The Emphasized Bible (EBR)

by Joseph Bryant Rotherham

Publisher:

Kregel

, 1959

Overview

The Emphasized Bible, by Joseph Bryant Rotherham, is a unique translation which helps English-only Bible readers to understand the linguistic and literary nuances of the Greek and Hebrew texts. This translation aims for a literal rendering of the original languages, and adds markings to the English text to indicate emphases, parallel structures, and the other linguistic features. It also includes accent marks, brackets, indentations, and other markings within the text itself, to help communicate the features in Greek and Hebrew which are lost in translation.

Indentations in The Emphasized Bible mark:

• The transition from narrative to speech
• The existence of speech within speech
• Parallelism within the text—one of the first translations to do this; now widely employed in biblical scholarship to display parallel relationships
• Results of logical analysis
• Divine proclamations

Emphasis markings indicate:

• Unusual or emphatic word order
• Inversion in both English and original language word order—in other words, the unusual features in the translation also present in the original languages
• Idiomatic features
• Levels of emphasis: accents for single-word emphasis, vertical lines for emphatic phrases, clauses, and multiple words
• Italics indicate New Testament use of the Old Testament
• Repeated refrains

The New Testament text—entitled The New Testament Critically Emphasised—first appeared in 1872, after Rotherham devoted nearly a decade to translation work. During the subsequent years after the initial publication, Rotherham kept abreast of the advances in biblical scholarship, and began translating the Old Testament. The combined edition first appeared in 1902 as The Emphasized Bible—the same edition which underlies the Logos edition, along with numerous reprintings throughout the twentieth century, most recently by Kregel in 1994. This edition uses the Ginsburg edition of the Masoretic text for the Old Testament, and Westcott and Hort’s Greek text for the New Testament.

Key Features

• Emphasis markings and indentation reveal the literary and linguistic features of the original languages
• Allows English-only readers of the Bible to view and understand additional elements from the original languages
• Includes a lengthy introduction on translating emphasis in the biblical texts

Praise for the Print Edition

The Emphasized Bible is one of the most innovative and thoroughly researched translations ever done by a single individual. Its presentation of emphases and grammatical features of the original language still reward careful study. And, because its language is less than a century old and because its textual base and footnotes are quite modern, it can be used as a companion text to any contemporary translation.

—John R. Kohlenberger, III

Product Details

• Title: The Emphasized Bible: A Translation Designed to Set Forth the Exact Meaning, the Proper Terminology, and the Graphic Style of the Sacred Original (EBR)
• Author: Joseph Bryant Rotherham
• Publisher: H. R. Allenson
• Date: 1902
• Pages: 1,192

About Joseph Bryant Rotherham

Joseph Bryant Rotherham (1828–1910) was a British biblical scholar and minister of the Churches of Christ. He was a prolific writer whose best-known work was the Emphasized Bible, a new translation that used “emphatic inversion” and a set of diacritical marks to bring out shades of meaning in the original text.

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