German Bible Research Articles

The Debatable Ending: יו‎ or ה‎

Modern translations are influenced by the debatable ending of יו‎ or ה‎ of Proverbs 30:19. German Bible translations such as – Zürcher Bibel, the German Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift, the German Elberfelder Bibel revidierte Fassung 1993, the German Darby Unrevidierte Elberfelder 1905, and Textbibel von Kautzsch und Weizsäcker – have Frau (woman) or Mädchen (girl) or Jungfrau (virgin). These translations demonstrate that the favorable reading is girl (woman or virgin) because it is influenced by the ending of ה‎. The debatale ending of יו‎ or ה‎ is noticeable in English Bible translations. The ending of ה‎ is followed by most of English Bible translations such as King James Version [KJV], American Standard Version [ASV], New International Version [NIV], English Standard Version [ESV]. Good News Translation [GNB] interprets it as the love story between a man and a woman. Aramaic Bible in Plain English, Young’s Literal Translation [YLT], Brenton Septuagint Translation, Douay-Rheims Bible [DRB], and Literal Standard Version [LST] read the ending of יו‎. Therefore, their translations are in his youth. This research argues for the ending of יו‎ or in his youth as the original reading with the usage of textual criticism and the syntactical analysis of Proverbs 30:19 as its methodology.

The September Testament and Its Predecessors: How Was Luther’s New Testament Translation Different from Previous German Versions?

Luther’s first New Testament in German, issued in September 1522, forms a landmark in the history of Bible translation. Yet how precisely did Luther’s work diverge from and build on received biblical scholarship, and on previous translations into German? This article compares John’s Gospel in the September Testament with Anton Koberger’s German Bible of 1483 and Erasmus’s Greek and Latin New Testament of 1519. Luther’s 1522 Testament differed in format from its predecessors: Luther discarded Jerome’s prefaces in favour of his own, and added expository commentaries and paragraph breaks to help the reader. Compared to Koberger, Luther aspired to more fluent and elegant language. He avoided importing Latin terms into German and strove for rhetorically powerful German. He adopted several of Erasmus’s philological interventions, though not uncritically. Luther worked continuously to make his German New Testament embody what he saw as the essential gospel.

Biblical Translation in Context (Frederick W. Knobloch, ed., Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture 10, Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 2002)

This article is an extended review on Frederick W. Knobloch, ed., Biblical Translation in Context. Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture 10 (Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 2002). The book under review consists of thirteen essays that were originally delivered on the conference, Biblical Translation in Context, held at the University of Maryland, USA in 1998. Contributors were actively involved in various translation projects such as the New English Translation of the Septuagint, the New American Bible revision, the Chicago Bible Translation, the New Living Translation, the New Century Version, and so forth. Although the essays in the book vary in their subject matters, they all have in common the commitment to examining the nature and practice of Bible translation. Readers will understand that Bible translators are no neutral and scientific mediums, but all translators work out of their theological, denominational, political, cultural ‘prejudices.’ This is intimated by the fact that Bible translations have been planned and executed along particular confessional and denominational lines, be it Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Evangelical. Reading the Bible in translation is, one may say, nothing other than reading translators’ interpretation of the Bible. The thirteen essays in this book will help us to appreciate various influences that went into the making of Greek, Aramaic, German, Mongolian, and English Bibles.BR This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 “Precedent: The Bible in the Ancient World” contains two essays on the first ever translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. Part 2 “Scripture and Community: Jewish Bibles, Christian Bibles” constitutes the meat of the book: the eight essays contained therein deal with individual translation projects in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Although the contributors all try to shed light on the ways in which prejudices of Bible translators influence the work of translating the Bible, Gillman takes the matter into another level: the two German Bibles discussed in Gillman’s article (Chapter 5) show that Bible translators may incorporate their visions for a religious community into their versions of the Bible. Mendelssohn, for instance, used his German Bible to take Yiddish speaking Jewish-Germans out of their ghetto life into the high German culture in early 18SUPth/SUP century whereas Buber and Rosenzweig used their version of the Bible to restore the spirituality in their Jewish community of the early 20SUPth/SUP century. Finally, Part 3 “The Bible in the Classroom: Mimetic Translation and the Literary Approach” consists of three essays on bible translation designed specifically for an academic setting. Three scholars share their experience as a Bible teacher in a university or seminary setting, and propose various translations that may help students to appreciate the literary artifice crafted in the Biblical literature.

