Ferrara Bible

The Ferrara Bible holds a landmark place in the history of scripture in the vernacular as the first complete printed Jewish Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible. Its scope is the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, rendered directly from Hebrew and following the Masoretic Hebrew tradition as its base text. It is best classified as a fresh, literal translation, though it draws on earlier Iberian Jewish translation traditions, which served as its predecessor and base — a body of work carried outward by Sephardic communities after their expulsion from Spain. Its translation philosophy is highly literal and Hebraizing, and its most distinctive feature is the deliberate preservation of Hebrew syntax and diction within the Spanish text, so that the shape of the original remains visible in the receiving language. Produced for Spanish-speaking Jewish readers, it became a point of reference for later Ladino and Spanish biblical versions.