The Hebrew Bible, side by side

A man comes to the sage Hillel and offers to convert to Judaism on one condition: teach him the whole Torah while he stands on one foot. Hillel does it in a breath. What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.

The line everyone quotes is the golden rule in the middle. The line that tells you how Jews actually read this book is the one at the end: go and learn. The whole Torah fits on one foot, and it also takes a lifetime, because the summary comes with homework attached. The Hebrew Bible is not a book you read alone. For two thousand years it has been read the way Hillel read it, inside an argument about what it means, the written text and the spoken tradition that unfolds it treated as one thing.

You can see why the argument never settles in the very first sentence. Three words open the book.

Same three words. Two of these translators give you a finished act: in the beginning, God created, full stop, the universe made from nothing in a single clean instant. The others say the Hebrew will not sit still like that. The first word, בְּרֵאשִׁית, is not quite in the beginning; it is closer to in the beginning of, the start of a longer clause, so the sentence really opens when God began to create, and drops you into a world already half-made, with a wind over dark water. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, said as much a thousand years ago. The first three words, and the translators are already a whole theology apart. That spread is the subject of this page.

Below are the keystones of the Tanakh, the Jewish name for the Bible: an acronym for its three parts, Torah (the teaching, the five books of Moses), Nevi’im (the prophets), and Ketuvim (the writings). These are not the most quoted verses. They are the load-bearing ones, the passages the rest of the tradition leans on, plus the one Talmud story that frames the whole thing. For each you get the pointed Hebrew, a transliteration so you can hear it, a plain breakdown of what it is doing and where the translators part ways, and then the English versions stacked. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move between them.

Where the text comes from

Every translation here is reproduced verbatim, not paraphrased. The Hebrew and most of the English I pulled with scripts from clean digital editions and checked line by line. Robert Alter, whose translation is not posted online as one clean text, I quote only where I could verify his exact wording against a published source, on the passages where his rendering most earns a place. The one change to any quotation is curly quotation marks turned straight, to match the rest of the site. Where a translator uses a dash, it is theirs, not mine.

• The Hebrew is the vocalized Masoretic text, with vowel points but without the cantillation marks, served by Sefaria. The Talmud passage is in its original Aramaic.
• JPS 1917, the first English Tanakh by a Jewish committee, with the King James Version (1611) and Young’s Literal Translation (1898), are in the public domain.
• NJPS (the 1985 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh), the Koren Jerusalem Bible (1962), Everett Fox’s The Five Books of Moses (1995, the Torah only), and Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible (2018) are in copyright, quoted here for comparison and study with every translator named.
• The Hillel story is the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a, in the Koren-Steinsaltz English (Sefaria) and the older Soncino, with the Aramaic alongside.

The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship and the classical Jewish commentators, Rashi and Ibn Ezra and the rabbis of the Talmud and the Midrash, and where the Jewish reading of a verse parts from the familiar Christian one, I have tried to lay both out plainly and fairly rather than smooth the difference over.

The photograph on the homepage card is an open Torah scroll, the handwritten parchment from which the Five Books are chanted aloud in synagogue, with a silver pointer (a yad) resting in front so no finger touches the text. Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow; public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.