebrew in Israel and to do a little translating. The task: translate the first reading for our wedding from Hebrew into English. The text we were looking at was the beginning of Genesis 29, where Jacob first sees Rachel, and we quickly noticed some differences between traditional translations and the Hebrew in front of us.

Case in point: in the Hebrew, Jacob approaches a well with three flocks of sheep, and Rachel is quite literally introduced as "Rachel who came with the sheep," as if she was a member of the flock! Of course, that's not really what it meant--the gist is more like, "Rachel, who was traveling with the sheep." We were also quite surprised to find Rachel described as a shepherdess, a detail that gets left out of English translations.

This made Alexis exclaim, "Wow, Rachel the career woman! What a great idea for an ancient Barbie doll!"

I followed with, "Indeed--and it would totally transform the traditional Bo Peep poem. Imagine: 'Shepherdess Rachel did not lose her sheep, and knew exactly where to find them!"

This all brought us lots of laughter, and it made us nostalgic for the days when translating was our full-time gig! But it also was a great occasion for us to think about how to best translate the Hebrew into English in a way that both kept the spirit of the ancient text and also brought it to life for us today. Hope we succeeded!