Category Archives: Biblical Hebrew Language

Summaries and reviews of books, essays, and articles pertaining to the Akkadian language as well as innovative thoughts and reflections for further research.

Charles Halton

Why the Study of Ancient Culture is Inseparable from Translation

by

I have noticed that often times students who begin learning one of the biblical languages think that at the end of a few years of studying vocabulary, grammar, and syntax that they will then know how to read and translate the Bible. However, learning vocabulary, grammar, and syntax is not enough if one wants to truly understand a language–one has to also be a student of the cultures, both general and local, in which these languages were used.

I remember asking the late Michael P. O’Connor what aspect of biblical Hebrew pedagogy he thought was most in need of improvement. Without hesitation he said that the biggest weakness that he saw in the students entering a PhD program (and he was referring to students that already had at least 2 years of biblical Hebrew upon their application to the program) is that they had virtually no understanding of ancient culture–they had merely studied language, biblical content, and theology and because of this really didn’t know the language at all (and I would add that if you don’t know the language you really don’t know biblical content or theology on a deep level, but I digress).

But how could this be? Why would O’Connor make such statements? For instance, aren’t the meanings of words readily accessible in the myriad of lexicons on the shelves of any good library? Yes and no. Take Lipinski’s discussion regarding the meaning of the words we commonly translate as “slave” and “slave-girl”:

The West Semitic noun ‘abd-, e.g., can designate a slave, a servant, a king’s minister, a god’s worshipper, because its conceptual content is not a social rank, but a relation created by a dependent activity. As a result, when one is translating the Bible, e.g., into some European language, the problems of equivalence can be acute. It is easier to translate the noun in question by ‘servant’ and to have recourse to the polysemy of the English word, but ‘abd- really does not mean ‘servant’ and the corresponding polysemy does not exist in Semitic. Neither ‘dependent’ would fit the case because ‘abd- is etymologically related to the verb ‘bd which suggests some form of performed activity. Besides, diachronic aspects should not be forgotten. E.g. if the Hebrew word shipha is often translated by ‘slave-girl’,–probably under influence of Arabic sifah, ‘concubinage by capture’, ‘cohabitation by force’,–one cannot forget that mishpaha was a clan or a larger family in biblical times, and that shph means ‘posterity’ in Ugaritic and ‘family’ in Punic. One can assume therefore that shipha was originally a house-born girl who was not a legal daughter of the paterfamilias, probably because she was born from a kind of sifah. Now, these social implications are missing in a translation like ‘slave-girl’. These examples show that languages are basically a part of culture, and that words cannot be understood correctly apart from the local cultural phenomena for which they are symbols.1

All this to say, I’m looking forward to teaching a course on ancient Near Eastern culture in the Fall.


  1. Edward Lipinski, Semitic Languages Outline of a Comparative Grammar (OLA 80; Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 557. [back]
Charles Halton

Hebrew Bible for Kindle and eReaders

by

A couple friends of mine from the University of Chicago have put together a very nice Hebrew (and Aramaic) Bible for Kindle and eReaders. Drayton Benner is the man behind Miklal Software which put the everything together and H.H.”Chip” Hardy composed the dictionary that accompanies the biblical text.

I have it on my Kindle and it is fantastic–the font is very readable and the book is easily navigable. I’ve even transitioned to using this whenever I’m reading the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. I still use BHS and BHQ when I am studying a text but I think this eReader has an advantage when what you want to do is read. I often find my eye skipping down to the apparatus of BHS and BHQ because I’m curious to see what the various versions read and I end up loosing my train of thought as I’m reading through a narrative or meditating on a poem. This text, on the other hand, presents the Hebrew (and Aramaic) in a straightforward and non-distracting manner which is perfect for reading.

I could go on and say more about it but Drayton and Chip were kind enough to participate in an interview and fill in some details:

Drayton, tell us a little about yourself and your studies at Chicago.

Drayton: I am an advanced PhD student in Northwest Semitic Philology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, studying Hebrew, the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and other languages, literatures, and societies of the Ancient Near East. For my dissertation, I am working on the use of sound in Biblical Hebrew poetry, particularly in the Psalms. I am also President ofMiklal Software Solutions. I have a rather unusual background that is a hybrid of biblical studies and software development, both of which I seek to practice at a high level. In terms of software development, my undergraduate work was in mathematics and computer science, and I did mathematical software development full-time for a few years before doing a Master’s degree in Old Testament at Regent College(Vancouver, BC, Canada). I continued doing mathematical software development on the side of my Master’s degree, but when I came to the University of Chicago, I switched to doing Bible software on the side of my studies, combining my interests. I have done a good deal of work for Olive Tree Bible Software, including most of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek work. More recently, I launched Miklal Software Solutions as a platform for a variety of projects involving the Biblical studies, Semitics, and technology.

What made you want to produce a version of the Hebrew Bible for Kindle?

