Posts in the category “Hebrew.”

April, 2008

Reader's Hebrew Bible

Posted Monday, April 21, 2008 by Charlie Trimm
Categories: Old Testament; Hebrew   Comments: None
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I noticed recently that Zondervan has published a Reader's Hebrew Bible . This looks to be an excellent tool for all of us who were not born in Israel several thousand years ago. The format of the book is the Hebrew text (basically the same as BHS) at the top and running helps on the bottom. The helps include both glosses on rare words (all words that appear less than 100 times, I believe), and some morphological help for complicated words. This allows one to read through the text without flipping the lexicon and paradigms trying to deciper a word. This book does not replace BHS, since there is no text critical information included. But this would be a great book to get after one finishes Hebrew classes and needs to just keep reading to retain the language. This cuts down the painfulness of reading and makes it a pleasure (or at least a lot closer!). It would be a great gift for someone graduating from seminary. Broad reading of the text is very important both for retaining one's Hebrew skills as well as for understanding the OT, and I strongly encourage as much reading as possible for those I teach. The other major pathway to easier reading is to use a computer program, like Bibleworks (or Biblespade !). I read a chapter a day of the OT, and whenever I don't know a word, I simply scroll the mouse over the word and a lexicon definition pops up. But Bibleworks is a lot more expensive than this book, and it is always nice to hold a book in one's hands. And since the glosses in the reader's bible are designed for the context, there is no need to go searching through a lexical entry to try and find the appropriate entry. Buy this book and start reading some more Hebrew!
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