Project background
Shortly after the expansion of Muslim rule in the 7th and 8th centuries CE, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans living in the Muslim world began to translate their sacred texts—the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Samaritan Pentateuch—into the new dominant language of the time: Arabic. Many of these translations, from languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Coptic, have survived and have come down to us in a vast corpus of manuscripts and fragments that hail from monasteries, synagogues and libraries, especially in the Middle East. Manuscripts containing Arabic Bible translations constitute the most central record of Jewish and Christian cultural heritage in the Near East, with a transcommunal and transnational importance.
In terms of the number of surviving manuscripts, Arabic versions are the most abundant of all the translation traditions of the Bible throughout its history. This is also the case, at a later stage, for the number of prints. Moreover, they reveal an unusually large variety of stylistic and didactic approaches, vocabulary, scripts and, strategies. Although originally intended for internal use by the different denominations that produced them, the translations were also quoted and adapted by Muslim writers, who were familiar with many biblical episodes and characters through their own sacred scripture, the Qur’an.
Biblical versions in Arabic were produced over many centuries, on the basis of a wide range of source languages, and in varying contexts. Arabic Bible texts have come down to us over the course of more than a millennium in versions ranging from an early stage of the process of Arabicization in late-antique communities to quite recent contexts.
Whereas much attention has been paid in modern scholarship to the translation of scientific and philosophical works from Greek into Arabic in the early Abbasid period (late 8th century to 10th century CE), the parallel endeavor of translating the Bible (in the broadest sense of the term) into Arabic has hardly been studied in any systematic way. Biblia Arabica aims to redress this imbalance by undertaking a comprehensive inventory of worldwide manuscripts and producing large-scale critical editions.
Project details
Funding and time-frame
The project “Biblia Arabica: Critical edition and comprehensive digital inventory of Arabic Old Testament manuscripts and their paratexts” will run for 21 years (2026–2046) and is funded through the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
It is based at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz with research teams at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich and at Goethe University Frankfurt. The project is led jointly by PIs Prof. Dr. Ronny Vollandt (LMU Munich) and Prof. Dr. Nathan P. Gibson (Goethe University Frankfurt). Building on earlier research undertaken in the DFG-DIP project “Biblia Arabica” (2012–2018, see below), the project will be the first comprehensive study of Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The team is working to identify and describe around 8,200 manuscripts and to make them digitally available through a selection of editions and English translations. They will also investigate historical contexts, translators, and usage traditions. The aim is to preserve this unique heritage and make it visible and accessible worldwide.
Scope
The project focuses on the Old Testament/Tanakh for two strategic reasons. First, this is the part of the Bible where the interreligious aspects of the translation activity are most evident. Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan communities were translating the Bible and sometimes engaging with each other’s translations, while Muslim authors were reading and quoting from these texts.
The second reason is that other projects (including PAVONe at the University of Balamand in Lebanon) are working on Arabic New Testament translations, whereas the Biblia Arabica project can best complement this on the Old Testament/Tanakh side.
In order to efficiently collate the large number of manuscripts, priority will be given to running biblical texts, rather than to commentaries or lectionaries. In addition, the Psalms tradition in Arabic is too extensive in its own right to be properly treated within the framework of the Academies project.
Work plan and outputs
The first stage of the project is to inventory all manuscripts of the Arabic Old Testament/Tanakh worldwide, based on archive visits (where possible), digitizations, and existing manuscript catalogues. This will include basic metadata, accessible in open access, which serves as the basis for our more detailed work and for others who are researching Arabic Bible versions.
After this, the project will proceed in 3–5 year stages working on particular biblical sections (wisdom literature, Pentateuch, historical books, and prophets). At each stage, we will conduct a detailed scientific cataloguing of a selection of manuscripts and transcribe these same manuscripts for use in the editions. Critical editions will be made for the most important Jewish and Christian versions on the basis of selected manuscripts, and these will be accompanied by automated transcriptions from a wider variety of versions.
Overarching questions and doctoral studies
Several overarching topics guide our interest across the corpus of Arabic Bible translations, which we plan to examine in doctoral dissertations and research monographs. These include:
- canon formation,
- Muslim reception,
- authorial practices and perspectives,
- relationships between specific manuscripts, and
- paratextuality and materiality.
