What does it mean?

But the universal problem of ancient vocabulary is that is that it’s just a different animal, with a different set of habits. In modern English, as a rule, you make sharply conscious, committed choices in wording, assisted by that massive vocabulary; you can be quite exact in getting your point across, but the loss is that you pick one meaning and ditch the others.

Sarah Ruden, The Face of Water

I alluded to this problem faced by Bible translators in my review of The Face of Water the other day. Each word in Hebrew and Greek, as well as other ancient languages, could have many different meanings because they had much smaller vocabularies than those of us who speak modern English. Even modern English words can have a variety of different meanings — mouse, for example, or house. But in ancient languages, meanings could be even more numerous, thus translators must make choices based on context and how the same word is used in other manuscripts from the same period. A wrong choice obviously means a wrong meaning.

One of the strengths of the Bible, as with literature in general, is that it allows for multiple meanings, from person to person, from generation to generation. It can be frustrating for a reader not to know precisely what it means, but different possible interpretations give the Bible life, vibrancy, depth. Consider the parable of the prodigal son. What it means to readers can depend upon where they place themselves in the story. Do they see themselves more as the prodigal, the older brother or perhaps even as the forgiving father or one of the servants, a neutral observer?

Too much precision in a translation can cost depth. In some translations, footnotes are included to give alternate meanings of a questionable word.

In the case of Bible paraphrases, such as The Message, things get stickier. Readers love The Message because Eugene Peterson made the Bible easy to understand, not just by using words and phrases contemporary readers can quickly grasp but also by determining for readers what each passage means. You can’t easily paraphrase something without first deciding what it means. That’s why, as a newspaper reporter, I tried to paraphrase anything a source told me that seemed at all confusing. Usually I would be told that that was precisely what was meant, but sometimes I was corrected. That wasn’t what was meant at all. With the Bible, you can’t get that sort of correction from the source. When you paraphrase, you pin down a particular meaning, whether it is the correct one or not.