The American mission at Beirut began this translation around 1847, and the man who started it did not finish it. Eli Smith had spent two decades in the Levant and knew the language well enough to argue about it; he worked at the text until his death in 1857. Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck took it over and carried it through — the New Testament done in 1860, the Old Testament five years later, in 1865. The two names on the book are the two halves of one job.
The names not on the spine matter as much. Van Dyck had learned his Arabic from Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yaziji, and both worked on the translation with him, as did the shaykh Yusuf al-Asir, who went over the Arabic for idiom and style. Those three were not assistants to a missionary project. They were among the central figures of the Nahda, the Arabic literary revival, and what came out reads as Arabic prose rather than as a translation wearing Arabic clothes. That is why the book outlived the mission that paid for it.
It was a feat of printing as much as of scholarship. The American Press at Beirut set it in an Arabic face cut for the mission and finished in 1843, the type still known as al-Amerikani, which Smith had a hand in shaping. Arabic is hard to set well — the letters join, and change shape as they join — and a Bible that looked right on the page did more for its reception than argument could. Millions of copies have gone out since, to Protestant and Coptic readers alike, and for most Arabic-speaking Christians this is simply what the Bible sounds like.
In this reader it is the only Arabic Bible, and that settles how it behaves. Set the interface to Arabic and this is what opens — not because it was picked, the way Reina-Valera 1909 was picked for Spanish, but because the catalogue looks for a Bible in the interface language and finds exactly one. It is also one of only two editions here whose text runs right to left, the modern Hebrew Bible being the other. In the lineage rungs no parent is recorded for it, so a rung opened beneath a verse falls straight to the original-language floor marked with ≈ — which fits closer here than it usually does, since the Greek that floor supplies is the Textus Receptus, and the Textus Receptus is what its New Testament was made from.