The Anstey Psalter is characterised by five key features:
a. Equivalence
All Bible translations aim for “equivalence”, even when the result is geared towards a particular readership and context. This translation will be no different and will be of the NRSV/NIV type of equivalence rather than The Message type.1 This is standard practice for official translations used in denominational liturgy.
Of particular importance is bringing to the translation the vast amount of scholarly work done since the current APBA Psalter was first translated in 1976/77, especially the insights gained from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and significant advances in our knowledge of Biblical Hebrew grammar and lexicon. One telling example is Psalm 145:13-14. Psa 145 is an acrostic, so verse 13 starts with mem (M) and verse 14 with samek (S), but a verse starting with the letter nun (N), between M and S in the Hebrew alphabet, is missing in the Hebrew text.
[M] Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom:
and your dominion endures through all generations.
[S] The Lord upholds all those who stumble:
and raises up those that are bowed down (Psalm 145:13-14 APBA)
However, when The Great Psalms Scroll (called 11QPsa) was discovered in 1956, the missing N line was also present, and has thus been included in modern translations. So here is the NIV (cf. the similar NRSV):
[M] Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations.
[N] The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does.*
[S] The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down (Psalm 145:13-14 NIV)
*One manuscript of the Masoretic Text, Dead Sea Scrolls and Syriac (see also Septuagint); most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text do not have the last two lines of verse 13.
Although the APBA was translated twenty years after this scroll was discovered, scholarship on the DSS was still in its infancy in 1976, and so this “missing verse” was not included. There are very strong grounds for including it in a new translation.2
b. Comprehension
The English language has changed substantially in the last 50 years and the APBA contains many words and phrases that are difficult for modern readers to understand accurately, or at all. For example, “fatness” in Psalm 65:11 denotes “obesity” for modern readers, rather than “fertility/richness” (which is now obsolete according to the OED); “aliens” (Ps 18:46) typically denotes extra-terrestrial beings, rather than “foreigners/refugees”; “do not make me the butt of fools” (39:9) for most younger readers refers to one’s posterior (!); words like “pate”, “bulwark”, “asunder”, “usury”, “crag”, “recompensed”, “felicity”, “requites”, “handsbreadth”, “potsherd” have fallen almost entirely out of use3; and so forth.
This project will use contemporary English and address the many problematic words and phrases in the APBA. Like most modern Bible translation projects, the target English lexicon/grammar will be that spoken by people in their early thirties, as this is the age where many people begin reading frequently to their children, and thus it has lower frequency of slang and idiomatic phrases, and tends towards “correct” pronunciation and syntax.
c. Continuity
The Psalms are familiar to a great many Christians and have been integral to their prayer life. This sense of “familiarity” is reinforced especially by famous verses that have stirred the hearts of generations of Christians. Here is an illustrative example:
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight: O Lord, my strength and my redeemer (Psalm 19:14 APBA 1976)
Let’s begin with Coverdale (1535):
Yee the wordes of my mouth & the meditacion of my herte shalbe acceptable vnto the, o LORDE, my helper and my redemer.
(Psalm 19:14 Coverdale 1535)
The KJV made one change, from “helper” to “strength”, and this has been retained since:
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer (Psalm 19:14 KJV 1611)
The BCP though included “alway” (updated to “always” in 1928 BCP), which is found in the LXX (διαπαντός) but not the Hebrew original:
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart : be alway
acceptable in thy sight, O Lord : my strength, and my redeemer
(Psalm 19:14 BCP 1662)
Most importantly, one can see that after 400 years of translation, the APBA still closely follows the rhythm and overall shape of the Coverdale, as have the translations in-between. Any new translation of the Psalms needs to respect this continuity, so that readers and hearers feel a connection to the rich history of prior translations.
This can affect translation too: even though the Hebrew word translated by “helper/strength” (tsur) is nowadays correctly translated as “rock” (e.g. “my rock and my redeemer” NRSV Psalm 19:14) and so “rock” has a higher level of equivalence, retaining “strength” is probably preferable on the basis of continuity. This illustrates that often competing principles are at play in translation.
d. Prosody
One of the great challenges of translating the Psalms is that Psalms are not just prayed one or two times, but hundreds and hundreds of times. For this reason, prosody (or speech rhythm) is very important, because a pleasant sounding verse is easier to repeat and remember. Here are two illustrations.
