Compared to what? If we were translating “Gone with the Wind,” which has 200,000 words, it would take about six months. But “Gone with the Wind” is in English, a much easier language than Greek or Hebrew. It’s in one language, not two. And the subject matter is much easier. It’s not like Exodus, full of highly technical terms for animals, plants, minerals, architecture, textiles, and altar appointments. Gone with the Wind was written as entertainment. The Bible is intended to be spiritually and mentally challenging. It’s also much longer, because for marketing reasons we also have to translate the Septuagint. One million, 600,000 words, not counting the Apocrypha. Eight times as long as Gone with the Wind. Three times longer than War and Peace.

And the Bible is quite different from any other document in its readership, because experts will dissect and analyze every word. Pastors use short texts from the Bible to write sermons, articles, classes, and books. They dig into these texts as deeply as they can, using either the original languages or commentaries by professors who know the original languages. For this reason, our readership includes many people who have become experts in a few hundred verses or paragraphs of the Bible, and our translation has to be right or those pastors will not recommend our translation to their parishes.

So why is it taking so long? We have to do it right, so we won’t waste years and a stack of hundred dollar bills having to do it over.

Second answer:

Is it really taking so long? Compared to WHOM?

I went to the big Kingdom Hall here in Ternopil, a provincial capital, to see what Jehovah’s Witnesses were doing at their annual convocations. Ternopil province has one fiftieth of Ukraine‘s population. So when I counted 2,500 to 3,000 Jehovists just in our province, that tells me there are about 125,000-150,000 active Witnesses just in Ukraine, which agrees with their own figures. There are even more in Russia. That’s over a quarter million single-minded religionists with an enormous publishing house and a pile of money backing them. Just this year they finally published their heretical New World Translation in Russian. It took them 15 years–and they did it from an English original, not from the original languages; it says so right on the title page. “Perevedeno z angliyskovo izdanya.”

The patriarch of Kiev also issued a translation of the Bible into Ukrainian, but that was done from the Russian and Russian is even easier for Ukrainians to translate than English. It took them 15 years–and there are thousands of priests here who know both languages.

There are rumors that the Baptists are also doing a translation from the NIV into Ukrainian. It hasn’t shown up yet.

In any case, our translation will be the definitive Ukrainian translation of the 21st century, because only we will be doing it from the original languages. And we will be doing it as correctly as is possible for a small team of experts.

I thank you all for helping me do this, because it’s not the kind of work an amateur can do after he’s tired from his day job. By the grace of God, I’m not an amateur; my college and seminary have the finest program of Biblical languages that Lutherans offer in the Western Hemisphere. And by the generosity of you I could quit my day job as professor of Biblical languages, so I can edit the Ukrainian translation full time.

But what I truly need most of all is your prayers for me and for this project. Only God can give me the energy I need to do this work, and sometimes I run out of gas. A good time to pray for me is when you put on the coffee in the morning–something you do every day that’ll remind you to pray for me every day.

God bless you for your help.

I’m five seven and these days I see young (NOT old) Ukrainian women my height or a handful of inches taller. My wife is five two and vividly remembers the day we went to church at the famous Pochaiv monastery. It was a five or six hour service (we only stayed three and a half, standing the whole time). She vividly remembers that, standing behind dozens of old women, she could see over all their heads. This is something that had never happened to her before. That’s because all those women had been born in the 1920′s in the Soviet Union.

In 1932, Joseph Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians didn’t want to be part of the USSR, so Stalin, perhaps to save bullets and increase the terror, assembled the Red Army to close the border and confiscate the harvest. People still tell of Russian soldiers coming into their kitchens, smashing jars, trampling food, and destroying whatever they couldn’t carry off. There are other stories, many of them, that belong in a horror film. Stalin openly admitted to Churchill (it’s in “The Hinge of Fate”) to murdering five million Ukrainians, though it was closer to ten. Children who lived through it never grew to a normal height. When we arrived here in 1992, many old women (the men had almost all died in the war) walked at a permanent right-angle stoop from osteoporosis and scoliosis. Some looked like witches with protruding chins, missing teeth, and such twisted spines they would have fallen on their faces without walking sticks. It came from that terrible winter of man-made starvation.

