TIRUNELVELI: At the age of 80, a retired Tamil teacher of Tirunelveli, has translated the Old Testament of the Holy Bible from its root language Hebrew to Tamil.
S Jayaraj (80), a graduate of Mathematics and a post-graduate in Tamil, is currently working as a Tamil teacher at the Sankar Higher Secondary School in Sankarnagar.
After retirement he started learning Hebrew under the guidance of Robinson, the then Tirumangalam CSI pastorate chairman, from 2003 to 2005. In 2005, Robinson died and before his death, Robinson asked Jayaraj to translate at least the first five chapters of the Old Testament.
Subsequently, Jayaraj got involved in the translation and in 2008 published the first five chapters Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Then he did the translation of next five chapters Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Songs of Solomon.
Last month when he was involved in the translation, he suffered a stroke. Discharged from hospital on the eve of Christmas, Express caught up with Jayaraj.
He said when he was studying Cardwell’s book “Comparative grammar of Dravidian languages” he learnt that Tamil and Hebrew were related. This struck a cord with him. So he started learning Hebrew. But in India the basic books of the language were not available. After lot of efforts Jayaraj bought the Hebrew books from Israel at a cost of Rs 50,000 in 2000.
According to Jayaraj many translations are being done from English to Tamil but the original meaning can be brought out only when the translation is done from the root language.
According to Tamil scholar Tho Paramasivam, to his knowledge Jayaraj was the only person translating the Old Testament of the Bible from Hebrew to Tamil and he should be recognised for it