AD 390

Jerome’s Hebrew translations of the Old Testament

Jerome begins his Hebrew-based Latin Old Testament project

Jerome called his preface to Samuel and Kings a “helmeted” introduction — armour against the critics he expected.

No day in 390, and no finished New Testament

The listing has Jerome completing a Latin New Testament in 390 and then starting the Old. No source records a particular day when he began, and the premise is wrong: his securely attributable New Testament work was a relatively light revision of the four Gospels made in 382–384, and the reviser of Acts, the Epistles and Revelation remains unknown.

Around this period, living near Bethlehem, he moved from revising Septuagint-based Latin texts to producing new Latin versions based principally on Hebrew and Aramaic scripture.

The year 390 is a conventional approximate starting point, not a documented day or even an uncontested first book.

A start spread across years

What began was a sequence of book projects rather than one translation event. Jerome had produced a new Hebrew-based Psalter by approximately 390–392, and recent scholarship dates Daniel, an early part of the larger Hebrew-Aramaic project, to 392–393.

A traditional chronology places Samuel and Kings near the beginning of the enterprise.

The translations were issued book by book, each with its own preface.

The helmeted preface

The prologue to Samuel and Kings declares that Jerome was turning books from Hebrew into Latin, and asks readers to compare his version against Greek and Latin copies. It organised the Hebrew scriptures as twenty-two books and addressed his patrons Paula and Eustochium.

The new versions invited criticism immediately, because familiar church readings derived from the Septuagint could now differ from Jerome’s text.

Hebrew and Aramaic supplied the base, but Jerome also drew on the Septuagint, Old Latin versions, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and Jewish exegesis.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0390.

What the sources leave uncertain

The year 390 is a conventional approximate starting point, not an independently documented day or even an uncontested first book.
The sequence is difficult to reduce to a single “start”: Jerome had already revised or translated Old Testament material from Greek, produced a Hebrew-based Psalter around 390–392 and translated other Hebrew-Aramaic books over the following fifteen years.
The title “Vulgate” is anachronistic for this moment. In Jerome’s lifetime, “common edition” commonly referred to Septuagint-derived text, and the later Vulgate was a composite collection.