Welcome to the Form Life Podcast. I'm Paul Brandis,

campus pastor at the Shawnee Campus. And I'm Bill Gorman, campus

pastor at the Brookside campus. Today we're joined on the podcast by Dr.

Dorian Cover Cox. Dr. Cox is a professor at Dallas Theological

Seminary, where she teaches Hebrew. Additionally, she also

serves on the translation oversight committee for the Christian Standard

Bible. Yeah. As a church, and you may have heard about this already,

we are switching to the CSB, Christian Standard Bible CSB,

as our primary Bible translation. And so we were so

grateful to be able to get Dr. Cox. And in this episode, she walked through

what went into making this translation, as well as the joys and

challenges of Bible translation in general. Yeah, it was a great conversation,

and I think you'll walk away with a greater understanding and appreciation for the

amazing work that goes into the English Bible that you read every day.

So let's jump into that conversation now.

Well, Dr. Cox, thanks so much for being with us today. I'm excited to get

to talk with you about Bible translation and really how that

impacts our experience of reading and studying and being

changed by that's so important, right? Not just reading and studying, but being changed

by and enjoying the Scriptures. And so thanks so much

for taking the time to do this with us. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting

me. I'm greatly honored. Oh, that's great. Well,

I know you've spent a lot of your time in your life studying the Bible,

and not just in English, but in the original languages and even

doing Bible translation, which is another step further kind of in that

work. And so I'm curious what ignited your

passion for biblical languages and to do this work of

Bible translation? I'd just love to hear a little bit of that story.

Well, I learned as a child the value

of knowing languages, partly because my

parents would frequently

entertain missionaries from other countries,

and I could see right away

that it would be great to be able to know other languages.

And I listened to my father preaching,

and I could see the benefit that it was to

him to be able

to understand Hebrew or

Greek. I heard him say that

he wished he had had a better experience with

Hebrew.

He didn't have as much

facility with Hebrew as he did with Greek.

And

I've thought about that fairly often

while attempting to help people learn Hebrew.

I want them to know that

even if they're not great at it, they can

be better at it, and it will be helpful

to them and to other people to have this

access to reading

Scripture in the language

it came to us in.

And yet in the process,

I have also been grateful to be able to

say to them and to others that

the way scripture works, it can

be translated, and it can be translated well.

So that what we need is

available. Yeah. Well, and with

that, what do you feel like

are some common misunderstandings about Bible

translation or things that you wish people understood

about Bible translating or translations?

I'm sure you encounter that as you're teaching or just in the life of the

local church, but yeah. What are just some common misunderstandings that

you encounter around that? And what would you want people to

know about kind of Bible translation in the process? Yeah.

One thing I think some

people might be concerned about,

and that is that we have multiple

English translations. Yeah. So English speaking people

have a fairly wide

variety of English translations that have

been done. Meanwhile, there are places in the world

and people groups who have none.

And I think it might be a little bit too easy

sometimes to think that it's all or

nothing and that either

we don't do translations for

new people or we have more

English. Like, we have to pick between one or the other. I'm not saying it

well, but you get the idea. Yeah. So it's not fair or something

like that. Oh, yeah. We have so many variety of translations in

English, and there's certain right. Yeah. Why would you want to do

another English translation? Yeah. Why would you want to be

involved in anything like that? Well,

first, I think it's our job to be

involved in both to the best of our ability, whether as

supporters or people who are actually directly

involved in reducing languages

to writing and then coming up with good

translations into all of the languages

where there are people who need them.

It's not an either or choice.

When I look at English translations, there are a variety of

reasons why a person or a publisher

might want to support

a new translation. And so I'm glad that

we have options, because

as translators work, they have to make

choices about how to translate in

view of their audience,

because they're making choices

about how to put it into English.

And English isn't the same for everybody.

There are things about it that are different for

people in different countries and

different

skill levels. That's right. Yeah. Right.

And English changes

quickly, fairly quickly.

So there will always be a need for people

who can explain all right, here's what it

says. Now, let me tell you what that means. Even if they're

reading it in a very good translation that's right. Because

it is a body of

literature that comes to us

from

times and places where we don't live.

Right. So there are many things to

think about in order to understand

it well and thoroughly. So the

translators are working at making that

accessible to their target

audience. Who is it that we're attempting to

reach? Who do we expect to be able

to read the translation that

we're doing and understand it?