Rosenzweig and Luther. The Concept of Faith in the Perspective of «New Thinking» and Bible Translation

In his “The Star of Redemption”, Rosenzweig engages not only in an argument with philosophy, but also with theology. Next to Augustine and Friedrich Schleiermacher Martin Luther was a counterpart in whose face he developed his dialogical “new thinking”. The essay takes up the traces of this dispute in the letters to focus here on Rosenzweig's reading of Ricarda Huch's “Luther’s Faith”. This literary picture is then related in a sketch to Luther's Reformation theology as it emerges from contemporary research. In a next step, the “Star” is interpreted as a book that, on the one hand, owes much to a previous reception of Luther, but on the other hand, also shows the Reformator's thinking in a new light. Finally, the late writings on the problem of translation come into view in order to justify Rosenzweig’s “Verdeutschung” of the Hebrew Bible, undertaken together with Buber, to Luther’s “German Bible”.

The Reformation of Philosophy ed. by Marius Timmann Mjaaland

Reviewed by: The Reformation of Philosophy ed. by Marius Timmann Mjaaland Mark Mattes The Reformation of Philosophy. Edited by Marius Timmann Mjaaland. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. viii + 279 pp. These eighteen essays present the results of the Sixth Nordic Conference for Philosophy of Religion held in Oslo in 2017. Their goal is to assess the impact of the Reformation on philosophy. Questions raised include: how did the Reformation re-situate philosophy? Was the Reformation in some sense a philosophical event? Strangely, the majority of thinkers tend to leapfrog from Luther, if he is examined at all, to German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, Schelling), Existentialism (Kierkegaard or Nietzsche), various schools of twentieth-century [End Page 362] phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger), and postmodern thinkers (Derrida, Agamben, Badiou, and others). The theme is subdivided into four subthemes: (1) Re-Formation of Philosophy in Christianity and Islam, (2) Philosophy in the Wake of the Reformation, (3) Reformation, Phenomenology and Metaphysics, and (4) Critique, Protest and Reform. Many of the essays are fairly abstract and assume a working knowledge of current trends in philosophy. That said, those aware of the divergent schools in philosophy will find value in this book for assessing medium theory, communication theory, aesthetics, metaphysics, and hermeneutics in light of Luther in whom are “traces” of modern concepts. Editor Mjaaland sees many of the “deep structures” of modern philosophy as pre-figured in Luther. Some highlights include the following. Philipp Stoellger interprets Luther’s legacy for philosophy in light of medium theory. In this light, the Reformation is a “re-formatting” of religion and faith through the medium of the justifying word as well as other media by which God is self-revealing (43). Safet Bektovic, a Muslim scholar, follows the thinking of medieval Muslim mystic Ibn Arabi, who, similar to Luther’s notion of a “hidden God” (masks of God or larva dei), claims that Allah uses “signs” that reveal aspects of his presence while veiling his essence. Mjaaland shows how the destructive aspect of the theology of the cross, its crucifying of spiritual pride, impacted Heidegger and Kant who both use a notion of destruction to overthrow metaphysics. Ultimately, for Kant, however, the notion of God is problematic because it can neither be presupposed in experience nor proved, given that it is beyond sense experience. Stian Grøgaard appropriates the thinking of F. W. J. Schelling as a counter both to Kierkegaard’s skepticism of metaphysics and Hegel’s “speculative philosophy of Spirit” with an “a priori empiricism” which allows the logic of experience to permeate pure thought. Like Luther, the critique of philosophy is itself philosophical. Jayne Svennungsson also appeals to Schelling as a voice affirming Jewish experience in the face of German Idealism’s anti-Semitism. She notes that Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig developed this further with a messianic vision that (ironically) challenges the nationalist [End Page 363] idea of one people as superior to all others, and makes this vision the vocation of the Jews. Jan-Olav Henriksen describes Nietzsche’s appreciation for Luther’s translation of the German Bible but otherwise develops Nietzsche’s wholesale rejection of Luther’s view of grace. Countering Protestant ambivalence towards aesthetics, Dorthe Jørgensen seeks an aesthetic which presents, and does not just represent, metaphysical truths. She appeals to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartner and Kant to help in this quest and sees them as offering such an aesthetic based on dialogue with God. With respect to the traditional Lutheran doctrine of election, Atle Søvik defends the Book of Concord: “saying that people are sinners who should convert and presenting the grace of the gospel can be understood as a way that God creates faith . . . Thus blaming people for not having faith and God creating faith are two sides of the same event. They are not two contradictory events, but the same event” (238). This is a book by academics for academics. Perhaps an essay devoted to Luther as Nominalist would ground the material more in the Reformation legacy and serve as a frame of reference for the other essays. This book should be consulted only if one is invested in a specific theme or figure discussed in one of the...

