Over the past couple of days, my editor, agent, and I have been scrambling to deal with an ironic case of mistaken identity in Bible Babel. In short: the main character’s name isn’t correct in the version poised to go out to reviewers and potential endorsers. Yikes! One of the reasons that I wrote Bible Babel was to help people understand big and little puzzlers such as why God is sometimes referred to as LORD (appearing as big capital L, small caps ORD) and other times Lord. The former, LORD, is the way many English translations render the Old Testament’s four-letter, personal name for God (transliterated YHWH). This is THE NAME that God revealed to Moses, a stand-in for God’s very presence in the Jerusalem Temple, and by which God’s people could specially know their particular God. “Lord,” on the other hand, is the translation of a different Hebrew word, a generic noun meaning just that — “lord, master,” or (brace yourselves, feminists) “husband.” YHWH or LORD never appears in the New Testament, and the transition from LORD to Lord (especially the manner in which “the name of the Lord” functions in the New Testament) signals a provocative theological shift — finally defining what makes a Christian a Christian. Well, just before the book’s galleys (final form “lite” — i.e., possibly containing typos, etc) were produced, a typesetter misunderstood copyediting instructions and changed some cases of Lord to LORD. The result — sometimes there’s an error that may confound though a reader wouldn’t necessarily identify it as the typo it is, and sometimes the text simply doesn’t make sense. Even though the galleys clearly state that this is an “uncorrected proof,” to the credit of my superb editor and the team at HarperCollins, the plan now is to correct manually every instance in which the word appears erroneously before sending the copies out. Whew!
