The: Lamsa Bible
Exodus 20:1-17

AND God spoke all these words, saying, I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
  1. You shall have no other gods except me.
  2. You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth; You shall not worship them nor serve them; for I the LORD your God am a zealous God, visiting the offenses of the fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me; And showing mercy to thousands of generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
  3. You shall not take a false oath in the name of the LORD your God; for the LORD will not declare him innocent who takes an oath in his name falsely.
  4. Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all your work; But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor the sojourner who dwells in your towns;

    For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the seas, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and sanctified it.
  5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God gives you.
  6. You shall not kill.
  7. You shall not commit adultery.
  8. You shall not steal.
  9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
  10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
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George M. Lamsa
1957

History

This translation of the Old and New Testaments is based on Peshitta manuscripts which have comprised the accepted Bible of all those Christians who have used Syriac as their language of prayer and worship for many centuries. The Church of the East and some noted Western scholars dispute the belief of modern scholarship that the originals of the Four Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were written in Greek. In any case, Aramaic speech is an underlying factor and New Testament writers drew on documents written in Aramaic. Syriac is the literary dialect of Aramaic. From the Mediterranean east into India, the Peshitta is still the Bible of preference among Christians.

George M. Lamsa, the translator, devoted the major part of his life to this work. He was an Assyrian and a native of ancient Bible lands. He and his people retained Biblical customs and Semitic culture, which had perished elsewhere. With this background and his knowledge of the Aramaic (Syriac) language, he has recovered much of the meaning that has been lost in other translations of the Scriptures. There is a section on the problems of translating from the Aramaic to the Greek.

Manuscripts used were the Codex Ambrosianus for the Old Testament and the Mortimer-McCawley manuscript for the New Testament. Comparisons have been made with other Peshitta manuscripts, including the oldest dated manuscript in existence. The term Peshitta means straight, simple, sincere and true, that is, the original. Even the Moslems in the Middle East accept and revere the Peshitta text.

Although the Peshitta Old Testament contains the Books of the Apocrypha, this edition has omitted them.

A. J. Holman Company (1957)

[Tyndale House, Cambridge, United Kingdom]