The “Last Word” in Pictures: Enhanced Visual Interpretation of Revelation in Luther’s High German Bible (1534)

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Martin Luther and his associates were active in Bible translation, publishing first the New Testament, from 1522 onwards, and by 1534—at roughly the mid-point of these endeavours—the whole Bible in German. Across this entire period, until his death, Luther continuously offered reader-viewers of the final New Testament book, Revelation, not only verbal commentary—in a preface (1522), or replacement preface with accompanying marginal notes (1530)—but visual exegesis, in the form of successive series of woodcut engravings designed to illustrate the text. A set of images commissioned for Luther’s 1534 German Bible was the crowning achievement of this visual interpretation: the 1534 Bible even extended pictorial illustration and adornment to the Gospels and Epistles, as well as Old Testament texts. From the perspective of art history, to regard these acclaimed illustrations as “the last word in pictures” represents no novelty, for the 1534 Luther Bible has long been counted among “the finest things that the art of printing produced in the Reformation period” (Schramm 1923, 22–23; my translation). However, to make the same assertion about the Revelation illustrations specifically, from an explicitly exegetical standpoint—and in English—is new and requires substantiation through supporting evidence. I will provide this through close analysis and evaluation of the interpretative moves that the 1534 images make, in conjunction with Luther’s translation and comment, over and against the visual exegesis of their predecessors created, from 1522 onwards, for Luther’s German New Testament.

