Making the Narrative Flow

When working on narrative sections of the Bible, such as bits of Genesis, the Synoptic gospels, and so on, it is often good to keep certain key terms and phrases concordant, by which I mean we translate them the same way each time. Some translators will want to vary nouns such as 'blessing' and 'faithful love', adjectives such as 'good' and 'merciful', and phrases such as 'walk with God' and 'the Word of the LORD' each time they use them, much as a poet would. Though this may be seen as good style from a literary point of view, it doesn't help the narrative hang together in the way the author or narrator originally designed it - what we call 'cohesion'. I prefer to talk about narrators rather than authors, as we cannot get in the mind of the author, but we can see from the text what the narrator was trying to achieve. In the 1980s and 1990s various writers (Alter, Berlin, Licht, Sternberg, Turner) brought out books teaching what has come to be known as the New Literary Criticism, or Narrative Approaches to the Bible. They study scenes, characters, points of view (narrator's, a character's), and key terms. Although they wrote mainly on the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible as some of them would call it, their approaches can equally be applied to narrative portions of the NT. If we keep terms concordant, we allow the reader to see links between narratives, and draw conclusions that are vital to understanding the Bible. Meaning-based translation can militate against such concordance (or consistency, if there is some kind of system), and variance may at times be necessary due to the difference in semantic range of words, but we need to keep as much consistency as possible, I would argue, and not be slap-dash or careless in our work.

Here are a couple of books to read on the subject:

Alter, Robert
The Art of Biblical Narrative
Basic Books, USA, 1981

Sternberg, Meir
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative
Indiana University Press, Bloomington IL. 1985

Adele Berlin
Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative.
Eisenbrauns; Reprint edition (1 Dec 1994)

In addition, Alter has done translations of the Pentateuch, Samuel, and Psalms. The translations themselves are not by any means meaning-based, but the footnotes are wonderfully helpful!

And to finish, here's a quote:

'Gen. 22, Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac, is an example of a brilliant narrative. ‘Narrative, whatever its medium, holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers’ (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction).'
http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t94/e1308 accessed 16/09/2013