Why these differences? The simple answer is: because no one is sure about the meaning of the Hebrew. This was also the case in 400 CE, when Jerome did his translations for the Vulgate, and in the second century BCE, when the "seventy" translators of the Septuagint did their work. The scholars who translated the Septuagint (Hebrew Bible into Greek) presumably had better texts to work with than we do, but the problem already existed, along with many others. This is not too hard to understand. There were many misreadings with consequent copying errors, and they were writing without vowels.
The problem of defective writing of the manuscripts explains a lot, but there's more. When Jerome presented his translations to the Pope, he provided dual translations of a single book: the Psalms. One translation was based on the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX), and the other was based on the Hebrew text of his day (which, by the way, was very similar to the Masoretic text that we use now). The Pope opted for the more familiar text, based on the LXX, which then became part of the Latin of the Vulgate. My edition of the Vulgate, though, includes both texts. The title of this blog entry is a quotation from Jerome's Hebrew-based translation.
The Pope's decision was not too bad, considering that Greek was much better understood in the West than Hebrew, and also considering that the LXX was based on earlier Hebrew texts, which were clearly in better condition (sometimes whole verses are missing from the Masoretic text) than the Hebrew texts extant in Jerome's time, or in ours.
For many years I preferred the Psalms based on the LXX, because of their familiarity, use in the Mass, and so on. I thought of the other text as a mere curiosity.
At the present time I am translating Psalm 17 (18). It's quite long, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through. Translating this long psalm has been a wonderful test case where various translations are concerned. It has shown me that, already in Jerome's time, there was institutional bias to go along with the institutional "softening" that I've mentioned previously. When faced with a choice between something like "discipline," and something like "gentleness," the institutional Church, already an ally or agent of the Roman government, would invariably choose the harsher, the more negative, the less good. This trend has continued into modern times, and can explain the suppression of the word "mercy" in modern translations, among other examples (which I've also written about previously).
Another thing that I've learned in the course of this exercise is that the very best translation I've found of the Psalms into a modern language is in the French "Version Synodale," which goes back to 1910 and before. I had already decided some years ago that it was the most beautiful Bible translation that I had found. Now, it turns out to be also one of the most accurate. It is better than any translation in English that I've found. Why not just translate the Synodale into English? Well, it is tempting, and I'd do it if it were not for one thing: in some places it is a little loose for my comfort.
