The name is a place. Elberfeld is a town in the Wupper valley, part of Wuppertal since 1929, and it is where most of the work was done. Three men began it: John Nelson Darby, Carl Brockhaus and Julius Anton von Poseck, all of them connected with the German wing of the Brethren movement. The New Testament appeared in 1855, the Psalms in 1859 and the Old Testament in 1871, issued not under anybody's name but as translated from the original text “by some Christians”.
What set it apart was the Greek underneath it. Nearly every German Bible then in circulation still stood on the Textus Receptus; this one broke with it, and took in the readings of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus as those manuscripts were published through the middle of the nineteenth century. The Old Testament was made from the Masoretic Hebrew. The translating principle was exactness before elegance: German that follows the Hebrew and the Greek closely enough to be stiff, every word supplied for sense marked as supplied, and no section headings at all, on the ground that the original texts have none. It is still reckoned among the German versions that stand closest to the wording beneath them.
This is the 1905 printing, the first to be set in Latin type instead of Fraktur; from the small size of that type it is known as the Perlbibel. It was not a fresh translation. Until Rudolf Brockhaus died in 1932 the Elberfelder was gone over and corrected from printing to printing — Alfred Rochat answering for the Old Testament, Emil Dönges for the New — so a date here names a printing in a moving text rather than a finished edition. What is sold as the Elberfelder today is usually something else again: a commission from the same movement spent twenty-five years revising it and published the result in 1975 and 1985. That revision took “Jehova” out of the Old Testament and put “HERR” in its place. This text still prints “Jehova”, which sets it beside the American Standard Version and beside Darby's own French Bible.
Its place in this collection is slightly apart. German has no curated default edition in the reader, so a German interface opens on the first German Bible in the catalogue, which is this one — ahead of both Luther Bibles by alphabetical order and nothing else. In the lineage rungs it stands alone. The two Luthers form a chain, 1912 revised from 1545 and 1545 resting on the Greek and the Hebrew, while the Elberfelder has no recorded parent, because the 1871 Elberfelder it was corrected down from is not in this corpus. A rung beneath an Elberfelder verse therefore goes straight to the original-language floor marked with ≈, even though the French Darby Bible sitting one column away is its closest relative here.