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To: Caesar Soze

Interesting. I tend to prefer ‘more literal’ over ‘more readable,’ but that’s just me.

Heck, I’m still trying to find one that uses the proper names of God rather than the “The Lord, the Lord Almighty” silliness.


44 posted on 09/02/2009 11:11:00 AM PDT by Terabitten (Vets wrote a blank check, payable to the Constitution, for an amount up to and including their life.)
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To: Terabitten
Heck, I’m still trying to find one that uses the proper names of God rather than the “The Lord, the Lord Almighty” silliness.

The Holman Christian Standard Bible transliterates the tetragrammaton occasionally. It was translated at the behest of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it is not explicitly a Baptist translation. It is a fairly new translation, and tends to favor the generic masculine pronoun over gender inclusive language. (It follows the Colorado Springs Guidelines.) The reading level and "flavor" seem to be on par with the NIV, which it was intended to replace in SBC publications.

The New Jerusalem Bible transliterates the name at every occurrence, and also transliterates El-Shaddai. It's a Catholic translation, so includes the Deuterocanon. It's quite readable, but it may go for literary over literal. It's available in a text edition and a study edition with historical-critical notes. The earlier Jerusalem Bible also transliterates the Tetragrammaton, but I have not read from it and cannot comment on it.

Rotherham's Emphasized Bible also transliterates the tetragrammaton, and uses different typefaces to indicate El, Eloah, and Elohim. It's a very literal, one-man translation that uses several curious typographical techniques to indicate which clauses Rotherham thought should be granted emphasis due to untranslatable elements of the original languages. It is only available in a largish, hardcover facsimile. The text is freely available online, but it lacks the typographical emphasis cues. It was translated in the 19th century, so it benefits from scholarship of Westcott and Hort, but predates the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The World English Bible is a one-man revision of the American Standard Version, with Apocryphal books based on the KJV. It transliterates the tetragrammton consistently. It's in the public domain, freely downloadable, and the Psalms+NT are available in hardcopy. I haven't really read it, but the website is informative.

If you consider Jehovah an acceptable transliteration of the tetragrammaton, you might like the American Standard Version. It's the American version of the British Revised Version, a late 19th/early 20th century revision of the KJV. It is literal to a fault, "better at Greek than English." It never really caught on, and the next revision (the RSV) dropped Jehovah and put a greater emphasis on readability. I haven't read it, but it's public domain now if you want to sample it.

46 posted on 09/02/2009 11:49:27 AM PDT by Caesar Soze
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