New English Bible
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The New English Bible (NEB) is a Bible translation jointly produced in 1970 by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. The NEB is presented as a new translation from the original Greek and Hebrew texts and is written meaning-for-meaning (versus word-for-word in other translations) and favors contemporary British English idiom.
The resultant translation is clearer than the King James Version (KJV) to the modern ear but also wordier, as can be seen in the following excerpts.
- From Psalm 23:
KJV:
- The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
- He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
- he leadeth me beside still waters.
- He restoreth my soul . . .
NEB:
- Yahweh is my shepherd, I shall want nothing.
- He makes me lie down in green pastures,
- and leads me beside the waters of peace.
- He renews life within me.
- From Ecclesiastes:
KJV:
- Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
- Vanity of vanities: all is vanity.
NEB:
- Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker,
- Emptiness, all is empty.
Aside from the fact that this translation is clearly aimed primarily at a British and British-educated audience, which is only a shortcoming from primarily an American viewpoint, this version has been accused, with some justification, of sexism. Even as the world was changing with regard to the roles of sexes, the translators insisted on using "man" and "men" for the generic human being of either sex upon the premise of grammatical exactitude, even when the context of the original languages was gender-neutral. (This is quite a different criticism from stating that many Biblical doctrines are sexist, which by modern standards is certainly the case, but can hardly be considered a fault of translators.) One of the many changes to the NEB made in the Revised English Bible was an attempt to correct this; however critics of the REB tend to feel that the effort resulted in overcompensation, and that the REB often renders words that were clearly masculine in their original context in a gender-neutral fashion. Some accuse the REB translators of bowing to political correctness in this regard.
In their own introduction, the NEB translators state their goals. They in large measure wanted to make a clean break with past translation traditions and approach the text with much of the same approach that would have been taken had important ancient Hebrew and Greek texts been recently discovered. While at times this approach seems to have resulted in phrasing that was constructed in a way so as to appear completely as an attempt not to sound "Biblical", for the most part the translators seem to have succeeded in the eyes of many.