Goliath was six cubits tall. Six Israelite cubits, which were like the old Ukrainian cubit–15 inches, not 18. Their cubit was short because they were short, and they were short because the Philistines had been stealing everything that wasn’t red hot, nailed down, or moving fast. It was to end the taxing, the looting, and the raiding that these hungry and desperate men rebelled against Philistia. Remember that David’s father sent food for his sons–the army couldn’t feed the soldiers enough.

Except for Saul, a six-footer who stood “head and shoulders above the rest,” the soldiers were all half-starved shorties, probably under five feet! So their cubit was also short. Six-cubit Goliath was not a nine-foot acromegalic giant doomed to bad health and an early death. He was a seven-foot-six superman who towered almost a yard over their heads. His spear was like a weaver’s beam with a point weighing 600 shekels–however much that was. Because measurements like the cubit varied depending on whether people were starving or not, some weights and measures in Bible dictionaries will have to be revised. And because I know about things like this, the footnotes in our Bible will not make Goliath an almost-impossible nine feet tall, but more like an overmuscled NBA center.

In the past, we have flooded three prisons with these New Testaments, and have also provided them to orphans, unwed mothers who visit our life centers, street kids, people in drug and alcohol rehab, and the destitute elderly in government institutions. In the past, about one fourth also went to a special program for poor handicapped children. Since Ukraine now has a beautifully illustrated full-color children’s Bible, and since almost all these children are far too poor even for a wheelchair let alone a TV set, this might be the most beautiful thing in their homes. At the moment this project is suspended because there is no funding even to print such Bibles, let alone distribute them.

If you would like to help us distribute more New Testaments, please donate today! Please also contact me and mention the amount and designation for your gift.

And may the Lord bless you as you bless others. These Bibles and Testaments will not sit on a coffee table. Most Ukrainians don’t have coffee tables! Or houses big enough to keep one in! And they will not gather dust on a top shelf. They will be READ.

Three verses just in Genesis seemed to contradict Biblical theology, so the oldest translators intentionally mistranslated these verses, as though they were mistakes by the scribes who had hand-copied and re-re-re-copied these words for over a thousand years.

But they weren’t mistakes. The translators just didn’t understand that the doctrine of the Trinity has many hidden proofs in the Old Testament. This fact was first brought to light by author Yoel Natan-the most important book on the Trinity in the last 1500 years. It’s subtitled “When Rabbis Worshipped the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

For 2,300 years Bible translators have been intentionally mis-translating. (There’s even a joke about how archeologists in Rome found a decree from an ancient Pope and realized that priests were supposed to “celebrate Mass”, not be a “celibate mass” but they left the “R” out of the first copy….)

In Genesis 20:13, 31:7 and 35:7, for example, all translations in all languages translate the word Elohim as God. This is quite proper where there is a singular verb. But all three verses have PLURAL verbs, which means that they MUST be translated with a plural like “Gods,” referring to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

This creates a problem, because the Athanasian Creed correctly states that we do not have three Gods but rather one God in three Persons. Fortunately, Elohim is actually an adjective usually used as a noun (“God”), but we could leave it as an adjective in this case and translate Elohim as “the Mighty Ones.”

The Ukrainian Bible will be the first in any language to have these new accuracies, and the only one until “The Jewish Trinity” sells a lot more copies. (The Jewish Trinity would be a terrific gift for your pastor, as are the author’s other ground-breaking books, which you can read about by visiting Yoel.info).

