Comment by bentley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bentley | Hacker News Reader

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Since the article is kind of shallow, here are a few atypical approaches to Biblical translation I’ve found interesting over the years:

• The Five Books of Moses, by Everett Fox, who attempts to retain in English the underlying poetry of the Hebrew like alliteration, meter, wordplay, and so on. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-book...)

• The Books of the Bible: not a new translation (it’s just the NIV), but rather than a typical modern Bible which is laid out for easy referencing, instead cuts out chapters and verses completely, formatting it instead in the way the books were originally written, and eliminating a few historical artifacts of translation like the splitting of the Book of Chronicles, the order of books relative to each other, and so on. (https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes...)

• Alpha: A Translation of Genesis 1. (https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...)

For readers of the Hebrew Bible who want to dig deeper, the Jewish Publication Society Commentary series [1] is quite remarkable. Here's the description in the listing for the first volume, for Genesis. [2]

"The JPS Torah Commentary series guides readers through the words and ideas of the Torah. Each volume is the work of a scholar who stands at the pinnacle of his field.

Every page contains the complete traditional Hebrew text, with cantillation notes, the JPS translation of the Holy Scriptures, aliyot breaks, Masoretic notes, and commentary by a distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar, integrating classical and modern sources.

Each volume also contains supplementary essays that elaborate upon key words and themes, a glossary of commentators and sources, extensive bibliographic notes, and maps."

[1] https://jps.org/product-category/collections/jps-bible-comme...

[2] https://jps.org/books/jps-torah-commentary-genesis/

There was a beautifully made book from 1936 called "The Bible Designed To Be Read As Literature" that was set out and edited to be more like a normal book:

https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10239/

I picked up a copy secondhand years ago and I'm happy I did.

Bibliotheca looks like possibly a modern version of this, I recently ordered a copy so I'll know when it ships late 2023.

https://www.bibliotheca.co/

I like the ESV and Crossway publishes a Reader's Edition exactly like this:

https://www.crossway.org/bibles/esv-readers-bible-cob/

That does look amazing, thank you for the link. Unfortunately for me it doesn't contain the deuterocanonical books ("apocrypha") which for me are important to have.

Crossway does publish the ESV with apocrypha. I think there must be a Reader's Edition with them somewhere.

Unfortunately the ESV Reader's Edition does not contain the deuterocanonical books, it's actually noted on the Bibliotheca (Bible) Wikipedia article that Crossway's edition "could be viewed as less ecumenical" because it's missing these books. Still, the ESV set is stunning and I still am considering picking up, I'd just use another Bible for the missing books.

> Crossway does publish the ESV with apocrypha.

I'll have to take another look, last I checked i couldn't find one meeting my specifications but I may have missed something. Thanks!

If you like Everett Fox, you may like Robert Alter's translations of the tanakh. He has translated the entire hebrew bible and given plenty of notes along the way. If you don't read hebrew, by the time you are done reading the translation and notes you will have seen or heard the hebrew language wordplay, and the english translation by itself is nice to read!

Similar translations from the Greek by Andy Gaus titled "The Unvarnished Gospels" and "The Unvarnished New Testament".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gaus

> instead cuts out chapters and verses completely, formatting it instead in the way the books were originally written

I wish there were more translations like this (and of a high quality binding). One example I found and have ordered is "Bibliotheca" which looks amazing, should arrive later this year. Unfortunately it's not a translation I'm very interested in, I've been seriously considering seeing what it takes to print my own edition that has all the textual features I want.

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