Frank kicked the bucket.
Go ahead and translate that sentence into Japanese. If you translate the words, Japanese readers will spend the rest of the chapter wondering why Frank assaulted a pail. So you do what every translator does: you translate the meaning instead, and you write “Frank died.” Clean. Accurate. Done.
Except that later in the story, on the morning of the funeral, Frank’s grieving daughter kicks a bucket down the stairs, and the author meant for you to flinch when she did. Your Japanese readers feel nothing. Nothing was mistranslated, and something was lost anyway, because the kick and the bucket quietly died with Frank.
Now. About your Bible.
Unless you read biblical Hebrew and Greek, every word of Scripture you have ever loved reached you through a translator, a devout, exhausted expert standing between two languages, making ten thousand small decisions exactly like the bucket decision. This chapter is not going to shake your confidence in your Bible. It is going to do something better: show you what translation can and cannot carry, so that you stop reading English with the confidence that belongs only to the Hebrew. Hence the first rule of reading like a Jew: never forget that you are reading a translation.
Translator, Traitor
The Italians have a proverb two words long: traduttore, traditore. Translator, traitor. It is unfair to translators, who are heroes, and it is also true, because every translation is a long series of interpretations. The translator does not carry your sentence across the river; the translator rebuilds it from local materials on the far bank. And the materials never quite match. Hebrew puns refuse to board the boat: God forms the adam from the adamah, the human from the humus, the earthling from the earth (Genesis 2:7), and in English the family resemblance between man and ground, which the Hebrew flaunts in every syllable, simply vanishes. Word order, rhythm, register, wordplay: at every line, something must be chosen and something must be left on the bank. Every translator is a marriage counselor between two languages that want a divorce. Three exhibits, quickly.
Exhibit one: a comma. On the cross, Jesus tells the dying criminal beside him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43). Now move the comma one word to the right: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.” In the first sentence, the man arrives in paradise that afternoon. In the second, “today” merely solemnizes the promise, and the arrival date is open. Entire theologies of what happens after death have camped on either side of that comma, whole traditions about whether the faithful dead are conscious in paradise now or asleep until resurrection morning. Here is the detail your English Bible cannot show you: the earliest Greek manuscripts have no punctuation at all. No commas, no periods, often no spaces between the words, just rivers of capital letters. The comma is not in the text. The comma is a decision, and a translator made it for you. I am not going to tell you which reading I believe is right; that is a conversation for a different book. I am telling you something more basic and more useful: if you have ever felt certain about that verse, some of your certainty was manufactured by a committee’s punctuation. Knowing that is not a loss of faith. It is an accurate map of where your faith was actually standing.
Exhibit two: a wind, a breath, a Spirit. In the Bible’s second verse, something of God moves over the dark waters. The NIV says “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The Jewish Publication Society’s translation says “a wind from God sweeping over the water” (Genesis 1:2). Who is right? Both. Neither. The Hebrew word ruach means wind, breath, and spirit all at once, and Hebrew feels no need to choose, because in Hebrew the words breathe together: the God whose breath is wind, whose wind is Spirit. English grammar demands one noun, so the translator picks, and whichever word she picks, two others fall silently to the floor.
Exhibit three: the sparrow. Jesus says that not one sparrow “will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matthew 10:29). That is the whole phrase in Greek: aneu tou patros hymon, “apart from your Father.” Apart from him how? The Greek does not say, and apparently the silence was unbearable, because look what the committees did. The NIV writes, “not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” The NET Bible writes, “not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will.” Other translations choose the word “knowledge.” Care, knowledge, and will are not the same theology. A sparrow that dies inside God’s care is held; a sparrow that dies by God’s will is scheduled. The Greek says neither. It says that no sparrow falls alone, without your Father, and it leaves the mystery of how exactly there, unresolved, where Jesus left it. Every committee reached into the silence and put a word in God’s mouth. They meant well. They always mean well. That is precisely why you need to know they are there.
The Law That Was Never “Law”
Sometimes the fateful decision happened twenty-two centuries ago, and we have been living downstream ever since.
When Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Torah into Greek, they needed a word for torah itself, and they chose nomos: law. Latin followed with lex. English landed on “law,” and there it sits in your Bible, in Paul’s letters, in a thousand sermons about being “under the law.”
But “Torah” does not mean law. The word comes from a root that means to point, to direct, to aim, to teach; it is the word for what an archer does to an arrow and what a parent does to a child. Hear how the Bible itself uses it: “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.” (Proverbs 1:8). That last phrase is torat imecha, your mother’s torah. Is mom issuing legislation? Shall we picture her in robes, banging a gavel over the soup? Of course not. A mother’s torah is her guidance, her pointing of your life in the direction of life. That is the word the Jewish people chose for the five books of Moses: not the Statutes, not the Code. The Pointing. The Teaching.
Now feel the difference a single translation choice makes. “The Law of Moses” sounds like something you are prosecuted under. “The Teaching of Moses” sounds like something you were lucky to grow up with. An honest chunk of Christianity’s historic allergy to “the Law,” the shudder the word produces in a thousand pulpits, is an allergy to a Greek translation choice. The rabbis, meanwhile, sing love songs to the Torah and dance with it once a year, an entire holiday of carrying the scroll like a bride. Nobody dances with a legal code. They never thought they had one.
Four Words, One Bulldozer
Here is the case study I most want you to take home, and I will keep it strictly about language.
Your King James Bible says “hell” fifty-four times, and behind that one English word stand four different ancient words.Sheol is Hebrew for the grave, the silent realm of all the dead, good and bad alike; Jacob expects to go there, and he is nobody’s villain. Hades is its Greek-language cousin. Gehenna is not an otherworld at all but a place you can visit today with a bus pass: Gei Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem’s walls, a ravine with a genuinely dark history, the place where kings of Judah once sacrificed their own children to pagan gods (Jeremiah 7:31), and whose name became a picture of national judgment. And tartaroo, used exactly once, is borrowed straight from the basement of Greek mythology. Four words, four flavors, one English bulldozer flattening them into “hell.” And I don’t have to tell you about the doctrine that was built over it.
And here is the detail that proves the translators knew better: the very same King James committee translated the very same word sheol as “grave” thirty-one times. When Jacob says he will go down to sheol mourning, the KJV writes “grave,” because not even 1611 could send old Jacob to the inferno. In other words, the King James translators knew sheol was not Dante’s basement. The torture basement came later, with better artists.
Watch what their own good instincts prove. When Jacob, shown Joseph’s bloodied coat, groans that he will go down to sheol to his son mourning (Genesis 37:35), the KJV wrote “grave,” because not even 1611 was prepared to damn the patriarch for grieving. Right choice. But now run the logic backward: if sheol means “grave” when Jacob goes there, by what rule does the same word become the afterlife inferno a few psalms later? The rule, it turns out, was not in the Hebrew. It was in the translators’ expectations of which people belonged where, and that is this chapter’s lesson wearing its plainest clothes: when one English word absorbs four ancient ones, the traffic of meaning flows backward, and the English word’s medieval luggage gets delivered to addresses that never ordered it.
Meanwhile the English word “hell” has lived its own life. In old English it meant the hidden, covered place (it is a distant cousin of “helmet”: both grow from a root meaning to cover), which is not far from sheol, the concealed realm of the dead. But the word kept absorbing medieval paintings and poems, and modern readers now pour all of that back into every verse where the old bulldozer parked. The result: English readers routinely hear Jesus warning about a Greek mythological netherworld when he was pointing across the valley at Gei Hinnom. What you do with all this theologically is a conversation for another book, and I have written it. For this chapter, the point is linguistic, and it is the rule in miniature: you were not reading “the Bible.” You were reading a decision.
The Offering That Was Not About Anger
One more, because it may be the most beautiful retranslation I know.
