Bender, Margaret C., and Thomas N. Belt. 2025. The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 190 pp.
The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible documents and explains how Bible translation into the Cherokee language dealt with many challenges, both linguistic and cultural. The authors’ explanations enable readers to better understand how the translated Bible became the new voice of God in Cherokee.
The title refers to the “Cherokee Bible,” though both Christians and Jews would agree that the complete “Bible,” their canonical Scripture, has not yet been fully translated into Cherokee. The Cherokee New Testament was translated and published in the first half of the nineteenth century, then Exodus and Genesis soon after, with the rest of the Bible underway. These Scriptures are still important in Cherokee life. For many, the Cherokee New Testament is an important part of their religious belief and practice. For a wider audience, it is the authority on proper spelling. The main title of this book is The New Voice of God. This reflects the way that the Scriptures gained respect and authority broadly across the Cherokee nation.
The authors represent the perspective of a native Cherokee speaker (Thomas N. Belt) and the perspective of a very informed outsider (Margaret Bender), who has studied modern Cherokee life extensively. This combination of emic and etic perspectives makes the discussion richer.
Neither of the scholars is familiar with the technical literature on Bible translation. When they mention some interesting translation examples, the broader readership will be fascinated by them. But Bible translation scholars may simply nod and read on, as with the discussion of inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns. This is not a criticism, just a clarification of their intended broad audience.
The authors analyze three biblical books: Genesis and the Gospels of Matthew and John. They describe and explain many features of the translation, highlighting choices made by the translators. The authors examine in separate chapters the Cherokee words used in the translation, grammatical issues faced in translation, cultural issues affecting translation, and literacy.
The Cherokee translation used ordinary words and very few loan words. Therefore, the authors state, nineteenth-century Cherokee readers could understand the Cherokee translation more easily than nineteenth-century English speakers could understand the King James Version. The translation’s straightforward vocabulary “contrasted with traditional ceremonial and medicinal language” (52).
The authors contrast the attitudes of missionaries toward traditional language among the Cherokee and among the Apache. Those working with the Cherokee used many existing and traditional words to talk about the Christian message. In stark contrast, missionaries to the Apache taught that anything in the Apache language having to do with traditional religion had to be purged (110). This may be part of the reason that among the Apache there has been strong resistance to the Christian faith (Brown 1963, 17–18).
The Cherokee translators coined new terms by combining words and also gave semantic extensions to some Cherokee words. For example, “priests,” those who offered burnt sacrifices, was translated as “fire feeders.” And where the King James text of Genesis 1:21 reads, “God created great whales,” the translators used the Cherokee word for a river monster. The word “oven” became “bread baking place,” a new idea to the Cherokee and one still in use in contemporary Cherokee. The Cherokee language had no technical term for “virgin,” so the translators spoke of a female’s age and marital status. This was different from the King James Version’s use of “virgin,” but more in line with the Hebrew word עַלְמָה.
The Cherokee translators faced the struggle that every Bible translation faces: how to translate “God,” the high deity (103–104). They chose the word Unehlanvi, also translated as “creator.” Through frequent use in Christian circles, the word has now become an established term, even among Cherokees who do not follow Christianity. The word can now be pronounced with different tones to distinguish its use as “creator” or “God” (Feeling 1975, 177).
In a number of places, the authors point out that the grammar of the Cherokee translation is more precise than that of the King James Version, which the translators had followed. They highlight the linguistic awareness and precision of the translators as they applied their language’s grammatical categories to foreign texts.
The Cherokee language marks past-tense verbs to show whether the speaker or author experienced the action personally, an evidential function. The authors identify and explain relevant passages. For example, the action of God creating the earth is marked as not experienced by the author of Genesis. In the Gospel of Matthew, the authors point out how the translation uses evidential markers to indicate when the author Matthew was present for the action and when he was not, such as when Jesus was alone with three disciples.
Cherokee further distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive categories in first-person plural pronouns. The translation uses the appropriate morphemes to carefully indicate whom the speaker includes in saying “we” (62). The authors give the example of the disciple Andrew telling his brother Peter, “We have found the Messiah” (John 1:41). Andrew is telling Peter, who has not yet met Jesus, so this passage uses the first-person exclusive forms. The translators were aware of their language’s features and used them. However, the authors do not mention the passage that is (in)famous among Bible translators who think about the inclusive/exclusive distinction, Matthew 8:25. In a boat in a storm, the disciples say to Jesus, “Lord, save us: we perish!” Did the disciples include Jesus when they said, “We perish”?
Cherokee also marks nouns for grammatical animacy rather than gender. Within this system, stars are grammatically classified as human. In Genesis, Joseph tells his family about his dream in which stars (representing his brothers) bow down to him. In the Cherokee text, the stars are obligatorily marked as human. The authors claim that because the stars bowing to him in the dream are grammatically marked as human, the metaphor is stronger. If the stars are obligatorily marked as human by the grammar, I am skeptical that native speakers of Cherokee would sense a stronger metaphor, though English speakers may see it that way.
Cherokee grammar allows three different ways to express imperatives, using grammatical forms that differentiate degrees of time and politeness. The authors discuss the differences and explain why the translators made their choices according to the contexts, helpfully giving dozens of biblical examples in tables (65–77).
The book does not include much discussion of the individual translators. However, the authors helpfully tell us that David Brown and Elias Boudinot, two Cherokee translators, were sent to “elite northeastern boarding schools” where they learned Greek and Latin, better equipping them as Bible translators (5). The authors also describe the company of translators as “highly competent fluent translators” (63).
Cherokee literacy skills spread quickly and widely. This was due, in part, to two local factors. First, there was immense pride that Sequoyah had just invented their syllabary in 1821. It was then officially adopted in 1825, during the time that the Cherokee Bible translation was underway. Second, the syllabary was relatively easy for Cherokee speakers to learn. Translated Scripture was the most widely available literature in their language. As more and more Cherokee learned to read their own language, fewer of them came to the missionaries to learn to read English.
Having Scripture in their language equipped Cherokee believers to take control and develop their own Cherokee way of practicing Christianity (Sanneh 2009). This book is one of a small but growing number of studies examining and evaluating older Bible translations and their impact. See, for example, Alfredo (2025), Guthmann (2026), and Reed (2025). One hopes that there will be similar studies of early Bible translations among marginalized communities. The New Voice of God has set a high bar for others who follow. It will be of interest to any who study Cherokee history, language, and culture, as well as to those who study Bible translations and how they affect societies.
Peter Unseth
Dallas International University