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I own the New JPS version, but want to get an ArtScroll since that's what my friends who are much more fluent in Hebrew explain is the superior translation. For quick on line reference, I use the translation posted on line by Wold Ort for the Torah portion alone and for the entire Tanakh, I use Chabad's on line translation.
While Christian theologians of past generations apparently had no problem recognizing that the Tanakh and their Old and New Testaments were from different texts translations with regard to the "Septuagint", it appears that in recent years, and only since I've been on the Internet, have I seen people trying to obfuscate the fact that the Torah portion ALONE was the ORIGINAL Septuagint. Another ancient name for the Tanakh is Mikra, meaning reading, because the scriptures were read aloud each week to the congregation.
The Christian Bible's Old Testament (it?s adaptation of Tanakh) reveals that in many places there are significant translation differences rendering the meanings of the passages quite different. Not only are the books rearranged so that the books are not in the order of Torah, Prophets and Writings, but Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah are divided. The Protestant Old Testament contains roughly the same books; the Vulgate has additional texts added to the canon that were originally written in Greek. The Greek Septuagint (meaning 70) was originally referring to the Torah portion only, and in fact, that is the only portion that was translated by 72 scribes whose translations matched. The rest of Tanakh was translated from the Hebrew to the Greek over the course of about 300 years and scholars cannot tell who or when exactly any of them were translated. Yet the common name of Septuagint is now generally applied to the whole Greek translation. By the beginning of the first century CE, there were many different versions of each text that appeared, some of them with less accurate Hebrew to Greek, and during this time, many other texts appeared being originally written IN Greek such as the books of the Maccabees. By the time of the beginnings of Christianity, some of these texts of Tanakh had become so changed through the Hellenization (introduction of Greek philosophic concepts through language) that they were no longer adherent to Torah precept. The Hebrew Bible canon had been more or less "closed" since the time of Ezra/ Nehemiah (around 423 BCE) but of course, Jewish scribes still penned what was going on in Jewish life in Judea and wrote and discussed how to apply Torah to their lives. It has been debated by many Jewish scholars that if the Books of Maccabees had originally been written in Hebrew rather than Greek they may have been more readily accepted by Jews as Jewish texts..but since the Tanakh was already formed and closed..it could not have been as a part of our Bible.
****The Greek Septuagint called the Old Testament is not a Jewish document, but rather a Christian one. The original Septuagint, created 2,200 years ago by 72 Jewish translators, was a Greek translation of the Five Books of Moses alone. It therefore did not contain prophetic Books of the Bible such as Isaiah. The Septuagint as we have it today, which includes the Prophets and Writings as well, is a product of the church, not the Jewish people. In fact, the Septuagint remains the official Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the manuscripts that consist of our Septuagint today date to the third century C.E. The fact that additional books known as the Apocrypha, which are uniquely sacred to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church, are found in the Septuagint should raise a red flag to those inquiring into the Jewishness of the Septuagint.
The fact that the original Septuagint translated by Jewish scribes more than 22 centuries ago was only of the Pentateuch and not of prophetic books of the Bible such as Isaiah is confirmed by countless sources including the ancient Letter of Aristeas, which is the earliest attestation to the existence of the Septuagint. The Talmud also states this explicitly in Tractate Megillah (9a), and Josephus as well affirms that the Septuagint was a translation only of the Law of Moses in his preface to Antiquities of the Jews. Moreover, Jerome, a church father and Bible translator who could hardly be construed as friendly to Judaism, affirms Josephus' statement regarding the authorship of the Septuagint in his preface to The Book of Hebrew Questions.
In fact, Dr. F.F. Bruce, the preeminent professor of Biblical exegesis, keenly points out that, strictly speaking, the Septuagint deals only with the Pentateuch and not the whole Old Testament. Bruce writes, "The Jews might have gone on at a later time to authorize a standard text of the rest of the Septuagint, but . . . lost interest in the Septuagint altogether. With but few exceptions, every manuscript of the Septuagint which has come down to our day was copied and preserved in Christian, not Jewish, circles."***** < this is by Rabbi Tovia Singer, and he is referring to a Christian theologian who in his lifetime was considered one of the world's foremost experts on Bible history.
Below are links to online Bibles and other references of interest germaine to this question and other answers
The accuracy of the words we see now in the Hebrew Bible was confirmed with the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls where fragments of each book except the book of Esther (the last book to be included in the canon) match quite well with the Tanakh's Jews use today.
The majority of the Dead Sea scrolls were written in the Hebrew Language (approximately 90-95%) with Assyrian Block script. From this majority there are a few cases in which the scribes used Paleo-Hebrew (see for example 4QPaleoExodus).
Modern Hebrew is different from the ancient Paleo Hebrew, but the Hebrew of 2000 years ago is closer to modern Hebrew than the English of the 1700?s is to the English we speak today. There was a council of rabbis and scribes at Yavneh 90 CE who worked hard to weed out from use any books attached to the Tanakh of the Hellenized versions of scripture that were being spread. Some Christian apologist scholars often try to claim that this was when the Jewish Bible's canon was formed in response to Christianity, but that is an error ignoring that their very own early church father?s writings refer to it as a formed work already at the time of the writing of their New Testament! The council of these earliest rabbis were concerned that without the centrality of the Temple and the dispersion of Jews, the Hellenist apologists and Romans would corrupt the Tanakh by altering it through mistranslation into Greek and adding pagan precepts. There is no doubt that all the texts admitted into the Prophets and Writings were already a part of the Tanakh long before the time of Jesus. Some of the texts that Judaism never considered as a part of Jewish scripture were early apologetic attempts to tie in Christian dogma to the Tanakh. Others that were condemned, show pre-Christian attempts to Hellenize Judaism. Both the Greek and Roman conquerers tried to assimilate the Jewish people out of existence through such methods. These texts known as Pseudepigrapha were largely written between 200 BCE and 100 CE and included great amounts of Greek philosophy.
Most of the book of Daniel and portions of Ezra and a single sentence in Jeremiah are in Aramaic, a related language to Hebrew using Hebrew letters. All else in the Jewish Bible was written in Hebrew
The Apocrypha (Greek, "hidden books") are Jewish books not considered part of the Holy Scriptures of Judaism.
Pseudepigrapha (Greek, "falsely attributed") was given to Jewish writings, which were attributed to authors who did not actually write them...many people confuse the two terms and which books belong in each category
Neither Apocrypha or Pseudepigrapha have ever been Holy Scriptures to Judaism. Those terms are important to understand when studying these and many related ancient texts.
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Jews: What English translation of the Tanakh do You Prefer?
