Elberfelder 1871
de
The Elberfelder 1871 is the first complete Bible of the Elberfelder translation. The New Testament appeared in 1855 and the Old Testament was finished in 1871. The work came from the circle of Carl Brockhaus and the Englishman John Nelson Darby, both tied to the Brethren movement, and it was carried out largely in Elberfeld, today part of Wuppertal.
Its method is faithfulness to the original. The translators preferred to stay close to the Hebrew and Greek rather than produce smooth German. Words added to complete the sense are marked, and the divine name is rendered Jehova, a form later editions dropped in favor of «HERR». The text asks for patient reading, but it shows the structure of the originals with unusual clarity.
This version should not be confused with the Elberfelder 1905, which Midvash also offers. Both belong to the same unrevised line of the text: the 1905 edition was the first printed in Latin type, the so-called Pearl Bible, and the 1871 text is where that line begins. We have not compared the two verse by verse, so we do not claim exactly how they differ. In this version the module's footnotes were removed and only the verse text is shown.
The text is in the public domain and comes from CrossWire's SWORD module GerElb1871, which labels it the Elberfelder «of 1871», a wording that signals an approximate attribution. For students it stands as a historical witness to a literal translation that shaped German-language Bible reading.