An-Naml Surah: A Comparison between Joseph Rivlin and Uri Rubin’s Hebrew Translations

The study of Hebrew translations of the Qur’an can contribute to the improvement of the level of the Qur’anic studies in the academic community of the country. It should be noted that among the Sami languages, Arabic and Hebrew have the most similarities. These two languages are very consistent at different levels such as phonemes, letters, building words, and syntactic rules. Therefore, Hebrew translators’ finding equivalence for the Qur’anic words can develop the comparative studies of Sami languages. However, if studying the translations of the Qur’an is a one of the necessities, the Hebrew translations are taking priority over the other ones. In the present article, two Hebrew translations of An-Naml Surah have been compared in terms of loyalty to the source text, equivalence finding, literary style: classic or modern, and some reflections. This surah includes several leads to intertextuality; however, since this topic has not been taken into account by either of the authors despite the large number of footnotes (only in this surah, and except Uri Rubin’stranslation, Ᾱyah 82) the present paper’s focus is not on comparing the content with Bible reports, but just on the linguistic issues. One of the innovative features of this research is that it has used Torah’s usages in Hebrew equivalences, which will appeal to those interested in comparative linguistic studies.