Opening the Vulgate Can of Worms — Guest Post by Bob Short

In the decade I have been praying the Liturgy of the Hours, there is one reading that has always confused me.  Most of the time when we celebrate the memorial of a saint who lived out their vocation as a female religious, during Morning Prayer you flip to the back after the third psalm and pick up the rest from the Common of Virgins. 

Here is how it reads:

Deep waters cannot quench love,
nor floods sweep it away.
Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love,
he would be roundly mocked.

Song of Songs 8:7 1970 NAB

For us Americans, the scriptural readings from the Liturgy of the Hours come from the 1970 New American Bible. (The psalter is from the Grail Psalms, though psalm 95, as well as the Gospel canticles are ICEL translations.) Now, I generally turn off my critical mind when I have my breviary in my hands, but as I type this I have a few observations. The Old Testament readings from the Office are the same translation we hear at Mass—though not every reading from the Office is going to be found in the lectionary. Some of these translations from the 1970 NAB predate that edition. You might recall that at some point in the 1940s the Confraternity Bible project switched from being a revision of the Challoner version of the Douay-Rheims to being a translation of the scriptural texts from their original languages. The book of Genesis was translated anew for the 1970 NAB, but I believe much of the rest had been published under the title of the Confraternity Bible. (Someone ought to snag a copy of that sometime and compare it to the 1970 NAB. I promise to read it and leave a glowing comment.) Whenever it was these Old Testament renderings first appeared, besides the psalter they remained in printed copies of the NAB until the 2011 release of the NABRE. Let’s check out what the NABRE has for this verse:

Deep waters cannot quench love
nor rivers sweep it away.
Were one to offer all the wealth of his house for love
he would be utterly despised

Song of Songs 8:7 NABRE

The history of interpretation of the Song of Songs is long and complex, and features names like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The common thread in the traditional Christian reading of this text is that when read allegorically, we can see the love between Christ and his Bride, the Church, as well as the love between God and the individual soul. This is obviously the interpretive tradition that associates this text with the lives of such saints as Therese of Lisieux and Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Knowing that, what is our mini-exegesis of the verse, as it appears in the Liturgy of the Hours? It cannot be defeated by fire and water, extremes which can stand in for any challenge material or immaterial. In fact, love is so monolithic that you will never be able to afford it. Even the attempt would be laughable. Still, there is something that bothered me about this rendering. The flow seems unpoetic, though I am unsure how one would fix it. In the context it seems like a non-sequitur, or even a cliché (money can’t buy love) that sits uncomfortably next to the high biblical poetry of fire and water.

This discomfort comes up every so often when a saint sends me to that part of the breviary, but I was reminded of this when I read Marc’s thoughtful analysis of the NRSV psalter.  My own Christian walk has led me to be a layman associated with a Benedictine monastery. Both in my own experience with Lectio Divina and my realization that the Fathers read the Bible in a much different way than us, I must admit that my patience has gotten low with the way the modern academy, modern biblical studies, and even modern translations seem resistant to any attempt to read scripture the way Christians pretty much universally did before the Reformation. It makes me think of the words of Christ to the scribes and pharisees: “For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.” (Matthew 23:13, NRSV). (As a side note, the NAB/NABRE has “You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.” Perhaps this is what people are talking about when they complain about the tin ear of the NAB, but a look in my interlinear New Testament suggests that the NAB is actually super literal in this verse, more literal even than the hyper-literal NASB.)

A look on Bible Hub shows that all modern translations agree with the sense found in the NAB and NABRE.

When I was early in my Lectio Divina journey, I read the wonderful book Praying the Word by Enzo Bianchi. It is a profound book on praying with scripture by the founder and prior of an ecumenical monastery in Italy. I was surprised to read the following remark in his book, “always make use, proportionally to your intellectual preparation, of the versions of the LXX and the Vulgate, which are holy translations, venerated by the church throughout the centuries.” Note that the LXX means the Septuagint, which remains the privileged Old Testament text in the Eastern Church.

I am no traditionalist, but I have begun to see it his way when it comes to my praying with scripture—though I still make ample use of the New Jerusalem Bible as well. On my desk I have Baronius Press printings of the Knox and the Douay Rheims, as well as an old Confraternity New Testament from 1941 printed by the St. Anthony Guild Press. Let’s see how two translations of the Vulgate handled our verse from the Song of Songs.

Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the floods drown it: if a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.

Song of Songs 8:7 Douay-Rheims

Yes, love is a fire no waters avail to quench, no floods to drown; for love, a man will give up all that he has in the world, and think nothing of his loss.

Song of Songs 8:7 Knox Version

Now this is interesting. I think this verse shows both the beauty and limits of both these translations. The Douay-Rheims is poetic and at times opaque: what is the antecedent of the last “it”? Is it the substance of his house? The exchange of goods for love? Love? (It is the first of the three, but in my initial reading of this verse, I had to slow down to about 5 miles per hour to be sure I was interpreting it correctly!) As for the Knox, it is the poetry which sometimes makes it opaque! I can live with his flights of fancy, but I can completely understand why those who dig deep into the wisdom literature and prophets in the Knox sometimes fall out of love with the translation. For me it is a different story, but that is something for another day.

Returning to our exegesis of the passage, translations based on the Vulgate give a very different meaning. Rather than the one attempting to make the transaction being mocked or despised, in contrast to love, all that one has should be despised in comparison. This is an image right in the center of a web of associations. I am thinking of the merchant who sold all he had for the pearl of great price. I am thinking of the rich theology of asceticism in which we renounce things because they are good in search of the One who is Love itself.

To complicate matters even more, the Septuagint in this case agrees not with the Vulgate, but with the Masoretic Text. The plot thickens.

Here are some concluding thoughts:

1. I find that I am very open to attempts to persuade me that we should be still be privileging the Vulgate and Septuagint.  Yes, yes, I know that the Church has moved on from that and I know that there is something to having a translation as close as possible to the originals, but there is a price to pay for this. 
2. As some Catholics have enthusiastically taken up the ESV-CE, I think it should be said that while the NAB, RSV, and NRSV use the Septuagint and other ancient versions to illuminate the meaning of obscure passages, the ESV sticks incredibly close to the Masoretic Text, even when it is obviously corrupt.  (They make an exception for Isaiah 7:14).
3. This is a bold statement, but I am really starting to feel that starting sometime during or directly after the Counter-Reformation, the Church began reading the Scriptures in a more literal way, very nearly as literal as Protestant ways of reading the Bible.  To do so is to cut ourselves off from the thought-world of the ancient and Medieval Church.  I think the assumptions which lie behind modern Bible translations are not disbelieving, but I do think they generally the work of people ignorant of the interpretive tradition of scripture.
4. I own two translations of the Septuagint made since the year 2000.  When is someone going to make a new translation of the Vulgate?  In a comment exchange with Timothy a few years ago, I proposed someone continue the editing of the (public domain) Challoner edition of the Douay-Rheims along the same lines as the Confraternity New Testament.  I don’t think it will happen anytime soon.  It seems that most folks who prefer the Vulgate are happy with the Douay Rheims.
5. One last side note: at Mass on All Souls Day, I noticed in the missal that the phrase “Let perpetual light shine upon them” is based on an image found in 2 Esdras, an apocalyptic work found in the appendix of the Clementine Vulgate.  I think I have read that Baronius’ Vulgate/D-R Bible is the only Bible in print that includes this appendix.  Has anyone read it?  What is the English translation used?
6. While I probably sound as if I have firmly held beliefs in this area, they are topics that I struggle with and change my mind on often.  Please tell me in the comments how do you navigate this mental minefield?