What is the Translated Hebrew Bible? A Paratextual Reflection

Abstract:In this essay I adapt the category of "paratext" first proposed by Gérard Genette and refined by book historians to explore particular questions about the translated Tanak. Paratext suggests itself as an analytical category because Targums, for example, typically appear in manuscripts and in print editions alongside (para) the Hebrew text, making the visual relationship between source and target language a paratextual one. What can we learn from such paratextual presentation of the translated Hebrew Bible, about biblical translation as a portal or threshold—as Genette's Seuil? Does it bring the anterior source to the reader's linguistic world or does it bring the reader to the linguistic world of the source? A historical overview of premodern Bible translations and of the discourse applied to these translations (another paratextual dimension) highlights the fact that translated texts and their readers are always embedded in and reflecting various social locations. Thus the translated Bible is properly understood broadly as a flexible social concept, not simply as a rigidly linguistic one. We see that the variously translated Tanak has always taken shape as a context-specific hermeneutical (para)textual entity, manifesting the pluriformities that characterize multiple-context hermeneutics. I conclude that, whatever else the Hebrew Bible is in its translated forms, it is a social phenomenon that roots its existence in the interstices of the translation's textual and paratextual characteristics.