I have not yet translated Psalm 120 (121), but when I do, I'll have a decision to make. In the first verse, we have either:
I will lift up my eyes to the mountains.
from whence my help will come,
or
I will lift up my eyes to the mountains,
from whence will my help come?
A friend of mine had a father who absolutely loved the mountains of his native Switzerland, and this was his favorite psalm. He no doubt knew it in the first of these forms. Emotionally, I have to agree with him, since the mountains are very special to me, too. But the decision as to which version to use must be made on some other basis.
I began by looking at the Hebrew. The word that the KJV translates as "whence" is "me'ayin." It can be used interrogatively or relatively. But, going through all occurrences in Strong's Concordance, I found that it was usually interrogative; for relatives, other constructions were used most of the time.
In the Greek of the Septuagint, the word is "pothen." Again, it can be either interrogative or relative. The oldest manuscripts (I checked the Codex Sinaiticus, for example), had no punctuation here to guide us. Some modern editors, such as Rahlf, did put in a question mark.
In Latin, the word is "unde," and again, it can be either interrogative or relative. So why did the KJV translate it relatively? Those translators claimed to be working from the Hebrew, but we know that they were extremely influenced by the Latin of the Vulgate, where the word is translated in its relative sense. In those days, neither Latin nor Greek really gave any clue as to which meaning was intended.
I even checked the Syriac of the Peshitta, which is hard on these old eyes. Again, no special punctuation.
The most modern of my Latin translations (dating from 1945), put a question mark there. That translation has been very influential with modern English translations, so it is no surprise that they put in a question mark, too.
Going to my JPS Tanakh, I found that they had put in a question mark, too. Remembering my test with Strong's Concordance, and believing that no one is likely to understand Hebrew better than Jews, I decided to opt for the question mark. And that is, basically, how these things are done.
So now we've answered the question about the question. But we are still far from out of the woods. This Psalm well illustrates many of the problems that a translator faces.
In the lines I quoted above, I used the future tense. The RSV uses the present tense. The Greek of the Septuagint (LXX), uses a past tense for "lifted up," and a future tense for "will come." The Vulgate is a special case, because it includes two translations of the Psalms, one "from the Septuagint," and the other "from Hebrew." The first of the two was translated into Latin by St. Jerome himself, from the Greek, and the second was done with the help of a Jewish informant, from an unpointed Hebrew text, older by at least a couple of centuries than any manuscript we have of the pointed, Masoretic text. Both of those translations use a past and a future, like the Septuagint. It is worth noting that the Greek Septuagint was translated by highly educated Jews of Alexandria, at a time when even better Hebrew texts would have been available. These are all considerations. and may come into play at some point.
My JPS Tanakh, a modern Hebrew Bible based on the Masoretic text, uses present and future to translate this verse into English. How do we solve this?
Can't we just "go back to the original Hebrew?" No, we can't, because 1) We don't HAVE the "original" Hebrew, dating from, I don't know, about 900 BCE--it has not survived; and 2) Biblical Hebrew does not even have tenses in the sense that modern European languages have them. It has perfect, indicating that an action is complete, and imperfect, indicating that the action is continuous or ongoing (in past, present, or future). There are other forms, but they are not tenses.
So what do we do?
(to be continued)
