Hawaii - James Michener [176]
Nothing that Abner applied himself to in these years gave him greater pleasure, for he kept before him his Greek and Hebrew texts, Cornelius Schrevelius' Greek-Latin Lexicon, plus those versions of the Bible he had studied at Yale. He was happy, like a plowman who turns furrows in a field without stones, or a fisherman who sets his nets for known returns. Usually he worked with Keoki, laboring over every passage with the most minute attention, and as the years passed he reached those two books of the Bible which he cherished most. The first was Proverbs, which seemed to him a distillation of all the knowledge man could hope to know. It was especially appropriate for Hawaii, since its crystallizations were in simple language, easily understood and long remembered, and when he came to the glorious closing pages in which King Lemuel describes the ideal woman, his pen truly flew along the ruled pages, for it seemed to him that Lemuel spoke specifically of Jerusha Bromley: "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. . . . She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar. . . . She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. . . . Strength and honor are her clothing; . . . Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."
When he finished translating Proverbs he left the last pages exposed, so that Jerusha might read them, and he was disappointed that she did not take notice of them, for she had learned not to interfere with his Biblical studies; so at last he was forced to hand her the pages of King Lemuel's conclusions, and she read them quietly, saying only, "A woman would do well to mark those pages." He was constrained to cry, "They were written about you, Jerusha!" but he said nothing, and put them along with the rest and forwarded them to Honolulu.
In the decades that were to follow, more than six committees would have occasion to polish this first translation of the Bible into Hawaiian, and in the portions contributed from the big island of Hawaii, or from Kauai, or Honolulu, the scholars frequently found understandable errors in translation or emphasis. But in the portions for which Abner Hale had been responsible, they rarely found an error. One expert, with degrees from both Yale and Harvard, said, "It was as if he had been in turn a Hebrew and a Greek and a Hawaiian." Abner did not hear this praise, for it came long after he was dead, but he reaped his full enjoyment from his great task when it came time to translate Ezekiel, for there was something about this strange book--a contrapuntal melody of the most banal observations and the most exalted personal revelations--that spoke directly to him and epitomized his life.
He loved the recurring passages in which Ezekiel, who must have been a rather boring man most of the time, laboriously set down the specific dates on which God spoke to him: "Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day . . . that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. . . . The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel." The assurance with which Ezekiel spoke on all matters, and his confidence that the Lord personally directed him, gave Abner great consolation, and whenever he copied out Ezekiel's blunt statements of his correspondence with God, he felt that he, too, was participating in it: "In the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day . . . , as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah sat before me, . . . the hand of the Lord God fell there upon me." It was, to Abner Hale, clarity itself that the prophet Ezekiel, sitting in counsel