Well, another feature of it, I think, and

something that CSB thinks

about, if I can speak. Yeah, please do.

When we work on things, we ask ourselves,

how does this sound? Physically

sound? Yes. Because we

hope that churches

and individuals and Bible study groups

will read it aloud. Yes. And

so we want the words to work together, to be

pronounceable together, to meet one another in a

way that facilitates reading

aloud. That's really good. I have young kids, I do a lot of reading aloud.

And you can tell certain books, whether they're picture books or

chapter books, have been written in a way that they're easy to read

aloud or not. There's a big difference

there. Yeah. And you can tell we're trying to

make it pronounceable

for a person who normally can read

English. Yeah, that's really good.

Well, and the longer I read and study the Bible, I'm

increasingly grateful for the work of scholars and translators

like you and those men. Yeah, I've done that work

because I think for a long time, as even just growing up, you're so used

to in English, having translate, it's easy to take it for granted. But the

more that I've read and studied, the more I just am so

grateful for the work that goes into a translation.

And we said, as a church fan, we were adopting the Christian Standard Bible as

our primary translation. And so I just wonder if you could even tell us

you've started that a little bit, but just even introduce us to the CSB a

little bit. What were some of the goals, some of the uniquenesses of it? I

know reading, some of the introduction, this idea of I'd love to even talk

about kind of the optimal equivalence kind of translation philosophy a little

bit, maybe some of the gender accuracy kind of pieces that are

a hallmark of the CSB. Those two things were what really led us as a

church as we were evaluating the different options that were out there.

Those two features were really what attracted us to the CSB. So I wonder if

you could just talk even a little bit about those two pieces of optimal

equivalence and gender accuracy and

approach.

I grew up without any

problem personally in

seeing masculine pronouns used

when it was clear that

a mixed group was

in view. I was used to it. It didn't bother

me. I was in a situation where I knew

that I was valued and

that other women and girls were valued, and

I wasn't troubled by

pronouns. Yeah.

And I also could understand and knew and was told early

on that sometimes

that there are languages, for example,

Greek and Hebrew, that don't have

the equivalent of our English sibling.

So we have a word sibling that

doesn't specify gender. Right.

Hebrew and Greek. Don't. So

a translation might be

accurate in the sense of

providing a masculine pronoun

that matches the gender of the masculine pronoun in Greek or

Hebrew, but that would, in a way, be

misleading. Yes. Because

everybody reading in Greek and Hebrew

would know there is no sibling word, for example.

Right. And so it's truly

fair to bring it into English and say something

like brothers and sisters

or siblings, except even in English.

Now, though, we have the word sibling, we

wouldn't use it in the same way

that brothers is used, for example,

in Greek. Yeah. I don't walk into a room full of

my brothers and sisters and say siblings as a way of addressing

them. Yeah. Meanwhile, I would like

to introduce a word that is like

siblings, but for nieces

and nephews. We don't have a

combo word, but I think we should why wouldn't we just call them

nephlings? I love that. Let's start that

today. Yeah. I don't know if nephlings. Okay. We could have

nephlings and just to take care of all of

them. Yeah. That's fascinating, isn't it? This

is the kind of conversation about language you don't even start to think about, even

in English, you don't think about, oh, we don't have a word like siblings

for nieces, nephews. Meanwhile, it's really

fun working at Dallas Seminary and having

students from around the world who come to DTS,

and they're taking Hebrew or Greek, and I'm getting to talk with

them. And so I learn a little bit

about how their first languages

work. Yeah. So I

learned a little bit about an Asian language

that has no

simple word for

simple, from my point of view. Simple word for uncle or

aunt. Because

in that language, you have to specify whether

this is the brother of your father

or the brother of your mother, and you have to specify whether it is

your father's older brother or younger brother.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Because of the importance of relative

age in the culture. So they don't have a

simple way of saying it simple, to my way of

thinking. Yeah. Because they have to specify age. Older

brother, younger brother, older sister, younger

sister. Yes. You don't say my Uncle

Bob. You say, My dad's older

brother. Yeah. Something like

every language. Every language is

like a musical instrument.

Well, musical instruments each can

play a variety of pieces.

