Here is another instance in which the translators’ command of
Hebrew should have enabled them to know better, but a reticence about
recognizing the boldness of the original led them astray. The most common word
for “God” in the Hebrew, ’elohim, famously has a plural ending but is
treated grammatically as a singular, whether because it is a linguistic fossil
harking back to a period when everyone spoke of “the gods” or because it is
something like a plural of majesty (if in fact that actually existed in
biblical Hebrew). All biblical scholars are aware that when the noun is treated
grammatically as a plural it refers to “the gods,” as in Aaron’s words about
the golden calf. “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land
of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). But when Abraham tells Abimelech how he became a
wanderer (Genesis 20:13), all the English versions have “God” impose this fate
on him despite the fact that here ’elohim is unambiguously the subject
of a plural verb, so that it must be rendered, “When the gods made me a
wanderer from my father’s house.” This is a small but vivid instance of the
liveliness of the dialogue in the Bible, a topic we shall take up in another
chapter. Abraham is speaking with a polytheist, and he wants to address him in
language entirely accessible to his interlocutor. In fact, his choice of words
might well reflect an ancient “manner of speaking”—the gods, ’elohim, which
is to say, circumstances, fate, my destiny, made me wander from my father’s
house. What Abraham clearly does not want to hint at in his words to Abimelech
is that the one God, as part of a covenantal promise, commanded him to leave
his father’s house. The piquancy of the patriarch’s adjusting his terms to the
ear of a pagan monarch is altogether lost by the translations that make him out
to be an impeccable monotheist in all his dealings. [Robert J. Alter, The Art
of Bible Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019], 50-51)
