Everybody Needs an Editor

These days, I have more free time on my hands than I used to, so I have been listening to a series of lectures on CD by a professor of Hebrew and Bible studies at NYU on the history of the Bible. One of the early lectures focuses on the question of who wrote the Bible. There are no definitive answers to the question. Really, I didn’t expect a specific author credit other than perhaps Moses. But the scholarship is very interesting. What did surprise me was that the professor spends some time noting that the Bible had not only writers but also editors. 

As someone who sends out business cards proclaiming to be a “Writer/Editor,” I was glad that the editing role in the creation of the Bible was being acknowledged. Even if the writers were divinely inspired, they were bound to make some mistakes and overlook some inconsistencies. Hence, the need for editors. Of course, we editors also like to think we are divinely inspired. As I often tell my children (and anyone else I encounter), “Everybody needs an editor.”

Here is an example of Biblical editing that the lecturer noted. In Exodus, Chapter 12, verses 8–10, the Israelites are commanded to eat the flesh of the lamb that they slaughtered and whose blood they used to paint their doorposts so the Angel of Death would “pass over” their houses and spare their first born children. How should the lamb be cooked? The answer is stated directly: it should be roasted with fire and NOT boiled in water. Any parts that remain after the evening meal should be burned with fire in the morning. The details are pretty specific, so they must have seemed important to the writers of Exodus and to the people of Israel who were fleeing from Egypt and heading slowly toward Canaan.

The story of the Passover celebration meal is repeated later in the Bible, this time in Deuteronomy 16:7, where a different verb is used to describe the cooking process—one which involves boiling, though my Bible translates the term as “roast.” Not a big deal, most of us would probably think. But the discrepancy worried scholars over the years—and must have disturbed one or two Biblical editors too, because they now got involved. In a later book, II Chronicles (35:13), one or more editors took over when the lamb cooking process is again described, and this time included terms for BOTH roasting and boiling. The editors thus protected the egos of both previous sets of writers—an editing skill that is often underappreciated.

Over the years, my children have each asked me to review some of their compositions and to provide a little editing magic. We all decided that was not cheating, just improving. I found the best technique to use involved leaving the beginnings and endings of paragraphs pretty much intact while making needed adjustments in the middle sentences and adding an occasional transition or two. [It’s a little like those reading tests you see online where some of the letters inside words are transposed, but your mind makes the connections anyway.] It must have worked ok, because both children often got an ego boost in noting, “You really didn’t change anything much.” I would just nod.

  

All of which reminds me of perhaps my most memorable editing moment, which occurred the summer after I graduated from high school. I was working as an intern on the Savannah Evening Press, the local afternoon daily. The press run of the day’s paper was almost ready to begin. I was asked to give a quick (but thorough) read to the front page to make sure everything looked right. I spotted a pretty embarrassing error. The typesetter had left out the letter l in the word public. In Savannah, Georgia, in 1967, no one discussed anything pubic, especially on the front page of a newspaper. I was told to rush down to the press room, find a pressman, and say these memorable words—“Stop the Presses!!!” That is exactly what happened. Then a typesetter rushed in with a chisel and chipped off the letters “ic” from the word on the plate. The presses started up again, and 30,000 copies were run off with a blank space between the words pub and library on page 1.

In the old days, type was set by placing individual
metal letters into metal frames

I have spent much of the next 50 years editing as well as writing a wide range of materials, but I have never felt quite as heroic as at that moment in 1967. I can just imagine how the editors working on II Chronicles must have felt as they improved the Bible!

A pressman checks the presses. As I learned,
he can even stop the presses!