The Jewish Study Bible
Today I glanced through the Bibles section of the CBD catalog which we receive. I noted The Jewish Study Bible for sale and thought to myself how good it is to see such a Bible, with study notes from Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish scholarship, in this catalog from a large Christian bookstore. The Jewish Study Bible uses the most recent version of the Tanakh, produced by the Jewish Publication Society. A number of my Bible translation coworkers appreciate this Bible translation and refer to it as one of their translation resource tools. I believe that the early church hurt itself so badly before and near the time of Constantine's embrace of Christianity (and, obviously thoughout much of history since then) when it cut itself off so much from its Jewish roots. Anti-Semitism can fester in Christian churches which do not pay adequate attention to the Jewish foundations of their own faith. Too often Christian translations of the Bible make little, if any, reference to Jewish biblical scholarship during the translation process. Such a loss!
We simply cannot understand much of what Jesus said and Paul wrote if we are not aware of how very Jewish those things were. We cannot understand the metaphors, idioms, and indirect speech forms that Jesus employed so often unless we study them within their original Jewish context, as they were spoken in a typical rabbinical fashion. I want to thank this blog's frequent visitor and commenter (Anonymous) for continuing to stimulate my thinking in this area until I decided it was time to blog a bit on the deep Jewishness, not only, of course, of the Hebrew Bible, but also of the New Testament. There is much more that could be said on this topic which is directly relevant to the production of better translations of the Bible, but I am running late tonight and I need some sleep. I hope we can return to this topic in the future.
We simply cannot understand much of what Jesus said and Paul wrote if we are not aware of how very Jewish those things were. We cannot understand the metaphors, idioms, and indirect speech forms that Jesus employed so often unless we study them within their original Jewish context, as they were spoken in a typical rabbinical fashion. I want to thank this blog's frequent visitor and commenter (Anonymous) for continuing to stimulate my thinking in this area until I decided it was time to blog a bit on the deep Jewishness, not only, of course, of the Hebrew Bible, but also of the New Testament. There is much more that could be said on this topic which is directly relevant to the production of better translations of the Bible, but I am running late tonight and I need some sleep. I hope we can return to this topic in the future.
posted by Wayne Leman at 10:57 PM
5 Comments:
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this comment is so large now that I fear it will be rejected by our good moderators
Nah, we don't do such things! :-)
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Anon, it seems to me that Hebrew seems to be harder to learn than Greek simply because of its writing system, which is very different from our western one. I learned Greek writing very quickly, because I was already familiar with most of the letters from mathematics, and with the rather similar Cyrillic alphabet (for I had learned Russian at school). But it has taken me very much longer to be able to read Hebrew writing fluently. However, I would reckon that apart from that factor Hebrew has actually been easier to learn than Greek.
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