Baibala Hemolele

The Baibala Hemolele (Holy Bible) is the translation that grew up alongside written Hawaiian itself. Missionaries from New England worked on it with Hawaiian scholars for nearly two decades: the Gospels were finished in 1828, the New Testament in 1832 and the Old Testament in 1839. The text here is the 1868 revision, which made light changes to the 1839 text.

It was a team effort, with an almost bookkeeping division of labor. Asa Thurston translated about a quarter of the text, Hiram Bingham, who also coordinated the project, around a fifth, and Artemas Bishop another large share, with Lorrin Andrews and Sheldon Dibble among the contributors. The Hawaiian scholars were decisive in making the text sound like Hawaiian rather than English in disguise.

Its historical weight is huge: for many Hawaiians this Bible was the road to reading their own language. The honest limit is the spelling. The text follows nineteenth-century orthography, with almost no ʻokina (the glottal stop) and no kahakō (the macron for long vowels), so different words can look identical. Readers of modern Hawaiian will have to guess the pronunciation in many places, and the vocabulary carries the flavor of another century.

The text is in the public domain: it belongs to everyone, with no restrictions on use. That is why Midvash can offer it complete and free, as a bridge between a people's faith and its history.