Many of you have been asking, where are the new Narrations and Psalms? We have not abandoned those but we would like to present you the work that has been keeping us so occupied recently. We are releasing Shma-Israel.org translations of the New Testament epistles. On 3-1-2007 we are releasing our translation of Galatians. We within the Hebraic Roots or Messianic worship have long understood there is something just not quite right about the conventional "Law versus Grace" interpretations of this letter.
One testimony we received from Europe explains thusly, "While reading the New Testament out of Bibles in multiple languages, I found differences between the translations. Until we used a hebraic New Testament to compare and mirror the texts, we were unable to obtain a clear meaning of several passages. Therefore we had to conclude that the true meaning of what had been written ages ago was turned and twisted in many places. We understood that originally the letters were written in a hebraic way of thinking, but in many translations had lost the real meaning because they were changed into Greek thinking and portions had lost their value and had been distorted."
Here at the ministry we have witnessed this sort of thing many times concerning passages of the Brit Chadasha (New Testament) We have sensed the leading of the Ruach to commence a translation project of the Salkinson-Ginsberg Hebrew New Testament (SHNT) into English, and soon to come, Spanish and other languages.
Idiomatic Hebrew
"I felt then how great a necessity there was for a version in idiomatic Hebrew..", the words of Dr. Isaac Salkinson, a believer in Yeshua, who was from an Orthodox Jewish home and who had read Hebrew since age four. Dr Salkinson, according to our research, possesed considerable experience in rendering idiomatic Hebrew, and had even translated from the works of Shakespeare into Hebrew. In 1883 his translation of the Greek into Hebrew was completed, and it was published in 1886.
At Shma-Israel.org we have been using his translation for a number of years and have found it to be completely remarkable. Difficult or obscure passages we have examined in his rendering and have been amazed at the consistent clarity. We have seen on a consistent basis that it effectively recaptures the original hebraic context, vocabulary, terminology, phraseology and style of the Torah which was all lost when the text was put into Greek. (For a more in-depth examination of this topic, please refer to the introduction preceding the translation texts.) In short, we were amazed at the fidelity and similarity to the texts of Holy Scriptures of Moses and the Prophets. (and the Writings) The language was clear, meaning it was without the "morphing" that we see in the Greek. We can not say the same for any other translation. Many of you have noticed, for example, in the book of Galatians there are several, if not many, verses which make little or no sense in the "standard" translations. Yet when you see the one we have done, we think you will be pleased at the clarity and overall logical, sensible and Biblical flow of ideas as written by Rav Sha'ul (Paul) in his letter to the Galatians.
There is a deeper problem - and that is that we know we are dealing with a mindset concerning interpreting the Bible. The basic mindset that we think is a problem starts with the actual naming or labeling of the Bible sections, i.e. calling a portion the 'New Testament' and the one which Yeshua had and learned and taught and preached about the 'Old Testament'. We also deal with this in our introduction. But the conclusion is, if one part had to be placed higher than another, then it would be far better to place the Tenach, which Yeshua testified would not pass away, higher than a collection of eyewitness accounts (like testimonies) and letters written about the Tenach and about the fulfillment of its prophesied Messiah, Yeshua.
How to use Them
Remember that at the time the Epistles were written, the Bible that everybody had was the Tenach, called "Old Testament" today. We think this choice of names is bad, because there is nothing "old" about it at all. Not only that, but realize the scripture used to instruct about any subject matter in any correspondence would have been only the Tenach, and all the ways of thinking about it were all in Hebrew and culturally of the people of Israel. So with that as the background, there would have been numerous indirect references, allusions, and invocations of something pertinant to that culture that only they would appreciate. For example, the term 'yankee' means something different depending on where you are, northern USA, southern USA, or outside the USA. So it is with Bible. Specific, technical allusions to Torah that are in the Epistles were lost for all intents and purposes when they went to Greek. Only someone skilled in language and knowledgeable of the Hebrew Scriptures could restore this lost information. What you will see is the product of that restoration process.
