>Getting back to books. I got a copy of the Qur'an and started that,
>and then realized I should have started with the OT. Sounds
>ridiculous, but I've never actually sat down and read it.
I can say I've been through the entire text, more than once. I even looked at Jerome for a while... but as an undergrad... I understood nothing.
>So here is an amusing problem. I discovered there has been some kind
>of revisionist move afoot for decades to re-write the bible. I found
>one new translation after another and they all read like shit. It
>seems to me there was a whole wave of these bogus bibles put out
>sometime after the Sixties---their popularity is testified to by their
>ubiquitous presence in used books stores. I finally found a copy of
>the Cambridge, King James version complete with the Apocrypha. This is
>the one I remember. So I bought it for nine bucks. It had never been
>opened. Inside I found a publishers ad card and a packing slip
>dated 7/8/57, marked as an examination copy. So the book had been sent
>as a promotion for a text. The ad card is titled, The Bible as
>Literature.
The RSV, Revised Standard Version is, really, the only copy worth reading if you're looking for any textual accuracy in translation. I generally use the NRSV which is similar but self-acknowledgedly inclusifies the text (men is men, but man is humankind... that kind of thing). The movement afoot was an attempt, I think, to indoctrinate the interpretations / text. Nothing slants an interpretation more than a translation. Each the translations, which are more and more common, have a particular 'take.' It is wonderful to compare them. At one point I compared seven or eight translations of the same passage... extraordinary differences overall, from past to present tense, the objects described... and so on. Check to see who is publishing it, read all the material in the introduction... just like you would with a dictionary... looking to see where the definitions are drawn from.
Other than that, I'm not much use here.
ken