Hebrew Bible

Completed by a single scholar rather than a committee, this landmark translation of the entire Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is accompanied throughout by commentary and was undertaken with sustained attention to preserving the literary artistry of biblical Hebrew. It renders the text from Hebrew, working from the traditional Masoretic Hebrew text while consulting textual-critical scholarship where the wording is in question. Its guiding philosophy may be described as literary-formal and attentive to Hebrew style: it is a fresh translation rather than a revision of an earlier English version, and so stands somewhat apart from the lineage of committee Bibles that descends from the King James tradition. Among its distinctive features, it often preserves repetition, syntax, and wordplay that smoother translations normalize, leaving in English something of the cadence, parallelism, and deliberate echoing that shape the Hebrew narrative and poetry.