Genesis : New Translation of the Classic Bible Stories, A

Rating:
Summary: Very necessary
Review: As someone who has recently been fascinated with new translations of the book of Genesis, I found Mitchell's to be one of the best. I call it 'very necessary' because I believe that whether or not one reads the Bible as literature or religious truth, this translation does a superb job in recovering the text from centuries of doctrinal interpretation and positioning the reader for an honest assessment of Genesis. The God of these stories is a complex, capricious, and ultimately unpredicatable character. The Lord is not a likeable deity. And, in my opinion, for a Christian or Jew who has problems with this portrayal of the Lord, read the older versions again. They more or less can reveal the same interpretation to an intelligent reader, and even provoke an interest in how these stories have been read and misread through the discourse of doctrine, of everyday media, and why. This is how I find Mitchell's translation and interpretation valuable, because it questions this Lord. Mitchell looks at the stories of the rejected Cain, the slighted Esau, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and others and reevaluates them with a critical but fully appreciative approach.

Rating:
Summary: If there is a translation in this, I missed it
Review: I really tried to finish this book, but there is only so much preaching one can take. The feeling reading this is that there is less of a translation being presented than the author's interpretation of the work. After being told several times what God thinks, or must have thought, or what God really meant but was misstated as the stories were passed along and re-written, the entire basis for a "new translation" seemed suspect. Most people will be better served by reading mainstream translations (with study notes for in-depth analysis). Many of these are written by scores of biblical scholars collaborating together and working with original texts. NIV, NASV, or other respected translations should be baseline reading...then interpretations such as this one can be read critically.

Rating:
Summary: Wildly uneven
Review: If you asked Stephen Mitchell to translate the telephone book, he'd probably come up with a brilliantly lucid work bristling with insights into the nature of spiritual reality. But you'd have to wade through an introduction that reads: "I found that the entirety of K-N was a later interpolation by a talented but spiritually inferior redactor, and moreover J is clearly a doublet of I just as V is a doublet of U. I have therefore taken the liberty of rearranging the alphabet in a way that felt authentic to me, following the spirit rather than the letter."

_Genesis_ is probably the clearest example of this tendency, as it's one of very few Mitchell works that's _supposed_ to be a complete and literal translation rather than a poetic rendering. And the translation, as always, is very, very good -- and very, very clear.

Unfortunately he chops the text to bits -- relegating the allegedly inauthentic bits to the appendices and notes, and explaining in the introduction all the things he thinks are wrong with the "redacted" version of Genesis. It's almost as though there's a conservation law at work: when Mitchell can't mess with the translation itself, his editorial views emerge somewhere else, with a vengeance.

I do not at all mean to imply that he has nothing important to say. On the contrary, some of his commentary is most helpful. He explains some very nice touches in his translation, and he does offer what seem to me to be some deep and genuine insights. (And he also does a nice job of showing how his translation is different from those of others.)

But I do find myself almost gasping for breath when I see the credulity with which he buys into the JEDP "documentary hypothesis" -- and, for that matter, the sheer chutzpah with which he determines just which bits of the text are later additions by "second- and third-rate writers" [p. xxxv] and even "dullard[s]" [p. xl]. I'm not terribly impressed with the usual arguments that the text is full of contradictions and awkward "doublets" in the first place; nor does Mitchell even pretend to make any effort to resolve them. (And neither have I found two authors who would divide the texts in the same way based on these features.) But as I noted long ago in my review of Kikawada and Quinn's _Before Abraham Was_ (which see), if all these alleged problems didn't bother the alleged "redactor," why do we think they would have bothered a single original author? Why not assume they are there for pedagogical reasons rather than inadvertently left there through mistake or stupidity?

Mitchell is also inclined to make little "arguments from moral indignation," in some cases even based on the _silence_ of the text on certain points. For example, he is properly repulsed by the manner in which the supposedly virtuous Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowd beating on his door. But it is beyond me why he imagines -- for it must be imagination he uses here -- that the biblical author did _not_ object to this action.

But the reader interested primarily in Mitchell's own spiritual progress will be happy to hear that the "stories took on a stunning clarity" for him after he had removed "coat after coat of lacquer" [p. xxxv]. In other words: as usual, when Mitchell removes the parts he doesn't agree with, he is quite unaccountably stunned and amazed to find that he likes what's left.

On the whole, his translation is well worth reading. But be sure to keep the aspirin handy, and to put any breakable objects somewhere out of reach.