Translating מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר in Isaiah 52:7
Why I prefer the NRSV's translation compared to most other English translations
I recently read Isaiah 52:7 in the NIV translation, and it seemed to me to feel a bit awkward and clunky to read, and not quite how I had remembered it in my head:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
Upon looking at various translations, I found that the NRSV’s rendering was most likely the one I had in mind, and one that I found much more enjoyable to read:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
Before diving in to the reason for the differences in translation, I want to first try and understand why I much more prefer the NRSV’s version to the NIV’s.
The Rule of Three
When I mentioned my preference to a friend, she responded with “it’s because we naturally like things to come in threes.” I hadn’t really given this much thought before, but I might be the only one—the “Rule of Three” is apparently a very well-known principle suggesting that lists containing three items are more satisfying, memorable, and effective than other numbers.1
The Rule of Three isn’t a new concept either, in fact, the Romans even had a phrase for this: omne trium perfectum (“Everything that comes in threes is perfect”).2 There is just something about lists of three that feels natural, that feels right.3 As Dr. Ken Broda Bahm puts it: “There is something satisfying and cognitively “complete” in a set of three.”4
In the NIV’s translation of Isaiah 52:7, the list of things that the messenger does before saying to Zion “Your God reigns” contains four items:
Bringing good news
Proclaiming peace
Bringing good tidings
Proclaiming salvation
Whereas the NRSV’s translation has only three:
Announcing peace
Bringing good news
Announcing salvation
My best guess for why I prefer the NRSV’s translation is due to the Rule of Three. Either this rule is inherent in human nature so that I am naturally drawn to lists of three over four, or I have grown up in a society that so embraces the Rule of Three that I have been subconsciously conditioned this way.
As to the final action of the messenger (saying to Zion, “Your God reigns!”): while this could be considered the fourth/fifth item in the list, I find myself both mentally and verbally pausing before these words, and therefore separating them slightly from the preceding words. I think this is why the verse feels like a list of three/four items, followed by an emphatic conclusion.
Alternatively, it could just be that the Rule of Three has nothing to do with it and I just have a preference for lists of four over lists of five. If this is the case, it could be related to our ability to only hold around four pieces of information in short-term memory.5
A survey of translations
When looking at English translations of this verse, they tend to fall in either one of two categories regarding who the feet belong to: either a simple noun (e.g. “the messenger” or “the herald”), or a more descriptive phrase related to good news or good tidings (e.g. “those who bring the good news”).
Here’s what I found when surveying an arbitrary list of English translations:
Simple noun – CEB, CSB/HCSB, NRSV/NRSVue, NET
Descriptive phrase – ASV, ESV, KJV, LEB, NASB, NIV, NKJV, NLT, RSV, TLV
Let’s be honest, I could put another few three-letter acronyms in that second list and no-one would question it.
Outside of the NRSV (and NRSVue) and a few other translations, it seems clear that the majority of English translations opt for the longer descriptive phrase in the first part of the verse instead of just a simple noun.6 But why?
To the Hebrew!
The Hebrew word in question here (according to the BHS) is מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר (mevaser).7 Without doing any further study, my initial instinct is to question why a single Hebrew word needs a translation as long as “those who bring the good news” instead of a simple “messenger”. However, I don’t actually know Hebrew, so going with my instinct here is probably a bad move.
Digging further, it turns out that מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר is a participle form of the word בָּשַׂר (bāśar). This, of course, didn’t really help much until I went and looked up what a participle form was.
A participle appears to be a kind of word which can function as a verb, an adjective, or a noun.8 In this case, the participle מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר is a form of the verb בָּשַׂר which is being used as a noun. Essentially it is the “noun version” of בָּשַׂר. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: what does בָּשַׂר mean?
To the lexicons!
According to the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), the primary meaning of the word בָּשַׂר is:
to bring news (good or bad)9
Several senses are then given, including one that can be translated as “to bring good news”, but this doesn’t seem to necessarily be inherent to the word itself.
The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament adds some additional details about the meaning of the word, including its often-positive connotations:
בָּשַׂר (bāśar) publish, bear (good) tidings, preach, show forth
The root meaning is “to bring news, especially pertaining to military encounters”
“Normally this is good news, but […] it need not necessarily be so”10
Finally, the Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament writes about בָּשַׂר:
The specific activity of delivering a message is indicated by the common Sem. root bśr, which had a neutral meaning at first but which often involved into “to bring good news”11
In summary: בָּשַׂר is a verb meaning “to bring news” and often (but not always) means “to bring good news.”
This means that the English translation of the word מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר needs to be a noun or noun phrase that is the “noun version” of bringing (good) news. This explains how we get the two different kinds of translation found above:
A simple noun such as “messenger” or “herald” seems to fit this definition perfectly well
A descriptive phrase such as “those who bring the good news”12 is perhaps a more literal rendering that maintains the verb-ness of the root word
One could argue that using the latter translation adds more context and more faithfully communicates the underlying sense of the word; the person to whom the feet belong isn’t just a generic messenger or herald, but someone engaged in the act of bringing good news.
This may seem like it answers the question of why the NIV and NRSV’s translations differ from each other, but there is one more aspect to consider.
