Do We Need A New Bible? Reflections on the Proposed Oxford Hebrew Bible(*) For many hundreds of years the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament has been a fundamental document not just for two or even three major world religions but also for much of our western cultural, political and intellectual history (1). It is difficult to attempt to evaluate the extent of its influence on art, music and literature, for instance, and although its reception in other great civilizations differs considerably and is often only far more recent, yet in our modern integrated world its prominence has become global. Because this influence has been most widely experienced through its inclusion as part of the Christian Bible, the vast majority of those who refer to “the Bible”, whether for religious or other purposes, do so quite unconsciously to the work in translation. This has been the case from the very earliest days of the Christian church. As Christianity and Judaism parted company, so the knowledge of Hebrew and western Aramaic soon became quite unfamiliar and “the Bible” was a work initially in Greek, Latin or Syriac, and then later in many other languages, the number of which is increasing all the time through the work of the Bible Society and other such agencies (2). Indeed, Jerome’s struggles to convince his contemporaries in the late fourth/early fifth centuries that it would be better to have a Latin Old Testament translated direct from the Hebrew rather than at one remove from the Greek, is a testimony to the extent to which the importance of Hebrew as the language of the larger part of the Christian Bible came to be (*) This article served as the basis for the public lecture given at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome on 27 March 2009, in connection with the “Joseph Gregory McCarthy Professorship” held by the author. (1) The question of terminology is difficult and nothing is wholly satisfactory. In this lecture I use the term Old Testament only when considering this literature within a specifically Christian context. Because my discussion concentrates mainly on the presentation of the text, I shall mostly use the term Hebrew Bible as the least unsatisfactory; it is unfortunate, of course, that as a shorthand it overlooks the presence of a small amount of Aramaic, though in principle what I say relates to that as well. (2) According to the Bible Society, over two thousand languages now have at least part of the Bible available in translation; this represents approximately one third of the number of languages currently in use throughout the world.