Lost in Translation by Joel S Baden Book Review

About the Book:

The Bible is words--it is, at the end of the day, nothing more than that. How those words have been read and understood has formed the basis of everything from private faith to public policy for two thousand years. Yet for the most part, casual readers--and even many professional interpreters, clerical and scholarly--are unaware of how culture has impacted the commonly accepted meanings of so many words and terms. To read the Bible well is to understand that the text is not the same as its interpretation and translation. To care about the Bible is to recognize where the past two millennia of cultural change have shaped our understanding of the biblical text, and to sift through it, to see what the Bible once was so that we can better understand what the Bible now is--and how we, its readers, came to be who we are.

My Review:

We might not think to much about the words as we read the Bible. Sure, we know it is a translation but Baden really opened my eyes to what that might mean. Some of our biblical concepts may come from outside the Bible. An example is cherubs. The pudgy angels we have in our mind come from the painter Raphael and not at all from the Bible. Cherubs are in fact guards, not angels (messengers).

Baden takes into account modern scholarship to help us understand what words meant originally, often in contrast to what we think they mean now. Some of his conclusions went against my childhood Sunday School lessons on hell (Sheol) and Satan, for example. His work is certainly food for thought, even if some might not like his conclusions.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

About the Author:

Joel S. Baden is Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Yale Divinity School. He holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, and has taught at Yale since 2007.

Fortress Press, 176 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent and honest review.

(My star ratings: 5-I love it, 4-I like it, 3-It's OK, 2-I don't like it, 1-I hate it.)