Spanish preference to drop pronouns

Question

I often read from the Bible when studying Spanish as it's very easy to read the English and Spanish in parallel. Here's a passage from Genesis 1:10 that got me thinking.

A lo seco, Dios lo llamó «tierra», y al conjunto de las aguas lo llamó «mares». Y vio Dios que era bueno.

There is no subject in the second clause of the second sentence and I was initially thinking about what makes the subject unambiguous. In other words, how do I know by context with certainty which way to read this?

And God saw that he was good. (No?)

And God saw that it was good. (Yes!)

Plugging both of those English sentences into Google Translate just now produced identical sentences in Spanish without any pronoun for clarification. No help there.

So I started comparing some of the various editions of Reina Valera. The original Reina Valera is many hundreds of years old though it had been revised several times in recent decades and consistently rendered the same as above. But then I saw that the Reina Valera Actualizada has added an explicit pronoun.

Y vio Dios que esto era bueno.

RVA seems to be it's own branch of the translation tree starting in the early 1980s. One description of RVA says: "The RVA uses a contemporary language that people can understand throughout the Spanish speaking world." https://www.logos.com/product/339/reina-valera-actualizada

Most of the versions I had available to examine were one of these two Spanish sentences with the concensus leaning toward omitting the pronoun. I can't tell at a glance whether there was a trend based on recency of the translations. In case anyone cares, other variations were:

Y Dios consideró que esto era bueno. (NBD)

Al ver Dios que todo estaba bien, ... (DHH)

Y Dios vio que estaba muy bien esto que había hecho. (PDT)

Al ver Dios tal belleza, dijo: ... (TLA)

So here's my question: Is there a tendency for modern speakers to favor the inclusion of esto here? A potential explanation is that this represents a more universally understood translation across the whole Spanish-speaking world without confusion and possibly education level being a factor. As evidence of preference, perhaps this topic is even addressed in style guides for Spanish-language publications. (I would have checked http://www.manualdeestiloap.com/ except I'd need to buy an account.) Or is all this speculation completely off base?

Any insights on why some don't include the pronoun while others do?

Answer 1

Probably one of the most difficult questions in this site. I can only give my opinion: the Bible has always been one of the most studied books, and hence one of the most known. One of the first translations (from 1569) said this:

Y llamó Dios à la ſeca Tierra, y al ayuntamiento de las aguas llamó Mares: y vido Dios que era bueno.

As this is the first chapter of the Bible, what is said here is what is most learned and what people most know. So I think the translators had to be careful not to change sentences that were already in the minds of the people. The sentence in fact has arrived our days unchanged, but for me it sounds very archaic, the kind of sentence you expect to read just in the Bible, and nowhere else. When I make cupcakes I don't say "y vio Carlos que eran buenas". Neither with nor without the subject in the relative sentence.

So maybe the Bible is the book that follows absolutely no guide of translation, except for the very new ones, that speak the nowadays Spanish. In this version that sentence just disappears, or is changed for "al ver Dios tal belleza", as you state in your question.