Josh Tinley notes that the TNIV of 1 Samuel 1:19 reads:

Early the next morning they arose and worshiped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her.

Josh then raises a question about the phrase “made love”:

“Made love”? I’m not a Hebrew expert, but isn’t “made love” a bit too colorful of a translation of a verb that the NRSV translates as “knew”? A form of the verb “to know” was also used by the gang rapists at Sodom (Genesis 19:5); fortunately, the TNIV translators here do not use “make love,” but opt for “have sex with.” After further analysis of the books of the Pentateuch and Deuteronomic history, I found that the more common verb for sex, which the NRSV translates as “to lay with,” is translated in the TNIV as “to sleep with.”

Personally, I have to side with the Sodomite rapists in the TNIV: “To have sex with” is a verb phrase that means what it says, makes sense to contemporary readers, and avoids icky and weak jargon (i.e. “to make love to” and “to sleep with,” respectively). I appreciate the TNIV’s efforts to eliminate the confusing and childish use of the verbs “to know” and “to lay with.” But “making love” belongs in a contemporary paraphrase, not in a standard translation.

I’m not really sure why Josh considers “to make love” and “to sleep with” “icky” or “weak”; “to make love” certainly strikes me as much more sentimental than Hebrew ידע, but “to sleep with” seems to me pretty much the same euphemism as שכב. I’m also not sure why Josh considers “to know” and “to lay with” “confusing and childish”; these are merely literal(istic) and traditional renderings of ידע and שכב. Still, I would tend to agree with Josh that “to make love” is a little overly paraphrastic (see more below) and, it seems, somewhat inconsistent with the TNIV’s renderings elsewhere.

In a comment to Josh’s post, however, Wayne Lehman of the Better Bibles Blog offers a brief defense of “to make love” in this context. Wayne comments:

Josh, FWIW, I think the TNIV translates well here with the common euphemism “made love to.” To me, making love sounds like a more, well, loving thing for a husband and wife to do, than “sleeping with” each other.

I enjoyed reading your post and empathize with your concern that a translation not sound too colloquial.

Though I often appreciate (but rarely comment on) Wayne’s posts on the Better Bibles Blog, I have to disagree with his assessment quoted here. The problem, to me, is not the colloquialism of the translation, but the fact that Wayne’s defense of “to make love” for ידע here depends on psychologizing Elkanah. Now I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with readers wondering about biblical characters’ emotional states, states of mind, motivations, and so on. I do that myself, a lot, as a scholarly investigation into the literary artistry of biblical narratives, and most readers I know do that with historical and fictional characters all the time (whether in great novels, pulp novels, comic books, television shows, blockbuster films, or what have you). However, I do have a problem with translators disambiguating biblical characters’ emotional states when the text itself does not do so.

One important problem with “to make love to” in this particular passage is that the euphemism—or, at least, Wayne’s spin on the euphemism—imputes to Elkanah emotions that we don’t know that he had. To be sure, the larget context tells us that Elkanah loved Hannah (1:5), but also that he was preturbed with her for her fixation on getting pregnant (1:8). So when they went back to Ramah after their trip to Shiloh, and Elkanah “knew” Hannah, was he thinking thoughts of love (“I get to enjoy physical pleasure with my wife”), or thoughts of annoyance (“I have to play ‘baby maker’ for my wife”)? The text gives no way to decide this, and indeed these are not mutually exclusive, but Wayne’s logic in favor of “making love” over a more emotionally neutral term—because “to make love” sounds more loving than “to have sex”—seems to point readers toward one view of Elkanah’s emotional state over another, although the Hebrew text does not have this “spin” built into it. If I may borrow a trope from Wayne’s blog, it seems to me that better Bibles should mirror as closely as possible the ambiguities of the source texts, and it seems to me that Wayne’s comment, though intended to defend “to make love to” in 1 Sam 1:19, demonstrates precisely that the TNIV translators have not done that in this passage.

