Reliance on Jewish Commentators in Revisions to the Translation of Deuteronomy by William Tyndale

It is not known whether William Tyndale had access to the 1525 Biblia Rabbinica in preparing his 1530 Old Testament. But the Translators of the Authorised Version of 1611 used the Biblia Rabbinica as their Hebrew source text. In 1884 Reverend Mombert published Tyndale’s original translation with a critical commentary claiming that 300 changes were made to Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch in Matthew’s Bible alone. Mine appears to be the first attempt since then to list and analyse the changes made between those editions and subsequent ones leading to 1611. Concentrating on Deuteronomy I seek to draw conclusions about the kind of changes that were made to the translation and extent to which they can be seen to rely on one of the Jewish commentators in the Biblia Rabbinica.

In this paper I would present five different types of revision or evidence that has been thrown up by my research to discuss what the different cases might suggest.

Michael Weitzman remarked: “one must allow for the possibility that Tyndale and the Jewish interpreters, faced with the same problems in the text, independently arrived at the same solutions.” The present study rests on the proposition that repeated concurrence with a particular commentator rules out a reasonable chance of coincedence.