This Edition
What was used, what was changed, and what was left alone.
The sources
Everything here is in the public domain, and so is this edition. Five sources are used, and each division names the one it draws on:
- The deuterocanon and wider apocrypha, from the World English Bible (Updated), dedicated to the public domain by eBible.org.
- Enoch, from Richard Laurence's translation of an Ethiopic manuscript, 1883.
- The pseudepigrapha, from The Forgotten Books of Eden, 1926, which reprints translations older than itself.
- The New Testament apocrypha, from William Wake's translations.
- The Apostolic Fathers, from the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 1870 and 1886.
The English
Because translators of three centuries are gathered here, the English of all of them has been brought to one standard. Spelling is American throughout. The older forms are set as present-day ones: thou, thee and ye as you; hath and saith as has and says; the whole -eth and -est classes as their modern forms; unto as to.
A few constructions are turned rather than re-inflected — it came to pass becomes it happened, suffer me to go becomes allow me to go. Roughly eight hundred such rules were written, and each was checked in place before it was written.
What was left alone
The word order is the translators' own. No passage has been rewritten for sense or style: to recast their sentences would be to compose new translations rather than modernize old ones, and this edition does not pretend to do that.
Two words keep their old sense. Lest would need every clause rebuilt around an inserted negation to lose it. Behold is only sometimes the exclamation; the rest of the time it is the plain verb, which no substitution survives.
What is not here
Jubilees. It belongs in this volume by every measure but one: no copy of it could be found that separates the translation from the translator's own commentary, and printing a text that cannot be checked against its source would break the rule the rest of the book keeps. It is described in full in the pseudepigrapha division instead, and the reason is given there.
The book itself
5.5 × 8.5 in, perfect bound, cream stock, 786 pages. Set in Gentium Plus by SIL International, with Hebrew in Noto Serif Hebrew. Two columns, footnotes at the foot of the column that holds them, and a binding margin wide enough that the inner column is still readable in a book this thick.
There is no author. These writings are anonymous or pseudonymous, and the translators are named on the part-title page of each division.