Reading the Bible in Spanish: My Unexpected Journey

My grandmother came to the United States from Oaxaca in the 1970s. She brought three things: a cast iron pan, a photo of her mother, and a Spanish Bible with a cracked red cover that she read every morning at the kitchen table.

I grew up hearing Bible stories in English — Sunday school, VBS, youth group. The language of scripture for me was always King James cadence, thee and thou and hath. I thought I knew these stories.

Then my grandmother passed, and I inherited the red Bible.

Reading as a Second Language

My Spanish is decent but not fluent. Reading the Reina-Valera was slow at first — I had to look things up, cross-reference with English, read certain verses three times before they landed. But that slowness turned out to be a gift.

When you can't read on autopilot, you actually read. Every verse costs you a little effort, which means every verse gets a little more attention.

"Lámpara es a mis pies tu palabra, y lumbrera a mi camino." — Salmos 119:105

There's a music to the Spanish that I didn't expect. Lumbrera — a lantern, a luminary. The English word "light" is fine. Lumbrera is luminous.

What My Grandmother Heard

The further I got into her Bible, the more I felt like I was hearing scripture the way she heard it. The language she prayed in. The words that comforted her through hard decades in a new country.

I still use the English checklist app to track my progress — 66 books, one chapter at a time. But on the days I feel like I'm just going through the motions, I open the red Bible instead. It slows me down in the best possible way.

I think she would have liked that.