Turkish Linguistics, Arabic linguistics, Slavic linguistics

Every nation has its unique world of folk tales, legends, proverbs, songs, poems, stories and other oral and written texts. In these texts, people express their “truths” in ways most natural and meaningful to them. Generations treasure these texts as an important part of their cultural heritage. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of ancient texts most meaningful to the ancient Hebrew people. Unlike other nations of the ancient world, Hebrews were monotheists, hence the Hebrew Bible is a national literature based on the Hebrew people’s monotheistic beliefs. During the centuries, many other nations translated the Hebrew Bible and accepted it as sacred writings. As a result, a multitude of Hebrew sayings and idioms made their way into other languages. There have been numerous studies on biblical elements in different languages and literatures. In this study, we focus on “meanings” or “truths” of the Hebrew Bible rather than the idioms and other Hebraic elements. As we know, translating national texts into another language by necessity results in deformation of the phonetic, musical, rhythmic, associational and aesthetic aspects of the texts. While expressing the “meanings” relatively correctly, translation often fails to come across as natural and loses significant linguistic and literary qualities of the original. On the other hand, similar “meanings” or “truths” may naturally exist in other national literatures, and identifying these parallel texts helps discover similar ideas and values in different linguistic and literary forms and appreciate cultural diversity. In this paper, some passages from several books of the Hebrew Bible are compared with some parallel Turkic texts that express the same “truths”, but in forms peculiar to Turkic languages and literatures. Examples are given from some poems by the Turkish poet Yunus Emre (1238-1320), the Azerbaijani poet Molla Panah Vaqif (1717-1797), and other sources.