Drayton: I assume that my experience with e-books is at least somewhat representative. There are some books I still like to have in print form because I am faster at taking notes on the physical book than I am with e-books. However, with reference books and many other books, I love to have them available in electronic formats for two main reasons: efficiency and accessibility. I can do my work much faster if I have the resources I need in electronic form. My physical books are spread out between my apartment and my locker at the main library on campus. The university’s more extensive resources are spread out between a main campus library and my department’s library, and the main campus library is massive. Having books, especially reference works, in electronic form means I don’t have to carry so many books with me, I don’t have to walk across campus or wait until I get to school (or home) to briefly check a reference work, and I can get to the right spot in the book rapidly. Moreover, I can have my Kindle by my side as I study in the library (especially in the library where the lighting is too bright to comfortably look at a computer screen all day), bring it to church and check the Hebrew during the sermon, or even bring it to the beach on vacation.

I think that e-readers are a fabulous invention, and they are growing quickly in popularity. In my work for Olive Tree, I had to develop ways of displaying Biblical Hebrew on devices (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm) that lack complex script support, and I enjoyed both the challenge of it and the results of enabling people to access the Hebrew Bible wherever they might be. Kindle lacks support not only for complex scripts but even for displaying any Hebrew and even any text right-to-left, so it was a challenge to produce this Hebrew Bible for Kindle (and Nook), but I enjoyed the challenge, and I hope that you and your readers enjoy the results and get a great deal of use out of it.

What is the basis for the Hebrew and Aramaic text?

Drayton: The source text for the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is the Westminster Leningrad Codex. This follows a single manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, which is the oldest complete manuscript of the Old Testament in the Tiberian Massoretic tradition. It is the same manuscript that underlies Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Biblia Hebraica Quinta. The text, including all of the vowels, cantillation marks, and other symbols, has been digitized over the past several decades. The work began as a joint project between The University of Michigan and Claremont Graduate Schools with various grants supporting the project. Westminster Theological Seminary took over the project, and now it is the responsibility of The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research, headed ably by Kirk Lowery. It is based on their version 4.14, which was the most recent version of the text at the time this product was released.

Chip, could you introduce yourself to us including your studies at Chicago and your new position, congratulations by the way.

Chip: I am a Ph.D. candidate in Northwest Semitic Philology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. This means that I focus on the study of the languages and cultures of the Ancient Near East. In particular, my recent research has concentrated on the changing linguistic system of function words found in the Hebrew Bible. Some of your readers may be familiar with my nearly defunct DailyHebrew.com site. As you alluded, I accepted an appointment at Louisiana Collegeand the Caskey Divinity School starting in the fall term as Assistant Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew. Thank you for the congratulatory remark, Charles.

What is the basis for the dictionary and how did you go about composing it?

Chip: The Complete Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic Glossary (CBHAG) was birthed from a project of OliveTree Bible Software. In their attempt to develop a tool for reading the Hebrew Bible on handheld devices, they decided to overlay the BHS text with a layer of information that would provide the user with word level data. This information included morphological information—noun, verb, verbal stem, person, number, gender, etc.—as well as an English gloss. What they discovered is that whereas there exist several databases for morphological data, the available glossaries were outmoded. At this point they asked me to construct a new product that would provide updated English glosses along with every verbal stem found in the Hebrew Bible.

CBHAG was constructed primarily using three Hebrew-English dictionaries—BDB, HALOT, and CDH—based on the lexeme list of the most up-to-date Westminster Hebrew Morphology database. The entries were keyed to their usages in the Hebrew Bible and adjusted to contemporary American English usage patterns. Instead of grouping the glosses according to semantic similarities, like one finds in BDB, the entries are listed according to the frequency of use, that is to say, the most common use is found first in the glossary. (This arrangement was chosen to provide the end-user with the most likely translation equivalent first.)

Since being incorporated into OliveTree’s Bible reader software, CBHAG has been used in several other very useful products. In particular, I should note (1) Babel Flashcards, which is a downloadable program for PC or Mac aimed at helping students of the Hebrew Bible to memorize vocabulary, (2) the Kindle Hebrew Bible mentioned previously, and (3) a stand-alone eReader version for Kindle and Nook. Each of these products is of superb quality, and I would recommend them highly to your readers.

Many thanks Drayton and Chip.

Charles Halton

Hobbins on ANEM 3 and Original Language Scholarship

by

John Hobbins has some valuable reflections on the forthcoming Ancient Near East Monograph volume that I was a part of (the book was available for download for a couple days, however, SBL uploaded an earlier draft version with a few formatting errors so they pulled it down and we are still waiting for it to be fixed and then made available once more).

John reflects upon a prevalent reality in which scholars merely debate and recapitulate secondary literature; a lament that we both share:

Scholars are known to succumb to a grave and debilitating disease: that of spending all their days reading each other rather than the texts and other artifacts that are supposed to be the objects of their research. In the blessed assurance that someone else knows more about a particular text than she does, a specialist will often say little or nothing about a text that has not been said before. “I and my secondary literature, tenured and blest, watching and waiting, looking above” (with apologies to Fanny Crosby).

It’s a shame.

