Euskera Written Holly Book

No, it is not a holly book that tells the world that Euskal Herria is the Basque promised land. It is actually more simple than that.

This is about a note appeared at the Center for Basque Studies's web site about the different versions that can be found of the Bible translated to Euskara, the Basque Language.

Here it is:

The Bible in Basque

By Jacques Bellay

In 1571 Joannes Leizarrga, a Catholic priest from Zuberoa, joined the Protestant Reform movement and undertook the translation of the New Testament into Basque for the first time. The Roman Church set their sights on the task in 1740 when Haraneder produced his translation of the New Testament. More recently, in 1976 the abbot Kerexeta translated the Bible into Bizkaian.

Meanwhile, a new ecumenical translation of the Bible into Basque has appeared in bookstores under the title Elizen Arteko Biblia, published by the Sociedades B¡blicas Unidas, an organization that includes both Protestants and Catholics in the Basque Country.

This book is sturdily bound and contains all sorts of interesting information at the end of the volume, such as twenty pages of interdialectical vocabulary, thirty pages of Biblical dictionary, a subject index, plus maps and a timetable of Biblical history compared with general history of the period.

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