Early Translations of the Torah

As the canon took shape, the first translations of Jewish scripture began to appear. These translations were meant to make the text available to people who did not know Hebrew, allowing them to access the holy text in their own languages, just as Bible translations do today. These translations could also be studied alongside the original Hebrew text. The first translation was the Greek, known as the Septuagint, written for the sizable Jewish community in Alexandria. But the practice of translating the Bible into Aramaic began early as well, as is reflected in the account of Ezra’s reading of the law in Nehemiah 8:8, although the extant Aramaic translations, the targumim, come from later periods. Early Latin translations of the Bible were made from the Greek, but Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, was made directly from the Hebrew.

The art of translating requires the translator to make interpretive choices, and so, in some sense, all translations are also interpretations, as is well articulated by the translator of Ben Sira into Greek in his translator’s prologue. A translator’s own prior understanding of a text may also inform their interpretive choices, as was the case when Jerome translated the Vulgate with the Christian understanding that prophecies foretold in the “Old Testament” were realized in Jesus. Some of the Jewish translations read like midrash in their expansion and overt reinterpretation of the biblical text.