Eliyahu Koren - Biography - The Koren Bible

The Koren Bible

By the mid-late 1950s, Korngold had begun to work on what would become his most significant work, The Koren Bible. Korngold was committed to publishing a Hebrew Bible designed, edited, printed, and bound by Jews—something that had not been accomplished in nearly 500 years. The first printed Hebrew Bibles from Italy (1488) were printed by Jews, but after Daniel Bomberg's 1517 Venice printing, all editions up to the 20th century had non-Jewish publishers or printers, and errors had found their way into the text.

Korngold had been approached by Judah L. Magnes, then president of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem about creating a new font for a new edition of the Hebrew Bible in the 1940s. Korngold set to work on a font and won a competition for the project, but following years of work on the University's Bible Committee, which Korngold chaired, the project moved in a direction that he and many Bible scholars found unacceptable. Rather than create a wholly new edition of the Bible, in 1953 Hebrew University Press published a photographic offset of David Christian Ginzburg's British and Foreign Bible Society edition with additional notations from Moshe David Cassuto's Letteris edition. Korngold resigned from the committee.

He then set himself to the task of producing a new edition of the Hebrew Bible on his own. In 1957, he established an independent studio, and in 1961 founded Koren Publishers Jerusalem. Korngold worked painstakingly on the project, correcting typesetting errors of previous editions, and creating a new font, Koren Bible Type to enable the text to be as accurate and legible as possible. The text, vocalization, and cantillation were based on a Bible edition of the early 19th century German Jewish grammarian and masoretic scholar Wolf Heidenheim. Avraham Meir Habermann, Daniel Goldschmidt, and Meir Medan proofread and edited the text.

In 1962, during the Chanukah holiday, Koren Publishers Jerusalem published the Torah, the first part of The Koren Bible. The entire Bible appeared nearly two years later. During this time, Korngold changed his name to Koren.

The Koren Bible was immediately recognized as the new standard Hebrew Bible. In response to its publication, David Ben-Gurion declared, "Israel is redeemed from shame." The Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted the edition for reading Haftarah (prophetic portions) in synagogues when the handwritten parchment scroll is not used. The Koren Bible became the Bible on which the President of Israel is sworn into office. The Israel Ministry of Education and Israeli municipalities began distributing The Koren Bible as gifts to high school graduates, and the Israel Defense Forces began distributing The Koren Bible to newly inducted soldiers.

Koren Publishers Jerusalem later published a Hebrew/English edition of the Koren Bible with a new translation by Professor Harold Fisch, a Biblical and literary scholar.