Leviticus prescribes an offering called the chatat. Most English Bibles translate it “sin offering,” and the label writes its own theology: somebody sinned, something must die. But watch who brings a chatat. A woman who has just given birth brings one (Leviticus 12:6-8). A healed leper, a person recovered from a defiling skin disease, brings one (Leviticus 14). Now answer honestly: what was the new mother’s sin? Childbirth? The scholar Jacob Milgrom spent a career on Leviticus and concluded that the offering is misnamed in English; the chatat is a purification offering, from the verb’s sense of cleansing, decontaminating. Its blood does not calm down an angry God; it cleans sacred space, the way you scrub a house so the family can keep living in it together. Impurity, not anger, is the problem it solves. Nearness is the goal. Its sibling offering, the asham, makes the family resemblance obvious: brought for damage done, it came with mandatory restitution to the injured party plus twenty percent (Leviticus 5:16), a built-in repair budget. These offerings are not a system for absorbing rage. They are a system for repairing a shared home.
Hold the two translations side by side. “Sin offering”: God is upset, and something dies to settle it. “Purification offering”: something in the house of God’s presence gets washed, so that nothing has to come between him and his people, not even a newborn’s blood and birth-water. One Hebrew word, two different Gods, and only one of them is in the Hebrew. Keep that in your pocket. Much later in this book, when we talk about how the church lost its rabbi’s accent, you will want it.
Nine Hundred Scandals, or One Working System
At this point somebody always plays the trump card: “But there are hundreds of English translations! Which one is right? Doesn’t that prove the whole thing is broken?”
There are, in fact, about nine hundred of them, complete or partial, by the American Bible Society’s own counting. And I want to say, as a Jew: nine hundred is not the scandal. Nine hundred is the honesty. Every new translation is a committee admitting, in public, that the last committee’s choices were choices. The differences between your Bibles are not cracks in Scripture; they are flags planted on the hard places, and the flags are a gift, because now you know exactly where to dig.
And here is the part I love: Jews got there first, by about two thousand years. In fact, Jews invented the entire enterprise. The first major translation of Scripture in human history was the Septuagint, Greek for “the Seventy,” after the legend of its seventy-two translators: the Hebrew Bible rendered into Greek in Alexandria beginning in the third century before Jesus, because the grandchildren of Hebrew speakers now dreamed in Greek and their God refused to lose them over grammar. Read that sentence again as theology: the first Bible translation in history was a Jewish act of pastoral care. Your English Bible is the great-great-grandchild of a Jewish idea. When Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the Jewish street language, the synagogue did not quietly swap in an Aramaic Bible and hope nobody noticed. It invented the targum, a live Aramaic rendering: the reader chanted the holy Hebrew from the scroll, and a translator rendered it aloud for the people, right there, in real time. Picture the scene: Shabbat morning, the reader sings a verse of Hebrew from the parchment; a man standing beside him turns it into the crowd’s Aramaic; then the next verse, then the next, two voices in holy leapfrog, the original and its translation taking turns in the air. Nobody in that room could ever confuse the two; the room’s own choreography was the lesson. You have already seen the Bible’s snapshot of the practice, Ezra’s Levites in Nehemiah 8:8, reading, clarifying, giving the meaning. The Mishnah even regulates the dance: the reader may hand the translator only one verse of Torah at a time, so that the Word and its translation never blur into each other. Think about what that procedure teaches, every week, without a word of theory: the translation is necessary, the translation is honored, and the translation is not the original. A whole civilization trained to hold both.
That is all Rule #1 asks of you. Not Hebrew lessons. Just the targum posture: love your English Bible, use your English Bible, and never confuse it with the scroll.
Some words lose a little in translation. Others lose almost everything. If you’d like to dig into words like this, the ones that change everything once you hear them in Hebrew, pick up my book Lost in Translation: 15 Hebrew Words to Transform Your Christian Faith.
The Five-Translation Habit
So what do you actually do? You do what the differences invite you to do: you let the committees argue in front of you.
Read at least three translations that disagree on purpose. Five is better.
Start with one formal, word-tracking translation that stays as close to the original’s structure as English allows, such as the NASB or the ESV. Add one meaning-driven translation that prioritizes natural English, like your NIV or CSB.
