Professor finishes 35-year translation project

Anil and Shaila Solanki
Anil and Shaila Solanki celebrate the completion of the Gujarati Bible, a project more than three decades in the making.
Photo by Jim Bishop

In 1969, the Bible Society of India appointed Anil D. Solanki to begin a new translation of the Bible into his native language, Gujarati. Now, 35 years later, that project is completed and the Bible is published.

Dr. Solanki, a part-time professor of Old Testament at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, was doing graduate studies in Old Testament in Bangalore, India at a seminary, when he was asked to create a team to work on a new translation. At the time, Solanki was the leading Hebrew scholar among those who speak his native language of Gujarati. He invited three colleagues of various denominations to work with him.

“We had two primary goals in our translation work,” Solanki recalled. “The first was to be faithful to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, and the second was to make the translation communicate readily to readers. The earlier translation was so outdated that it couldn