A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman

Reviewed by: A History of German Jewish Bible Translation by Abigail Gillman Ran HaCohen (bio) A History of German Jewish Bible Translation By Abigail Gillman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 332 pp. Within merely a century and a half, from the late eighteenth century to the early years of the Nazi regime, the relatively small German-speaking Jewish minority in Central Europe produced a dozen different German translations of the entire Hebrew Bible, as well as many more partial ones. No other Jewish diaspora, to this day, has been more prolific in the field of bible translation. The impact of these translations has gone far beyond the German Jewish sphere: Mendelssohn's Be'ur was intensively received in Eastern Europe for many generations, whereas S. R. Hirsch's German Pentateuch was published twice in English, and Everette Fox's modern-day English translation follows the principles of Buber and Rosenzweig's German Bible—neither of which (as well as other many English Jewish bibles) are mentioned in David Daniell's formidable The Bible in English (2003). Quite a few scholarly essays have treated one or several of these German translations; Abigail Gillman's, however, is the first full-fledged book to offer a history of German Jewish bible translation as a whole. Gillman divides the translations she discusses into four consecutive "waves." The first wave expectedly includes Mendelssohn's translation, but starts, significantly, with the Yiddish translations of Blitz and of Witzenhausen, published in Amsterdam a century before the Be'ur. Taken together, these works constitute the revolutionary "Jewish Enlightenment Bibles," the roots of which can be traced back to the Reformation and Luther, whose German translation influenced, directly or otherwise, all Yiddish and German Jewish bibles. [End Page 365] The chapter on the second wave discusses the translations of Joseph Johlson, Gotthold Salomon, Leopold Zunz, and Salomon Herxheimer, all of which were published in the 1830s and 1840s and aimed at Germanspeaking Jews "for whom traditional Judaism had lost its innate appeal" (87). Philologically informed and a reaction to Mendelssohn's, these translations were literal and foreignizing, and their authors sought to "invent a more Hebrew-sounding German Jewish biblical idiom" (99). Their focus was predominantly on the biblical text itself, with very little paratext. The third wave includes the two highly popular translations of respectively Jewish liberal and Modern-Orthodox leaders, Ludwig Philippson and S. R. Hirsch, published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite denominational differences, these works reveal a visually striking similarity: Unlike their predecessors of the second wave, both Philippson and Hirsch added a comprehensive commentary, in some cases almost dwarfing the bilingual biblical text itself. Additionally, Philippson's bible is extensively illustrated. Whereas Philippson anchored his commentary in an encyclopedic knowledge of "the Orient," constructing what Gillman terms "a national story," Hirsch in his commentary turned his readers' attention inward, to the minute phonetic nuances of the Hebrew text. Both Philippson and Hirsch, Gillman claims, turned the bible into a Gesamtkunstwerk. The fourth and last wave includes, expectedly, the Buber-Rosenzweig famous Verdeutschung [Germanization] of the Bible, and the much less obvious choice of Berta Pappenheim's translation of the Yiddish Frauenbibel [women's bible] Zeenah u-Reenah, an adaptation of the Genesis stories. Both twentieth-century translations offer a radical break with the tradition outlined by the previous waves. Buber in particular stressed the need to listen to the "naked" bible, stripped of a thousand years of reading and interpretation. Each translation of the bible stands at a crossroads of numerous factors: religious, philological, cultural, social, even commercial. Gillman's discussion seems to leave little untouched: from comparative textual analysis, through the paratextual level of introductions, commentary, and visual aspects, on to the biographies of the translator, their cultural [End Page 366] environment, both Jewish and (too often neglected in previous studies) Christian, up to the contemporary reception and later legacies. While Mendelssohn's and Buber-Rosenzweig's translations have been the subject of much earlier scholarship, their respective lesser-known counterparts (the translation into or from Yiddish, i.e., Blitz-Witzenhausen and Pappenheim) add an illuminating aspect to the discussion of the first and fourth waves. The...

Inanimate Conversion

Works on conversion have concentrated almost solely on the movement of people – individuals or communities – between religions. The material evidence has been employed as a tool to learn about people and texts. Nevertheless, when studied on its own accord, the material evidence reveals another facet of conversion; it tells of sacred objects which were at the heart of religious communities, and whose transition to another religion touched upon the very essence of religious identity and the meaning of sanctity.Books and buildings are two of the most common sacred objects used by Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages. Rarely studied together, the transformation of both objects has much in common, and books, much like archaeological sites and buildings, contain evidence of successive layers of compilation and use. The conversion of buildings and sites has been central to religious conquest and appropriation. These transformations were manifested by physical modifications as well as in the creation of a new mythology, which was employed, surprisingly, by Christians and Muslims alike, in the Latin East, Iberia and Egypt. Books were also volatile objects, and evidence reveals the movement of sacred books between religions, with the most treasured Gospel Books being given to Jewish communities as collateral, or the amalgamation of Jewish and Christian Bibles in medieval monasteries. In this article specific examples, from the conversion of the Dome of the Rock to the multi-layer transformation of a German Bible, provide a concrete basis for this theoretical exploration.

The Creation of the World by Virgil Solis

Abstract Virgil Solis (1514 – 1562), a prosperous artist and printmaker from Nuremberg, dedicated his final major work to an illustration of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although the designs of most of the woodcuts for this first extensive German series were borrowed from the Metamorphoses series of the French artist Bernard Salomon (c. 1508 – 1561), a closer study reveals several notable differences in the details of individual scenes, among them The Creation of the World. Placing Solis’ work within the tradition of the printed illustrated editions of Ovid’s magnum opus, which had by then crystallized mainly in Italy and France, the article argues that Solis’ illustration drew not only on the earlier Metamorphoses, but also on printed German Bibles, following the parallels taken up at the time between the Creation story in the Metamorphoses and the Creation story in Genesis.

Gog at Vienna: Three Woodcut Images of the Turks as Apocalyptic Destroyers in Early Editions of the Luther Bible

AbstractThree woodcut illustrations by different artist in early editions of Martin Luther’s German Bible depict the 1529 Siege of Vienna by Ottoman Turks under Suleiman I as the fulfillment of the prophecy of “Gog and Magog,” the biblical destroyers in both the Book of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse. A marginal annotation also associates Gog and Magog with the historical Tartars and the legendary Red Jews. This article examines the images in light of their historical and theological contexts. It uses Luther’s theology, as it developed in the wake of the siege, to interpret the illustrations, and the illustrations to explain Luther’s theology, specifically his sola scriptura doctrine. A curious but often overlooked detail in one of the images is reinterpreted: a crescent moon atop the spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. This detail is puzzling since the siege failed and the Turks never entered the city. The Islamic symbol where it does not belong can be read as the artist’s subtle condemnation of the Catholic faith. This interpretation aligns with Luther’s polemical attacks on both Islam and Catholicism and his association of the two.

Johannes Dietenberger and his Counter-Reformation German Bible

Abstract Johannes Dietenberger (ca. 1475–1537), native of Frankfurt am Main, university-trained Doctor of Theology, and Dominican friar, served as prior in Frankfurt and Koblenz during the 1525 Urban Revolt of the German Peasants’ War and the early Protestant Reformation, respectively. Like Martin Luther, Dietenberger translated the Bible into the vernacular German after consulting recently published Greek and Hebrew biblical texts; however, unlike Luther he produced a translation that remained true to the Latin Vulgate and the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church. Dietenberger aimed to counter those parts of Luther’s translation which contradicted Catholic tradition, and at the same time to provide a translation whose language was less coarse and offensive. Still, there were more commonalities between the translations of Luther and Dietenberger than earlier research in controversial theology assumed. Overshadowed by the famous Wittenberg reformer and slandered by polemical Protestant scholarship of previous centuries, Dietenberger and his Bible translation have never received the scholarly attention they deserve. This article represents an attempt to correct the oversight.

독일성서공회판 통독성경에 대한 평가와 우리말 통독성경을 위한 제언

독일성서공회판 통독성경에 대한 평가와 우리말 통독성경을 위한 제언

The Impact and Influence of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament

Abstract: Although often eclipsed by the giants of the Reformation, Desiderius Erasmus had a notable influence on the Reformation and the world that followed. Responsible for five editions of the Greek New Testament, his contributions include a renewed emphasis on the Greek over against the Latin of the day, as well as influence on subsequent Greek New Testaments and many translations, including Luther’s German Bible and the English King James Version. In God’s providence, Erasmus provided kindling for the fire of the Reformation.

