The LivingTorah and The Living Nach are popular, clear and modern English translations of the Tanakh based on traditional Jewish sources, along with extensive notes, maps, illustrations, diagrams, charts, bibliography, and index. A 2006 list categorized "An Annotated Bibliography Of Translations And Commentaries" placed these volumes in "Texts with Talmudic Translations" in second place, right after ArtScroll. The series is published by Moznaim Publishers.
''The Living Torah''
The Living Torah is a 1981 translation of the Torah by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. It was and remains a highly popular translation, and was reissued in a Hebrew-English version with haftarot for synagogue use. Kaplan had the following goals for his translation, which were arguably absent from previous English translations:
Make it clear and readable
Keep it close to the basic meaning of the text in many places, but in other places translated it to be in accord with post-biblical rabbinic commentary and Jewish codes of law.
Provide useful notes, a table of contents, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.
Kaplan's work has been hailed as one of the bestEnglish translations of the Torah, next to Rabbi Hirsch's translation, because of his inclusion of the rabbinic elucidation of the text. Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg, a prominent legal decider for the Orthodox community, is reported to have said that the translation is so good that if one is unable to read the Targum Onkelos, which is written in Aramaic, one can fulfill Shnayim mikra ve-echad targum, the obligatory weekly reading of the Torah twice in Hebrew and once with translation, with The Living Torah's translation. A Russian language translation of The Living Torah has been published.
Special features
The table of contents lists the wordings and page numbers of the 670 short descriptions he wrote for each section.
Regarding the Torah's paragraph indicators, P/PaTuAch/Open-to-end-of-line and S/SaToom/enClosed-within-line-of-text, "Kaplan.. accentuates these in the English text."
The introduction wrestles with maintaining the distinction between singular and plural for the wordyou. Kaplan then states that
* "thee" is more correct
* but he sees "thee" as violating a command, "every day the Torah should be as new."
The Living Torah was later supplemented by The Living Nach on Nevi'im and Ketuvim. These follow Rabbi Kaplan's format and approach, and were prepared posthumously: the former two by ; the third by Moshe Schapiro, M.H. Mykoff, and Gavriel Rubin.
