Ancient Web: Delitz.fr Rebuilt a Hebrew New Testament Reading Room

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A nineteenth-century translator produced a Hebrew version of a text usually read in Greek. More than a century later, a small website began gathering the editions, objections, and biographical documents needed to understand his work.

Explore Delitz.fr.

The site's central subject is the Hebrew New Testament associated with Christian Hebraist Franz Delitzsch. Its homepage links a 1901 twelfth edition, a 2003 revision called the Negev Version, and online Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament texts. It also offers an experimental presentation of the Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew-English lexicon, originally published in the early twentieth century.

The editorial structure is admirably specific. Rather than simply declaring one translation definitive, the site puts different editions beside documents about how the translation was made and criticized.

The argument survives beside the text

Its document section links Samuel Ives Curtiss's 1891 memorial tribute, an 1892 discussion by Gustaf Dalman, an 1884 review by Davidson, and Delitzsch's own essays on vernacular language in the Gospels. Further entries preserve Delitzsch's published defenses of his Hebrew New Testament in 1889.

That is an unusually useful research arrangement. A visitor interested in a word or phrase can place the translated text within the intellectual disagreements of its period, rather than accept a modern editor's unexplained choices.

The page also points toward historical scans held at external academic libraries, including a Leipzig publication from 1870 and a series titled Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae. Some documents are PDF files; others are browsable text editions. The collection labels the Brown–Driver–Briggs experiment as a work in progress rather than claiming it is a completed scholarly resource.

The website itself does not establish a reliable early-1990s founding date. This is a specialist digitization and preservation exception, with historical content predating the Web and a modern 2003 revision clearly identified. Its worth lies in the careful assembly of related evidence.

Religious and philological interpretations vary, and the availability of a translation is not proof that it supersedes the original-language manuscripts or competing editions. But keeping the original debates within reach is a genuine service to readers.

Browse the translation editions and historical documents.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.