When Aviya Kushner enrolled in Marilynne Robinsonâ??s Old Testament course at the Iowa Writersâ?? Workshop, she didnâ??t recognize the text her teacher and classmates were familiar with. She wasnâ??t new to the stories they were studying; she had read them many times since she was a young child. But Kushner had read them in Hebrew as part of her Orthodox Jewish schooling, and the translations her Christian classmates knew well sounded nothing like the Hebrew to Kushner. With Robinsonâ??s encouragement, Kushner set out to collect a wide variety of English translations, then compare them with each other and with the Hebrew Bible.
In The Grammar of God, Kushner draws on this research to explore how the Bible in English translation differs from the Masoretic Text. Interspersed throughout are meditations on Kushnerâ??s family and schooling, some relevant to the Bible and some not so muchâ??for example, when Kushner tries to connect an anecdote about a vendor urging customers to buy two doughnuts to a phrase that appears twice in the account of the third day of Creation. Kushner touches on differences between traditional Jewish methods of interpretation and the way her Christian classmates and professor approached the Old Testament.
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