Versions of the Sacred Texts Used in This Concordance

The Arabic translation of the Bible used in this comparative concordance is the one that was commissioned by the American Board of Commissionars for Foreign Missions in the middle of the last century. This complete Arabic translation from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts of the Bible was begun by the missionary Eli Smith. After his death on January 11, 1857 the work was completed by Cornely van Dyck, the director of the American press in Beirut, Lebanon. They were assisted in their endeavour by two well known Arab literates Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yazigi from Lebanon, as well as by Yusuf al-Asir, a Muslim teacher at the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, Egypt. The New Testament translation of this so-called Van Dyck Bible was first published in 1860 and the complete Arabic Bible was first published in two volumes in 1864. (For an overview of translations of the Bible into Arabic cf.: Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur. Vol I: Die Übersetzungen, [Citta del Vaticano, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944] esp. 85-100.) Today this translation has a very high standing among the protestant and orthodox Christians of the Middle East, comparable to the standing of the Authorised Version of the Bible in the English speaking world.

For the purposes of our concordance we have essentially left this Arabic translation of the Bible as it is. The only changes that were introduced are the following: a) The orthography was modernised in some instances (e.g. the original Van-Dyck-Bible used the Arabic letter waw in  writing the Arabic word Salaat meaning prayer; our modernised text uses instead of the waw the customary 'alif in the same word, as is the usual orthographical practice today); b) some words that are hardly used anymore were replaced by more intelligible Arabic words (e.g. the seldom Arabic word kharaa'iib meaning branches was replaced with the word 'aghSaan); c) the redundancy of vowel signs on one consonant characteristic of the original version was changed so that in our version every consonant has only one vowel sign associated with it; and d) the almost complete absence of punctuation in the original Van Dycke Bible was supplemented in our version: we added quotations marks, question marks, exclamation marks, commas, colons and semicolons.

For the Qur'an we used the traditional Arabic text in a slightly modernised orthography as is currently being made available on computers and on the internet by various Muslim organisations world-wide. Our version of the Qur'an uses the numbering system of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. This text contains no punctuation. The Qur'anic text excerpts in our concordance consequently also lack this customary system for improving the readability of texts.