Book review: “Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Biblical Words” by Joel S. Baden

When it comes to history, including religious history, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, writes that it’s important to attempt “a real engagement with the strangeness of the past.”

The people of the past were human beings as we are, but they lived much different lives and saw the world much differently than we do. We would seem very strange to them, and, if we really want to understand the past, we need to recognize their strangeness for us.

That recognition is at the heart of Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Biblical Words by Yale Divinity School professor Joel S. Baden. The book, published by the Minneapolis-based Fortress Press, is a nuanced look at more than three dozen words and phrases that appear often in the Hebrew Bible of Judaism, called the Old Testament in Christianity.

This is a work that, at first glance, might seem of little interest to most readers in our highly secular age. Yet, the words Baden examines—such as angel, leprosy, Satan, grace, hell and the Lord—are woven into the literature and thinking of western civilization and are likely to resonate far beyond devout Jews and Christians.

 

Ephemeralness, not self-centeredness

Think of the often-quoted opening of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

That’s from the King James Version of the Bible from 1611, one of the most influential works (along with Shakespeare) in shaping modern English. Yet, as Baden notes, modern English doesn’t use “vanity” in the way the KJV translators meant it.  The word doesn’t refer at all to self-centeredness but has something to do with the ephemeralness of life and the impossibility of understanding it.

Life is fleeting—this is an important part of the message of Ecclesiastes. But just as importantly, perhaps, the attempt to figure out how life works—how one should live properly, why some people suffer and some succeed, and especially how we may behave in this life so as to ensure a blessed existence in the next—is worthless, futile, in vain.

The bottom line message, Baden writes, is that the fate of humans is determined by God who is unknowable. Which is quite a contrast to the modern view that seemingly any problem can be solved if we throw enough money and brain power at it.

 

Words thousands of years old

“We are,” write Baden, a former Chicagoan, “more distant from the original Hebrew than we realize.” The words in modern English translations of the Hebrew Bible may seem clear enough, but Baden cautions that our cultural idiom isn’t that of the Israelite world of two and three thousand years ago.

And the words that we read in English, though seemingly transparent to us, do not actually let us see through the thousands of years back to the original Hebrew in which the text was written. The words that we think we understand today are often quite different from the ones that they’re ostensibly representing.

Baden is the author of the insightful and endlessly fascinating The Book of ‘Exodus’: A Biography, published in 2019 by Princeton University Press, and he brings a similar sprightly and yet also scholarly approach to Lost in Translation.

His goal in this new book is to provide readers with historical and linguistic insights that will help them better understand what the original writers of Jewish scripture were saying in Hebrew and Aramaic.

 

The “Hebrew” nickname

Actually, “Hebrew” is one of the interesting words Baden examines. Today, the word primarily refers to the modern or ancient versions of the Hebrew language. Yet, when the Bible mentions the language of ancient Israel, it’s called “Judean” or “the language of Judah. The people of the Bible generally don’t refer to themselves as Hebrews.

Most of the time, Baden writes, “Hebrew” seems to be a pejorative nickname used by high-status foreigners, such as the Pharaoh, equating the Israelites with a band of outlaws, mercenaries and nomads.

Perhaps a reasonable modern analogy is to the term “Yankee,” which was used first by the British as a pejorative name for the American colonists and then during the Civil War era by the southern Confederates as a pejorative name for the northerners. Of course, often a pejorative term is adopted by its referent as a point of pride—the New York Yankees—and so it is no surprise that even Israelites occasionally used “Hebrew” to refer to themselves.

 

Quite a different hell

Readers of the Hebrew Bible today, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack of one, are influenced by two thousand years of Christian interpretations.

Consider hell: For Christians, it’s a place of suffering for the wicked. But that’s quite different from the Sheol of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel.

Sheol is a physical place under the earth surface like the Greek Hades. But, unlike hell, Sheol is everyone’s eventual destination. And it’s not a place of torture.

The biblical conception of the afterlife is one of, well, nothing.

 

Quite a different cherub

If the biblical hell is a lot different from what modern readers might expect, so are the cherubs, probably more so.  Your image of cherubs most likely has been shaped by Raphael who, five hundred years ago, painted them as chubby-faced little angels, seemingly babies with wings. But Baden writes that that’s nothing like how Ezekiel portrays them in the Hebrew Bible.

Though somewhat hard to picture, the details [of a biblical cherub] are basically this: four faces (ox, human, lion, and eagle); four wings, with human-like hands under each wing; a wheel, somehow; and, oh, yes—covered all over with eyes.

Talk about strangeness!

In his final chapter, Baden notes that the word “Bible” does not appear in the Bible. It was first used in the third century by Christians, from the Greek term for “the books.”  Each age interprets the Bible in its own way, as does each faith down the centuries.

What it meant three thousand years ago need not determine what it means for us today. But neither should how we read it today erase entirely what the text once communicated.

In a way, the Bible is a conversation between those who read it today and those who wrote it and revered its words in antiquity. Baden’s book aims to help today’s readers hear better their religious ancestors.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.13.26

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 1.23.26