So a

composer might create

a concerto for violin,

but then a flute

player comes along and wants to be able to play

it, and you think, well,

that's nice. It would sound well on flute,

but it has to be arranged in such a way that the flute

can play it. Yeah. And then when you hear it, you know you're hearing

the same song, but you're hearing it

arranged for a different instrument. The same kind of thing happens

with what we might call an instrument, and that would be human

voices. So a tenor

or a soprano or an alto or a

choir or a trio

or a quartet might each

sing a song, a song that you're very familiar with, and

it won't have quite the same sound

depending on the voice or the voices

or the arrangement that has been

made. And sometimes you read it or you

hear a song that you're very familiar with and you

like very much, and you say,

oh, wow, they really messed up that song. I can

recognize it. I recognize it, but I don't like it. Yeah.

Or you listen to it, you think, wow, it's

still the same song, but I really appreciate it more

than I have in the past. That person captured

it in a way that is

meaningful to me right now. Yeah,

that's so fascinating because I could think of those examples, whether it's you

hear a song that you've heard it all with like a full accompanying and then

you hear an acoustic version or a much simpler version, it's like, oh, I

really hear the lyrics more because there's less production to

it. And it's like that. I hear it in a whole different way. It's the

same song, but I hear it fresh, different. Yeah, exactly.

I think that languages are a bit like

that. So when translators come

along, they have

to take into consideration

the abilities of their target language

and understand well the

original and then say, okay, now how

can we get this into English? So that it will carry

as much as possible of the concepts that

are involved in the

original composition. Yeah, well, can we

just look at an example with that? Because as I was doing, I was part

of the team of people who looked at all these different bible translations and I

quickly found that as we were evaluating these different options that we had available,

that Amos 46 was a really revealing

was a really revealing verse. And that

in terms of how the translation was approaching,

whether it was more formal in its approach

or more functional in its approach to translations,

I see you turning that in your Bible.

I don't know all these things off the top of my head. I didn't mean

to put you on the spot there. No, I had to look at it. I

thought, okay, I can see why you would pick that one.

A translation that's a bit more formal, like the new American

Standard or the English Standard Bible. It's going to say something like

the Lord's talking through the prophet, I will give you cleanness of

teeth, something to that effect. If you're

going more to an NIV or a New Living translation more on the functional,

it's going to say something like hunger or famine

or nothing to eat, or something like that.

And so I wonder if you just even talked through

that's, where you kind of get this optimal equivalence idea, I think, in the

CSB, where it's like if you have a really formal approach where you're trying to

do that word for word, more

approach, how do you handle idioms like

cleanness of teeth? Because that's not just a matter of communicating

this kind of prepositional phrase of cleanness of teeth, or

I'm probably not even using the right grammatical term there. No, that's fine. Cleanness of

teeth. That is

one way to put those words into English.

The other way would be because it involves a

modifier. English tends to put modifiers

ahead of the item modified. So clean

teeth. But

the of connector

is the fancy way of saying it is a

paraphrastic genitive. It's a sort of a roundabout way, a longer

way of providing

the modification that goes

on with a noun

cleanness and a noun teeth.

Yeah, cleanness is a noun being used

to describe teeth. Okay. Well,

it is always a difficult

choice to try to decide

whether to retain the figure of

speech, which would be cleanness of teeth or clean

teeth,

because when you're looking at it, you think, okay.

Oh, yeah. You really

know, don't you, that he's not talking

about dental habits

and proper brushing of

teeth. Yeah. So

the question then becomes, with

any figure of speech, do I retain the figure

of speech or provide

an interpretation of it so that it's

more quickly understandable?

And that's a hard choice. It's just a hard choice.

Yeah.

You can hear a kind of figure of

speech, a very familiar one,

that you wouldn't want to

have undone or not

included. I can

quote in English, the Lord is my

shepherd.

And that's a figure of

speech in a way. Right. It's an

image.

Well, does

it have to be interpreted? Is it

a good one to retain? I would say, of course, yes, it needs to

be retained, and then

the picture needs to be unpacked, which is what

the psalm goes on to do. But

you really don't want people

and I don't think most people would, but you really don't want people to think,

okay, the Lord is my shepherd, and he

stands here with his with a shepherd's crook in his

hand, and he's wearing sandals, or he's

using his helicopter.

Do shepherds use helicopters? Well, not then, but

they now. Right.

