| abstract | - The Hebraic Roots Bible or Hebraic Roots Version (HRV) is an edition of the Bible translated and edited by James S. Trimm of the Society of Nazarene Judaism. The HRV Tanakh is translated primarily from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and uses footnotes to supply alternate readings from the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, the Aramaic Tanakh and the Aramaic Targums. Importantly, the footnotes "give insights on passages which are difficult or almost nonsensical when translated from Greek, but make sense when translated from Hebrew or Aramaic." Just as the manuscript order of the books of the Tanakh differs from the ordering of the same books in the Christian Old Testament, Trimm places the books of the New Testament in their ancient manuscript order:
* Gospels
* Acts
* Jewish Epistles (Ya,akov/James, 1 & 2 Kefa/Peter; 1, 2 & 3 Yochanan/John and Y'hudah/Jude
* Pauline Epistles
* Revelation This original order was rearranged by Rome in the Latin Vulgate which gave the Pauline epistles precedence over the Jewish epistles. Trimm points out that the original manuscript order was significant because "it agreed with the precept that the message was to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles. It also agrees with the concept that Ya'akov, Kefa and Yochanan were emissaries that come before Paul (Gal. 1:17) and with the concept that Kefa, Ya'akov and Yochanan served as three pillars which give the authority upon which Paul's message was built (Gal. 2:9) and not vice-versa. The [early Christian] reader of the New Testament was intended to read the Jewish epistles first and then to read the Pauline epistles already having understood the Jewish epistles. The New Testament reader was intended to read Ya'akov's admonition concerning faith and works (James 2) as well as Kefa's warnings about Paul being difficult to understand and often twisted (1 Peter 3:15-16) etc. before ever attempting to understand the writings of Paul." The HRV New Testament text is taken from ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts and is unlike most translations as it is not rooted in a Greek Hellenistic text, but instead approaches the text from the languages in which it was originally written. This actually gives greater insight into the text because there are some passages in the New Testament which do not make sense at all in Greek, but do when translated from Hebrew and Aramaic viewpoints. In the King James Version (KJV), Matthew 26:6 reads: Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper... Lepers were not, however, permitted to live in the towns (Lev. 13:46) Hebrew and Aramaic were written without vowels, so there was no distinction between the Aramaic words gar'ba ("leper") and garaba ("jar maker" or "jar merchant"). Some of the translations are even more interesting - Matthew 19:24 {KJV) reads "And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." This seemingly nonsensical and very widely repeated phrase makes much more sense when one understands that the word for "camel" in the Aramaic manuscripts is gamla which also means a "large rope".
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