Jewish English Bible translations: Encyclopedia II - Jewish English Bible translations - Jewish Publication Society translations

Jewish English Bible translations - Jewish Publication Society translations

The translations of the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPS) have become the most popular English translations of the Hebrew Bible. JPS has published two such translations.

Jewish English Bible translations - Old JPS 1917

The first JPS translation was completed in 1917, and was based on the scholarship of its day; its literary form was consciously based on that of the King James version. The Old JPS translation is used in a number of Orthodox Jewish works published before the 1980s, such as the Pentateuch and Haftaroth edited by J. H. Hertz and the Soncino Books of the Bible series.

Jewish English Bible translations - New JPS

The 1917 translation was felt to be outdated by the 1950s, and a new effort developed that involved cooperation between numerous Jewish scholars from a variety of denominations. Their translation of the Torah was started in 1955 and completed in 1962. The entire Tanakh was finally published in one volume in 1985, and a bilingual Hebrew-English version appeared in 1999 (also in one volume). The translation is usually referred to as the "The New JPS version", abbreviated NJPS (it has also been called the "New Jewish Version" or NJV).

The translators of the new JPS version were experts in both traditional Jewish exegesis of the Bible and modern biblical scholarship. The translation attempts in all cases to present the original meaning of the text in a highly aesthetic form.

The New JPS translation is used in the official Torah commentary of Reform Judaism, and in the official Torah commentary of Conservative Judaism. This translation recently was most recently used in The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Jewish Publication Society translations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki