In terms of standard English Bibles I prefer the Revised Standard Version (RSV) over the NRSV. The problem is that it is hard to get these days since the NRSV has taken over with most publishers.  You can still get the RSV Oxford Annotated edition with the Apocrypha, still in print, and I would suggest it as a basic resource for the “entire” Bible with notes (plus wonderful Oxford maps)–but be careful here not to confuse it with the newer one that is the NRSV. This is the correct one on Amazon here.
The Revised Standard Version represents many advances over the King James and American Standard Version tradition. The problem with it is that in many places it incorporates conjectural readings, emendations, and alternative textual traditions like the Septuagint. These are indicated in the footnotes, but one just has to be aware one is not always dealing with just the standard Masoretic text.

The English Standard Version (ESV) attempts to keep all the virtues of the RSV in terms of scholarship and academic integrity, while removing this objection and relying wholly and solely on the Masoretic traditional Hebrew text. It has swept the evangelical Christian market and also attracted the attention of many scholars, on its way to replacing the popular New International Version (NIV) that had once held that market. It comes in many editions but the standard textual edition is reasonable in price and you can get it with the apocrypha on Amazon here.

I would recommend either one or both of these as a basic translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament for general reading and reference, and whether one has much interest in the N.T. or not, it is clearly an important part of our culture and from an academic and historical point of view both the N.T. and the Apocrypha are needed for general Biblical studies.

The problem with both the RSV and the ESV is that they still are not as literal and careful with the Hebrew as I would want but on the whole the ESV makes a fair attempt.

In terms of English Bibles though I still favor heavily the 1901 American Standard Version (not to be confused with the New American Standard Version that also can be good), both for its accuracy and literalness as well as its unprecedented use of the Divine Name Jehovah, which few standard translations have ever done. It is basically “out of print” but you can find editions if you want a hard copy. It is easily available in electronic formats, both free on the web and for various devices.  I have the ASV on my iPad and computer and often use it as an English parallel to the Hebrew. I find it to be quite accurate, and an advance over the KJV.

In terms of Jewish translations of the Tanakh the choices are much more limited. There are four main ones I would note:

1. The 1985 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. This one is the most widely available and would be somewhat equivalent to the RSV in terms of its academic approach to the text. However, it does, for the most part, stay with the original Masoretic Hebrew rather than bringing in alternative readings. Its drawback is that it can be very loose with the text and put meanings into the English that are clearly more interpretations, thus closing off to the average reader the more literal or original meaning.

2. The older 1917 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh is now, alas, out of print but it was heavily modeled on the ASV but without, of course, using the Divine Name, but choosing “LORD” for YHVH as most English translations have done. This is the Bible that David Horowitz used all his life and Ralph Buntyn has David’s personal leather bound copy. I have one of my own that I bought years ago, back in the 1970s. If you check the used bookstores you can find a copy. You can also get an e-book version for $.99 on Amazon here that will download to the Kindle app on any device! There are also numerous web sites that have this 1917 JPS Tanakh on-line. I do recommend it and if I had a parallel version of the Hebrew Bible with this 1917 translation I would consider it the best of all worlds in terms of the Hebrew Bible.

3. The Koren “Jerusalem Bible,” produced in Israel with the traditional Hebrew text and a fairly literal English translation by Harold Fish on facing pages. You can get it at many bookstores but most easily via Amazon here.  Two disadvantages are the print is small and the binding is not of the highest quality. I have used and worn out about three of these but over the years switched to a Hebrew Bible with no English.

4. The 1996 Stone Edition of the Tanakh. Even though this one is quite popular I find the translation far far from accurate and literal and just as the Christian translations of the Bible have a strong theological slant in many places this translation of the Tanakh has a decidedly Jewish slant that gets in the way of the literal/accurate meaning of the text itself.

So the upshot of this note, depending on your own preferences would be to get:

1. A copy of either the Oxford RSV and ESV with the Apocrypha just so you have a standard full English Bible. Which you chose might depend on whether you want the notes, maps, etc. of the Oxford or just the straight text of the ESV.

2. A copy of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh if you can find one through a used book dealer. Otherwise, if you use electronic devices, it is easy to obtain, or, alternatively get a copy of the ASV, which is very similar and has the added bonus of using the Divine Name.

