For Biblical scholar Dr. Everett Fox, translating the Bible is more than just worrying about syntax and diction, it’s about focusing on the idea of “translation as performance.”

Fox visited UMass Dartmouth on March 3 to discuss his work as a translator of the Hebrew Bible. He authored two collections in the 1990s, “The Five Books of Moses” and “The Early Prophets,” described as a translations that maintain the “echoes, allusions, alliterations, and wordplays of the Hebrew original.”

“The history of the translation of the Hebrew Bible is a rich topic in and of itself. People have bene translating the Bible into various languages for 2,000 years. Every translation is actually an interpretation, and the goals of each translation differ,” said Rabbi Jacqueline Satlow, director of the Center for Religious and Spiritual Life.

Fox attempts to take a familiar work and start over with a blank slate. Rather than writing prose in paragraph format, his work is linear, taking a form similar to an epic poem.

This structure is based on the sound and “feel” of the source material. He read several passages from the Hebrew Bible, which sounded rhythmic and poetic – an effect not unlike listening to “The Canterbury Tales” in Middle English. Fox’s translation, too, emphasized the poetic structure of the original text.

“It’s not only what the text says, but the way it comes across,” said Fox. “Every time we open a Biblical text, we are consciously or subconsciously dealing with performance. There is no such thing as the text in and of itself any more than there is a piece of music. Yes, there are the notes, but the performer has to make decisions.”

As a way of helping “unlock” some of the original meaning of the translation, Fox keeps an eye out for word repetition in his work.

“The way in which a sentence or paragraph is put together in the Bible, often tells you something about the idea behind it,” said Fox.

He said that translators of the Bible are often faced with a dilemma: do you make the text literal and scholarly or do you try to make the work as accessible as possible. He said much of the translations in the early 20th Century had the latter in mind.

Some of the more modern, scholarly versions of the Bible can sometimes backfire.

“One of the ironies of this business is people get used to certain things. In South Africa, for the Afrikaans community, they spent a lot of money doing a new translation of the Bible that was much more accurate from a scholarly point of view,” he said. “In order to that, they changed the name of God that was usually used. People hated it. The publication bombed because it wouldn’t sell.”

Fox surmised that because the texts were carefully absorbed by listeners in more primitive cultures, the way words hit the ear had much to do with the work’s success.

“One of my colleagues once said that, ‘Everything that became sacred text in the world, started out as great art,’” said Fox.