I first realized this when reading Job a verse I was looking for was literally in a different chapter in English. The verses, or psukim, are not always the same as they are in Hebrew. On many occasions, I did not recognize passages I knew by heart in Hebrew. It was an entirely new world, and I was often lost in it. And the translations I was reading obsessively weren’t just in English they were also Christian. In that graduate course and in the community church class I attended, I encountered the Bible in English translation for the first time. There, I took a Bible course with the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Then I drove a thousand miles, across the Mississippi River and through miles and miles of corn, and enrolled at the University of Iowa’s MFA program in creative writing. I didn’t think I could be surprised by anything Biblical. I memorized many passages, and was quizzed on others. At yeshiva day school, which I attended six days a week, the Torah and its commentaries were taught for hours each day. At home, we often discussed the Torah around the dining-room table - its language, its humor, its grammar, and its tendency to contradict itself. My mother is Israeli, and so my first language was Hebrew naturally, I read the Torah in Hebrew. In Monsey, New York, the religious Jewish community where I grew up, no one was reading The King James Bible. She is the author of The Grammar of God and is blogging here all week for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribe series on The Prose nPeople. Earlier this week, Aviya Kushner wrote about the “smashing, positively dashing spectacle” of modern theater performed in Hebrew.
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