A final personal note…

I had to suspend most of my work on the Transparent English Bible (Original Bible Project) when I became chair of the Department of Religious Studies here at UNC Charlotte in 2005, taking on a 40 hour+ per week job, 12 months a year. This left me almost no “extra” time for the translation and what time I have had for research I have given to writing the four books (The Jesus Dynasty, Restoring Abrahamic Faith, The Jesus Discovery, and Jesus and Paul) and related research, filming, and archaeology projects. I have the intention of returning to the TEB work when I retire from the chair job in May, 2013 and we have plans to publish portions of the translation in e-book format as early as 2012. If you are not familiar with this “best of all translations,” you can download a sample of Genesis 1-12 at the Web site.

http://www.rootsoffaith.net/group/theoriginofspeeches

As well as Isaac’s Blog on SWW here:

http://www.rootsoffaith.net/profile/IsaacMozeson

Just to whet your interest a bit on the wonderful style of Isaac Mozeson, here is an Op Ed piece he published in the Jerusalem Post in January, 2005. You can find this and lots more archived at his Web site: http://www.edenics.org/

Both options seem strange. Since Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) science assumes that, after millions of years of evolving mutations, some grunting apes became the gesturing Neanderthals, which led to Shakespearean sonnets. Happily, the floating, uniquely human hyoid throat bone also appeared, helping this species survive by lying, crooning, yodeling and rapping. (The world’s oldest hyoid bone was unearthed in Haifa).

Secularists have always considered it mythic that a Divine Engineer would factory-install a language program at Eden, creating the first modern humans. And that multi-national history was then to have been neurolinguistically kickstarted at the Tower of Babel, with 70 spin-offs which have since de-evolved into our 6,000 tongues.

Linguist Noam Chomsky proved that the human brain is hard-wired for language. He suggested that some super-intelligent alien engineered language. And recent linguists DO conclude that all Earth languages came from one universal language. But NOT that “recent West-Semitic language” called Hebrew.

The establishment Eurocentrists still support “origin unknown” for LAD (boy), even though Hebrew yeled and Arabic walid mean “boy,” and the root of birthing is Lamed-Daled. Genesis 11:1 has “kol aretz saphah echat” – coincidentally like WHOLE, EARTH, SPEECH… one (source of EACH). The new science of Edenics now has over 23,000 such “coincidences.” Edenics works with a Proto-Semitic, “Edenic” vocabulary where each root letter has the “genes” for the wide diversity of the world’s words.

Edenics doesn’t use kabbalistic formulae, only bread-and-butter stuff already used to link, say, French with Italian. So, Daled-Resh-Kahf, derekh (way, road) is echoed in the words for “road” in Russian (doroga), Australian Aborigine (turingas) and 40 other languages in the “DIRECTION” entry of our e-word CD dictionary. Moreover, the Gimel of garon (throat) can shift harder to a hard C or softer to an H. This is why EGRETS, CRANES and HERONS are all long-throated birds.

There are only a few hundred English-Edenic links as easy as rageel (usual) and ReGuLar. If one shifts the position of a letter instead of its sound, one knows why ReLiGion is about a spiritual path becoming a ReGuLar routine.

Instead of the divine dance of sense among sound, scholars assume that words are merely chaotic noises that we assign meaning to. But words traced back to Eden AREN’T meaningless sounds. Take mysterious animal names. In English, names like 1) GIRAFFE, 2) SKUNK, 3) GOPHER, and 4) HORSE are mere sounds. But in Biblical Hebrew, (Sephardic) Ayin-Resh-Phey, ghoref, means neck. 2) Tsokhen, stinker, gave the Indians that delightful creature’s name, 3) Khopher means digger, and 4) Horaish is plower. There’s a large chapter on animal names from Eden in The Origin of Speeches:From the Language of Eden To Our Babble After Babel (2005).When the guardians of Modern Hebrew had to coin a word for that crustacean, the CRAB, they went to the Old High German krebitz. This word is thought to mean “scratching,” even though crabs don’t scratch. The Academy then named the crab sartan, for scratching. (Samekh-Resh-Tet is the source of SERRATED). The scholars should have noted other creatures with exoskeletons, like the aqrab (scorpion). From qeren (horn) and Aramaic karpafta (skull) they should have seen a KR subroot of hardness. Koof-Resh-Bhet means battle and encroachment. So, nature’s lumbering, armored tank, the CRAB, should have been called a qarebet.

