The Bible as a Focus of Thought
It is equally true that all the time which learned men have given to translating and elucidating the text seems nothing when it is compared with the time that mankind at large have spent in reading it. But the Britannica mentions a report of the great English Bible Society, the “British and Foreign,” in which the copies circulated by it are totalled at more than 198 million, and, for the American Bible Society and its federated associations, it gives a total of more than 84 million copies (Vol. 3, p. 907). It has often been said that the English Bible is the only example of a translation that became more famous than the original, and it is as true that no other translation has been the source of so many secondary translations, for versions in no less than 530 distinct languages and dialects have been derived from the English text. It is interesting to note, although in this case the English version has certainly nothing to do with the matter, that “in Italy, by a departure from the traditional policy of the Roman Church, the newly formed, ‘Pious Society of St. Jerome for the Dissemination of the Holy Gospels’ issued in 1901, from the Vatican press, a new Italian version of the Four Gospels and Acts,” and sold 400,000 copies at 4 cents each.
As a sort of threshold-study, it will be well to consider three topics: Hebrew Literature, Hebrew Religion and Biblical History.
Preliminaries
Hebrew Literature (Vol. 13, p. 169), by Dr. Arthur Cowley, of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, points out that the term “Hebrew Literature” is loosely used of “all works written in Hebrew characters, whether the language be Aramaic, Arabic, or even some vernacular not related to Hebrew;” and that “this literature begins with, as it is almost entirely based upon, the Old Testament.” This article on Hebrew Literature may be supplemented by the following articles:
Targum, by John Frederick Stenning, lecturer in Aramaic at Oxford.
| Halakha | by Israel Abrahams, reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature, Cambridge. |
| Qaraites | |
| Talmud | by Stanley Arthur Cook, lecturer in Hebrew and Syriac, Cambridge. |
| Midrash |
Seadiah, by Dr. Arthur Cowley.
Maimonides, by Herbert Loewe, curator of Oriental Literature, Cambridge.
Hebrew Religion