Lexical bundles and German bibles

Lexical bundles and German bibles

The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture by Jonathan Sheehan

107 than in how it is said. Swift’s self-styled ‘‘modern’’ speaker embodies the undisciplined use of reason the tale lambasts. By satirizing such individualism, Swift endorsed religious conformity. Though his unyielding faith in the National Church’s authority may appear odd to us, it was a common attitude within Anglican religious debate and certainly among its clergy. As J. R. Pocock has observed, ‘‘it is incredibly hard for us, raised as we are on the liberal presupposition that religion should have nothing to do with authority, to recapture the mentality of our predecessors to whom religion was an affair of authority and could not be otherwise.’’ But doing so is necessary. The purpose of Swift’s satire, as Christian Thorne has noted, seems less to enter a public debate than to ‘‘shout discourse down.’’ To conclude, as Ms. Ellenzweig does, that the Tale ‘‘uphold[s] the teachings of the Anglican Church while making clear that the spirit is a fiction’’ mistakes both Swift’s deep distrust of religious fanaticism and self-confident individualism for freethinking . Pope’s antisectarianism, which defined his religious thought and was itself the consequence of being raised and remaining Catholic in an anti-Catholic world, led him to strive continually for religious common ground. As a consequence , it has always attracted suspicions of heterodoxy. Like early critics of his Essay on Criticism, Ms. Ellenzweig detects heterodoxy in Pope’s observation that ‘‘Wit, like Faith, by each Man is apply’d / To one small Sect, and All are Damn’d beside.’’ But these lines attack sectarianism, not faith. Similarly, Pope’s claim in a letter to Bishop Atterbury that reading Church controversies left him ‘‘a Papist and a Protestant by turns, according to the last book I read’’ signals not his deism, but his ongoing interest in identifying common ground between Catholicism and Protestantism . Pope exemplifies both his era’s exhaustion with theological disputes and his own exasperation as an internal exile. The sophisticated, learned, and self-consciously literary world of eighteenth-century religious controversy certainly included an intense engagement with the past and a familiarity with heterodox beliefs. By addressing these issues, Ms. Ellenzweig opens a valuable conversation. But entering fully into that religious controversy requires greater awareness of these writers’ contexts and a sharper sense of the variety of eighteenth-century habits of religious thought than this study provides. Anna Battigelli SUNY Plattsburgh JONATHAN SHEEHAN. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton; Princeton, 2005. Pp. xvi ⫹ 273. $58. Although I am still in doubt as to what ‘‘Enlightenment’’ means after Mr. Sheehan’s explanation, which includes an index of almost all we know about the eighteenth century, The Enlightenment Bible is valuable, learned, and important . Mr. Sheehan explores a series of hermeneutical questions that arose (and perhaps only could have arisen) after the Renaissance and before the high Victorian age, between Luther’s German Bible of 1522 and the Essays and Reviews of 1860. Mr. Sheehan’s general adversaries are those who think that philosophy engulfed religion at this time as interest in the Bible waned. Mr. Sheehan focuses on biblical studies that flourished mostly in Germany and England. Almost three-quarters of 108 his analysis concerns Germany; only one of his two major chapters (out of nine), ‘‘Scholarship, the New Testament , and the English Defense of the Bible,’’ directly deals with the time of the Scriblerians, who are rarely mentioned . The following topics are covered: the beginnings of the vernacular Bible; the birth of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ Bible, and English responses up to and including Richard Bentley, whom Sheehan makes seminal; German pietism’s incorporation of critical methodology; responses to philological research; approaches stressing moral pedagogy and the bible as poetry; the bible as stimulus for archival research; universalist and cultural readings; and the vagaries of higher criticism through 1850 in England and Germany . The thread that unites large and small essays on the English bible is translation . Mr. Sheehan regards those periods that created research without making the bible available to the public (as in translation ) as epicene and deficient; such periods fail to use the Bible as it should be used. He repeatedly inquires why English translation, after the Authorized Version...

The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship

The wide distribution and availability of German and other vernacular Bible translations in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with 22 printed full Bible translations into German/Low German/Netherlandish appearing before Luther’s famous Bible translation, has been known to scholars since at least the early eighteenth century, when various works on German Bibles before the Reformation began to appear. However, the existence of such translations did not guarantee that scholars, especially church historians and historians of the Reformation took such Bible translations seriously. Luther himself had claimed (polemically) that the Bible had been entirely unknown and unavailable when he was a young man. The rather dispassionate scholarship of the eighteenth century, which included important works on pre-Reformation German Bibles by orthodox Lutheran divines, gave way in the second half of the nineteenth century to a rather bitter polemical discourse in the context of the Kulturkampf in Germany. Luther the linguistic genius and Luther the theological hero were the protagonists on one side; the late medieval Bible, on which Luther drew heavily for his own translation, was on the other. Not so much a Catholic-Lutheran debate as an ideological one about the place, value and influence of medieval piety and culture (and their relation to German national culture) was played out by prominent church historians. By the eve of WWII, German Bible scholarship had become a more clear-eyed exercise in historical evaluation--yet immediately after the war, in the context of the Cold War and the construction of a lineage of democratic and liberty-oriented values for Christian western Europe, the Luther Bible began to loom ever larger, especially in textbooks and general surveys, as a turning point in the history of western culture. Since the 1990s, more specialized and careful assessments of the importance of pre-Reformation German Bibles have prevailed, perhaps as part of a general re-evaluation of medieval culture and piety from perspectives informed more by anthropology and literary theory than by ideological polemic. These findings might shed light on the modes of history-writing in the contexts of both myth-making and source analysis.

