Enmeshed in his own tangle of errors a translator has often no other choice but to wade even deeper into more silly mistakes, until he finally gets totally lost. Such was the fate of the third chapter of Genesis, where the translators, excited by the drama of the original sin about to happen,stumbled on the very first word “nachash”. In the untranslated Hebrew Torah, letters have no vowel signs and the translator must rely on his memory or imagination which word to choose from many available options. NChSh as a a verb appears in other places of the Bible as meaning “to learn by experience, to practise enchantments, to use sorcery, to hiss or whisper as a soothsayer, to augur, to forbode , to divine or to take something as an omen.” As a noun the same word can mean someone practising sorcery, a diviner or enchanter, but also a serpent (from hissing) and from its root meaning to shine, it was often used as a synonym for copper, brass or things made from those shining metals like chains, fetters. money etc. In this bountiful choice the translators considered the serpent as the most likely tempter and they were wrong. Instead of writing ” Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,”they should have written “The brightest among all the beings living on the land where Jehovah Elohim created them was the Enchanter.” Beasts of the field (chayat he sadeh) was only one of many other possible translations. Chayi is also an anima, a vital body or any living being including animals.The word “field” means a country, a plain or a level. The translators could not accept that apart from Adam and Eve there might have been other human-like beings in that experimental creative field of Jehovah Elohim. The choice of serpent as the seducer of Eve wasn’t very fortunate from the start, because we may wonder in what language was that reptile talking to a human being and how did it know that there was a forbidden tree, unless it was eavesdropping or JE himself told him. When angry JE yells at the serpent and says “thou art cursed above all cattle…and upon thy belly shall thou go…” we are being led into the world of comics where only kids and slow-witted people will believe what they hear. The serpent has always crawled on its belly, which should have been apparent to the translators and to JE himself, because what snake is and does can be seen by everybody. In this chapter Eve became a victim of the translators, not of the snake who wasn’t there. She was enchanted by a Sorcerer, shining like a copper bracelet and muttering his incantations. Some medieval painters (eg Hieronymus Bosch) gave the serpent a human face and torso of a woman while the rest of her body was a serpent. Did they know something that was still obvious in their times? Or, perhaps, the original sin was plotted between two women – the Witch Nachash and Eve, the female half of the separated Androgyne.
Tags: anima, Errors in translation, Hieronymus Bosch, nachash synonyms, woman-serpent
