JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ible
(New Testament, 1923) and J.W. Powis Smith with others (Old
Testament, 1927).
ANGLO-JEWISH VERSIONS. From the early 18th century,
progressive anglicization of Jewish settlers in England and
America rendered first the Spanish, and ultimately the Yiddish,
translations inadequate for educational needs. The King
James Version became current in spite of the Christianizing
tendency of some of its “headlines” to the Prophets. The Pentateuch
with haftarot published in London by David Levi
(1787) appears to be the King James Version but without offending
captions and with Jewish annotations. An earlier
Pentateuch was produced by A. Alexander in 1785. In the U.S.
Isaac *Leeser published a Pentateuch (5 vols., 1845) and subsequently
a complete Old Testament in English (1853), which
incorporated matter from the Mendelssohn school’s German
translation and included the Hebrew text. Leeser used the KJV
as a basis, de-Christianizing some renderings (e.g., substituting
“this young woman” for ha-almah in Is. 7:14) and incorporating
rabbinic readings of the Bible into his text via parentheses.
Leeser’s version stood as pre-eminent in the American
Jewish community until the appearance of the “Old JPS” translation
of 1917. C.G. *Montefiore’s Bible for Home Reading was
published in 1896. A. *Benisch issued a Jewish School and Family
Bible (1851–61) and M. *Friedlaender’s Jewish Family Bible
(1881) used the Authorized Version. After the Revised Version
of 1885 had appeared, the London Jewish Religious Education
Board published (1896) a pamphlet listing essential emendations
to make that version acceptable for Jewish use. These
modifications were among the material utilized for the version
published by the *Jewish Publication Society of America
in 1917, which also took into account 19th-century Jewish Bible
scholarship and rabbinical commentary (e.g., *Malbim); the
edition – issued by a committee representative of both traditional
and Reform Judaism – was basically the work of Max L.
Margolis. The New Jewish Version, in the course of translation
by an American Jewish team presided over by H.M. Orlinsky,
while probably being more open than any earlier Jewish version
to the findings of non-Jewish biblical scholarship, still remains
tied to the Masoretic text, even though it incorporated
on its margin emendations based on evidence gathered from
ancient versions of Hebrew manuscripts. Its Pentateuch, published
in 1962, has consequently met with substantial criticism
from Orthodox Jewish circles. Two traditional Pentateuchs are
the Pentateuch and Haftorahs edited by Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz
(1929–36), which first used the Revised Version and later the
1917 JPS translation – although it was popularly supposed that
the translations were Hertz’s own – and I. Levi’s Hirsch Pentateuch
(1958–62), translated from the German [but see Torah
Translations by Jews below].
[Raphael Loewe / Everett Fox (2nd ed.)]
SINCE WORLD WAR II. Introduction. From 1611 to 1900,
some 500 English biblical translations were unable to break
the dominance of the King James Version [KJV]. The history
of Bible translation since World War II primarily consists of
further attempts to break away from the KJV. Many, however,
continue to prefer the spiritual nostalgia of the KJV, since it
has influenced so much of the English-speaking world. President
Harry Truman states it bluntly:
We were talking about the Bible, and I always read the King
James Version, not one of those damn new translations that
they’ve got out lately. I don’t know why it is when you’ve got a
good thing, you’ve got to monkey about changing it. The KJV
of the Bible is the best there is or ever has been or will be, and
you get a bunch of college professors spending years working
on it, and all they do is take the poetry out of it.
Nevertheless, each age has its need for a new translation;
textual and philological scholarship make advances, English
usage changes, and communities have specific needs. In
the case of postwar translations, L. Greenspoon cites the
cataclysmic events of the first half of the 20th century, along
with the challenge posed by such forces as secularism and
Communism, as providing a strong impetus to revisit the
Bible, including its retranslation. Thus the last half-century
has seen a large number of major renditions of the Bible into
English.
Major Versions Since World War II. The fact is that since 1945,
as many new translations of all or parts of the Bible have appeared
in English as in the three centuries preceding. In the
following discussion, major post-World War II versions will
each be treated in terms of: (1) the history of the translation;
(2) the principles of the translation and representative examples;
and (3) the acceptance of the translation. It should be
noted that many of these are available for instant comparison
on popular Bible software programs, with sophisticated
search capabilities.
Knox Bible [= Knox] (1949). History. The Knox Bible is the
work of the writer-scholar, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox. His
father was the Anglican bishop of Manchester, and both of
Knox’s grandfathers were Protestant divines. He was a prizewinning
student in classics at Oxford and was to become an
accomplished author, writing six detective novels. In 1917, at
age 29, he joined the Roman Catholic Church.
For nine years he worked an eight-hour-day, six-daya-week
schedule, turning out 24 verses a day on the average.
He published the New Testament (1945), the Psalms (1947),
and the Old Testament (1948–1949), for which he received
the Roman Catholic imprimatur (1955). This authorized version
came to surpass the Douay-Rheims-Challoner Version
for Catholics.
Principles and Representative Examples. Although Knox
translated from the Vulgate, he took cognizance of the original
languages in his footnotes. His knowledge of Greek was
better than that of Hebrew. His work, however, is a translation
of a translation, and the Clementine Vulgate (1592) at that. He
stuck closely to the Clementine Vulgate, even where it was evidently
in error. Since Jerome relied heavily on the Septuagint
and on the Hexapla (which included various Greek versions),
614 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3