Darby Translation

The Darby Translation is the work of John Nelson Darby, the Anglo-Irish preacher who was a central figure among the Plymouth Brethren. He published his English New Testament in 1867 and revised it in 1872 and 1884. The Old Testament was finished after his death by his students, working from Darby's own French and German translations, and the complete Bible appeared in 1890. Darby was also behind the German Elberfelder Bible and the French translation that bears his name, the same French Darby already on Midvash.

His aim was to give ordinary readers, without Hebrew or Greek, a text as close to the original as possible. Darby chose accuracy over elegance and leaned on the textual scholarship of his time, including Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. The most visible mark is the divine name: where nearly every English Bible prints LORD, Darby writes Jehovah. Psalm 23 opens: Jehovah is my shepherd.

For the student who wants to feel the shape of the original sentence in English, it is a valuable companion, more literal than the King James and built on a more carefully weighed Greek text by nineteenth century standards. The honest limit is the language: thou, maketh and stiff syntax make for slow reading, and its textual criticism predates many later manuscript discoveries. Readers who know Darby through dispensationalism may expect a party Bible, yet what shapes the text is literalness, not the translator's theology.

The translation is in the public domain. That is why Midvash can offer it in full, with no restrictions, to read, quote and share.