The Jews who started translating the Bible into Greek in 285 B.C. either did not understand this or they intentionally mistranslated it to make it agree with their Unitarian understanding of God. Or possibly the knowledge of the truth was lost during the captivity in Babylon. The unitarianism of Judaism could have been a reaction to the triad gods of Anu, Bel, and Ea. The Jews preached the Trinity, the Babylonians responded with their threefold god. The emphasis on unity was maintained while the trinity was forgotten. Possibly they intentionally mistranslated it so that no Jew could ever again think that there were more gods than the One. We know that the Jews will occasionally revise Scripture if they don’t agree with it; their translation of Psalm 22:8 is both wrong and nonsensical, for instance. But God is not a Unitarian, and there are no Satanic verses in our Bible. Especially in our time, with so many Jews coming to Jesus and so many anti-trinitarian cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses, we need the knowledge found in The Jewish Trinity. It might even be helpful for evangelizing Muslims!

Which is important. I’ve also been reading the Koran and in my opinion there are a lot more than three Satanic verses in it.

He was leading the class, and it was his job to explain: What does that mean in ordinary English?

Ray said “You should rejoice with your wife while she’s young.”

My hand shot up. “I reject that interpretation. I think it means you should rejoice with the wife you married WHEN you were young, instead of trading your 50-year-old wife for two 25-year-olds!”

After the laugh-explosion–this was a seminary, after all– everyone adopted my interpretation.

The book of Proverbs is the distilled and inspired wisdom of a people that honored wisdom above all else. Other nations boast of the beauty of their young women; Jews boast of the wisdom of their old men. The book of Proverbs isn’t something that you read through once in your life so that you can say you’ve finally read the Bible through. One Bible-reading program I saw recommends that–since there are 31 chapters–you read through one chapter a day, and start over every month. Or read it once a year and memorize what you’ve underlined.

Not a bad idea, since the way Proverbs was originally used was the way we use the wise sayings of Ben Franklin. You know: “The early bird gets the beer bottles,” “Never put off till tomorrow what you can postpone till the day after,” and “This is the day the Lord hath made. Let’s not louse it up.”

Biblical proverbs were memorized and quoted in all applicable situations. They were thought about while doing manual labor. They programmed the young so that they would act in certain ways. Some of them are paradoxical or hard to understand, and would have been discussed at length around the campfire after the day’s work was done. (I almost said “supper table,” but a simple table has been an unaffordable luxury for most of the world’s people throughout most of the world’s history–it still is, in much of the rural Third World.)

What’s so wise about saying “Rejoice with your wife while she’s young”? This is worth ink, paper and memorization for 3,000 years? Nah! Since there are various possible translations of “wife of your youth,” we need to pick the one that’s wisest. If you have a wiser interpretation, please tell me.

We also have to go beyond the literal. What does “Rejoice” mean? Not enough for our purposes! When it’s appropriate, of course you’ll rejoice. New jobs. Raises. Holidays. Anniversaries. New homes. Birth of a child, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, weddings… of course you’ll rejoice, even without a commandment. Let’s try for a synonym that’s actually useful, and translate it this way: Rejoice means what: Make merry? Celebrate? How about….

“BE HAPPY WITH the wife who you married when you were both younger.”

Be happy with–that is, rejoice AND be satisfied with her. Don’t expect more. Don’t go comparing her to other women, especially not the ones you see in mass media who can afford to spend hours in the beauty parlor before they ever get in front of a camera. Realize that we should control all our appetites–for food, drink, sex and even golf–and be moderate in all things. We should try to be less unattractive to our wives (it helps to keep off the pounds, try to give up smoking, comb our hair the first thing in the morning and even shave on our days off). If she’s got a few gray hairs, you’re the one who gave them to her, and if she has a few faults, remember: They’re the reason she figured she couldn’t get a better husband than you.

Other things that help: I’ve been out of America a dozen years and maybe the new statistics are different, but the last I knew, excessive debt was a factor in 90% of divorces, so discipline your spending. I’d suggest visiting EverydayCheapskate.com to help you get out of debt if your credit cards are hard to control.

