Jewish English Bible translations

Before then, even Jews in English-speaking countries were still part of an immigrant culture to a large extent, which meant that they could either understand the Hebrew Bible in its original language to a certain degree or, if they required a translation, were still not fully comfortable in English.

Many translated Bibles and prayer books from before the Holocaust were still in Yiddish, even those published in countries like the United States.

A further reason is that often those Jews who study the Bible regularly still do so, to a greater or lesser extent, in its original language, as it is read in the synagogue.

[5] Nevertheless, Jewish translations of the Bible to English have become far more widespread, especially since the 1980s, and have been made available in numerous complementary versions and styles.

[7] A modern writer notes that despite its longevity, Leeser's translation was "wooden" and "devoid of literary distinction".

Its literary form was consciously based on that of the King James Version; Margolis, a non-native speaker of English, felt that was the proper standard of language that Jews should adopt for their translation.

The Old JPS translation was used in a number of Jewish works published before the 1980s, such as the Pentateuch and Haftaroth edited by J. H. Hertz and the Soncino Books of the Bible series.

The translation committee included Cyrus Adler, Solomon Schechter, Kaufmann Kohler, Samuel Schulman, and David Philipson.

[14] The 1917 translation was felt to be outdated by the 1950s, and a new effort developed that involved cooperation between numerous Jewish scholars from a variety of denominations.

The translators of the New JPS version were experts in both traditional Jewish exegesis of the Bible and modern biblical scholarship.

The translation attempts in all cases to present the original meaning of the text in a highly aesthetic form.

[15] The New JPS version is adapted for gender-neutral language in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised edition (2005, Union for Reform Judaism, ISBN 978-0-8074-0883-4), the official Torah commentary of Reform Judaism, where it appears together with the work of translator Chaim Stern.

Since 2017, the bilingual Hebrew-English edition of the JPS Tanakh (1985 translation) has been digitalized and is available online for free on the website Sefaria.

[16] First published in 1916, revised in 1951, by the Hebrew Publishing Company, revised by Alexander Harkavy, a Hebrew Bible translation in English, which contains the form Jehovah as the Divine Name in Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, and Isaiah 12:2 and three times in compound place names at Genesis 22:14, Exodus 17:15 and Judges 6:24 as well as Jah in Psalm 68:4.

In 1957 Joseph Gaer produced an abridged translation called The Jewish Bible for Family Reading.

Influenced by biblical source criticism and the documentary hypothesis, Gaer moved all "duplications, specifications, detailed descriptions of rituals and genealogies" to a summary in an appendix; made a separate appendix summary of the Torah's "principal laws;" and omitted "all obvious redundancies.

The ArtScroll Tanach series includes introductions to each book and a running commentary based on classic rabbinic interpretation.

The English translation in the ArtScroll series relies heavily on the interpretation of Rashi and other traditional sources and religious law.

[8][24] In this regard, one critic likened the ArtScroll volumes to "non-literal" targumim, which interpreted as well as translated the Bible.

Most English translations represent this name by the phrase "the Lord"; ArtScroll uses the Hebrew word "Ha-Shem" instead.

"[30] Chaim Miller's chumash is a translation whose text incorporates Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson's "novel interpretation" of Rashi's commentary, which was delivered in a series of public talks that began in 1964 and continued for more than 25 years.

Kehot Publication Society has started a translation of the Torah, and as of March 2007 has completed the books of Shemot (Exodus) and Bamidbar (Numbers).

Heinrich Guggenheimer published bilingual editions of Psalms (2020) and Job (2021) with original translation shortly before his death in 2021.

Guggenheimer's editions are unique in their use of Masoretic punctuation as a formatting guide; every verse is divided according to the indicated syntax both in Hebrew and in English.

Later, he translated parts of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that were deemed to have been written by the Documentary hypothesis J writer, also known as the Yahwist, author of the Bible's oldest strand, and released this volume as The Book of J in 1990, with commentary by American literary critic Harold Bloom.

Rosenberg worked on A Literary Bible: An Original Translation, a secular, poetic version of the Jewish scriptures.