The Alter Bible

—Robert Alter

However, this reading doesn’t make much sense in Hebrew—elsewhere in the Bible, Shiloh is the name of a place, not a person—and modern translations interpret the verse differently. Thus the Revised Standard Version, an updating of the King James Bible produced in the 20th century, renders Genesis 49:10 as follows: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah,/nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,/until he comes to whom it belongs;/and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” This is something that Alter deliberately tries to avoid, as he explains in his introduction: “The unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language.”

Source: www.tabletmag.com