Jewish texts in English

At the heart of Jewish scripture is the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Its name is made from the first letters of its three parts: Torah, the five books of Moses; Nevi'im, the Prophets; and Ketuvim, the Writings. The Torah holds the highest place. It is handwritten on a parchment scroll, kept in the ark of every synagogue, and read aloud in public week by week.

Around the written Bible stands the vast body of interpretation that tradition calls the Oral Torah: the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Midrash, followed by centuries of commentary, law, and philosophy. A student of Genesis will often read it with the eleventh-century commentator Rashi beside it. These works are not yet part of this collection, but our explanations sometimes mention how they read a verse.

The siddur, the Jewish prayer book, is built in large part from the Bible. The Shema comes from Deuteronomy and Numbers, psalms are said every day, and verses from every part of the Tanakh are woven through the prayers. That is why this collection includes texts that are both scripture and prayer.

Jewish scripture is meant to be heard. On Shabbat mornings, and in shorter readings on Monday and Thursday mornings and on festivals, a portion of the Torah is chanted from the scroll in the synagogue, following a yearly cycle. On Shabbat and festivals it is followed by a haftarah, a passage from the Prophets usually chosen to echo it.

The reading is sung to cantillation, a system of signs above and below the Hebrew letters that was fixed in writing by early medieval scribes, and Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yemenite, and other communities each have their own melodies for it. The Five Scrolls have their days as well: Esther on Purim, Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B'Av, and in many communities the Song of Songs on Passover and Ecclesiastes on Sukkot.

Psalms are part of every morning service, and some people read through the whole Book of Psalms each week or each month. Families say the Shema with their children at bedtime. Much of Jewish life is carried by these words spoken aloud.

Every page in this collection shows the Hebrew first, read from right to left, with its vowel signs. Beneath each verse is the English of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, and beneath that our explanation, which picks out the key Hebrew words and the traditions around the verse.

Hebrew comes first because it is the language of Jewish prayer and Torah reading everywhere. A Jew in London, New York, or Johannesburg says the Shema in the same words as a Jew in Jerusalem. Hebrew also holds meanings that no translation can carry at once: ruach is wind, breath, and spirit together, and a single root can link verses many chapters apart.

The Hebrew is printed without the cantillation signs, with ordinary punctuation marking the pauses. A short line between two words is the maqaf, which joins them into a single unit for reading.

The English on these pages comes from The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in Philadelphia in 1917. A committee of Jewish scholars, with Max Margolis as editor-in-chief, prepared it to give English-speaking Jews a translation of their own, faithful to the traditional Hebrew text and to Jewish interpretation. For much of the twentieth century it was the English Bible in many synagogues and Jewish homes.

Its English follows the style of the King James Version, with thee and thou, maketh and leadeth, so it sounds familiar to anyone who knows that tradition, but it departs from the King James wherever the Hebrew or Jewish tradition requires. The Society published an entirely new translation in 1985, which is still under copyright and is not used here.

The four-letter name of God written in the Hebrew Bible is not pronounced as it is written. In prayer and in the reading of the Torah it is said as Adonai, my Lord, and in ordinary conversation many Jews say HaShem, the Name. The 1917 translation follows the long English custom of printing the LORD in capital letters wherever the Hebrew has this name, and our explanations write the LORD or Adonai.

Many Jews also treat printed pages bearing God's name with special care. Worn-out prayer books and Bibles are not thrown away but placed in a genizah, a store for sacred texts, and later buried.

Three readings are published so far. The Hebrew Bible page introduces the Tanakh as a whole and begins where the Bible begins, with Genesis 1:1 to 5, the first day of creation. Its article explains how the books are arranged, where the Hebrew text comes from, and how the Torah is read through the year.

Psalm 23, the psalm of the LORD as shepherd, has its own page, with its key Hebrew words and the occasions when it is sung and read. The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9, has a page as well, covering when it is said, the customs that go with it, and the verses written inside tefillin and the mezuzah. All three are listed below.

If you are learning Hebrew, try reading each verse aloud before you look at the English, then check yourself against the translation and the explanation. If you do not read Hebrew, the English and the explanation give the sense, and the key Hebrew words in each explanation are written in Roman letters so that you can say them.

Questions of practice, such as when to say a prayer or which customs to follow, are best taken to a rabbi or teacher. Customs differ between communities, and these pages describe common practice without ruling on it.