Ezekiel Rahabi (1694–1771) was the chief Jewish merchant of the

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( ; VOC ), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, was a chartered company, chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world. Established on 20 March 1602 by the States Ge ...

Cochin Kochi ( , ), formerly known as Cochin ( ), is a major port city along the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea. It is part of the district of Ernakulam in the state of Kerala. The city is also commonly referred to as Ernaku ...

, India for almost 50 years. Rabbi ''Rahabi Ezekiel'', (or ''Ezekiel Rahabi'') was from

Aleppo Aleppo is a city in Syria, which serves as the capital of the Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Governorates of Syria, governorate of Syria. With an estimated population of 2,098,000 residents it is Syria's largest city by urban area, and ...

, in modern

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

. A rabbinical writer known only through his polemical Hebrew translation of the New Testament - ''The Book of the Gospel Belonging to the Followers of Jesus'' (c.1750). The translation contains all the books of the New Testament and was translated between 1741 and 1756Commissioner, purpose, translators, copyist and age of the Hebrew New Testament of Cochin and the Quran of the Library of Congress, Mascha van Dort, professor Meir Bar-Ilan, July 2021, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20148.58242 by a certain Ezekiel Rahabi (not R'dkibi, pace

Franz Delitzsch Franz Delitzsch (23 February 1813, in Leipzig – 4 March 1890, in Leipzig) was a German Lutheran theologian and Hebraist. Delitzsch wrote many commentaries on books of the Bible, Jewish antiquities, Biblical psychology, as well as a history of J ...

p.108) in "an uneven and faulty Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian bias."Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish-Christian Dialogue 1984 p76 Pinchas E. Lapide, Helmut Gollwitzer - 1984 Oo 1:32 reads: "Heaven is my witness that I have not translated this, God forfend, to believe it, but to understand it and know how to answer the heretics . . . that our true Messiah will come. Amen." The 1756 edition appears to be the work of two different translators - a less educated

Sephardi Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendant ...

writer (Matthew-John), Ezekiel Rahabi himself, and a more educated German rabbi (Acts-Revelation) Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ezekiel, Rahabi Translators of the New Testament into Hebrew 18th-century rabbis Jewish translators of the Bible Cochin Jews Syrian Jews Indian rabbis 18th-century Indian translators Indian critics of Christianity Dutch East India Company people Writers from Aleppo 1694 births 1771 deaths Clergy from Kochi