Schoenberg, Numerology, and Moses und Aron

Throughout his opera Moses und Aron, Arnold Schoenberg spells “Aaron” with a single a instead of the double a spelling customarily found in English translations of the Bible. When I point this out to my students, they often assume that Schoenberg was either using a German spelling of the name or that he was transliterating from the Hebrew. In neither case is that so. In German Bibles based on Martin Luther's translation, Aaron is always spelled with two a's, just as it is in English.1 And had Schoenberg wanted to transliterate from the Hebrew, he would have added a letter—Aharon—not subtracted one.2 No, the reason for the missing a has nothing to do with orthography; rather, Schoenberg's motivation for removing the a is probably numerological. Had the title included the second a, it would have had thirteen letters. Without the second a, there are only twelve.3 Since Schoenberg believed that thirteen was a baleful number, one with all kinds of negative influences, whereas twelve was a benign number, one with all kinds of positive influences, it is likely that Schoenberg omitted the second a so that his title would have only twelve letters.4

A Christian Bible for Jewish Children

vel, it is an intra-cultural translation, in which the target culture (German Jews) constitutes a sub-culture1 of the (German) source culture. On the linguistic level, the source text (Christian Bible stories) was itself based on a translation (the German Bible); in the work examined, it was adapted (in German) as well as reverse-translated into the original (Hebrew) language. The German adaptation and the Hebrew reverse-translation are printed side by side.2 The text examined is p57o ina,3 biblical stories for Jewish children published in Breslau (then Prussia) in 1837 by the Jewish scholar and teacher David Samose.4 Samose (1789-1864) is known for his Hebrew translations of German children's literature for Jewish children.5 His bilingual German/Hebrew textbook of biblical stories was not the first of its kind; it had been preceded by several Bible stories for Jewish children in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century in various Jewish communities; numerous other books would follow.6 The remarkable thing about Samosc's book is its

Arnold Goldberg's Bible Translation

The most eminent and much discussed example of translating texts as translating cultures is the Hebrew Bible. Its numerous translations from antiquity to our present time reflect many remarkable transformations of the original text (if there ever has been an original text) into a vast variety of quite different cultures and the ongoing process of adapting the cultural context of the Hebrew Bible to ever new historical circumstances. We are not dealing here, in this context, with a selection of the highlights of Bible translation throughout the centuries; rather, we are interested in Bible translations in relation to Martin Buber's attempt to translate the Hebrew Bible into his own cultural context, the German language and culture of the early 20th century. This task justifies a closer look at Arnold Goldberg's Bible translation because it turns out to be the most recent and most ambitious attempt to take up and continue the long line of German Bible translations from Mendelssohn to Zunz and Philipson and others that climaxed in the Buber-Rosenzweig translation. The very fact that someone started the project of a new German Bible translation, after the huge success of Buber-Rosenzweig, is remarkable enough and deserves our attention.

Rechenschaftsbericht zur Editio altera der Handausgabe der Septuaginta von Alfred Rahlfs

AbstractIn agreement with the German Bible Society in Stuttgart the Septuagint-Committee of the Göttingen Academy of Humanities and Sciences decided to entrust the author, Prof. Hanhart, with the responsibility for a revision that would leave the text established by Alfred Rahlfs largely untouched and would restrict revisionary activity to the most inevitable changes.