There's a spot in New Zealand where

you can visit, and when they need to

do sheep shearing, they send a helicopter

to persuade the sheep to come down off the

steep hillsides

to be taken care of and shorn of their

wool. So shepherding

looks different

in that place than it did

thousands of years ago or even now

in remote places in the

Middle East.

But every culture and every

reader is in a culture where some things have to be

explained. Yeah. And that's why you want

people to be knowing

the source cultures and thinking well

about the target cultures, to be able to explain and to

make the decisions involved

in conveying a word for word

versus idea for

is. Those are judgment calls that can be difficult.

Yeah, well, and I think that the approach that the

CSB has, even just reading how the explicit stated

philosophy of that, trying to say, we're going to approach this as

trying to be as close to the original word

ordering and figures of speech and idioms as we can.

But yet when we get to a place like Amos four, six in

particular is one where the CSB does provide a more

meaning kind of of the it translates more of this idea of hunger.

I can't remember exactly what I don't have it in front of me, what it

says in the CSB, but it's more on that side. It doesn't go cleanness of

teeth or clean teeth. It's more to the

hunger or nothing to eat or something to that

extent. I was looking at that or one

similar to it just recently

and I was trying to find it here.

I don't see it. This is not going to be the best you can edit

it all out, I hope. But

yeah, it was something like

I will absolutely not give you food, or some it was

not providing food and

I don't have it right here to look at.

Well, and I think Eugene Peterson in the message, which is much more on the

paraphrase side, he brings that across as something like I'm going to give you empty

pantries know, something like know he's even going to

further kind of the paraphrase. But

you kind of see that spectrum from this very literal bringing across of the

city. Your teeth are going to be clean because you're not going to have any

food to get them dirty. You're going to be hungry

to you're going to have empty pantries as

kind of one far example on the kind of the paraphrase

side of the spectrum. So it's just interesting.

What I appreciate with the CSB's approach is sort of a bias or

we'll start with our default will be to

go to cleanness of teeth unless we really feel like that's just not going to

resonate for people again as you're talking about

who's our audience and what's in the reading aloud and all of that. And

so in this particular moment, when we sense that

this is not going to resonate with our audience in terms of quickly

apprehending, what is this passage about moving toward

well, I was just thinking. One of the things that we saw working

on this because we are a

committee and I was not involved in the

original translation committee. I came in

in a second group of people for CSB

after the translation had been out for about, I

don't know, 20 years, maybe for a while, ten or 15 years,

that's findoutable, but I don't recall. So

it had been out in use for a

while and the publishers decided

that they wanted to take a look at it and wanted new

eyes on the project. And so I became part of that

translation oversight committee as it's called now

the original translators, many of them are still

alive and you could talk with them. That would be fun if you

wanted know, Dr. Alman comes to mind. James Alman,

who used to have an office right down the hall from me, I know, did

the beginning translation for

a large portion of the Psalms. Okay. And

then it was gone over by multiple other people

to see is there anything that needed to be fixed or

improved from that base translation. And

then after it had been in use and people had

sent in comments and said, what about this? Or I don't understand

that. Or maybe a better way to say it would be this.

And then all of those comments and questions

have been collected, and then the Translation

Oversight Committee was brought in to examine them

and make recommendations and make decisions about what

could be improved for

the edition that's currently available.

And it was so

fun to see the

benefit of having people from different

parts of the world on the committee. So we had a man from

Scotland, we had a man

from

central United States,

we had a man who

had such a quick wit, I should say, had

we have such a quick wit. And he would

always be the one who would say, no, we can't say it

that way because all the 7th grade boys will

he was he was aware of jokes and of

slang. Yeah. And then

our man from Scotland could tell us,

okay, here's a way of saying it. And he would be

drawing from his knowledge of UK English.

Yeah. And that was it was so fun to work

on, trying to make good

decisions so that people would have things to read

that they understand well and

without too much effort. All reading takes effort.

That's right. But you don't want it to be

so much effort that people just close the book and say it's hopeless.

I can never understand this. Yeah, it's really

good. On the idea of the 7th grade boys

laughing, I remember reading again, I did a lot of reading on translations, and

one of the I think it was in the ESV translates it's in

Jesus talking about all that discourse

or something. And the ESV brings across there were two women grinding together.

