- The texts
of the Jewish, Christian and Moslem scriptures are written and
preserved in a variety of languages from the ancient world. The
chief languages are Hebrew for the Tanakh (and the related Aramaic
for a few passages), Greek for the New Testament, and Arabic for
the Qur'an.
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- For the Jewish and Christian scriptures,
facility in some additional languages is helpful, because copies
of a given biblical or extra-canonical book in that language may
be important witnesses to the text. For example, there
are important manuscripts of Tanakh written in Aramaic, Greek,
Syriac and Latin, while versions of the New Testament exist in
Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Old Church
Slavonic.
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- Some other languages are necessary if one wants to read literary and documentary texts from the Ancient Near East that shed light on the biblical texts. This group includes all of the languages mentioned above, as well as Sumerian, Akkadian and Ugaritic for Mesopotamia and Egyptian for the Nile River Valley.
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- Contemporary scholarship on the scriptures of western religions is conducted in all modern languages, but research tools for Arabic, French, German and Hebrew are the most essential and so are included in this list.
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- Use the arrows below to cyle through brief descriptions of these languages and lists of related resources.
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| © 2017 |
Catherine
Murphy, Associate Professor cmurphy@scu.edu |
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Dept of Religious Studies, Santa Clara University,
Santa Clara, CA 95053 |
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