JEWEL TERMINOLOGY IN ROMANIAN BIBLICAL TRANSLATIONS FLORENTINA NICOLAE 1 Abstract. This study is a linguistic analysis of the twelve precious stones that appear on the breastplate of the High Priest, in the Old Testament, the Exodus episode. The contrastive analysis has been conducted in a diachronic manner, from the first translation into Romanian of few parts of the Old Testament (Palia de la Orăştie, 1581- 1582), up to the Synodal edition of the Holy Bible, published in 2008. The research on the biblical language arouses interest because it contains old Romanian terms, which are sometimes ignored in the modern dictionaries. For example, the term hoşen was attested in the Palia, but it is not recorded in DEX (the Explanatory Dictionary of Romanian Language). Romanian translations of the Holy Bible were consistently related to the Septuagint and Vulgate, but there were also influences from the modern translations in Hungarian, German, Modern Greek, Italian, French, Russian and English, which contributed to the slow modernization of the Romanian biblical vocabulary. Key words: Holy Bible, the Old Testament, Exodus, priestly breastplate, gemstones, Romanian language, translations of the Bible. The research of religious language in Romanian biblical translations is an ongoing process, especially due to the reprint in the recent years of some Bible variants extremely important for the evolution of the Romanian language in general: the New Testament from Balgrad (1648), the Psaltir from Balgrad (1651), the version of the Old Testament attributed to Daniil Andrean Panoneanul (c. 1665–1672), Nicolae Milescu’s version of the Old Testament (c. 1683–1686), the Bible from Bucharest (1688), the Vulgata Bible from Blaj (1760–1761), the Bible translated by Samuil Clain (1795). The analysis of the terminology for gems has considered these sources, to which we could add the modern and contemporary translations, which, in their turn have become sources for the next editions (1858 – the partial translation of the Old Testament by Ion Heliade Rădulescu), 1874, 1914 – the first Romanian Synodal edition of the Holy Scripture, 1921, 1924 (Dumitru Cornilescu’s version, considered the model of the subsequent Protestant editions), 1939, 1944, 1968, 1982, 1988, 2001 (Bartolomeu Anania’s version) 2004 and 2008. We have attempted a broad view of the respective terms, the impact of the translation sources and the pressure of contemporary Romanian. We have concluded that as regards the terminology for gems, the Greek and Latin sources (the Septuaginta, the Vulgate, respectively) are more important than the Slavic sources and they combine with the Old Testament sources in the modern languages, permanently making the Biblical lexis new. 1 “Ovidius” University, Constanţa, nicolae_flori@yahoo.com. RRL, LVIII, 2, p. 137–151, Bucureşti, 2013 Provided by Diacronia.ro for IP 18.206.187.241 (2021-11-29 17:36:45 UTC) BDD-A410 © 2013 Editura Academiei