This is how it says this, which they're

grinding grain or whatever. But the idea is give sort of a dance floor

and something very different for maybe a

7th grade boy or a 7th grade girl hearing two women grinding together.

And you can imagine how easy that would be when

readers nowadays, many of them would never

have seen grinding stones. Right. Or would

never have worked on grinding grain in any

fashion. Or what happens when translators go to a

place where people have never seen

a sheep, right? Yeah.

Well, you and I, depending on

where we grow up, may never have seen a sheep in person

either. Right. And we benefit from

having parents who show us books with

pictures and teach it. That is a know

it says BA exactly.

Yeah. Well, Dr. Cox, this

has been so good, and we're getting close to our time, so I'd love to

just say, is there anything that we haven't touched on yet? Is there

anything else that you would just as you think about the CsBr and just anything

that you would want to just I have one final question for you, but

before we go there anything else that we're just in this

conversation that you'd want to share or thoughts that you have?

Yeah.

I was very grateful to be

able and am very grateful to be able to

contribute to the work of

CSB because I

know the work

we've put into it the desire of the publisher to

have a very fine product available for people to

use and

the privilege of getting to know the other members of

the committee and to work together well has

been just a great

experience. And partly because it

was an opportunity for me to see once

again how the Lord has

given me opportunities

to use things that I've learned many, which

began years and years ago, and I

couldn't see how it would be valuable.

And yet the Lord has brought me

through things that have

turned out to be valuable that I would not have picked.

And so I often tell students, if you're not sure what

you're going to do when you graduate from DTS,

that's okay. The job description

may not have been written yet. Wow. You just don't

know. But right now, you have the opportunity

and the requirements, in some cases, to take a certain number of

classes and certain classes that we think will be

valuable, and so pour yourselves into them.

Enjoy. Do the best you can, and leave it in

the hands of the Lord to give you opportunities to

say, yes, there's that class I didn't want to

take, and it's coming in handy right now. Yes,

absolutely. Well, that's so good. Well, as we wrap

up, we always like to ask our guests a final

question, and we always ask the same question, which is this if

you could do something other than the amazing work that you've done all these years

with Bible translation and biblical scholarship and teaching in a

seminary, what would you do? What would be your other

job? If you could live another life and have a different career path,

is there something like, I would love to have done this, or this is what

I would do? When I saw

that question and knew that you were going

to ask it because you well, you sent it to me. So that was

very that was on purpose. Yeah. And I thought, oh, no,

I can't think of anything I would rather do,

but one of the things that I might

pick would be would be to be a

violinist. Do you play at all?

Violin. My mother tried to teach me to play the violin,

and we nearly divorced each other over it, and

I have regretted that ever since.

I wish, in a way, that I had kept

up and done the work

to be able to play well. Yeah.

And as it was, I

just didn't want to do the practicing, I guess.

And so we agreed, no, I

wouldn't continue. And I went on and did other things,

but never became very good at any of

the instruments that I had the opportunity

to have lessons on. But I

guess I might be a good

like that. I like that. Well, again,

thank you so much for taking this time, Dr. Cox. This is such a joy

to get to learn about this and learn about Bible translation, all the work that

goes into it. I mean, I think probably most of us, when we just open

up the Bible app on our phone or pick the Bible up off the

coffee table to read in the morning, we just don't think about all that went

into getting those words to us. I think we

think about the inspiration part of God working to inspire the

human authors. But there is such a

massive amount of amazing work that goes on for us to be able to open

and read pretty seamlessly

in our first language. And so, again, I'm just grateful

for us to get a window into all the work that goes into that. And

again, like I said before, just really grateful for the work that you and so

many others, not only now, but across the centuries, have

done to make that possible for us as Bible readers. That is

so true. We stand on the shoulders

of many who have come before us and have

been convinced that it was

valuable to read the word of God and to have

it in more than one language. I think

of the Old Testament being put into Greek

more than 200 years before the time of Christ. Yeah.

That has been going on

now for a very long time because people have

seen that it matters to know God's

word and to make it accessible

to new groups of people and to have

it be as clear as possible and as

available as possible. That's

awesome. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us.

And thanks for listening yeah. For being on this episode. We're

so grateful. So blessings on your work, dr. Cox. And

again, thanks for your time. Thank you, sir.

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