Then step outside the usual aisle, because here is something most readers never realize: nearly every modern English Bible on the shelf was produced within the same Western, Protestant-and-Catholic theological world. They differ in style, but they share the same instincts about core doctrines such as sin, judgment, and atonement. So bring in voices from other traditions. For the Hebrew Bible, I especially recommend the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh or Robert Alter’s translation with its commentary, where you will meet the text without the Christian defaults you didn’t know were defaults. For the New Testament, read David Bentley Hart’s translation, done by an Eastern Orthodox scholar with no interest in protecting Western assumptions. Where most Bibles say “eternal punishment,” for example, Hart writes “the chastening of that Age” (Matthew 25:46). And keep a King James Version nearby too. It reflects an older English world, before many modern theological habits hardened, and its wording still shapes how millions hear Scripture.
Read your passage in all of them. Where they agree, walk on in peace; the ground is firm. Where they diverge, stop and dig, because X marks the spot. You have just found one of those ten thousand decisions, and some of the Bible’s best treasure is buried exactly there.
Let me show you the habit paying off, one last taste. Psalm 23 ends, in the English you memorized, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Follow. A gentle word; goodness trails along behind you like a well-trained spaniel. Open a Jewish translation and the spaniel is gone: the Hebrew verb is radaph, to chase, to pursue, to hunt down. It is the word used for Pharaoh’s army pursuing Israel to the sea (Exodus 14:8). Robert Alter renders the line with “pursue”. Now read David’s sentence again: goodness and covenant love are not following you, politely, at a distance. They are hunting you, the way an army hunts, all the days of your life, and the psalm’s final joke is that the pursuer you cannot outrun is mercy. One verb, checked against one other translation, and a verse you have known since childhood stands up and roars. That is the three-translation habit. The Toolbox at the back of this book walks you through it step by step, with free tools.
A warning before the toolbox, though, because this rule has a counterfeit. It is the preacher announcing “what the Greek REALLY means” on the strength of one semester and a concordance. You know the move: an English word is swapped for a Greek one, the room murmurs at the secret knowledge, and the sermon proceeds exactly where it was going anyway, now wearing a lab coat. Its cousin is concordance surfing, where a word’s every possible meaning is listed and the preacher selects the most dramatic one or the one that fits his views, the way a man might order from a menu by choosing whatever he likes the most. Hear me carefully: the problem is not consulting the Greek and Hebrew; this whole chapter is begging you to care about them. The problem is using the original languages as a trump card instead of a window. (How to smell this move coming is a skill of its own; I will teach it in the chapter on fallacies and fake Hebrew, where several beloved legends will receive a dignified funeral.)
So let me land the plane exactly where I promised. Can you trust your English Bible?
Yes, to a degree. But not on its own.
The manuscript evidence behind it is rich, and the committees that produced it were devout and brilliant. Your Bible is a faithful window, but there are human fingerprints on the glass. This rule asks only that you learn to see them, because some of those fingerprints point straight at the most remarkable discoveries you will ever make.
Naïve trust reads the English and thinks it has touched bottom. Mature trust reads the English, knows there is a floor beneath the floor, and keeps a shovel close at hand.
Read Like a Jew
You are reading a translation: faithful, prayerful, and made of ten thousand human decisions. Trust it like a good map, not like the territory.
When translations differ, rejoice: X marks the spot. The committees just showed you where the treasure is buried.
Keep five Bibles that disagree on purpose, and let one of them be Jewish and one Eastern Orthodox.
Hold the targum posture: honor the translation, and never confuse it with the scroll.
Next, a question the translator cannot answer for you: once the words have crossed the river, whose mail are you reading? Because every letter in this Book has an address on it, and the address is not yours. Somewhere, Frank’s daughter is still kicking that bucket, and nobody knows why. Let’s make sure that never happens to you again.
This was a free chapter from my book Read Like a Jew: 8 Rules of Basic Bible Interpretation for the Christian. If you enjoyed it, get the book. I think you will love it.
