of gods and chance

We came up against two interesting translation challenges while working on I Samuel recently. The first is a problem we have frequently, and this was just a new variation. For the Monkolé people, and indeed most people groups in this part of West Africa, there is one supreme God, but there are also spirits who are worshipped and sacrificed to through idols (often represented by a tree or a rock or another natural object). This makes it difficult to translate when the Bible talks of « other gods » … not that the Bible is not mono-theistic, but it recognizes that other peoples worship their own idea of a god (or gods). It is not possible, grammatically speaking, to put « god » in plural in Monkolé, or to talk of « their God », because that supposes the existence of others. So when it comes to saying « the God of the Israelites », we tend to translate it with « God, the Lord of the Israelites ».

In I Samuel 4, the Israelites are fighting against the Philistines, and are losing. So they send for the ark of the LORD. When the Philistines hear that the ark has come into the Israelite camp, they say something along the lines of, “God has come into their camp … who shall rescue us from these powerful gods?” (In the Hebrew “god” is first singular then plural.) For people like the Monkolé, who believe in one supreme God, this makes it sound as if the Philistines are saying that this one supreme God is on the side of their enemies (and “gods” must be translated as a singular “God”).

In chapter 5, the Philistines have captured the ark of the LORD in battle, and taken it back to their own country where they place it in the temple of their god Dagon. The first night it is there, the statue of Dagon falls on the floor in front of the ark. The second night not only does it fall, but its head and hands fall off. Then the people of the city are plagued with tumours, and they realise that keeping the ark in their city is perhaps not such a good idea. So they say, “The God of Israel did this. He is the one causing trouble for us and for our god Dagon.” Even when the translators choose (as they do in many English versions) to write the first occurrence of “God” with a capital “G” and the second with a lowercase “g”, it seems clear that for the Philistines these two gods were beings of the same nature … which didn't seem at all the case in our Monkolé translation which said “God, the Lord of the Israelites, did this. He is the one causing trouble for us and for our idol Dagon.”

We discussed this as a team, but couldn't find a satisfactory solution. However, when I talked with a missionary colleague who is a translator in another Beninese language, she asked whether it wasn't possible to use the word for “Lord” for both. So instead of “God, the Lord of the Israelites”, simply “the Lord of the Israelites”, and then instead of “our idol Dagon”, “our Lord Dagon”. I went back with this proposition to my translators, to find out whether that was acceptable in Monkolé, and as we looked through the different passages we were able to work it in. Of course, we'll have to wait and see what our translation consultant thinks of it, but I think we may have found a fairly good way to translate so that we remain true to the mindset of the original readers while expressing it in a reasonable natural form of the Monkolé language.

The second question I had when looking at the text before working with the team, was in I Samuel 6:9. Here the Philistines say that if a certain thing happens they'll know that it is the God (or Lord!) of the Israelites who is sending the plague upon them, but that if it doesn't happen they'll know that the plague has come upon them by chance. Chance is not something which exists in the Monkolé worldview. There must always be a reason for everything, so I wondered how this would be translated. Looking at the translation, I found that it said, « otherwise we will know that this has come upon us from somewhere [else] », a translation supported by a translators' manual which is on my computer. My translators said that anyway, Christians don't believe in chance ... yet I don't feel that Western Christians see things quite the same way as Monkolé Christians ...