The BARA Bible is a brand new type of Bible for the modern thinker. We have thrown away two millennia of false assumptions and are taking a fresh look at the actual Hebrew texts only, ignoring the mistakes that have crept in through myriad errors in the Greek, Latin, German, and early English translation efforts.
The BARA Bible is not a paraphrase, but a direct translation. (see the Translation page for more details)
Here is a sample verse from a beta version BARA Translation. It is one of the most widely-known scriptures; the opening verse from Genesis chapter 1:
Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
Transliteration: bə-rê-šîṯ bā-rā ’ĕ-lō-hîm ’êṯ – ha-šhem-im hā-’ā-reṣ.
Typical translations: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
BARA BIBLE translation (beta version): The coronation divided between the immigrants and the heroes of earth.
– Genesis 1:1
Why is the BARA version so different from the typical translations? It’s because we are reading the Hebrew words exactly for what they actually mean. Unbelievably, this straight-forward approach is NOT how every other Bible translation was implemented.
This first sentence of the ancient scripture opens with the word ‘bereshit‘. Typically, this is translated into English as “In the beginning…”
This interpretation is not entirely accurate. Although it is true that ‘bereshit‘ does refer to a time of beginning, this particular word is reserved for a very specific type of beginning. It is not used for beginnings in general. It is always used when speaking very specifically about the beginning of an era of authority, usually the coronation of a king.
The subject of the sentence is ‘the Elohim‘, a plural proper noun whose root word is ‘el‘, meaning “to”. The direct translation of ‘Elohim‘ is “the ‘to’ ones” or “the ‘to’ people”, with the implication of the overall meaning of the word being the people who came to here, or “the immigrants”. This word has been universally erroneously translated as “God”.
The verb in this sentence is ‘bara‘ which means “divide”. The action in this verse is not creation, but division.
The sentence includes an additional noun in the sentence, translated here as “heroes” stemming from the word ‘hashemim‘, built upon the root ‘shem‘ meaning fame (or infamy). Every other English translation gets this word completely wrong, by misconstruing it as being built from the root ‘mayim‘, which they then incorrectly translate as “sky” or in this case “the heavens”. Again, this word is a plural proper noun (clearly evidenced by the Hebrew suffix ‘im‘) indicating that it is the name of a group of people. Some modern translators, realizing this, have begun to translate it as “sky people”, but this is still incorrect, given that it is built upon the wrong root word. Heroes might not be the best interpretation, as it implies an unambiguous positive slant which is absent in the Hebrew. A better interpretation may simply be “famous ones” or “legendary ones”. This is the type of subtlety we will continue working on as we proceed through beta phase.
The only word translated correctly in any other version of the Bible is the final word of the sentence: “Earth”.
It is clear that this verse is about events that took place on Earth, long ago…
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