Bible Review

G. Driver, “Colloquialisms in the Old Testament,” in Mélanges Marcel Cohen: Études de Linguistique, Ethnographie et Sciences Connexes, ed. David Cohen (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), p. 232.

Brown et al. (A Hebrew and English Lexicon, p. 116) give the etymology as a compound of beli “without” and ya‘al “worth, use, profit.” See also Mandelkern, Concordance, p. 202; Theodor H. Gaster, “Belial,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, columns 428–429.

Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” p. 160. So, too, p. 164: “There is a great deal of this polite drawing-room chat in most new translations of the Bible, as if sin were not bad but only bad form.”

Peter Mullen, “The Religious Speak-Easy,” in Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism, ed. D.J. Enright, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 164–165. In later editions, the Jerusalem Bible replaced “happy” with “blessed.”

John Beekman and John Callow, Translating the Word of God (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1986), p. 105.

I wish to thank Donald Kraus for his graciousness in searching Oxford’s files and library in order to answer my questions.

F.F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations from the Earliest English Versions to the New English Bible (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 248.

Godfrey R. Driver, “Problems of Interpretation in the Heptateuch,” Mélanges Bibliques: Rédigés en l’Honneur de André Robert, Travaux de l’Institute Catholique de Paris 4, (Paris: L’Institute Catholique de Paris, 1957), pp. 73–75. I am grateful to Suzanne Siegel of the Hunter College library for help in tracking down Driver’s far-flung publications.