Reader's Hebrew Bible

Sometimes providence smiles on you. Last week I arrived at my desk and dutifully checked my favorite blog, Between Two Worlds. There I saw an entry that offered a free copy of A Reader's Hebrew Bible (RHB) from Zondervan to the first five people who committed to review it on their blog. I was sure I was to late, but shot off the email. Low and behold I was lucky number four! On Tuesday when I arrived at my desk I found the new book awaiting my perusal and critical eye. On to the review...

This book is a must own for any intermediate Hebrew student. It removes the excessive crutches and dangers that you often face when using an interlinear bible, but provides enough vocabulary help to encourage the student toward proficiency. It is an ideal resource for Hebrew students striving to read the text, but possessing a limited to moderate Hebrew vocabulary.

The aesthetics of the book are excellent. Like A Reader's Greek Bible before it, the book is made of beautiful Italian Duo-Tone. The Hebrew font for the book is a slightly modified, yet highly readable, version of the BibleWorks Hebrew font. The Hebrew text follows the Westminster Leningrad Codex. When minor differences between WTC and Biblia Hebraica Struttgartensia occur they are marked and can examined in Appendix B.

The book is a reader, meant to enable students with a working knowledge of Biblical Hebrew but a limited vocabulary to increase their proficiency with the language. To that end the book works marvelously. Every Hebrew word occurring 100 times or less and every Aramaic word occurring 25 times or less is footnoted in a gloss at the bottom of the page. The footnote/gloss system is intuitive and easy to use. The gloss utilizes The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) and The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (BDB) as its primary lexical sources for the definition of the rare words.Each gloss contains the following pattern: (numerical footnote superscript) HOMONYM#, LEMMA, STEM: HALOT; BDB; ALTERNATE.

Another convenient function is that the massive amount of rare proper nouns (less than 100 and 25 again) are printed in gray but not footnoted. This helps the reader to identify that a strange word is a proper noun, while not clogging down the glosses with the severe number of proper nouns present in the Old Testament.

The RHB also has a convenient glossary containing all Hebrew lemmas with a frequency of 100 times or more in Appendix A. The definitions are again based on BDB and the Appendix is arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet.

The one negative is that the RHB does not contain a text critical apparatus. For this a student will need to consult a source like BHS.

In summary, the RHB is a great resource that should prove valuable for intermediate students in generations to come. It is an excellent companion to its Greek counterpart.

A special thanks to Justin Taylor at BTW and Chris Fann at Zondervan for hooking me up with a free copy!