English

Leviticus: A new translation with commentary

This translation of Leviticus completes my translation of the books of the Torah and follows a similar approach to my other translations. My priority was always to express the ideas in the text in the most natural way in English, and at the same time to capture the energy and rhythm of the original Hebrew. One unique aspect of all my translations is that they jettison the traditional chapter divisions and instead organize the material according to the Masoretic parashot. Organizing the text in this way, I believe, gets us closer to the ancient writers, and yields numerous insights into their composition approach. The commentary accompanying the translation focuses on issues of translation, language, and composition history. After the commentary I provide an essay that summarizes my (necessarily speculative) views on the composition history of Levitucs. In that essay, I assign each of the parashot to one of the five major compositional stages that I identify, which span a period of some 700 years, from the turn of the second millennium BCE to the late fourth century BCE. In my treatment of the composition history, I make a number of unusual proposals. Specifically, I argue (1) that

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