The Hebrew Bible is the Bible of two communities. For Christians it is the Old Testament, read alongside the New. For Jews it is the whole of Scripture, called the Tanakh, and it is read with a long tradition of rabbinic interpretation. When English-speaking Jews wanted the Bible in their own language, they could use the King James Version, and for a long time many did. But it had been made by Christians, its chapter headings and some of its renderings reflected Christian readings, and its arrangement of the books was not theirs. Jewish translators set out to make English Bibles of their own.
This article describes those translations and what each set out to do, and looks fairly at some verses where Jewish and Christian translations differ.
The shape of the Tanakh
The word Tanakh is an acronym of the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible:
- Torah (Teaching): Genesis to Deuteronomy.
- Nevi’im (Prophets): the Former Prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the Latter Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve.
- Ketuvim (Writings): Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther), Daniel, Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles.
The books are the same as those of the Protestant Old Testament, but the order is different, and the count is different too: Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah are each one book, and the twelve minor prophets are one, giving twenty-four books rather than thirty-nine. Daniel is among the Writings, not the Prophets. The Christian Old Testament, following the Greek tradition, ends with Malachi’s promise that Elijah will come, which leads naturally into the Gospels. The Tanakh usually ends with Chronicles, and the last words are Cyrus’s decree inviting the exiles to return and rebuild the Temple. In the World English Bible:
Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given all the kingdoms of the earth to me; and he has commanded me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever there is among you of all his people, Yahweh his God be with him, and let him go up.’ (2 Chronicles 36:23)
Verse numbers can differ too. Jewish Bibles count a psalm’s title as verse 1, so many psalms are one verse “ahead” of Christian numbering, and Malachi has three chapters rather than four. (For how the books were gathered, see How the Old Testament was gathered.)
Isaac Leeser
The first complete Jewish translation of the Bible into English in America was made by Isaac Leeser, a rabbi and editor in Philadelphia. His Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures appeared in 1853. Leeser worked largely alone, from the Hebrew, consulting German Jewish scholarship and the King James Version. His English was close to the Hebrew and sometimes stiff, but his Bible became the standard one in American synagogues and homes for over half a century. In Britain, a similar role was later played by Jewish revisions of the King James text and by Michael Friedländer’s Jewish Family Bible (1881).
The JPS translation of 1917
In 1917 the Jewish Publication Society of America, with the cooperation of other Jewish bodies, published The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation. Its editor-in-chief was Max Margolis. The translators used the Revised Version and the King James Version as a starting point, and the result reads much like them in style, with “thee” and “thou.” But it followed the Masoretic Text throughout, drew on Jewish commentators, and removed what its preface regarded as Christian interpretations.
The JPS 1917 translation is now in the public domain, and it was the English Bible of English-speaking Jews for most of the twentieth century.
The New JPS Tanakh
By the 1950s the JPS decided that revision was not enough. Under Harry Orlinsky, who had also served on the Revised Standard Version committee, a new translation was made directly from the Hebrew. The Torah appeared in 1962, The Prophets in 1978 and The Writings in 1982, and the complete Tanakh in one volume in 1985. It is usually called NJPS.
NJPS deliberately broke with the tradition of word-for-word rendering. Its translators aimed to render the sense of each passage in idiomatic modern English, rather than matching Hebrew words and constructions one by one. They did not, for example, translate every occurrence of the Hebrew conjunction ve- as “and,” a habit that gives older Bibles their “And it came to pass” rhythm. They drew on medieval Jewish commentators as well as modern philology, kept strictly to the Masoretic Text, and put alternative readings and admissions of uncertainty in footnotes, some of them simply saying that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain.
Its opening shows its approach: NJPS begins “When God began to create heaven and earth,” following a reading of the first verse found in the medieval commentator Rashi, among others, rather than the traditional “In the beginning God created.” (On that verse, see In the beginning.) Some readers find NJPS clear and fresh; others miss the cadence of older translations or feel that its idiomatic choices sometimes decide questions the Hebrew leaves open.
Everett Fox and the Schocken Bible
Everett Fox took the opposite path. His Five Books of Moses (1995), the first volume of the Schocken Bible, and later volumes such as The Early Prophets (2014), follow the method of the German translation by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Fox’s English is designed to be read aloud: it is set in short lines according to the rhythm of the Hebrew, keeps repeated key words so that a listener can hear the connections, and preserves wordplay and Hebrew forms of names such as Moshe and Yaakov. He prints the divine name in a form that is not pronounced. The result can sound strange on the page, by design: Fox wants the reader to hear that the text is Hebrew, not English.
