Bible translations into Arabic

Arabic translations of the Bible constitute one of the richest traditions of Bible transmission. Translations of the Bible into Arabic were produced by Arabic-speaking Jews (Rabbanite and Karaite), Christians, and Samaritans. Even though Arabic was spoken by Jews and Christians before the advent of Islam, running Arabic translations of the Bible are attested in manuscripts only from the 9th century CE onwards. So far, no evidence could be adduced that Arabic Bible translations were available at that time. Before that, quotations from the Bible (so-called testimonia) were used in Arabic especially by Christians.

The Bible was translated into Arabic from a variety of source languages. These include Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac.^[1] Judeo-Arabic translations can also exhibit influence of the Aramaic Targums. Especially in the 19th century, Arabic Bible translations start to express regional colloquial dialects. The different communities that produced Arabic translations of the Bible also used different alphabets to write Arabic. Accordingly, Arabic translations of the Bible are found in Greek, Hebrew, Samaritan, and Syriac (Garshuni) script. Arabic versions of biblical books were not confined to their original communities. Especially Coptic Christians displayed considerable interest in Christian and non-Christian versions, which were based on different source languages. Already at an early stage, bilingual or multilingual manuscripts were produced. New translations are still made in the 21st century. The transmission of the Bible in Arabic, hence, spans a history of almost one and half millennia.

There is no general agreement regarding the text-critical value of early Arabic translations of the Bible, but it is often deemed to be small. They might have some importance for secondary translations like the Peshitta or the Septuagint. However, under the influence of New Philology scholarship has recently begun to value Arabic Bible translations in their own right. Importantly, digitization has increasingly made available manuscript sources, especially those from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the Cairo Genizah, and the Firkovitch collections. Another important resources is the large-scale digitization project of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. Still, there is only a small number of critical editions of Arabic versions of the Bible.