It’s important not to work on the Sabbath, like Rebecca and Lucy in the Bible.
Well, at least that seems to have been what a pastor was teaching his congregation in Nigeria. This pastor belonged to the Ekpeye people group, who lacked a Bible translation.
David J. Clark, author of Babes in the Jungle, spent a year with the Ekpeye to analyze their language. He met the local Baptist lay pastor in the village of Orupata, whose services Clark frequently attended. The services would be conducted mostly in Ekpeye, but since there was no Bible translation, the Bible reading was given in English from the King James Version. The pastor would then give his own interpretation of the passage into Ekpeye on the fly.
With ~2,200 languages around the world still lacking Scripture completely, many pastors are in this same situation, having to rely on Scriptures in a language neither they nor their congregations understand well. As Clark recalls, the consequences of lacking an Ekpeye Bible translation were somewhat serious:
We knew that Okpara’s grasp of English was not up to the King James language level, so his interpretations were almost certainly idiosyncratic to say the least. He would sometimes give a summary of his sermon in English for our benefit, and the one we remember best was about two characters called Rebecca and Lucy, both apparently male!
Rebecca wanted to borrow Lucy’s hoe to “go farm” and work on a Sunday. Lucy agreed to lend the hoe, so Rebecca went to work on the farm, and God was not pleased. The moral of the story was clearly that on Sunday one should give attendance at church priority over everyday concerns, however important.
But the story was presented as a Bible story, and brought home to us the difficulty that many pastors like Okpara labour under by not having a Bible in a language that they can readily understand. At one level, the sermon had its amusing side, but at a deeper level, it underlined the importance of Bible translation for a strong and well-founded church life.
According to the Joshua Project, the Ekpeye today have 90,000 speakers. But despite the fact that SIL had done some work among the Ekpeye in the early 1970s, the Bible translation project currently underway is still not completed.
Around the world, hundreds of millions of people are still waiting for a Bible translation project to start in their language. As a result, churches suffer and pastors struggle. You can join the effort to get the Bible into every language still needing it by partnering with the Scacewater’s Wycliffe teaching ministry in prayer or financial giving.
Also grab a copy of David Clark’s Babes in the Jungle, a thoroughly humorous and insightful memoir of the retired United Bible Societies Translation Consultant’s time among the Ekpeye people.