Good tidings of good
If we take the most conversative meaning of מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר as “one who brings news,” without determining whether the news is good or bad, are there any textual hints in Isaiah 52:7 about the nature of the news?
It seems reasonable that the context in which the word is used can be used to inform our understanding of the meaning of the word. Fortunately, this verse provides ample ammunition for such a task:
The description of the feet as “beautiful” probably means that the news is good
The remainder of the message (peace, salvation, God reigning) must surely have been considered good news13
The use of מְבַשֵּׂ֗ר in other places in Isaiah seem to refer to good news (40:9, 41:27)
And, most obviously:
A few words further on in the verse, we get the phrase “who brings good tidings” (NIV) or “who brings good news” (NRSV)
Looking at the Hebrew again, we find this second phrase is two Hebrew words: מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר טֹ֖וב (mevaser tov). טֹ֖וב is an adjective with the simplest meaning being “good” (as in mazel tov—“good fortune”). This modifies the word מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר to have a meaning such as “one who brings good news”.
It seems that in light of the news here being good, that the news referred to by the first use of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר (persumably the same news) must also be good, hence the translation “those who bring the good news.”
Those translations that already find מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר to inherently refer to good news tend to translate מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר טֹ֖וב as the seemingly redundant “good tidings of good” or similar (ASV, KJV, LSB, NKJV, RSV) or “good news of happiness” instead (ESV, NASB, TLV).
Handling redundancy
While all these translation choices make perfect sense, many of them result in a situation where the word מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר in the first part of the verse and the words מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר טֹ֖וב in the second part are translated almost identically. This is most obvious in the LEB version:
How delightful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns as a king."
The NIV (and several other translations) try to disguise the redundancy by translating the second instance as “good tidings” instead of “good news”, but the meaning is still the same. Adding slightly more variation here are the translations mentioned above that use phrases like “good tidings of good” or “good news of happiness”.
If the words מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר טֹ֖וב have an explicit connotation of bringing good news, then it seems that the use of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר must have a lack of such a connotation.14 To translate the first in light of the second in a consistent manner would result in the first being rendered “one who brings news”. In light of the presence of “one who brings good news” in the same passage, this seems almost unnecessary, which brings us back to the NRSV’s translation.
I wonder if the NRSV chose to translate the first instance of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר with the shorter and more concise “messenger” in light of the fact that the terms appears a second time and is translated with the longer, more specific phrase, “who brings good news,” which has explicitly positive connotations.
In fact, it certainly seems like this is the case when looking at how the same word is translated in Nahum 1:15a (a very similar passage to Isaiah 52:7):
Look! On the mountains the feet of one who brings good tidings who proclaims peace!
There’s no redundant use of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר in this passage, and so the NRSV opts for the more descriptive translation of “one who brings good tidings”, whereas it translates the same word in the beginning of Isaiah 52:7 as “the messenger.”
There is the possibility that the double use of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר was intentional by the author as a technique to emphasise the goodness of the news, however I was unable to find any discussion in commentaries suggesting this. In any case, I find listing the actions of the messenger (announcing peace, bringing good news, announcing salvation) to provide a crescendo to the final proclamation of YHWH’s reign to be a much more compelling literary technique than the repetition of the phrase “who brings good news.”
Conclusion
It seems to me that the NRSV’s choice to translate the first instance of מְבַשֵּׂ֥ר as “messenger” is a good choice for several reasons:
It is a simple and accurate translation of the word,
It doesn’t prematurely convey an inherent “goodness” to the news, which allows the subsequent use of the word to be translated clearly as “good news”
The lack of a more specific definition is offset by the same word being translated more specifically shortly afterwards,
It avoids the redundancy of using the phrase “good news” twice (or “good news” and “good tidings”),
And, to my original concern, it follows the rule of three and is more pleasant to read and to say (in my completely objective opinion)
Thus ends what was originally supposed to be a short and straightforward blog post. I have no particular expertise in either Hebrew or Bible translation, so if there are any obvious errors or inaccuracies in this post, please reach out and let me know.
Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity,” Behav Brain Sci 24.1 (2001): 87–114, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922.
However, most commentaries that I checked that included their own translations preferred the simple noun. See Joseph Blenkinsopp, ed., Isaiah 40-55: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible 19A (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 338; Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 399; John Goldingay and David F. Payne, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40-55, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 264; John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah. Chapters 40-66, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 365; John D. W. Watts, Isaiah 34 - 66, WBC 25 (Nashville: Nelson, 20), 214.
As far as I can tell there are no variant readings for this word, but then again I don’t really know how to use a critical apparatus.
“בשר,” HALOT, 1:163–164, 163.
John N. Oswalt, “בָּשַׂר,” TWOT, 135–136, 135.
R. Ficker, “מֲלְאָךְ,” TLOT, 2:666–672, 669.
The NIV seems to be alone in using the plural “those” to describe the bringer(s) of good news, where other English translations use singular words or phrases, such as “him” or “the messenger.”
Indeed, Goldingay and Payne find this to be the case for the feet being described as lovely, see John Goldingay and David F. Payne, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40-55, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 264.
Alternatively, the use of טֹ֖וב may function as an intensifier, e.g. “good good news” or “good tidings of good.”