Among the projects that Zamora worked on, the Hebrew edition of what is commonly called the Old Testament, along with its translation into Latin, was undoubtedly the most significant. He probably intended that this material be used extensively for the projected Complutensian Polyglot. One of his manuscripts is in El Escorial library near Madrid, Spain. Cataloged as G-I-4, it contains the complete book of Genesis in Hebrew, along with an interlinear, or word-for-word, translation into Latin.

In the prologue is this acknowledgment: “Salvation of the nations required the translation of the Holy Scriptures into other languages. . . . We have considered it . . . absolutely necessary that the faithful have a word-for-word Bible translation, done in such a way that for each Hebrew word there is an equivalent one in Latin.” Alfonso de Zamora had the qualifications needed to undertake such a new translation into Latin because he was a recognized scholar of Hebrew.

[Box/​Pictures on page 19]

Translating the Divine Name

It is of special interest to note how Alfonso de Zamora, a learned man of Hebrew background, transliterated the divine name. As can be seen in the accompanying photograph, a marginal note in his Hebrew-Latin interlinear translation of Genesis contains God’s name written as “jehovah.”

Evidently, Zamora accepted this translation of the divine name into Latin. During the 16th century, when the Bible was translated into principal European languages, this spelling or a very similar one was adopted by many Bible translators, including William Tyndale (English, 1530), Sebastian Münster (Latin, 1534), Pierre-Robert Olivétan (French, 1535) and Casiodoro de Reina (Spanish, 1569).

Thus Zamora became one of the first of many 16th-century Bible scholars who helped shed light on the divine name. The ignorance regarding God’s name occurred first as a result of Jewish superstition that did not allow the name to be pronounced. Under the influence of this Jewish tradition, Bible translators of Christendom​—Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, for example—​replaced the divine name with such terms as “Lord” or “God.”

[Picture]

Close-up view of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton translated “jehovah” by Zamora

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Frontispiece of Zamora’s interlinear translation