Pro­fes­sor Aaron Hugh­es is a gift­ed writer with a pas­sion and tal­ent for under­stand­ing the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of bib­li­cal trans­la­tions. His own use of lan­guage in this vol­ume may be a bit over the top even for an aca­d­e­m­ic work, but it can be viewed as a long epic lyri­cal poem. Trans­la­tion is a tapes­try of var­i­ous ana­lyt­i­cal, lin­guis­tic, philo­soph­i­cal, and aes­thet­ic process­es. Bib­li­cal trans­la­tion seeks to under­stand the past by uti­liz­ing con­tem­po­rary lan­guage to demon­strate rev­e­la­to­ry con­ti­nu­ity. A key ques­tion for trans­la­tors is whether to lead the read­er to under­stand the cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic uni­verse of the orig­i­nal or to trans­form the orig­i­nal by adopt­ing and adapt­ing it to the reader’s own cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic uni­verse. 

Hugh­es main­tains that bib­li­cal trans­la­tion is a philo­soph­i­cal activ­i­ty which ver­i­fies the nar­ra­tive as a source of wis­dom. It is not mere­ly a philo­log­i­cal exer­cise. It is a reflec­tion of the trans­la­tors and of their under­stand­ing of what Judaism should be. Hugh­es selects trans­la­tors who were philoso­phers to make his case. Saa­dia Gaon, Moses ibn Ezra, Mai­monides, Judah Mess­er Leon, Moses Mendelssohn, Mar­tin Buber, and Franz Rosen­zweig all attempt­ed to bring the Bible to a pop­u­la­tion for whom Hebrew was no longer com­pre­hen­si­ble. Access to the Bible is an impor­tant com­po­nent of Judaism and these trans­la­tions were as much salvif­ic as they were works of phi­los­o­phy and schol­ar­ship. These trans­la­tions were as much exe­ge­sis as they were ren­di­tions of the orig­i­nal text. 

The trans­la­tors select­ed for this study each require a more detailed and exhaus­tive analy­sis. We are tan­ta­lized by the snip­pets offered here. In essence this vol­ume is an intro­duc­to­ry essay to the field of trans­la­tion as Jew­ish phi­los­o­phy and social and cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Uti­liz­ing lit­er­ary the­o­ry from a Jew­ish post­mod­ernist per­spec­tive is wor­thy of exam­i­na­tion. The glar­ing omis­sion of the clas­sic Tar­gum and Sep­tu­agint trans­la­tions is a defi­cien­cy. The last para­graph of the book is worth citing: 

The lan­guage of truth and the truth of lan­guage here col­lide. It is a col­li­sion, how­ev­er, that can take place only in and through words — an under­stand­ing of their mal­leabil­i­ty, their trans­fer­abil­i­ty, and their point­ing to what resides beyond.