The Plantin Polyglot (also called the ''Antwerp Polyglot'', the ''Biblia Regia'' or "King's Bible") is a polyglot

Bible The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...

, printed under the title ''Biblia Polyglotta'' by Christopher Plantin in

Antwerp Antwerp (; ; ) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of Antwerp Province, and the third-largest city in Belgium by area at , after ...

(

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

) between 1568 and 1573.

History

Plantin was suspected of

Calvinist Reformed Christianity, also called Calvinism, is a major branch of Protestantism that began during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. In the modern day, it is largely represented by the Continental Reformed Protestantism, Continenta ...

sympathies, although Antwerp at that time was firmly

Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

. He developed a plan to prove his loyalty to the Catholic king

Philip II of Spain Philip II (21 May 152713 September 1598), sometimes known in Spain as Philip the Prudent (), was King of Spain from 1556, King of Portugal from 1580, and King of Naples and List of Sicilian monarchs, Sicily from 1554 until his death in 1598. He ...

by producing a polyglot version of the Bible, in five languages. The king promised to finance the project — completing it nearly bankrupted Plantin — and sent the Spanish theologian Benito Arias Montano to Antwerp to watch over the production of this eight-volume of printing, which was printed in 1,200 copies on paper and 12 copies on parchment. Printing the Bible required thirteen

printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in whi ...

es and fifty-five men to run them, as well as expert linguists who acted as proofreaders.

Description

The first four volumes contain the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

. The left page has two columns with the

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

original and the Latin translation, the right page has same text in

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

with its own Latin translation. Underneath these columns there is an

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

version on the left-hand page and a Latin translation of this on the right-hand side. For printing the Hebrew text Plantin used among others Daniel Bomberg's Hebrew type, which he had received from Bomberg's nephews.The type is still extant in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in

. See: Albert van der Heide, ''Hebraica Verita. Christopher Plantin and the Christian Hebraists'', Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus Museum, 2008, Exhibition catalogue, p. 155. Volume 5 contains the

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

in Greek and Syriac, each with a Latin translation, and a translation of the Syriac into Hebrew. Volume 6 has the complete Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, as well as an interlinear version that has the Latin translation printed between the lines. The last two volumes contain dictionaries (Hebrew-Latin, Greek-Latin, Syriac-Aramaic, grammar rules, list of names, etc.) that were of value to scholars. A complete copy of this Bible is on display at the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the site of the original printing press), including the typefaces used on the project.

References

External links

29 April 2008.

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

. Accessed 2 August 2010.
Museum guide "Plantin-Moretus Museum"
in Antwerp {{Authority control 1568 books Early printed Bibles 16th-century books in Latin Polyglot bibles

History

Description

References

Further reading

External links