Scripture translations have intrigued me since High School when I met Judy Brummer, a South African translator of the Book of Mormon who shared her experience of feeling Moroni’s energy sitting with her while she translated his words into the Xhosa language. Her creative, transformative experience of translating scripture greatly influenced my reading of scriptural texts. Suddenly, these sacred words no longer seemed magical or mystical, but more human– more prone to error and bias.
From then on, the words on the scritta paper weren’t necessarily the words of God but the words that translators thought were God’s–which seemed much more interesting to me. I realized that scriptural texts are filtered through invisible human translators who influence the messages and ideologies of a text. And yet, we rarely know their names–these writers of scripture.
Years later, when writing a paper in college, I came across a story about an Iraqw Bible translation project that again transformed the way I viewed God. The Iraqw language, a Cushitic language spoken in Northern Tanzania, posed a translation challenge because the Iraqw word for God is feminine.
According to Aloo Osotsi Mojola, a translation scholar at the University of Nairobi, translators are often confronted with issues of inadequate direct translation–words that require the translator’s creativity and judgment. When faced with a word, “God” in this case, that has no direct equivalent, the translators must make a choice: Do we take the path of domestication, using one of the names of God from the local language? Or do we opt for foreignization, borrowing one of the names of God from the neighboring dominant languages?
The Iraqw name for God is Mother Looa. This ancient goddess appears in their folktales and myths, in their daily conversations, and in their prayers. For centuries, Iraqw-speaking people understood that the creator of the universe was Mother Looa. She is the protector and loving mother of all humanity, “she represents all that is good, beautiful, and true.” By contrast, the masculine god, Neetlanqw, is understood to bring evil and calamity, suffering and chaos to the world. Naturally, the Bible translation team–consisting mostly of women–decided to translate the English word “God” to the Iraqw “Mother Looa.”
As I read this scholarly article, I loved imagining these people calling to Mother Looa when they were in trouble, reading Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning Mother Looa created the heavens and the earth.” I knew it was just normal to them, and I hated the idea of Christianity commandeering their Goddess of goodness, forcing her to enact the horrors attributed to the God of Israel in the Bible. But–wow. The Christian Bible held a Goddess in its pages, and she transformed all the hes into hers.
What a difference a word makes, I thought.
But the story ended predictably: Christian leaders discovered this feminine translation and took immediate action.
Obviously, there was no room for feminine language in the Bible. The Christian leaders argued that “everyone knows, God is a father and therefore masculine.” I would argue that the Iraqw-speaking people did not “know” that, but Mother Looa was cut from the Bible–erased from Christian tradition, theology, and thought. Instead of listening and straddling two worlds like translators do, the leaders held rigidly to the foundation of Christianity: Father, man, he, him.
And though I love the idea of a Goddess in the Bible, stripping away all those masculine pronouns, I am also–sadly–glad that Looa was released from the barbaric acts of our Old Testament God.
I’ve thought often about this story of translation, the power of a single word, and the decisions of translators–the invisible world-makers. This erasure of Mother Looa was still fresh in my mind when I learned of another instance where translation shaped (or reshaped) religious texts in 17th-century England. Mary Sidney, who knew five languages, including Hebrew, translated many texts into English, but when I read the Psalms that she translated, I was transformed.
For me, the Bible is literarily clunky and strange and hard to read. This ugliness was always excused to me because people said it was translated from an ancient language, but then I read Mary Sidney’s Psalms and realized that that just isn’t true. Her wordplay, metrical complexity, and linguistic prowess made scripture beautiful to me. Delightful. For example, here is a portion of her translation of Psalm 150:
Let ringing timbrels so his honor sound,
Let sounding cymbals so his glory ring,
That in their tunes such melody be found
As fits the pomp of most triumphant king.
Her Psalms, which she presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1599, demonstrate rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration. Her words are so much more beautiful, so much more linguistically complex and clever than the King James version of Psalm 150:
Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.
Yikes. Both translations originate from the same Hebrew poems, and yet, they vary vastly based on the person translating. I find Sidney’s translation more to my liking, but isn’t that fascinating? Two translators take the same Hebrew words and create two completely different products. Translators matter.
Ultimately, Bible translation is not just about words—it’s about power, belief, and who gets to define the divine.
*This post was inspired by guest blogger Leticia Storr’s beautiful post, God’s Language.
*Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
9 Responses
As a woman, I’ve always been troubled by the lack of women and the feminine in scripture and history. i love your idea of the influence of the translators, their language and culture, in scripture. I’ve also been disappointed in the lack of women’s voices in our church. The pictures of general authorities are always of men in business suits. How wonderful it would be to have women interspersed in that group. How would that scenario influence doctrine, policy, and church culture. I believe our girls and women need role models and their voices in the church. I know I do. Thanks for your blog post today.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Kim Evans! Once I noticed the lack of women in every part of Church leadership, scripture, and visuals, I couldn’t unsee it. I agree, how wonderful it would be to have women in positions of influence and visibility in the church. It would make all the difference.
Translation has always mattered to me since university days, when my thesis involved translating an essay from French into English. It was hard! I remember realizing that in Hebrew, “thousand” simply means “a big number,” (This is similar in many other languages.) The numbers in the text were no longer exact in my mind, leading to a greater fluidity in interpretation. The last talk I gave was about joy. I used 2 Nephi 2:25 this way: “Adam and Eve fell that men and women might be, we all are that we might have joy.” This is why when studying the Bible I often check other translations to see what other translators thought. Sometimes they are amazingly different.
Wow! Fascinating. Thanks for sharing, Traci. I am so impressed that you translated an essay from French into English for your thesis! So cool. Language is fluid and changing and I love that you included Eve and women in a scripture that originally excluded them.
Poetry is so hard to translate. What a huge difference in the feeling between those verses! Thanks for putting Mary Sidney on my radar.
I’m in the middle of reading “Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God” by Lauren Winner. She talks about how God is described with lots of different metaphors in the bible, but church tends to focus on only a few of those metaphors: father, shepherd, king, light of the world. But there are so many more. The book has fascinating explorations of some of the less commonly discussed metaphors. I just finished the chapter about God as a laboring woman. In the middle ages, God was frequently pictured as a lactating mother! I had no clue about that when I wrote a post about spiritual insights from breastfeeding, but 1) it’s validating that others have seen it and 2) it’s infuriating that in our culture I felt like I was really going out on a limb just to say this kind of stuff.
https://exponentii.org/blog/guest-post-spiritual-insights-from-breastfeeding/
Yes! That is one of the tragedies of silencing women throughout history: women are siloed in patriarchy and have to continue to rediscover themselves again and again with each generation. Thanks for your comment, Kaylee, and thank you for writing and researching and sharing these lost, feminine ideas. It matters. Hopefully, we can be loud enough that God is also a laboring and lactating woman for our children and grandchildren.
I think it’s so important for God to be infinite. For God to be more than just “man.” In that same article that I reference in my post, the author highlights a Kenyan theologian’s compiled list of African names for God and it basically includes everyone and everything. And when God includes me and looks like me, I can find God everywhere:
“God is called the Great Mother, Supreme One, Fashioner, Designer, Father, Distributor, Carver, Molder, Hewer, Excavator, Architect of the World. . . . In addition, the ultimate mystery is Alone the Great One, the Powerful One, Wise One, Shining One, the One who sees all, the One who is everywhere, He or She is Friend, the Greatest of Friends, the One you confide your troubles to, the One who can turn everything upside down, the One there from ancient times, the One who began the forest, the One who gives all, the Rain-giver. . . Highest of the Highest . . . Queen of Heaven whose glory shines in the mist and rainbow, the Great Spider, the Great Spirit, the Great One of the Sky, Protector of the Poor, Guardian of Orphans, the Chief, the Fire, the Almighty, Watcher of everything, Owner of everything, Savior of all . . . the One who loves, who gives birth to the people, who rules, who makes children, who embraces all, the One who does not die, who has not let us down yet, who bears the world, who has seen many moons, who thunders from far-off times, who carries everyone on her back, who is heard in all the world, the One who blesses.”
Yes. I need God to be so much bigger than is taught at church.
Love that quote! CBE has same great articles.
Now I want to go find me some Mother Loona stories!!
This also makes me think of how Mormon Culture/American culture is “translated” as the only way to worship. As a missionary in Hong Kong, I had members complain to me about it. The translated words create a “superior” culture and dominance over other ways of living. Its sad.
Ah. Yes. That makes sense that it’s a western American cultural take over of other cultures. So sad. Thanks for your comment! It makes me think of Caroline Kline’s book, Mormon Women at the Crossroads, that explores the Mormon church in other cultures across the globe. What if the LDS church didn’t define and confine God to be what a few American men think it is and instead allowed each diverse human to find God within themselves and their culture . . .?