The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible

For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and social worlds—and how their translation in turn encodes the profound linguistic and cultural exchange manifested in the making of the Cherokee Bible. While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview.

Focusing on three books of the Cherokee Bible—Genesis, John, and Matthew—Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt demonstrate how Christianity, written in and on Cherokee terms, can be uniquely and distinctly Cherokee, while remaining undeniably Christian. For example, Cherokee’s rich and complex grammar work against English’s noun-centeredness, yielding creative approximations of European objects as conditions and essences as events. Cherokee’s radically different pronoun structure includes the reader in Biblical conversation in surprising ways. The authors also explain the relevance of the Cherokee Indigenous writing system—invented by Sequoyah, a non-Christian native speaker—to the complex spiritual landscape of the nineteenth century. Their analysis suggests that the Cherokee Bible records this cross-cultural encounter at a deep philosophical level, providing evidence that microlinguistic detail powerfully and intricately reflects macrosociological phenomena.

In showing how Cherokee Christians ingeniously adapted Christian practices to create unique social and spiritual identities, The New Voice of God documents how this adaptation—manifest in the translation of Christian texts into Cherokee—not only bridged two vastly different languages but also exposed deep philosophical differences, challenging Western cultural norms and reshaping spiritual discourse.

 

Margaret Bender is Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life and editor of Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology.
 

Thomas N. Belt (Cherokee Nation) is a retired Cherokee language instructor at Western Carolina University, where he received an honorary doctorate. He is a fluent Cherokee speaker and the author of articles on Cherokee language and worldview.