Essay on Biblical names
Transliteration and English spellings
Introduction
The spelling of the names of the characters in our modern English Bibles has a long, and sometimes sad, history. Sad because a number of accidents of history makes common modern-English Biblical names very distant from their origins—in fact, sometimes so much so that those people probably wouldn’t have even turned around if you’d called them with the common English pronunciations because they wouldn’t even recognise that they were being called. Then, believe it or not, we live in a world where some people don’t even realise that the great majority of the characters in the Bible were Jewish, even Jesus. All of this can lead to a sad state of Biblical ignorance.
The main problem is that names of characters from the Hebrew Scriptures (commonly called the ‘Old Testament’) went from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to middle-English (influenced by German spelling) to modern-English, so by time we get them in our language, they don’t look/sound very Hebrew any more.
‘What does it matter?’ you might ask. Well, hopefully you would realise that speakers of another language might mispronounce your name. ‘Robert’ is often pronounced more like ‘Luber’ by Korean speakers. (Some languages don’t have ‘r’ or don’t distinguish ‘l’ from ‘r’. Some languages don’t allow two consonants to be together in one syllable (called ‘consonant clusters’). So ‘Luber’ would be a good approximation of ‘Robert’—at least it’s got the right number of syllables. What we would hope is that it’s pronounced with respect, i.e., that the Korean speaker made an effort to pronounce it as closely as possible to how I would say it. Compare that to the three syllable name ‘Yeshu'a’. Most English dialects don’t use the glottal stop so we can easily understand it coming out as ‘Yeshuwa’. Now English has all those sounds. But ‘Jesus’ seems miles off. The first consonant is wrong, the ‘sh’ is unnecessarily changed to ‘s’ (because Greek doesn’t have ‘sh’ even though English does), and the final ‘s’ consonant is unnecessarily added (when English, unlike some other languages, DOES allow syllables to end with a vowel) and it’s been reduced to two syllables from three. (The reason that we’ve ended up with ‘Jesus’ is that the Greek ‘Yaysous’ went through some English spelling and pronunciation changes and ending up starting with the modern ‘j’ sound.)
The Open English Translation of the Bible has a goal of improving Biblical understanding, and this extends to trying to improve the accuracy of Biblical names. However, we too are restrained by not being able to alter history, so this goal doesn’t mean that we insist on our readers learning how to pronounce Hebrew or Greek. Unfortunately then, our solution will only ever be a compromise solution, which will sadly frustrate some purists. The OET is a compromise, in fact, every Bible translation is always a compromise in many ways (even if most marketing departments don’t try to highlight that).
Consonants in the relevant languages
The following section is a layman’s look at the consonants in the languages that have had the most influence on transliterating Biblical names from Hebrew and Koine Greek into our modern-English Bibles.
Hebrew has twenty-two consonants in its alphabet which can be approximated into English as:
b d g h k l m n p r s sh t ts v y z and the glottal stop.
(The astute reader will notice that that’s only eighteen consonants, and that’s because Hebrew has doubles of some consonants, which are pronounced slightly differently, but which we don’t have enough English letters to represent, including two ‘h’s, two ‘k’s, two ‘s’s, two ‘t’s and two glottal stops. On the other hand, ‘s’ and ‘sh’ are regarded as a single consonant in Hebrew. Yes, languages are complex.)
Koine Greek (the language of the ‘New Testament’) has seventeen consonants in its alphabet which can be approximated into English as:
b ch d g k l m n p ph ps r s t th x and z.
Note particularly that ‘h’ and ‘sh’, ‘v’ and ‘y’, and glottal stop from Hebrew can’t be represented in Greek, so Hebrew ‘Mosheh’ for example comes out as ‘Mouses’. (We’re not worrying about vowels right now.)
Latin (the language of the first major European Bible translation) has nineteen consonants in its alphabet which can be approximated into English as:
b c d f g h k l m n p r s t v x y and z.
Note particularly that ‘h’ and ‘sh’, ‘v’ and ‘y’ from Hebrew could now be represented in this language,, but Hebrew ‘Mosheh’ for example stays as ‘Moses’ because sadly the Latin spelling was more influenced by the Greek than the Hebrew.
German (the language that evolved from the same proto-Germanic that modern English derived from) has twenty plus consonants in its alphabet which can be approximated into English as:
b c d f g h k l m n p q r s ß t v x y and z.
Note particularly that their letter ‘j’ is approximated by English letter ‘y’, as in their word for ‘yes’ which is spelt ‘ja’ but pronounced more like ‘ya’. This has had a major effect on the first letter of Hebrew names, because a large number of them start with the ‘Y’ sound (which would be ‘J’ in German).
Modern English has the following consonant sounds in its alphabet:
b d f g h j k l m n p r s t v w x y and z.
Note that ‘c’ and ‘q’ are omitted from the above list because they don’t have unique sounds of their own. It should also be noted that ‘sh’ is a common English consonant sound, as are ‘ch’ and ‘th’ (although the latter has two distinct pronunciations as can be seen in the words ‘this’ and ‘thistle’).
So you can easily see that when someone’s name is pronounced in another language, we might not always have the matching consonants available, so we have to adapt. (We also have to adapt the vowels, but that’s usually less noticeable than what happens to the consonants.)
The first major Bible translation
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The historical accidents that led to our Biblical names
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Modern cultural trends
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