JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

the Bulgarians. However, only fragments of these have been
preserved, mainly the Psalms. On the other hand, a host of
biblical texts from the post-Mongol period (15th century onward)
has survived. The so-called Judaizing sects of the 15th
century gave the strongest impetus to the codifications of the
Bible. Adherents of the sects in Novgorod were in possession
of a complete Russian Bible, and this moved the archbishop
Gennadi to compare the texts of the Greek Orthodox Bible
(Septuagint) with those of the Judaizers (see also above on
Church Slavonic). With the exception of Esther, all the missing
biblical books were translated from the Vulgate. Esther
and Psalms were once thought to have been translated from
the original Hebrew by the convert Fyodor (Theodore) the
Jew, but this has been disputed by Harkavy. Gennadi’s great
achievement was to produce, for the first time in the annals of
Church Slavonic literature, a complete and unified text of the
Bible unconnected with the liturgy of the Orthodox church.
The 16th-century Bible of the Moscow metropolitan Makari
reverted to the former liturgical orientation and order of the
biblical books. The first printed Psalter in Russian appeared
in 1564–68. The first complete Ukrainian Bible, commissioned
by Prince Constantine of Ostrog (1581), followed the text of
Gennadi. The first Moscow edition of the Russian Bible (1663)
was a more elegant version of the Ostrog text. Soon after this,
an attempt was made by Avraami Firsov in his Psalter (1683)
to translate the Scriptures into lively Russian. In 1714 Peter
the Great commissioned a Church Slavonic Bible, whose text
was compared with the Septuagint; this revision (the Czarina
Elizabeth Bible) appeared in 1751 and was edited by Valaam
Lyaschevski. Here the Old Testament was based on the Septuagint
and those biblical books which had earlier appeared
only in a translation based on the Vulgate were also translated
from the Greek text.
Bible translations of the first half of the 19th century are
linked with the activity of the Russian Bible Society. This
development was impeded by the political reaction which
marked the last years of the reign of Alexander I and the entire
reign of Nicholas I. Translations of several biblical books
from the original Hebrew, undertaken by the first Russian
Hebraist Pavski in the mid-19th century, were placed under a
ban. However, the Moscow metropolitan Philaret managed
to obtain the Russian Orthodox synod’s authorization for a
Russian version of the Scriptures in 1860. From 1868 onward
a complete translation of the Bible was undertaken by Daniel
A. Chwolson; later collaborators in the project included Gulyayev
and Bashanov. By virtue of its accuracy and style, this
so-called Synodal Bible (1875) is the best available in the Russian
language. Canonical books were translated from Hebrew;
non-canonical portions, from the Greek and Latin. Ukrainian
Bible translations were first attempted in the late Middle Ages,
the earliest printed edition being that published at Ostrog in
1581. A Ukrainian version of Psalms appeared at Vilna in 1526,
and complete Bibles were printed at Pochayev (1798) and Przemysl
(1859), both of these being based on the Russian Czarina
Elizabeth Bible of 1751. A 20th-century version was that of P.
bible
Kulish, I.S. Levytski, and J. Puluj (1903); another Orthodox
Bible was by Metropolitan (John Ohienko) Ilarion (1962); and
a third was the Catholic Bible of Ivan Khomenko (1963). All
were translated from the original Hebrew and Greek texts.
Translation activity has picked up in the 1990s, as in other
formerly Communist countries. A Russian Protestant Bible,
printed in London in 1875, was first banned in Russia, but a
reprint prepared there was later permitted. A new illustrated
Russian Old Testament, the first of its kind since the 1917 Revolution,
was issued in 100,000 copies by the Soviet State Publishing
House in 1967.
The translation of the Bible into modern Russian is
clouded by a number of issues: the multiplicity of Russian
literary styles, questions of authority and distribution, and
above all the relatively small role the Bible has historically
played in Eastern Orthodox liturgy and tradition (Batalden,
1990). The periodical Mir Biblii (1993– ) contains articles, reviews,
and translations of portions of Scripture into Russian
by different translators.
Among Jewish scholars, various attempts were made
from the 1860s onward to produce Russian translations of the
Bible. Leon Mandelstamm published a Pentateuch in Berlin
(1862), the second edition (1872) being accompanied by his
version of Psalms. Pumpyasnski also issued a translation of
Psalms (1872), which was followed by Proverbs in 1891. Meanwhile,
the Society for the Enlightenment of the Jews in Russia
had published a new version of the Pentateuch (1875), which
was prepared by J. Herstein with the assistance of the Hebrew
poet J.L. Gordon. Another version of the Pentateuch, that of
Joshua Steinberg, appeared under the Society’s auspices in
1899, and in 1906 Steinberg published translations of Joshua,
Judges, and Isaiah.
See also *Russian Literature.
SERBIAN AND CROATIAN; WENDISH. Until 1847 the literary
language of the Serbs was Old Slavonic, and Church Slavonic
remained dominant in the Serbian Orthodox Church. The earliest
complete translation of the Old Testament was produced
by the reformer Primož Trubar in Slovenia during the late 16th
century; a Croatian Lutheran edition appeared in Tuebingen
(1563), and two 19th-century versions were prepared by Matia
Petar Katančić in Croatia (1831) and by G. Daničić in Serbia
(1865; revised, 1932, 1933). A popular version is the “Zagreb
Bible” into modern language (1968). In 2002, the World Bible
Translation Center – once again, an evangelical group! – finished
a new Bible translation into Croatian; the Biblija Prijevod
KS had appeared in 1988. A modern Serbian Bible was that of
Petar Vlasić (1923–25).
The oldest Protestant translation of part of the Old Testament
into the South Lusatian dialect of the Wends (a declining
Slav people isolated in eastern Germany) was an edition
of Psalms by Pastor Wille (Guben, 1753); a complete Bible was
published by Johann Gottlieb Fritz (Cottbus, 1796). There were
earlier translations into the North Lusatian Wendish dialect:
Psalms by Paul Pretorius, and later Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 635