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.
