Ezekiel Rahabi (1694–1771) was the chief Jewish merchant of the

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( nl, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC) was a chartered company established on the 20th March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies into the first joint-stock ...

Cochin Kochi (), also known as Cochin ( ) ( the official name until 1996) is a major port city on the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea, which is a part of the Arabian Sea. It is part of the district of Ernakulam in the state of K ...

, India for almost 50 years. Rabbi ''Rahabi Ezekiel'', (or ''Ezekiel Rahabi'') also was a rabbinical writer known only through his polemical Hebrew translation of the New Testament - ''The Book of the Gospel Belonging to the Followers of Jesus'' (c.1750). The translation contains all the books of the New Testament and was translated between 1741 and 1756Commissioner, purpose, translators, copyist and age of the Hebrew New Testament of Cochin and the Quran of the Library of Congress, Mascha van Dort, professor Meir Bar-Ilan, July 2021, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20148.58242 by a certain Ezekiel Rahabi (not R'dkibi, pace

Franz Delitzsch Franz Delitzsch (23 February 1813, in Leipzig – 4 March 1890, in Leipzig) was a German Lutheran theologian and Hebraist. Delitzsch wrote many commentaries on books of the Bible, Jewish antiquities, Biblical psychology, as well as a history of ...

p.108) in "an uneven and faulty Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian bias."Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish-Christian Dialogue 1984 p76 Pinchas E. Lapide, Helmut Gollwitzer - 1984 Oo 1:32 reads: "Heaven is my witness that I have not translated this, God forfend, to believe it, but to understand it and know how to answer the heretics . . . that our true Messiah will come. Amen." The 1756 edition appears to be the work of two different translators - a less educated

Sephardi Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefa ...

writer (Matthew-John), Ezekiel Rahabi himself, and a more educated German rabbi (Acts-Revelation) Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ezekiel, Rahabi Translators of the New Testament into Hebrew 18th-century rabbis Jewish translators of the Bible Cochin Jews Indian rabbis 18th-century Indian translators Critics of Christianity Dutch East India Company people 1694 births 1771 deaths