Salkinson’s Pursuit of Bringing the New Testament into the Treasure Houseof Hebrew Literature : The controversy surrounding a Haskalah Hebrew translation of the New Testament

Sammanfattning: This study deals with the surprising commissioning of a new translation into Hebrew of the New Testament only months after the prestigious translation by the celebrated German Hebraist Prof. Franz Delitzsch had been published, in 1877. An alternative to the professor’s version was to be molded by Isaac Salkinson, a renowned Hebrew translator of world classics, like Shakespeare’s Othello. Salkinson, who despite his controversial status as a convert to Christianity, and even as a Presbyterian missionary, was still ‘high in demand’ by high-profile Haskalah proponents, due to his exceptional knowledge of Hebrew idioms. As an all-Jewish enterprise, Salkinson’s Hebrew NT, edited by the acclaimed Jewish scholar, Christian D. Ginsburg, aroused a storm of criticism among Protestant Hebraists after its publication in 1885. Foremost among the critics was the Oxford professor Samuel R. Driver, co- author of the BDB lexicon, the standard reference for Biblical Hebrew. Driver publicly declared Salkinson’s knowledge of Hebrew to be inadequate. At the same time, Salkinson’s language was pronounced a source of delight by a Jewish audience ready to reclaim Hebrew as their national tongue. Even today Salkinson’s rich Hebrew is admired by Israeli authors. The present linguistic study of Salkinson’s NT translation has been undertaken to provide insights into these very divergent evaluations of his opus.