Complaints about modern Biblical translations succumbing to “political correctness” are hardly uncommon. Most often, these revolve around the increasingly fraught usage of pronouns. However, sometimes the sentiments that inform the “PC” mindset direct the work of translation down the same path of evacuated meaning and self-defeat in surprising ways.
In the “Preface to the Revised New American Old Testament”, the editors of the NABRE make their apology for producing yet another Bible translation/revision following the usual reasoning: new manuscript discovery, linguistic advances in the study of ancient tongues, and changes in modern vocabulary. As an example of cultural changes bearing upon modern vocabulary usage, they observe that: “the term ‘holocaust’ is now normally reserved for the sacrilegious attempt to destroy the Jewish people by the Third Reich.”
As a result, comparison of the 2010 NABRE Old Testament text with the 1970 original NAB Old Testament shows that the while the 1970 translation used the English word “holocaust” 295 times, the 2010 OT revision uses it exactly once – in Psalm 40:7, in a passage quoted twice in chapter 10 of Hebrews, where both the 1970 NAB and 1986 revised NAB New Testament translations had rendered the Greek term ???????????? (holokautomata) as “holocausts”.
There is clearly a kind of well-meaning neurosis behind this idea to suppress the term “holocaust”, out of deference to the “PC” impulse and its characteristic fear of offending somebody’s sensitive feelings, or even of illegitimately “appropriating” some concept which allegedly “belongs” to a different group’s “experience”. But well-meaning or not, this verbal evasion by the NABRE translators actually works to conceal the very meaning of the allegedly “reserved” usage of the term, obscuring the sacrilegious aspect which the term had specifically been chosen to invoke, and thus rendering their verbal deference vain and self-defeating.
While it may be commendable, in respect to the singularity of the event, to avoid copy-cat usage of the term “holocaust” in reference to other trials or catastrophes, removing the original referent connotation from public usage just facilitates ignorance – which is about the last the last thing we need. However, removing it from the Bible just misses the point altogether.
Precisely in order to place the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in the resulting context, the 20th century use of the term “holocaust” to refer to what the Jews call the Shoah was very clearly intended to invoke the Biblical meaning of the word “holocaust”: a complete sacrifice of the victim by fire on the altar. Thus, ironically, removing the word from the English Bible de-contextualizes the word in its reference and application to the Shoah, stripping it of the very meaning intended, breaking the word’s linking of the modern atrocity to the word’s Biblical roots.
What will surely happen, once nobody knows this word as a Biblical term referring to sacrifice, is that the term will inevitably come to be understood by rising generations as something akin to a brand name for an event, a name that will eventually carry no more internal meaning than the gibberish neologisms that pollute the letterheads of modern corporations. The NABRE translators fancy themselves treating the word with some kind of reverently unique sacrality, but in alienating it from the English Bible, they end up historically and theologically alienating it from the history of the Jews, and of salvation history as a whole.
Ironically, the 1970 New American Bible was the only major modern English translation that used the word. It had been used in the Douay-Challoner tradition to translate the cognate term in the Latin Vulgate (holocaustum), which itself had a cognate in Greek that had been used in the LXX (holokautoma). But, as far as I can discern, none of the many Bibles based on the Masoretic text for the Old Testament used the word.
In other words, it was precisely the Catholic Biblical tradition that provided the word “holocaust” to the English language to begin with, and which provided the context for the word’s meaning in relation to the Shoah. That heritage has been abandoned by the Catholic Biblical Association in the NABRE. In its place, they have substituted the expression “burnt offering,” a perfectly good one, even if lacking somewhat in intensity. That rendering mimics scores of Protestant translations over the centuries, and even Orthodox translations from the LXX, but is otherwise not particularly compelling.
If the word had never been used last century to relate the Nazi savagery toward the Jews to the history of Biblical sacrifice, there would be no particular reason not to drop the Latinism from current usage. But precisely because that link now exists in the modern cultural context, it seems an affront to good translation to intentionally obscure that link. How are future generations supposed to remember the meaning of “the Holocaust” if the word itself is reduced in its signification to a kind of culturally disconnected label or “brand name”? Nominalism wins again.
Well, why worry about future generations when the rabbis and Hebrew Bible teachers are already wounded by the use of this term. It’s ok for people who are not Jewish to posit some uninformed crew into the future whose understanding might be lessened, and those pesky Jews should just go ahead and take it like … Jews, I guess. One more occasion of letting the people who control the language tell others how “this should not hurt a bit.” Please.
Thank you for taking the time to comment. I suppose if you look hard enough you could find some, but I’m not convinced it is Jewish leaders who are the ones agitating for the term “holocaust” to be “reserved for the sacrilegious attempt to destroy the Jewish people by the Third Reich”, especially since – as noted above – it’s not a term they seem very inclined to use for that purpose! If the rabbis have a beef with the use of the term, it would much more likely be with its continued popular use to refer to the Shoah, a concern which would render the CBA’s argument and actions silly and ineffectual. I suspect the origin of the CBA’s anxiety more likely emanates from the broader university circles the CBA scholars are professionally immersed in, and the blinkered new victimhood-obsessed moralism which has slowly consumed and debased those environs over the past several decades.
If I was wrong when I published this six years ago to worry too much about future generations at the expense of current generations, it would seem I’d just underestimated how rapidly the intellectual rot of historical ignorance would manifest itself. Later that same year (2018), the Claims Conference released the results of a survey which exposed ridiculous levels of ignorance regarding the Holocaust among American youth. A widely cited broader survey in 2020 painted an even worse picture. The roiling of American college and high school campuses with angry antisemitism since October 7th further illustrates that the American educational establishment has been fomenting not only obscene levels of ignorance, but of ignorant, self-righteous hatreds.
In the neo-Marxist “intersectional” victim-Olympics of the mainstream academy’s “woke” moral paradigm, the Jews are “oppressors” who need to be destroyed. I’m not OK with the re-emergence of rabid Jew-hatred, nor with the system of malignant moral ju-jitsu which birthed it, and I feel more strongly than ever that the CBA should not be bending the knee to its phony pieties, but rather aim to shed light on the condition of the world through being faithful carriers of a tradition that goes back not only to the beginnings of the Church, but all the way back to the rendering of the Septuagint translation, and which has the added benefit of providing explanatory context for the use of the English term in reference to the Shoah. Ignorance is never a better idea.
I think the concern I raised in this post has been thoroughly vindicated by history, already. Not that the CBA is in any way responsible for what has happened, but they had (and still have) an opportunity to choose illumination over buckling to the pressures of a system with unholy origins and aims which can only produce the fruits of ignorance and darkness in the end. Just light that single candle, regardless of how insignificant it might seem in the grand scheme of things. We don’t have to play along, and shouldn’t.