February 3, 2010

Joel Hoffman’s “And God Said” (preliminary thoughts)

I received my copy of Joel Hoffman’s well-intentioned And God Said:  How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning today (I had ordered it before Amazon started boycotting all Macmillan products) and opened it up to a random page – p. 234 as it turned out, and spotted errors immediately (Hoffman appears to be ignorant of that both Everett Fox and Robert Alter translated Shmeul [the books of Samuel] into English).  And no footnotes.  Not a good sign.  Sigh.

2 comments:

Justin (koavf) said...

Theophrastus,

This book sounds like poor scholarship at best.

Why do we hate Macmillan?

-JAK

Theophrastus said...

Amazon and Macmillan are in a huge battle over the price of e-books; Macmillan wants to hike them to at least $15 to avoid competing with hardcover books. Amazon, in response, suspended sales of all Macmillan titles on its site. Talks are going slowly. You can read more here and here