And there was this interesting graph I remember. It was roughly like an X. The line that went up from left to right was “Number of days per year the Bible was used, including worship services and home Bible reading.” As it went up from zero to 365, there was another line that slanted directly downward, not quite to zero but pretty close. That was “Divorce rates in the general population.” Those who didn’t use the Bible at all had a divorce rate equal to American society’s–no surprise there–but those who used the Bible on a daily basis had a divorce rate that was the same as America’s in the good old days around 1900.

Last but not least I have to be happy with my wife because if I wasn’t, I’d have some real problems with my father-in-law. You might think, “Come on! You’re 55, your father-in-law must be in his 80′s at least!” Well, actually, Fred was fairly feeble when I first met him and he died of Parkinson’s 15, 20 years ago.

The “father-in-law” that I have to worry about offending is God. (But at least I’ve got no mother-in-law!) My wife is His daughter. And that’s the way I should treat her. Like the daughter of a great king.

That’s wisdom for today, folks. Wouldn’t this article be worth discussing around the dinner table some evening? And incidentally that’s the way the Ukrainian Bible which I’m helping to translate will render this proverb. I sure hope it catches on!

I’d encourage you to recommend this website to anyone you think might be interested in my work. I’m helping give a modern translation of the Bible to a country that’s bigger than France or Germany, and has more people than our West Coast states.

Roger Kovaciny on the Dennis Prager Show

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bohdan Kachmar, Ukrainian. My first doctorate was in medicine. I am close to a second doctorate in theology from Andrews in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Theology will keep people alive forever and not just as long as their hearts keep beating. Until fifteen years ago I practiced cardiology in Moscow, which was paradise in the Soviet Union. Purgatory was being a slave laborer in the Soviet gulag.

I would have been in the gulag together with my friend Roman Vovk except that I read Sherlock Holmes.

Back in Soviet times, printing the Bible was a crime that would get you 12 years of “re-education”. Americans have no idea what this means. It means:

1. Being on a 900-calorie diet… for twelve years. You’re never NOT hungry, even though your dog or cat wouldn’t want the lukewarm swill they give you. Your teeth start falling out from lack of minerals. 2. Working whether or not you are sick, exhausted or something hurts. Going to the latrine only when they let you. 3. Having none of the comforts you take for granted, the things your bathroom is full of. Living in a barracks and having so little you can carry it all in your pockets. 4. Working in conditions that you couldn’t even pay an illegal immigrant to accept, not for any amount of money, like for instance underground in Siberia and up to your knees in cold water without waterproof boots. 5. Being able to see your wife once a year–if they don’t cancel permission after she’s already made the long and expensive trip. Having the guards steal whatever they want out of her care packages. Having the government pressure her to divorce you. Suggesting that she do it so they won’t persecute HER. 6. Such punishments for breaking rules as two weeks in an unheated cell, without your coat, in winter.

But we risked all that to print parts of the Bible. It wasn’t possible to do more than a page at a time, which we were able to mimeograph. But if they found out who cut the stencils… 12 years for each of us.

Fortunately, my friend Roman Vovk was a typewriter repairman. Not a very good one, it seemed. He always kept the typewriters longer than he should have.

That’s because I read Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock proved that a wicked stepfather had faked a love letter on his typewriter. Every typewriter, you see, develops defects over time. An “O” may be flattened on the bottom or top. A tiny grain of sand in the metal of an “e” turns into a microscopic hole in the letter. One point of a “t” may be weak and rounded off.

When the KGB finds the machine with all three defects, they know they’ve got you.

What Roman Vovk did was that, after I cut stencils on a particular typewriter, he would take my typewriter keyboard and a dozen others completely apart and redistribute the keys randomly. The typewriters would then go back to their original offices and the KGB, with all their microscopes, never did catch on. They never found one typewriter where all the defects matched. Probably drove them crazy–and I hope they actually read the Bible pages which they were searching for typewriter evidence.