First, one of the reasons the KJV is so loved is its beautiful and memorable prosody, most famously its use of the so-called “Beethoven rhythm”, as in Gen 1:3 “Let there be light”, with its “dut-dut-dut-DUM” beat (reminiscent of Beethoven’s 5thSymphony).4
The APBA Psalter could be improved prosodically. For example, the pleasant rhythm of Psalm 23:1 in the KJV, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” has too many beats in 1b in the APBA: “The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing”.
Secondly, there is the fabulous story of the KJV translation of 1 Kings 19:12, “and after the fire a still small voice”. The three English translations done in the decades prior to the KJV, namely, the Great Bible, Bishop’s Bible, and the Tyndale Bible, each had “And after the fire, came a small still voice”. When the KJV translators gathered together, they read out loud the translations to each other, and the story is told that when “small still voice” was read out loud, someone interjected and said, “Try instead, ‘…still small voice’”. The rest is history as they say and arguably, because of this change, “the still small voice” went on to become one of the most quoted and loved phrases of the OT.
Thus, to assist in the quality of the “musicality” of the Anstey Psalter, drafts have been reviewed by poets, musicians, and others.
e. Metatext
When the APBA Psalter was translated, there was barely any scholarship on what is now called “the rhetorical shaping of the Psalter”, which is essentially about the way the collection of 150 Psalms (and the mini-collections therein) have been purposefully ordered and arranged, such that the ordering and grouping itself expresses theological and liturgical ideas.
There is a richness in the arrangement of the Psalms, and foremost to understanding this are the superscriptions, yet unfortunately, these have been omitted too often in liturgical Psalters.5
Interestingly, in the Jewish Bible, the superscriptions are considered “canonical” (i.e. part of the revealed word of God”. In the Hebrew original, the superscriptions are part of the regular verse and not “superscripted” in any way. For example, compare the APBA with the NRSV of Psalm 34:1-2 and the Jewish Publication Version (1917):
1 I will bless the Lord continually:
his praise shall be always in my mouth (Psalm 34:1 APBA)
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Of David, when he feigned madness before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.
1 I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth (Psalm 34:1 NRSV)
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1 A Psalm of David; when he changed his demeanour before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he departed.
2 I will bless HaShem at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth (Psalm 34:1-2 JPV)
The Anstey Psalter follows modern Bible translations, like the NRSV, by including superscriptions. Readers are better served when they are provided. One very clear example is Psalm 51, which is used on Ash Wednesday in the lectionary. How many preachers would preach this without reference to the superscription: “To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba”, given the superscription causes the reader to interpret 51:4, “Against you only have I sinned”, in the context of 2 Sam 11-12 and the experience of Bathsheba.
If included, churches could then choose to read out the inscription prior to Psalm recitation, or include it in projections/pew sheets, which is very common nowadays.
Furthermore, the APBA frequently adjusts the original versification, either splitting longer verses or combining shorter verses. Most liturgical Psalters record this information within the Psalter, using † after verse numbers to indicate such, and/or in a table of adjusted verses in an Appendix. APBA does neither but The Anstey Psalter will include this.
Footnotes
1 In translation theory, the terms “literal” vs “free” vs “dynamic” are rarely used nowadays, as it is recognised that all translations are a complex mixture of everything from one-to-one lexical word equivalences (e.g. Elohim > “God”) to idiomatic equivalences (e.g. Hebrew “long of nose” > “angry”).
2 One should also note that in the 1970s, words and phrases thought to be difficult in the Hebrew were typically replaced with the LXX translations, or hypothetical emendations. Not only have many of these difficulties been resolved satisfactorily, there is also now a realisation that the LXX was not a “neutral” translation and has its own biases. For this reason, the modern translation trend is to retain the Hebrew more often than was done so in the past.
3 Some of these words are classified as archaic by the OED. They are all also very infrequent nowadays (Frequency Band 4 in OED), meaning they occur 0.1 to 1 times for every 1 million English words.
4 The KJV also employed more complex rhythms, like that of Joshua 24:15: “but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD”, an oft-repeated prosodic pattern. One must note in passing that there were some aurally-painful translations of Gen 1:3 in that period, from Wycliffe’s “Light be made!” to the Great Bible’s “Let there be made light”, to Douay-Rheims’ “Be light made”.
5 There are also something akin to paragraph divisions in the Hebrew text, and interestingly, these are retained for the most part in the APBA, indicated by a larger line space between sections (e.g. Psalm 34:10 has a gap before 34:11).