The New English Bible

Extract

If anyone thinks there have been quite enough translations of the Bible already, he will have to think again, and make room on his bookshelf; for the New English Bible (NEB) has arrived. It was heralded in The Times on 25th February with a fanfare, unusually shrill and orchestrated. And well it might be, for this is news indeed. It completes a project begun in 1946 and undertaken by representatives of all the major Christian bodies in Great Britain and Ireland, except the Roman Catholics. Why not they? A recent national newspaper colour supplement answers that it is because Roman Catholic scholars were engaged on the Jerusalem Bible (JB). What, all of them and all the time? Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration, but there is prudence in the telling. For seeing the august body that sat in judgment on one another’s work in committee stage, Roman Catholics could be nothing but admiring and grateful observers; which in fact, latterly, some of them officially were.

Review is necessary now only of the Old Testament as the New was published separately in 1961, to explode some of the critical booby traps. The Massoretic Hebrew text has been made the basis of the translation and the finest English scholars of a generation are the instrument. The result begins boldly; for the very first words summon up the apparatus of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica and a host of modern scholars to support the reading: ‘In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth. . . .’ And in the next verse, where JB had the first of its more notable misprints, there is ‘a mighty wind’ sweeping over the surface of the waters, instead of ‘the spirit of God hovering’. Thereafter a great deal more of Hebrew scholarship, especially by English scholars, is writ forever in the text.