Note: In my transition from Blogger to WordPress, the WordPress import feature did not work, so comments did not come across as comments. However, I do have archives of some comments available, and I thought the comments on this post were interesting enough to copy over as part of the post itself.

Daniel M. Perez commented:

For what it’s worth, based on the midrash, “make love” would not be completely out of order in terms of Elkanah’s feelings towards Hannah, though I doubt it is recorded anywhere in Rabbinic literature what he was thinking that very morning. I’d need to check to make sure, but this is my recollection.

Kevin P. Edgecomb commented:

For that particular usage of ידע I’ve always thought that the best translation would be “be intimate.” This conveys the closeness implied by the root’s connotation of knowledge, while still retaining a connection to proper English usage. We can “know a subject intimately” and can “be intimate” with someone. That seems an appropriate equivalence.

Wayne Leman commented:

Christopher, thanks for disagreeing with me so graciously. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the issue. I was simply commenting based on my understanding of biblical sex, that it is something that God intended to be a part of a loving relaitionship. I don’t know whether Elkanah and/or Hannah experienced love during their “love-making” (as it is often called in contemporary English) and I agree with you that we should not try to divine the feelings of biblical characters when they cannot be known to us.

I’m wondering if those who object to the use of “made love” might be focusing a bit too much on the literal words of this euphemism. It is, after all, intended to be a euphemism for the sex act. I’m not always sure when people “make love” today how much love is involved. Euphemisms, like most idioms, often lose some of the literal meanings of their words over time. It’s possible that that has occurred with “make love.”

In any case, this is a good topic to discuss. And, if nothing else, it should remind those of us who want to experience biblical sex that love should be part of that experience, even if it is not accurate to have the word “love” in a translation about that experience.

I enjoy reading your blog. Happy New Year, Christopher.

Wayne Leman commented:

Kevin said:

For that particular usage of ידע I’ve always thought that the best translation would be “be intimate.”

Kevin, I agree that “be intimate with” is an improvement on simply “know.” But it is quite common to be intimate with someone or to know them intimately where no sex is involved. From my understanding of English, I don’t think that any variation of the Hebrew euphemism for having sex with someone works for English, at least not unless we learn “Bible English” which many English speakers do not know (at least not, er, intimately!).

After reading Christopher’s post, I understand why some have objected to my affirmation of the English euphemism “make love” for what Elkanah and Hannah did. I would have no problem with simply translating that they “had sex.” Today’s speakers of English do not seem to have the same problem as speakers of Biblical Hebrew or Victorian English with just saying it like it is, instead of having to use a euphemism.

I do think that the point comes where we have to ask where the line is where we have gotten too literal in our analysis of euphemisms and other figures of speech. The common euphemism “sleep with” could be dismissed on such grounds because no one is asleep with they “sleep with” someone (having sex).

I myself may have been too much of a literalist in questioning your suggestion of “be intimate with” for the sex act.

Isn’t translation interesting, as well as difficult?!

Kevin P. Edgecomb wrote:

Yes, Wayne, it’s both fascinating and difficult! We all think we connote the same meanings in our usage of various words and phrases, which is as much a misconception as the idea of being able to completely literally translate any language into another.

One of the reasons I would still prefer “be intimate” for this particular usage of ידע is that this circumlocution in English, with its possibility of misconstrual, is already present there in the Hebrew. We know by context what is being done, but how did they describe it themselves? By a verb that covers the same range that our verb “be intimate” covers. After all, in English, to know something is to be intimate with a subject; to have a friend is to be intimate with them; to have intimate relations with someone is to have sex with them.

This kind of translation would not only teach us a little about the underlying Hebrew, and how these ancients thought about their world (which is rather the point of reading what they wrote, isn’t it?) but also for those just learning English (as truly we all should be, continually), it will give them more examples on how the language is used.

That’s my own ideal approach, anyway. We’ll just have to wait and see if I ever get around to a full-scale application like your own!