It was an animal, a little birdie, that whispered the whole Edenic concept into my ear back in 1978. I was a doctoral literature student, a published poet, stuck with a boring linguistics requirement at New York University. The professor demonstrated the genius behind reconstructing the so-called “Indo-European root” for the generic bird word. This never-spoken laboratory reconstruction was to show how Aryans emerged from a separate troop of well-groomed apes, without any (shudder) relationship to the “inferior” races, peoples and languages.

That theoretical, generic bird word was SPER. In second grade I knew a similar generic word for bird… tsipor. At the “SPARROW” entry one sees the Tsadi-Pey behind bird-related words for floating, spying, being covered (as in feathers), a talon, and chirping.

In Edenics every two consonants make a sound. Sound is energy. This is a science now, no more Humanities myths. Every sound carries sense. Therefore, if we examine the simple three-letter word for flower, Pey-Resh-Het or perakh, we can see that it is a combination of 1) P-R (botanical things, as in perot / FRUIT) and 2) the R-K element of fragrance, seen in reyakh (smell) or English REEK.

Here are two examples from the upcoming Japanese book. The SAMURAI, a storied warrior, was a royal guardsman. A guardian in Hebrew is a shomer. More often, the Japanese reverses the Hebrew. KARATE is an unarmed martial art. Therefore, kara means empty and te (pronounced tay) means hand. Reverse Hebrew raik (empty) and yad (hand) to get kara-te.

Are we naked but gabby gibbons, or have we divinely enhanced brains (Genesis 2:7) above an ape’s body? Were we engineered for speech, for literacy, perhaps even for Revealed moral instruction (G-d forbid)? Stay tuned. In our 21st Century culture wars, we will weigh in with the new science of Edenics.

Two billion Christians worldwide consider the Lord’s Prayer the ultimate expression of their faith—but few know the stunning story of its Hebrew origins. A Prayer to Our Father (175 pp., tpb, $19.95) is the true story of an exciting journey of faith of a Jewish Bible scholar and an African American pastor who join forces to uncover the truth about the most beloved prayer in the Christian world.

Their provocative new book reads like a detective novel. Written by two most unlikely collaborators, the charismatic personalities of the authors are as riveting as the story. Former chaplain to the Minnesota Vikings, Keith Johnson has ministered to some of the top names in the NFL and NBA. Jerusalem-based Jewish scholar and author, Nehemia Gordon, has spent his career translating the Dead Sea Scrolls and studying the deep mysteries of the Jewish religion.

Johnson and Gordon’s gripping adventure begins in the ancient city of Jerusalem and takes them to the very spot in Galilee where Jesus taught the multitudes to pray. Along the way they discover a Hebrew version of the Lord’s Prayer, preserved in secret by Jewish rabbis for over a thousand years. Their riveting journey and extraordinary relationship are chronicled in A Prayer to Our Father.

See the Website: http://www.aprayertoourfather.com/ for further details on the book and the background of the authors.

Nehemia Gordon holds a Masters Degree in Biblical Studies and a Bachelors Degree in Archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gordon has worked as a translator on the Dead Sea Scrolls and as a researcher deciphering ancient Hebrew manuscripts. He has been invited to speak in synagogues and churches around the world and has led groups of pilgrims and visitors on tours of biblical sites. A native of Chicago, Nehemia has made his home in Jerusalem, Israel for the last fifteen years.
Keith Johnson earned his Masters of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has spent nearly two decades in Christian ministry. As an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church, Johnson has served as pastor of Park Avenue Church in Minneapolis and as chaplain of the Minnesota Vikings. Johnson was also chosen as one of only 40 chaplains from around the world to serve the athletes of the 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta. Keith lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and sons.

Bless my life-breath YeHoVaH! And all inside me his holy Name!
Bless my life-breath YeHoVaH! And don’t forget all His retributions:
The One excusing all your wrong doings; The One healing all your illnesses;
The One buying back your lives from the pit of destruction;
The One who wreathes your head with Chesed and Rachamim (faithful love & mercies);
The One who satiates you with the good;
Of your ornamentation he makes new like an eagle your youths. (Psalm 103:1-5)

Two more Translation Samples of the Transparent English Bible, produced by the Original Bible Project, are now available for download:

LekLeka

VaYera

Bereshit

Noach