On reading Scripture.
2024-10-31 09:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553Like all good Unitarians, my parents owned about 7 or 8 scholarly translations of the Bible, which sat on the shelf unread for years. As a young person, I wanted to learn something about what the Bible actually said, so at about the age of 15 I started taking Hebrew lessons from the Rabbi in our town. We studied from Jacob Weingreen's Hebrew Grammar, and that well-worn volume sits on my bookshelf to this very day.
If you are interested in the Hebrew Scriptures, you can't go wrong with the magnificent Hebrew-English edition of the Koren Steinsaltz Tanakh. It is in three volumes, corresponding to the traditional divisions of the Hebrew Bible - the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (Torah, Nevi'im, Kethuvim, or Tanakh for short, in Hebrew). It is beautifully designed and copiously illustrated, with a readable English translation of the Biblical text and the commentary of the late Rabbi Adin (Even-Yisrael) Steinsaltz, one of the foremost Torah scholars of modern times.
Robert Alter is one of the foremost translators of Hebrew literature (both ancient and modern) into English, and he has produced a three-volume set, all in English, under the title 'The Hebrew Bible: a translation with commentary".
The Jewish Publication Society of America offers a very readable translation, the JPS Tanakh (1985), available in all-English or English and Hebrew.
The go-to resource for Orthodox Jews in the English-speaking world nowadays is probably ArtScroll publications, and they offer a very handy and widely-used Hebrew / English edition of the Tanakh. ArtScroll's target audience is primarily Ashkenazi (European Jewish) readers, so you are going to see some dialectal differences in how some Hebrew words are spelled (e.g. Shabbos vs. Shabbat) compared to some other books.
The Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony is the author of 'The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture' (2012), which offers a Jewish understanding of the role of the Hebrew Scriptures in a religious worldview. In the wake of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, the codification of the canon of the Hebrew Bible provided both a method and a motive for the surviving kingdom of Judah - that is, the Judahites or "Jews" - to remain intact as a nation. "This is the question of whether the Jews who had been exiled into Babylonia and Egypt would survive as a historical people, or whether they would take up the ways of the surrounding peoples and quickly disappear." (Hazony, p. 57.) [409]
If you are interested in the Hebrew Scriptures, you can't go wrong with the magnificent Hebrew-English edition of the Koren Steinsaltz Tanakh. It is in three volumes, corresponding to the traditional divisions of the Hebrew Bible - the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (Torah, Nevi'im, Kethuvim, or Tanakh for short, in Hebrew). It is beautifully designed and copiously illustrated, with a readable English translation of the Biblical text and the commentary of the late Rabbi Adin (Even-Yisrael) Steinsaltz, one of the foremost Torah scholars of modern times.
Robert Alter is one of the foremost translators of Hebrew literature (both ancient and modern) into English, and he has produced a three-volume set, all in English, under the title 'The Hebrew Bible: a translation with commentary".
The Jewish Publication Society of America offers a very readable translation, the JPS Tanakh (1985), available in all-English or English and Hebrew.
The go-to resource for Orthodox Jews in the English-speaking world nowadays is probably ArtScroll publications, and they offer a very handy and widely-used Hebrew / English edition of the Tanakh. ArtScroll's target audience is primarily Ashkenazi (European Jewish) readers, so you are going to see some dialectal differences in how some Hebrew words are spelled (e.g. Shabbos vs. Shabbat) compared to some other books.
The Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony is the author of 'The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture' (2012), which offers a Jewish understanding of the role of the Hebrew Scriptures in a religious worldview. In the wake of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, the codification of the canon of the Hebrew Bible provided both a method and a motive for the surviving kingdom of Judah - that is, the Judahites or "Jews" - to remain intact as a nation. "This is the question of whether the Jews who had been exiled into Babylonia and Egypt would survive as a historical people, or whether they would take up the ways of the surrounding peoples and quickly disappear." (Hazony, p. 57.) [409]