Such dedication to the Word is why, after Soviet power collapsed, Roman became general secretary of our Lviv branch of the Ukrainian Bible Society, and why I still work full-time translating the original languages into modern Ukrainian.

It isn’t easy, but we don’t complain much about how hard it is.

After all, we were ready to spend 12 years in a Soviet slave labor camp.

Thank you, Sherlock!

Dr. Bohdan Kachmar
Ukrainian Bible Society
44 Vul. Ivana Bahryanoho 79041
Lviv, Ukraine

I learned the language by studying grammar books, living in Ukraine, conversing, teaching English and four other languages while speaking Ukrainian, and reading their Bible all the way through, every book in one to five translations including one so old it uses a different alphabet. Reading a foreign Bible involves looking up and writing down the meaning of every word I didn’t know. During this process I discovered that practically every chapter of their Bible contains one or more words that I can’t find in any of my 12 dictionaries. This shows the need for a new translation–even Ukrainians can’t understand their own Bibles. And say so. Frequently.

To translate the Old Testament, first I prepare a book such as Genesis by reading it in Hebrew, looking up and writing down every unfamiliar word and form. Hebrew is so difficult that in the beginning, this meant every other word! (By now it’s “only” every fifth.) The Hebrew language is so complex that you need an 800-page two-column book of small print on large pages just as an index to the dictionary! It was certainly within God’s providence that, as knowledgeable Lutherans like Prof. Herman Sasse have written, the college and seminary I graduated from have the finest program of Biblical languages that Lutherans have in the Western Hemisphere. Our reputation stretches all the way to Germany.

When the translators are done, they send me their printout which I read through to look up and write down any unfamiliar words. By this time there are very few, but I don’t like to have to consult reference books while proofreading. I want to KNOW the material so as to take in the material as a big picture, as well as word by word.

By this time it should be a “simple” matter of comparing the Hebrew of Genesis to the new Ukrainian translation. It still isn’t. If there is the slightest question, I will consult the ancient Greek translation from 200 years before Christ, the second-century Aramaic, the Latin translation from the fourth century after Christ, and sometimes even look at how Luther translated. (Almost all scholars will acknowledge that Luther was the finest individual Bible translator in history.) They were all centuries closer to the original language than we are and frequently have much to contribute; in fact, the Latin and Greek are absolutely essential.

It’s still tough. But by one of those little coincidences that God so often helps me with, I found a packet of plastic paper clips in the form of an arrowhead. These are ideal for my work. I put an arrowhead above the first word of the original, and as I slide it from one Hebrew word to the next, I underline the Ukrainian words that reflect the Hebrew. By the end of each verse, the entire translation must be underlined, and there must be no Hebrew words left untranslated unless it’s something that can only be expressed by your tone of voice. Questions and suggestions are written in green pencil; my objections are in red.

Dictionaries and computer Bible programs are also not enough. I consult at least three commentaries for the things the dictionaries might have missed, and I use different dictionaries and commentaries than my colleagues have for the widest possible word choice.

Finally, I compare the final translation with an English version just to double-check my own accuracy. If there is a significant difference anywhere, I’ll look back at the original languages to find out why.

Before submitting my comments, I double-check them; then the original translators consider every suggestion in committee; and before they send the work to the Ukrainian proofreader (just to make sure there are no mis-spelled words, skipped commas, important words like “not” left out of Commandments and so forth, as happened once in what was called “the Wicked Bible,”) there is a meeting in which we discuss every comment I made. I am not always right, because sometimes they have very strong reasons for the way they translated, but I always leave our meetings satisfied that this will be the Bible of the 21st Century.

Actually, there have been so many coincidences of that kind that I think of them as little love letters from God.

Pastor Stolzenburg’s sermon started with the love of God. One of the most famous theologians of the Twentieth Century said as he lay dying that the profoundest truth in theology was Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. And it’s a fact that we know about God’s love from Scripture alone. No other religion has this truth.

