Again for my family’s Christmas party, I’ve done a translation from the bible. This time I’ve taken my translation from Isaiah 53 which is a messianic prophecy. I took my translation from the Septuagint, which is an ancient Greek version of the Old Testament. As you will see, my translation varies greatly from the text of the King James Bible, and it seems to me that the Septuagint isn’t the text that the King James version was taken from.

For those of you not familiar with the traditional English text, I will list the King James version, followed by the Greek from the Septuagint, and then finally my translation with an explanation of how I translated it.

King James Version:

1. Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

2. For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

3. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

5. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.



Text from the Septuagint:

1. κύριε τίς ἐπίστευσεν τῇ ἀκοῇ ἡμῶν καὶ ὁ βραχίων κυρίου τίνι ἀπεκαλύφθη

2. ἀνηγγείλαμεν ἐναντίον αὐτοῦ ὡς παιδίον ὡς ῥίζα ἐν γῇ διψώσῃ οὐκ ἔστιν εἶδος αὐτῷ οὐδὲ δόξα καὶ εἴδομεν αὐτόν καὶ οὐκ εἶχεν εἶδος οὐδὲ κάλλος

3. ἀλλὰ τὸ εἶδος αὐτοῦ ἄτιμον ἐκλεῖπον παρὰ πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἄνθρωπος ἐν πληγῇ ὢν καὶ εἰδὼς φέρειν μαλακίαν ὅτι ἀπέστραπται τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἠτιμάσθη καὶ οὐκ ἐλογίσθη

4. οὗτος τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν φέρει καὶ περὶ ἡμῶν ὀδυνᾶται καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐλογισάμεθα αὐτὸν εἶναι ἐν πόνῳ καὶ ἐν πληγῇ καὶ ἐν κακώσει

5. αὐτὸς δὲ ἐτραυματίσθη διὰ τὰς ἀνομίας ἡμῶν καὶ μεμαλάκισται διὰ τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν παιδεία εἰρήνης ἡμῶν ἐπ’ αὐτόν τῷ μώλωπι αὐτοῦ ἡμεῖς ἰάθημεν

My Translation:

1. Lord, who trusted our news, and to whom is the arm of the Lord uncovered?

2. We report in the presence of him, how the child as a root in parched ground, form is not in him, not even glory, and we saw him and he had not form nor beauty.

3. But the form was not worthy of him; he was eclipsed beside all mankind. The man being in calamity, and having known the bearing of weakness, his face is turned away; he was dishonored and not considered.

4. This man is bearing our guilt, and suffers on our account, and we consider him to be in distress by a stroke of calamity and misfortune.

5. But he was wounded by our lawlessness and weakened by our failures. The care of our peace is upon him; by his bruise we were healed.



Explanation of the Translation:

First you should be aware that often there can be a certain level of ambiguity in Greek grammar that could allow a translator a wide number of justifiable translations of any given text, and it is left to the translator to decide which of the possibilities makes the most sense, or often which translation gives a meaning closest to what the translator wants the passage to say.



For example, in the first verse of this this chapter we see the phrase, “to whom is the arm of the Lord uncovered?” The ambiguity here comes mostly from the word which means “to whom” τίνι (tini) which is a relative pronoun used in questions. This particular form of the pronoun can have many meanings. Where in English we often use prepositions to indicate a noun’s or pronoun’s function in a sentence, Greek will change the form of the word in place of many prepositions. We do something similar in English when we change the form of our pronouns such as “He, him, and his” to show the word’s grammatical function.



Τίνι has a similar meaning to the meanings we use with “his”, where the word can show possession among other things. Most commonly this form of the relative pronoun takes meanings like, “for whom? to whom? by whom? with whom?” among others.



So the phrase could also have read, “by whom is the arm of the Lord uncovered?” which would have greatly changed the meaning of the passage. However, given the context of the rest of the verse, I felt that “to/for whom?” made the most sense for the translation.

Once we get to the second verse, my translation starts to look very different from the King James version. For instance, in the King James Bible we see the phrase, “he shall grow up before him as a tender plant.” This idea is missing in the Septuagint. Something like, “The child was before him,” could be justifiable from the Greek, but there is nothing here about being a tender plant. While I don’t know Hebrew, I would guess there is some discrepancy here between the Greek and Hebrew versions.

One of the most interesting differences I found between the King James version and my translation were the phrases, “The chastisement of our peace was upon him,” as opposed to my translation, “The care of our peace is upon him.”

In the Greek, the word I translated as “care” is παιδεία (paideia), which means something like, “the raising of a child, the care of a child, the teaching of a child, education, or childhood,” and while I suppose one could derive the idea of chastisement from the word, such a harsh idea doesn’t seem to be in the force of its meaning. So I felt the wording of, “The education of our peace,” or, “The care of our peace,” was more appropriate.

My Translation Notes: