Topics Hebrew Bibles

This translation, the work of Salkinson and C.D. Ginsburg, is based on the standard historic Greek text of the Early Church. Dr. Salkinson began the translation but died in 1883. Before his death he had completed the translation of the New Testament with the exception of the Book of Acts. The work was continued and completed by Dr. C.D. Ginsburg, who published it in Vienna in 1886.

Salkinson, Isaac Edward

Russian Hebraist; convert to Christianity; born at Wilna; died at Vienna June 5, 1883. According to some, Salkinson was the son of Solomon Salkind. As a youth, he set out for America with the intention of entering a rabbinical seminary there; but while in London he was met by agents of the London Missionary Society and was persuaded to forsake Judaism. Baptized soon afterward, he entered, in 1849, the college of that society, where he studied four years. His first appointment was as missionary to the Jews at Edinburgh, where he became a student at Divinity Hall. He was ordained a minister of the Presbyterian Church at Glasgow in 1859. He served his church as a missionary in various towns, including Presburg, and finally settled in Vienna (1876).

Salkinson translated: "Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation," under the title "Sod ha-Yeshu'ah". (Altona, 1858); Milton's "Paradise Lost," under the title "Wa-Yegaresh et ha-Adam" (Vienna, 1871); Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," under the titles "Iti'el ha-Kushi" (ib. 1874; preface by P. Smolenskin) and "Ram we-Ya'el" (ib. 1878); Tiedge's "Urania," under the title "Ben Ḳohelet" (ib. 1876; rimed); the New Testament, under the title "Ha-Berit ha-Ḥadashah." The last-mentioned translation was undertaken for the British Missionary Society in 1877; it was published posthumously, under the supervision of C. D. Ginsburg, at Vienna in 1886.

Ginsburg, Christian David

English Masoretic scholar and Christian missionary; born at Warsaw Dec. 25, 1831. He was converted in 1846, and was for a time connected with the Liverpool branch of the London Society's Mission to the Jews, but retired in 1863, devoting himself entirely to literary work. Besides editions of the Song of Songs, 1857, and Ecclesiastes, 1861, he published essays on the Karaites, 1862; and Essenes, 1864; and a full account in English of the Cabala, 1865.He then devoted himself to Masoretic studies, publishing the text and translation of Elias Levita's "Massoret ha-Massoret" in 1867, and of Jacob b. Hayyim's "Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible" in the same year. He was elected a member of the Board of Revisers of the Old Testament in 1870, and devoted himself to the collation of all the extant remains of the Masorah, three volumes of which he published in 1880-86. Based upon these collations, he edited a new text of the Old Testament for the Trinitarian Bible Society, which was published in 1894 under the title "The Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible." To this he wrote an introduction, published together with a volume of facsimiles of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, in 1897. His method of settling the Masoretic text has been somewhat severely criticized by Blau in the "Jewish Quarterly Review" (viii. 343 et seq.). Ginsburg wrote the most elaborate account printed in English of the Moabite Stone (1871), and was instrumental in exposing forgeries of Shapira.