Utahn's work with Dead Sea Scrolls adds insights for Bible translation

PROVO — With its scriptural texts coming from the Holy Land's Old Testament era and its publication pedigree traced back to Germany at the turn of the 1900s, Biblia Hebraica Quinta will be a global product with worldwide benefits — and a Utah connection.

That Utah tie comes through Donald W. Parry, a Brigham Young University professor of Hebrew Bible. Parry is one of two dozen editors selected from across the world — and one of only a couple from the United States — for the current Biblia Hebraica Quinta project.

It's the fifth edition of Biblia Hebraica — the version of the Hebrew Bible published under the auspices of the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft (German Bible Society), which oversees 141 global Bible societies. Biblia Hebraica Quinta in turn will be used for future translations of the Old Testament into almost as many languages.

"It will become the standard for decades — no one will replace it," said Parry, adding, "in producing the newest translations of the Old Testament, they're going to use this work."

Invited to the editor's post in August 2008, he joins Arie van der Kooij of the Netherlands in providing the readings, interpretations, citations and footnotes for Biblia Hebraica Quinta's fascicle of the Book of Isaiah — all 1,292 verses.

The purpose of Biblia Hebraica Quinta is, Parry says, "to provide a clear statement of what the editor judges to be the earliest attainable form of the Hebrew/Aramaic text." That documentation — textual variants noted in the footnotes — in turn serves as a primary-source reference work for biblical societies and Bible scholars alike.

Key to the Biblia Hebraica Quinta project will be all the information and readings provided in recent years from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the some 900 ancient Hebrew and Aramaic documents — including texts of the Hebrew Bible — written mostly on parchment, with some papyrus records included. Originally discovered more than a half-century ago in caves near Qumran just off the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, the scrolls include some of the oldest surviving copies of biblical documents made before the first century B.C.

Besides having written six books on Isaiah, Parry brings 15 years of work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. A member of the scrolls' international team of translators, he translated the Book of Samuel and has authored 15 volumes on the Dead Sea Scrolls.