Sniggering teenage boys - 7 February 2012 |
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Bible translators tend to be rather coy with Judges 3:22.. The anglicised ESV does a pretty good job: “And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly; and the excrement came out.”
Other versions of the ESV (yes, there are other versions of the English “Standard” Version – lots of them, with more following in the third (!) edition) replace “excrement” with “dung”.
Well, OK, fair enough. At least it’s better than the NIV’s lame attempt to render the final phrase: “the fat closed in over it.” Right, whatever. After all that effort, Ehud, that’s how the NIV translators think your exploits should be remembered. And to think that you had to put up with that revolting smell…
Ideally, we want a word that conveys the biological details while raising the appropriate giggles from the church’s younger members. “Pooh” would probably do it. Almost. The Hebrew parshedon is not an expletive, but neither is it the kind of description you’d get from a coroner. It’s the word we all use for the stuff we all know he’s talking about, except that we don’t use it in polite company.
Ironically, that’s exactly what the translators are trying to avoid: generations of teenage boys gathering around Bibles after church to snigger at all the naughty bits, and then to insist that the same linguistic conventions should apply at Sunday lunch when Great Aunt Mabel comes to visit. (Lads: For the sake of clarity and the avoidance of all doubt, the fact that a particular word is found in the Bible does not by itself mean that the same word is appropriate in other contexts. You’ll need a better argument than that.)
It’s a shame, really, because one important reason what Judges 3:22 says what it says is precisely to give teenage boys something to laugh at – the stinking mess in the throne-room of a Pagan King.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Bible, Minister's Blog