The Truth about the Controversial New Translation of the Bible

I don’t know any Danish. My rudimentary ability to parse a simple Danish sentence depends entirely on my knowledge of English, German, a wee bit of Dutch, and a Danish-English dictionary. Moreover, I’ve seen only a handful of excerpts from the new Danish Bible translation that, accused of anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism, has recently been causing a furor. Yet having said as much, I’ll hazard the opinion that not only is the new translation not what it has been accused of being, it is in some ways (whether this was the intention of its translators or not) the most pro-Jewish Christian Bible ever published.

Those of you who have followed the uproar know it broke out when news spread that Bibelen 2020, a contemporary version of the Old and New Testaments published by the Danish Bible Society (DBS), had eliminated the word “Israel” in many places. In some passages, particularly in the New Testament, “Israel” was replaced by such wordings as “the Jews,” “the Jewish people,” or simply “the People.” In others, it was changed even more radically, as when Psalm 121:4, “He who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,” became “He who watches over us.”

A reaction was not long in coming from Danish Bible readers. “Bible 2020 is an assault on the faiths of both Jews and Christians, and an attack on the history of the Jewish state of Israel,” wrote Dr. Petra Heldt, director of the Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Jerusalem. Referring to Psalms 121:4, she went on: “DBS pretends that we get the divine watchfulness. [The identity of Israel] has been stolen.” Heldt accuses DBS of “emulating the current social attitude that develops from the anti-Israelism of Muslim immigrants and that is picked up by other parts of Danish society.”