The American Literary Version
(ALV)

Overview

To our astonishment, the 2014 crowdfunding campaign for Bibliotheca surpassed its fundraising goal nearly fortyfold. This allowed us to drastically broaden the scope of the project. Perhaps the most noteworthy enhancement was the ability to carry out a professional, comprehensive editorial overhaul of the chosen base translation, the 1901 American Standard Version (ASV).

With the funds raised, we were able to employ the help of

• a managing editor who helped develop a style guide for updating the ASV’s archaic vocabulary and punctuation,

• a team of professional copy editors to apply that style guide consistently across the text,

• a designated research editor to identify, examine, and present complex issues,

• a veteran Bible proofreading company to check for errors and ensure consistency,

• and seven Ph.D. biblical language experts (listed below) — all holding positions at reputable institutions — to review the text.

“Without damaging the literary quality of the base translation, we were able to suggest many changes that would bring the translation up to par with where textual criticism and Greek [and Hebrew] lexicography currently stand, not to mention alert Adam to a few all-out mistranslations of the original Hebrew and Greek in the ASV (every translation has them).”

David deSilva
Trustees Distinguished Professor of New Testament & Greek, Ashland Theological Seminary

In short, our objective was to update explicitly archaic vocabulary, punctuation, and grammatical structures (e.g., “Go ye out” became “Go out”) while, at the same time, taking great pains to preserve the markedly literary and literal qualities of the ASV — the very qualities that, we believe, lend it such merit.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING

A FINAL NOTE
ON THE
CHOICE OF TRANSLATION

From the creator of Bibliotheca, Adam Lewis Greene

For those who may still have reservations about why we chose to build on the ASV, a more-than-century-old revision of the four-century-old King James Version, and why we deliberately chose not to use a more recent translation: nothing says it quite so well as this 1996 article in Commentary (a magazine that, by the way, is now nothing like it was back then) by renowned scholar and translator Robert Alter, whose numerous works on biblical literature and translation philosophy provided much of the inspiration behind Bibliotheca and the choice of the ASV as its base text. (For a more recent and comprehensive survey on the topic of translation by Alter, see his book, The Art of Bible Translation, Princeton University Press, 2019.)

I want to emphasize that what our editorial team has produced in revising the ASV is not meant to be understood as an altogether “new version.” Rather, it is a means to reintroduce and revitalize a trusted and historic translation. We believe the ASV stands as one of the great achievements of English Bible translation, representing a unique marriage of philological accuracy and literary merit across the entire biblical corpus. It’s this delicate balance that we took great care to preserve and deliver to a modern readership.

The Editorial Process

Using a single style guide to ensure consistency across the text, a team of copy editors, led by a managing editor, gently and carefully revised the 1901 ASV for style. Archaic verbs and pronouns such as “doth” and “thou” were replaced with their modern equivalents. Dated use of punctuation no longer comprehensible to modern readers (e.g., excessive use of semicolons and colons) was systematically simplified.

Biblical Greek and, especially, Hebrew are characteristically concrete languages, often invoking material or anatomical imagery while Modern English, by comparison, tends toward the conceptual or abstract.

Editions of the 1901 ASV (our base translation) reveal this quality of the ancient languages by frequently presenting more literal alternative renderings in the margins. For example, in Ezekiel 38:12, a marginal note in the ASV reveals that the phrase, “in the middle of the earth,” might be translated more concretely from Hebrew as “in the navel of the earth.”

Wishing to accentuate this intrinsic aspect of the ancient languages, we incorporated these more concrete renderings whenever possible.

When a change like this was considered, all other occurrences of the underlying word or phrase throughout the biblical corpus were located and carefully compared. In the example above, the Hebrew word rendered “navel” is tabbur, which is found only once more in the Hebrew corpus, in Judges 9:37. There, too, in the main text the ASV renders tabbur as “middle” (following the King James Version), but “navel” is again given in the margin as the more literal rendering. Our revised text, then, has tabbur rendered as “navel” in both cases.

Occasionally, we found that the ASV did not present a more literal alternative where the Hebrew or Greek seemed to demand one. If, for example, a Hebrew word or phrase clearly invoked more concrete or anatomical imagery than was offered by the ASV’s English rendering, we would look to other reputable sources for precedent to better reflect the underlying text. Take for instance the word be·yad, which occurs with some regularity throughout the Torah and literally means “by the hand of” (most often employed in the phrase be·yad Mosheh: “by the hand of Moses”). In the ASV, be·yad is often rendered simply as “by,” with the sense of “through”; Leviticus 8:36 reads, “And Aaron and his sons did all the things which Jehovah commanded by Moses.”

Here again we see the propensity of the English language toward abstraction, in this case needlessly obscuring the concrete imagery of the Hebrew. Since the reason for choosing the ASV as a base text was precisely to bring the English reader further into the quiddities of the original languages — even by way of seemingly inconsequential idiomatic phrases such as “by the hand of” — we wanted to identify and remove as many of these dulling “Anglo-abstractions” as possible. Nothing is gained by eliminating the concrete image of the hand; in fact, much is lost, given the symbolic importance throughout the Hebrew scriptures (and indeed the ancient world) of the hand in conveying authority, responsibility, culpability, and possession. So then, looking primarily to the late 19th-century translations of Robert Young and Joseph Rotherham for old precedent, and to Robert Alter’s recently published translation for new, be·yad was consistently rendered as “by the hand of” throughout the text. So Leviticus 8:36 reads, “And Aaron and his sons did all the things that YHWH commanded by the hand of Moses.”

The text was divided up and reviewed by a team of Ph.D. biblical language experts (listed below). Not only did these scholars check for errors or inconsistencies that may have been introduced during the process of updating archaic vocabulary and punctuation, but they also made modest suggestions for improving the translation in instances where textual criticism and lexicography had shed light since the publication of the ASV well over a century ago.

The text was proofread in several stages by the industry-leading English Bible proofreading company, Peachtree Publishing Services.

peachtreepublishingservices.com

Over the years, Peachtree has proven itself the gold-standard Bible proofreading team, having worked on almost every major translation and countless editions of the Bible.

We are honored to have been the last client to work directly with co-founder and co-owner June Gunden before her retirement. Ms. Gunden personally took the lead on the proofreading of The American Literary Version. We are proud to share that, near the end of the process, Ms. Gunden wrote to our editorial team, “The more I study your work, the more impressed I am with how beautiful a job you’ve done!”

The Scholars

Listed here alphabetically are the seven scholars who collectively reviewed the text and suggested emendations to reflect advances in textual criticism and lexicography since the publication of our base translation, the 1901 American Standard Version.

Perhaps worth noting is that many of these scholars sat on the translation committee for the Common English Bible (2011) as well.