MATHETΩN

“But, semantics aside, the general practice of modern English translators of suppressing the ‘and’ when it is attached to a verb has the effect of changing the tempo, rhythm, and construction of events in biblical narrative. Let me illustrate by quoting a narrative sequence in Genesis 24 first in my own version, which reproduces every ‘and’ and every element of parataxis, and then in the version of the Revised English Bible. The Revised English Bible is in general one of the most compulsive repackagers of biblical language, though in this instance the reordering of the Hebrew is relatively minor: Its rendering of these sentences is roughly interchangeable with any of the other modern versions … . I begin in the middle of the verse 16, where Rebekah becomes the subject of a series of actions.

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And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, “Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, “For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.” And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.

“And this is how the Revised English Bible, in keeping with the prevailing assumptions of the most recent translations, renders these verses in what is presumed to be sensible modern English:

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She went down to the spring, filled her jar, and came up again. Abraham’s servant hurried to meet her and said, “Will you give me a little water from your jar?” “Please drink, sir,” she answered, and at once lowered her jar on her hand to let him drink. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, “I shall draw water also for your camels until they have had enough.” She quickly emptied her jar into the water trough, and then hurrying again to the well she drew water and watered all the camels.

“There is, as one would expect, some modification of biblical parataxis, though it is not so extreme here as elsewhere in the Revised English Bible: ‘And she let him drink his fill’ is converted into an introductory adverbial clause, ‘When she had finished giving him a drink’ …; ‘and she hurried’ is compressed into ‘quickly’; ‘and she ran again’ becomes the participial hurrying again’. (Moves of this sort, it should be said, push translation to the verge of paraphrase — recasting and interpreting the original instead of representing it.) The most striking divergence between these two versions is that mine has fifteen ‘and’s, corresponding precisely to fifteen occurrences of the particle waw in the Hebrew, whereas the Revised English Bible manages with just five. What difference does this make? To begin with, it should be observed that the waw, whatever is claimed about its linguistic functions, is by no means an inaudible element in the phonetics of the Hebrew text: we must keep constantly in mind that these narratives were composed to be heard, not merely to be decoded by a reader’s eye. The reiterated ‘and’, then, plays an important role in creating the rhythm of the story … [while] the elimination of the ‘and’ in the Revised English Bible and all its modern cousins produces — certainly to my ear — an abrupt, awkward effect in the sound pattern of the language … .

“More is at stake here than pleasing sounds, for the heroine of the repeated actions is in fact subtly but significantly reduced in all the rhythmically-deficient versions. She of course performs roughly the same acts in the different versions — politely offering water to the stranger, lowering her jug so that he can drink, rapidly going back and forth to the spring to bring water for the camels. But in the compressions, syntactical reorderings, and stop-and-start movements of the modernizing version, the encounter at the well and Rebekah’s actions are made to seem rather matter-of-fact … to obscure what the Hebrew highlights, which is that she is doing something quite extraordinary. Rebekah at the well presents one of the rare biblical instances of the performance of an act of ‘Homeric’ heroism. The servant begins by asking modestly to ‘sip a bit of water’, as though all he wanted were to wet his lips. But we need to remember, as the ancient audience surely did, that a camel after a long desert journey can drink as much as twenty-five gallons of water, and there are ten camels here whom Rebekah offers to water ‘until they drink their fill’. The chain of verbs tightly linked by all the ‘and’s does an admirable job in conveying the sense of the young woman’s hurling herself with prodigious speed into the sequence of required actions. Even her dialog is scarcely a pause in the narrative momentum, but is integrated syntactically and rhythmically into the chain: ‘And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug. … And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels.’ The parallel syntax and the barrage of ‘and’s, far from being the reflex of a ‘primitive’ language, are as artfully effective in furthering the ends of the narrative as any device one could find in a sophisticated modern novelist.”

– Robert Alter