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Just to stir this pot a bit more: There is evidence (estimably collected and analyzed by Collette Estin in various works on the Psalter) that Jerome was not as independent of his Greek sources as has been previously thought. That is to say, Estin (and others) have argued that while Jerome might have had some facility with Hebrew, it was not as much as he himself advertised and that his "translation" from the Hebrew into Latin relied closely on the Greek translations rendered by Symmachus, Aquila, and Theodotion. In this connection, it's worth thinking about *why* Jerome translated at all -- and this point is related to Christopher Crockett's earlier posting on the question of "accuracy" and what that might entail. Jerome believed that as the Seventy lived more about 2 centuries before Christ, they were not fully in possession of the "truth" of Scripture. That is, unless read with Christ as the key, a Latin translation of even the Hebrew Bible would be deficient -- or even distorted (as he claimed on occasion). As he said to Augustine (I'm paraphrasing of course): "Wouldn't you rather have the OT translated by a faithful Christian, than by seventy Jews?" In short, there's a polemical basis for Jerome's work as translator (and especially as "etymologist"), and an interest in self-promotion behind some of his claims to facility with Hebrew (as I believe Adam Kamesar points out in the book mentioned by Dr Tompkins, Jerome wanted to become the "Latin Origen," at least until Origen became unfashionable). Deborah L. Goodwin Department of Theology University of Notre Dame %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%