The first five books of the Old Testament, also known as the Pentateuch or the Mosaic Law, have been published for the first time ever in the Kumyk language. Kumyk belongs to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages. With about half a million speakers, Kumyk is one of the larger languages of Dagestan and is also spoken in northeast Chechnya and the Mozdok District of North Ossetia.

The translation team headed by the Institute for Bible Translation included experts in the Kumyk language as well as biblical scholars and linguists. The text was peer-reviewed and approved for publication by the Dagestan Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences...

IBT has recently published 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings as a single edition in the Kumyk language of Dagestan. Kumyk is the largest Turkic language of the N. Caucasus, with more than 500,000 Kumyks living in Russia (according to the 2010 census).

The Kumyk translation team is continuing to work on the rest of the Old Testament, with current work in progress on several of the Minor Prophets. The next publication in the Kumyk project is expected to be the Pentateuch in 2021.

IBT has published the translation of the Old Testament book of Job in Kumyk, a Turkic language spoken by more than 400,000 people, primarily in the Dagestan region of southern Russia. 

The book of Job has a special place both in the Bible and among the masterpieces of world literature, offering deep theological reflection on why suffering afflicts even good people in this life. It is one of the most difficult books of the Bible to translate due to numerous difficulties having to do with rare words and ambiguous expressions in the Hebrew original. This is the first time that IBT has published the book of Job by itself in any of our projects.  The Hebrew poetic form of the central portion of the book was rendered as poetry in Kumyk, and footnotes deal with translation issues that were difficult to get across in the text...

The Kumyk people, numbering about 430,000 speakers, are the third largest ethnic group and largest Turkic-language people in Dagestan,  a region in the Caucasus area of south Russia where more than 30 different languages are spoken. 

IBT first published the New Testament in the Kumyk language in 2007.  This was followed in 2009 by the translation of the first Old Testament books – Genesis and Proverbs – in 2016 by the illustrated edition of Parables from the Gospel of Luke and now by the Book of Psalms.

IBT has published a Kumyk-language edition of four parables from the Gospel of Luke: the Good Samaritan (10:30-35), the Wedding Feast (14:16-23), the Prodigal Son (15:11-32) and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (18:10-14). This book was previously published by IBT in the Agul (2007) and Dungan (2015) languages. The edition contains 35 black-and-white  illustrations.  Produced by an artist from Adyghea (northwest Caucasus),  the illustrations give a Caucasian visual perspective on the stories told by Jesus and bring the world of the Bible closer to Kumyk readers, who live for the most part in the Dagestan region of the northern Caucasus.

IBT has released an audio recording of the book of Proverbs in the Kumyk language. The Kumyks are the largest Turkic people in the northern Caucasus region of Russia, with approximately 432,000 living in Dagestan and another 70,000 or so in other parts of Russia.