Emphasized Bible

The Emphasized Bible, the work of the British scholar Joseph Bryant Rotherham, is a distinctive formal translation of the complete Bible that employs typography — a system of signs and accents printed with the text — to indicate emphasis and grammatical structure that would otherwise be lost in English. Produced in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when new manuscript scholarship was reshaping English Bible work, it was made directly from the Hebrew and Greek, taking a Hebrew Old Testament and a critical Greek New Testament as its base texts, and is classed as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an earlier version. Its philosophy is very literal, combined with the typographic emphasis for which it is named. Among its distinctive features, later editions use 'Yahweh' extensively in the Old Testament. It has remained a specialist's tool, valued chiefly for close study rather than public reading.