Robert Alter
The literary scholar Robert Alter spent over two decades translating the whole Hebrew Bible on his own, completing it in 2018 in three volumes with commentary. Alter criticised what he called the “heresy of explanation” in modern translations, the tendency to smooth over the Hebrew’s terseness, ambiguity and repetition in order to make everything clear. He tried to reproduce the compactness of Hebrew prose and the parallelism of its poetry, to keep its frequent “and,” and to use a consistent, slightly elevated English. Reviewers praised his ear and his notes; some Hebraists questioned particular renderings or argued that his English is sometimes more archaic than the Hebrew was to its first readers. Alter writes as a literary scholar rather than for a religious community, but his translation is widely read by Jews and others.
Orthodox translations: Koren and Stone
Orthodox Jewish readers have their own translations. The Koren Jerusalem Bible, published in Jerusalem by Koren Publishers, pairs the Hebrew text with an English translation revised by Harold Fisch from Friedländer’s version. It keeps a traditional, formal English.
The Stone Edition Tanach (1996), published by Mesorah Publications under the ArtScroll imprint and edited by Nosson Scherman, renders the text according to classical rabbinic interpretation, especially Rashi, where that interpretation and the plain sense diverge. Its treatment of the Song of Songs is the best-known example: it translates the book according to its traditional reading as an allegory of the love between God and Israel, giving a more literal rendering in the commentary. Its editors defended this as the only faithful way to present the book to their readers. Critics, including other Jewish scholars, argue that a translation should give the plain sense first and leave interpretation to the notes. Both positions are serious claims about what translation is for.
Isaiah 7:14
Some verses read differently in Jewish and Christian Bibles because the two communities read them in the light of different traditions. The most famous is Isaiah 7:14. The JPS 1917 translation reads:
Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
The World English Bible, like most Christian translations, reads:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
The Hebrew word is almah. Jewish translators point out that it means a young woman of marriageable age, that Hebrew has another word, betulah, more specifically associated with virginity, and that in its context the sign was given to King Ahaz in his own time. Christian translators point out that the Septuagint, a Jewish translation made before Christianity, rendered it parthenos, “virgin,” that Matthew 1:23 quotes it in that form, and that almah is never clearly used of a married woman. Both sides are reading the same Hebrew, and the difference turns on how much the later reading should shape the translation. Some Christian translations, beginning with the RSV, used “young woman” in Isaiah with a note, which caused fierce controversy (see English translations since the King James).
Psalm 2:12
Psalm 2:12 shows a different kind of disagreement, about an obscure word. The King James Version reads “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry,” and the World English Bible:
Give sincere homage to the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish on the way, for his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all those who take refuge in him.
The JPS 1917 translation reads:
Do homage in purity, lest He be angry, and ye perish in the way, when suddenly His wrath is kindled. Happy are all they that take refuge in Him.
The phrase is nashqu-bar. The verb usually means “kiss,” and kissing could be a sign of homage. The difficulty is bar. In Aramaic it means “son,” and that is how Christian tradition has read it, since the psalm speaks of God’s son a few verses earlier; but in that verse the Hebrew word for son is ben, and bar in Hebrew can mean “pure.” Ancient translations already disagreed: the Septuagint has “lay hold of instruction,” and Jerome’s own translation from the Hebrew has a rendering meaning “adore purely.” Modern translations of every tradition are divided, and many add a note saying the Hebrew is uncertain. Here the honest answer is that the text is hard, and readers of both traditions benefit from being told so.
Why the differences matter
These translations show that Jewish translators have differed from one another as much as from Christians: from Leeser’s literalism to NJPS’s idiom, from Fox’s echo of the Hebrew to Alter’s literary English, from Stone’s rabbinic reading to academic translations. What they share is the Hebrew text as the Masoretes transmitted it, and a refusal to read the Hebrew Bible only as a prelude to something else.
Open Word Bible translates its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, the same Masoretic tradition that Jewish translations follow (see The Masoretes). Where Jewish and Christian readings divide, as at Isaiah 7:14 and Psalm 2:12, its aim is to record the evidence and the decision in each sentence’s reasoning record, and to state the sense rather than choose a tradition silently. Its drafts are AI-assisted and unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them, and the translations described here are used for comparison only, never as the basis for its wording. It is dedicated to the public domain under CC0.
Sources
- Leeser, Isaac, trans. The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia, 1853.
- The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917. Preface.
- Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985. Preface.
- Orlinsky, Harry M., ed. Notes on the New Translation of the Torah. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969.
- Sarna, Jonathan D. JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
- Greenspoon, Leonard J. Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2020.
- Fox, Everett, trans. The Five Books of Moses. The Schocken Bible, vol. 1. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.
- Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. 3 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
- Scherman, Nosson, ed. Tanach: The Stone Edition. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1996.
- Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes the JPS 1917 translation, which is also in the public domain.