Where the smiting comes from

Nobody is smitten in Arabic. These 58 verses are in the corpus because at least one of eight English translators used a smite-word somewhere in them, and how often each one did so tells you about the translator: Arberry finds 37 verses to smite in, Pickthall 27 and Shakir 14, while Abdel Haleem and Khattab, translating in 2004 and 2015, find none at all.

The Arabic in front of Abdel Haleem and Khattab is the same as everyone else's. Where Pickthall writes smite the necks in 8:12, Khattab writes strike their necks, the same command from the same Arabic with a different English verb. Pickthall set out in 1930 to make the Qur'an sound like scripture, and scripture in English meant the King James Bible, so his Qur'an smites the way Joshua smites. By the time the modern translations were made the word had left the living language and they let it go.

The translators disagree with one another even when they worked a few years apart: Pickthall in 1930 finds 27 and Yusuf Ali in 1934 finds 8. No verse here has a smite-word in more than 5 of the eight translations, and 31 of the 58 rest on a single translator's word, so more than half of the Qur'anic verses in this account are here because one translator liked an old verb.

What I was counting

Auditing only the Qur'an would let the Bible off, and that won't do, because the 414 biblical verses got in exactly the same way. Where the King James Version says smite it is mostly translating one Hebrew root, nakah (נכה), a plain verb of hitting that covers everything from a slap to a massacre, and later English Bibles have been quietly replacing it with strike, kill and defeat, just as Abdel Haleem and Khattab do with the Arabic. Run this audit across four centuries of English Bibles and the smite-words would thin out the same way.

What I have been counting all along is an English verb with a four-hundred-year career, and the figure of 472 is, before anything else, a count of how often English translators chose that verb. I wanted to say so here, beside the counts, because an account book is only worth keeping if it says what it counted.

Account closed · 58 verses audited · 103 smite-words from six translators · 0 carried forward