Sometimes the translation errors occur not because the translators have misunderstood the Hebrew but because they are unwilling to convey what it actually means, their own imagination being more timid than that of the ancient writer. Thus, in Genesis 21:15, after Hagar has been driven out into the desert with her child Ishmael and the water in her waterskin is exhausted, in the sundry modern versions she “lays,” “puts,” “abandons” her son under one of the bushes and goes off at a distance so that she will not have to see the child dying. The King James Version is a little better than all of these, having her “thrust” the boy under one of the bushes. But the Hebrew verb hishlikh means only one thing, “to fling.” It is the very verb Pharoah uses when he says, “Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile” (Exodus 1:22). What this jolting verb suggests is the terrible violence of Hagar’s emotions at this moment of crisis. She is convinced that her only son is on the point of dying, and so in a paroxysm of maternal despair, she does not set him down under a bush but flings him down, and then runs off. The startling effect of this moment is blunted by the translators’ choice of these verbs that in effect bowdlerize it.

Here is another instance in which the translators’ command of Hebrew should have enabled them to know better, but a reticence about recognizing the boldness of the original led them astray. The most common word for “God” in the Hebrew, ’elohim, famously has a plural ending but is treated grammatically as a singular, whether because it is a linguistic fossil harking back to a period when everyone spoke of “the gods” or because it is something like a plural of majesty (if in fact that actually existed in biblical Hebrew). All biblical scholars are aware that when the noun is treated grammatically as a plural it refers to “the gods,” as in Aaron’s words about the golden calf. “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). But when Abraham tells Abimelech how he became a wanderer (Genesis 20:13), all the English versions have “God” impose this fate on him despite the fact that here ’elohim is unambiguously the subject of a plural verb, so that it must be rendered, “When the gods made me a wanderer from my father’s house.” This is a small but vivid instance of the liveliness of the dialogue in the Bible, a topic we shall take up in another chapter. Abraham is speaking with a polytheist, and he wants to address him in language entirely accessible to his interlocutor. In fact, his choice of words might well reflect an ancient “manner of speaking”—the gods, ’elohim, which is to say, circumstances, fate, my destiny, made me wander from my father’s house. What Abraham clearly does not want to hint at in his words to Abimelech is that the one God, as part of a covenantal promise, commanded him to leave his father’s house. The piquancy of the patriarch’s adjusting his terms to the ear of a pagan monarch is altogether lost by the translations that make him out to be an impeccable monotheist in all his dealings.