And yet, God encourages me to believe what Scripture says by little love letters-and when you’re working alone in a foreign mission, believe me that’s important.

One such was while we were visiting a missionary in Zimbabwe. In a store I saw exactly the zippered briefcase I wanted, and the price was right. Got it home and I couldn’t use it. Had to give it to my son-because it had all three of his initials on the zipper. Odds against that happening? 17,576 to one. (He needed it more than I did, anyhow.)

In my first parish they joked that I was like God, invisible all week and then eternal on Sunday, but another time I really DID have to be like God, present in two places at once. Or rather, I absolutely had to find a post office and mail a package without being late for the plane. It was in a strange city, I had no cell phone or phone book, time was so short and consequences of failure would have been so bad that I prayed Please, God, let the next person I see know how to direct me there! At that moment a man walked out to his car. I stopped to ask and he said “I’m driving there right now. Follow me.” Thank you, Lord.

One of the most striking was at the Black Sea where someone told me I could see Gorbachev’s dacha across the bay. It was high on a bluff, and I could see clouds forming rapidly as the hot, onshore wind rose and hit the cooler air forty stories up. When I stood at the cliff edge, of course the first thing I noticed was Gorbachev’s dacha. But I lost interest in his palace by looking down into the maelstrom of mist boiling up below my feet. Because the sun was behind me, my shadow fell onto the mist-and it was completely haloed by a rainbow.

A little love letter from God, that was, telling me how important my work of bringing Scripture to the former Soviet Union is.

Because only with an accurate modern translation of the Bible will Soviet citizens see the beauty and glory of Jesus transfigured before them-the way it happened in one last little love letter I’d like to tell you about.

This was on our own Transfiguration in August, and we were having an evening service at our church in Ternopil. Oddly for August, it had been gray all day, and I was preaching away about the transfiguration of Jesus. Usually I don’t stand behind a pulpit-just use it to hold the Scriptures and a water glass-but this time I did. It came time to re-read the verse about His garments being whiter than any launderer could bleach them. I stepped forward in my white robe and at THAT VERY MOMENT a brilliant shaft of sunlight came through the window and I was, so to speak, transfigured before them in dazzling white.

Coincidence? Dumb luck? Or a little love letter from God?

The three old translations use language I would call King James Ukrainian. Jesus and the Twelve sound like Robin Hood and the Merry Men. Many of the words in these translations aren’t found in any of my twelve dictionaries, and many Ukrainians don’t even have one.

The new translation you can understand but you can’t trust, because it was largely made with the help of a computer’s translation program. Also, it was translated from the Russian, not from the original languages.

Many Ukrainians can read Russian. But they don’t read Russian Bibles because the old Russian translation is even older than the old Ukrainian versions. There is to my knowledge only one modern Russian version, the Sovremenoye Perevod, and I’ve already found thirty major mistakes just in Genesis. Its best use is as a dictionary to help understand the old Russian Bible. Where they differ, the new one is usually wrong.

We are re-translating the Bible from the original languages so that Ukrainians will have a Bible they can both understand and trust. And when I’m done with the Ukrainian Bible I hope to do the same for the Russians, thanks to the generosity of my sponsors.

If you want 200 million former Soviet citizens to have Bibles that they can trust and understand, and would like to help, there is a way! Some guy said in the Bible, “I am too old to dig, and to beg I am ashamed.” I’m also too old to work with a shovel, but I’m not ashamed at all of begging. Please donate today! My colleagues both need at least a dollar-an-hour raise. One of them sounded like he wanted to quit last year because of the stress of too much work and so little salary that he had to do even more work at home, and it would have torpedoed the project if he had. But Mr. Jim Hildebrand of Columbus, Ohio, personally donated $2400 for him, so he’s still translating.

I’m not sure I can ask Mr. Hildebrand again, and besides my other colleague also needs a raise. Is there anyone else out there with a checkbook? Learn how to donate or view our current list of donors.