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Saturday, September 19, 2015

Jubilees in Hebrew

THE BOOK OF JUBILEES has been translated into Hebrew by Kana Werman (ספר היובלים מבוא, תרגום ופירוש - The Book of Jubilees: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary) and is available from the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute. This Second Temple Jewish work was originally composed in Hebrew (we have fragments of the original among the Dead Sea Scrolls), then translated into Greek. The Greek is now almost entirely lost, but in antiquity it was translated into Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and it survives complete only in that language. It was also translated into Latin and we have some, but not all of the Latin text, as well as bits of it in Syriac translation. Now all of these resource have been used to translate it back into Hebrew. A remarkable history of textual transmission.