Hindi Scriptures

As a linguistic variety, Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English. Alongside Urdu as Hindustani, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. There are believed to be in the order of 322 million speakers of Hindustani and various related languages.

We are thankful that considerable initial progress has been made towards the Society potentially taking up oversight of a new translation of the Hindi Bible. During the past twelve months contact has been established with a missionary to Suriname who has Hindi language abilities and contacts. This missionary initially helped us to carry out the Society’s Translation Analysis Checklist examination of the 1830 Hindi Bible, which overall appears to be a good translation with the distinct advantage of being based on the Greek Received Text.

Due to significant changes in the Hindi language since 1830 we cannot simply digitise the Bible text, typeset it and then publish it. However, we are hopeful that we have the beginnings of a team who may be able to revise the 1830 Bible or use it as a basis for a new edition of the Hindi Bible that is faithful to the Hebrew Masoretic and Greek Received Texts. We have therefore launched a pilot project in Hindi, commencing with a portion of the Gospel according to John.

We desire the prayers of our supporters as we take the first steps towards preparing a faithful and accurate Bible in this major world language. ‘Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass’ (Psalm 37.5).