Digital strategy and open access
We believe it is a crucial responsibility to make the study of cultural heritage materials (such as Arabic Bible translations) as open and enduring as possible. For this reason, we plan to make all of our publications, editions, manuscript transcriptions, and manuscript cataloguing open access, and to archive this research data in long-term open repositories. We do not plan to digitize manuscripts themselves; however, many partner organizations have been doing this, and some digitizations are also available in open access. Where heritage communities have decided not to make their manuscript digitizations openly accessible, we respect that decision.
In addition to research data, we will also be adapting and creating digital research tools for cataloguing, transcribing, and editing manuscripts. These, too, will be available under open-source licenses.
One key strategy deserves special attention: our use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) to aid in manuscript transcription. Even in a 21-year project, it will be impossible to catalog and transcribe all the manuscripts in the detailed way we would like to; we have to choose some to devote more attention to than others. For this reason, we are involving machine-learning-driven HTR in the first step of transcribing manuscripts. This has had some major advances for Arabic and Hebrew scripts in recent years, and we expect significant progress in the next couple decades. Our preliminary tests showed that correcting these HTR-transcriptions — always with reference to the manuscript image — will let us work a lot faster than if we were typing each individual character. In addition, we will be able to train different HTR-models for different styles of writing.
Advisory Board
The Scientific Advisory Board provides academic guidance and supports the project through scholarly exchange on conceptual, methodological, technical, and terminological questions.
- Prof. Dr. Camilla Adang — Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Tel Aviv University
- Prof. Dr. Miriam Hjälm — Stockholm School of Theology, Sankt Ignatios Center for Eastern Christian Studies
- Prof. Dr. Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala — Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Córdoba
- Prof. Dr. Meira Polliack — Department of Biblical Studies, Tel Aviv University
- Prof. Dr. Sabine Schmidtke — Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
- Prof. Dr. Loren Stuckenbruck — Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
- Prof. Dr. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra — École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Collaborative Research Partners
Biblia Arabica collaborates with research projects and academic institutions in related fields, fostering scholarly exchange, manuscript research, and the development of shared digital research resources.
- Digital Critical Edition of the Coptic-Sahidic Old Testament — Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Prof. Dr. Heike Behlmer and Dr. Frank Feder)
- Editio critica maior of the Greek Psalter — Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Prof. Dr. Reinhard Gregor Kratz and Dr. Felix Albrecht)
- Bibliotheca Arabica – A New History of Arabic Literature — Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Prof. Dr. Verena Klemm)
- Peshitta Institute — Prof. Dr. Bas ter Haar Romeny and Prof. Dr. Wido van Peursen
- Samaritan Studies Research Unit — Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Prof. Dr. Stefan Schorsch)
Project history
Biblia Arabica as a DFG-DIP project (2013–2018)
From 2013–2018, Arabic Bible translations were the focus of an international research project “Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims,” which was endowed with a 1.6 million Euro grant from the DFG DIP program (“Deutsch-Israelische Projektkooperation”) in 2012 and became the first project in the humanities ever to receive this prestigious grant. The project was lead by Camilla Adang and Meira Polliack of Tel Aviv University, on the Israeli side, and Sabine Schmidtke (then Freie Universität Berlin and now Princeton University) until 2015 and Andreas Kaplony and Ronny Vollandt of the LMU Munich from 2015 onwards.
This project focused on the stylistic and didactic features, vocabulary, scripts and strategies of the translations, as well as the extent to which they were influenced by the Qur’an and used by Muslims in their discussions with members of the other Abrahamic religions.
Former Researchers (Consortium and DFG-DIP)
Biblia Arabica as a consortium (2018–2025)
Building on the groundwork of the DFG-DIP project, work on Arabic Bible translations continued during the period 2018–2025 in the form of a consortium, which attempted to set methodological standards and offer a clear definition of an emerging and very active new field of research.
Biblia Arabica becomes a consortium
Texts and Studies published by Brill
Most of the outcomes of Biblia Arabica throughout its various phases have been or will be published in the book series Biblia Arabica: Texts and Studies, published by Brill in Leiden and edited by an international team of scholars.
Biblia Arabica : Texts and Studies, published by Brill
