“For the Tanakh, or Old Testament, the Masoretic text as published in the latest editions of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Quinta is used as the base text, in consultation with other ancient Hebrew texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and a select number of ancient versions (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Targums). All significant departures from the base text, as well as all significant textual variants, are indicated in footnotes. With respect to the book of Isaiah, Qumran Cave 1′s Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa) was used, along with certain other Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, as the base text for translation, with the MT secondarily consulted for variants to 1QIsa.”

But, on the .pdf version found here, http://isv.org/ISV_Features_and_Benefits.pdf, you say the following:

“The ISV® respects the scholarship of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unlike other modern English translations of the Bible, the ISV® does not use the traditional Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Scriptures as the base language original for rendering much of the English language translation of the ISV® Old Testament. Instead, the book of Isaiah was translated directly from the text of the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa), which was found among the Qumran Cave 1 collection of manuscripts and dates from the mid-second century BC. In contrast, the Masoretic Text dates much later, from c. 950-1050 AD.”

My question: Is the Masoretic Text the base for most of the translation or not?

Yes it’s true, that God does not change, but the bible is not God. It is the work of our hands and it is subject to time and new developments.

As a matter of fact, God is the author of Time and Growth. God is not afraid of change, He is the guiding hand of the whole process. This is what makes him sovereign and unchangeable.

As knowledge increases, new wisdom and understanding is revealed. Were previous individuals from past ages wrong? No, they were simply walking in faith. What was blind faith to them, is common knowledge to us now. and What is faith for us, will be common knowledge to our children and grand children.

“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.”

If this is God’s ultimate goal, then do not allow yourselves to be boggled down by the shadows of archaic language and let the living waters flow to reawaken our hearts to yearn more for God.

If God wanted to be inaccessible to mankind, then He would have never sent His unique Son to do a work that no one on this planet, before or after, will every complete.

What makes Jesus Unique? He’s the only one who can fulfill the following passage:

Proverbs 8:22-36

Does it matter to the Lord if you call him Jesus or Yeshua?

Does it matter to the Lord if you’re Asian or American?

Let’s leave the childish games behind and lets move to newer levels of growth in Spirit and truth.

Zechariah 14:9 “And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD, and his name one.”

And everyone will know that name. for the name of God is That He Is. God is Active, Living, Life, not letters written on some ancient parchment. It takes spiritual maturity to understand this.

God bless.

That being said, I didn’t need to ask about other traditional names, such as Mary, Joseph or others, because my point about consistency is true, whichever name is translated; none of the traditional names translated from the Greek are Greek. Therefore all of the traditional names, translated as such, are being translated through a Greek filter. This makes the question more urgent. The ISV seems to simply follow this trend, without question (and I would add substantiation).

I suppose, as long as the ISV’s translation strategy is transparent, that tradition is considered before linguistic fidelity, the only critique remaining would be to ask why this should be the case that tradition is given such precedence? However, I disagree that this question does not merit a response (even after having read your Translation Strategy page). If you knowingly render Hebrew names into English indirectly through a Greek filter, you either do so knowingly or unknowingly. If this approach is done knowingly, there must be a reason, whether or not other translations had one. If it is done unknowingly because of convention, that still does not justify the approach unquestionably.

Many modern translations, including this ISV, ‘minimize’ this type of confusion by translating obvious biblical names found in NT Greek directly from their Hebrew roots, ignoring the influence of Greek language cases. Such examples are: Elijah rather than Elias in [Matt 11:14] and [Mark 6:15]; Jeremiah rather than Jeremy in [Matt 2:17] and [Matt 27:9]; and Hezekiah rather than Ezekias in [Matt 1:9-10]. This seems to be a great translation strategy, so why did the ISV translation committee (like so many others) decide to do this selectively?

In a word, we didn’t translate names “selectively”. More on your presuppositional errors, below

The Greek name of the anointed one Ἰησοῦς (G2424) is a transliteration (in nominative form) of the beautiful Hebrew name יהושוע (H3091) meaning ‘Yahweh is salvation’. Even the genitive form of the name in Greek is closer to the Hebrew original. Although the name יהושוע is normally transliterated into English as Joshua, your strategy may be to avoid confusion with the OT Joshua and yet still treat the Messiah’s name uniquely by denoting it from others. If so, perhaps you could transliterate it more directly as one of its modern recognizable forms, such as Yahshua, Yehshua, Yeh’shua, or something else.

So the question is: Why are you using this Hebrew name normalization strategy in every other instance except where the name of the anointed one appears?

The name “Jesus” isn’t the only place where we employ traditional name translation. The names “Mary,” “Joseph,” and other names are also translations.

Do you believe the Messiah was Greek?

No, we don’t.

Or perhaps you’ve decided against adopting a consistent approach because the sheer weight of tradition is too great a thing to resist?

Whatever the case, simply avoiding the issue by sticking with a corrupted Greek form of the name for traditional reasons simply seems to lack exegetical courage, and inconsistent with your otherwise sound translation strategy.

Our view of this last paragraph is that the view contained in it is far too insulting to merit response by us. We do not lack “exegetical courage,” whatever that phrase might mean to you. We suggest you read our Principles of Translation page on our web site.

I would encourage you to consider contacting Moody Publishers to utilize the ISV as a replacement for the NIV? Thank you,

We don’t have access to their list of purchasers of the electronic editions of the ISV, either, so we cannot notify them of the availability of free updates. That’s the main reason we would prefer that ISV purchasers obtain them from the Davidson Press sales page at http://davidsonpress.com/EmbedEULA.htm.

The build numbers for the ISV follow the format “vn.n YYYY.MM.DD” where “v.n.n” is the version number, “YYYY” is the year, “MM” is the month in numbers, and “DD” is the day of the month of the release.

William O, Welty, Ph.D.
ISV Foundation