Originally Posted by DLx2

I'm really not impressed by this translation, actually. It completely absconds any attention to the literary merit of the books, and instead follows, more or less, the exact traditions the book claims to avoid.

I do like the translation by Nahum Sarna of B'reishit, Sh'mot, and Ketuvim, but primarily for his footnotes. As far as specific translations go, I also like the translation of the J segments in Bloom's The Book of J because Rosenberg actually attempts to keep the literary portions of the text intact.

The issue with "Easy to Read" is that, like dense literary works like Finnegans Wake, The Wasteland, The Satanic Verses, and Lolita, the core book of the Bible, the Torah, is very densely packed with literary technique, hidden myth, and clever wordplay. Other books may be meant to be "easy to read" but the Torah certainly is not, which is where the problem lies. The KJV is crap, I agree, but GW is not any better. The reason I like the Nahum Sarna translation of Genesis and Exodus is because he attempts to note the wordplay in a readable manner. I really like the Rosenberg translation because it emphasizes the wordplay in the translation itself.

Any further discussion of texts should probably be relegated to "Religious Texts," although I do feel that my loss of faith in God didn't require that I discard the Bible because I can still view it as a great literary work, while still permitting me to discard it as a definitive scientific and moral treatise. This is, in my opinion, the best way to approach the book. Yes, it's a foundation of our society. Yes, it influences how we see the world. No, it's not definitive, moral, or scientific. That's okay. Study it, certainly. Just don't feel obliged to believe it.

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

That said, it's a bit unreasonable. The reason all the Europeans speak more than one language is that they can pop down the road to cross the border and are instantly in France/Germany. We can't do that. Perhaps Mrs. T. was right to demand a channel bridge rather than a channel tunnel.