I whole heartedly agree. Learning original languages–notice the plural; in my opinion one is not a competent biblical scholar unless he or she has at least a working knowledge of the handful of cognate languages, furthermore other more distantly related but culturally significant ones are also desirable–is hard, time consuming work. It is far easier just to learn Hebrew, dabble in some Greek and then move on to write a dissertation and such. Yet, spending the extra time and effort at the front yields huge dividends throughout one’s reflective life. John discusses the importance of Akkadian and Sumerian–I will not use parenthesis for Sumerian since I translated Sumerian texts for my dissertation–for biblical studies:

It is not too much to say that one cannot be a serious student of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, or of pre-classical Mediterranean antiquity without a working knowledge of (Sumerian and) Akkadian and of the field of Assyriology. Grounded, detailed knowledge of ancient cultures and ancient history can only be acquired by reading lots of texts, not in translation, but in the original languages. Again, culturally informed, close readings of ancient texts are only possible on the basis of intimate familiarity with the texts in the languages in which they were written.

The entire piece is well worth a read. Also, I’ll post an update when the Akkadian reader is available.

Charles Halton

The Role of Linguistics in Dating Biblical Texts

by

Over at the Ancient Hebrew Grammar blog there is a fantastic discussion going on between Robert Holmstedt, John Cook, and Ian Young on the extent to which linguistics can be used to assign relative dates to the composition of biblical texts (H&C–yes, there is a role for linguistics; Young–no, this is the prerogative of text-critics).  It is a really substantive conversation and also contains some humor as well (discussions of how handsome linguists are as well as calling archaeologists “dirt-diggers/shovel bums” and epigraphers “chicken-scratch readers”).

Charles Halton

An Indecent Proposal: The Theological Core of the Book of Ruth

by

I just received word that my essay, “An Indecent Proposal: The Theological Core of the Book of Ruth,” has been accepted for publication in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament.  Here is the abstract:

Traditionally, biblical commentators either tone down the sexual tension within Ruth 3 or celebrate it with sensationalistic exuberance.  However, theologians have not attempted to integrate the provocative nature of the passage into a theological understanding of the book or the character of Ruth.  This essay outlines the reasons why Naomi’s plan is rightly interpreted as an attempt at sexual entrapment.  Ruth follows this plan until the very last minute when she reveals herself and her intentions to Boaz.  Both of these actions–showing fidelity to both Naomi and Boaz–exposed Ruth to potential harm and as such serves as a picture what hesed entails.

Charles Halton

Review: Holmstedt’s Ruth: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text

by

The takeaway: Buy it and recommend it to others.

Baylor University Press was kind enough to send me a copy of my friend, Robert Holmstedt’s, new book, Ruth: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text, which is part of the fairly new BHHB (Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible) series.  This book is not a traditional commentary in the sense that it explains contextual background, textual criticism, theological significance, etc.  But, it is a fantastic resource for understanding the Hebrew grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of the book.  Holmstedt guides the reader clause by clause through the book of Ruth and explains their features from a linguistic perspective.

In order to orient those who are unfamiliar with linguistic terminology, the first chapter provides a quick survey which includes: clauses and their constituents, compliments and adjuncts, verbal semantics, pragmatics, and constituent movement.  Then, Holmstedt presents the role of linguistic features in dating the book.  His treatment is measured and he points out the weaknesses and ambiguities associated with each feature.  He concludes by dating the book to the “early Persian period” (39).  Finally, he discusses the use of language to color characters’ speech.  Holmstedt identifies seven features which he believes highlight Ruth’s foreignness, however, the audience is “encouraged, by linguistic means, to identify with her” (49).  The rest of the book follows a clause by clause analysis of the Hebrew text of Ruth.

I usually read the book of Ruth with my second semester biblical Hebrew classes and I will use Holmstedt’s book as my new textbook for this component–it really is an excellent resource and I think all students and profs alike will benefit from it.  Since the book is designed as an introductory handbook it does not include a deep bibliography and it only surveys (albeit very well) the topics in the first three introductory chapters.  There were times in which I wished Holmstedt had gone a bit deeper or included some important citations.  For instance, in his discussion of linguistically dating the book he discusses orthographic conventions of spelling the name David (22) he does not mention Rick Hess’s very good study on this topic nor does Hess appear in the bibliography even though I consider him to be the foremost expert on West Semitic onomastics.  However, this is not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of Ruth and in most cases Holmstedt judiciously chooses which resources to provide.

In short, I think this book will be tremendously helpful for anyone reading the book of Ruth in Hebrew.

Charles Halton

Hackett’s New Biblical Hebrew Grammar

by

The publishing world is in a crisis.  I have just learned that there are no longer enough ISBN numbers for new books because there are so many biblical Hebrew grammars taking up numbers–they are having to switch from 13 digit numbers to 21 digit numbers just to accommodate them.

With the upcoming release Jo Ann Hackett’s new biblical Hebrew grammar Karyn Traphagen has a review based on electronic galleys sent by the publisher.  From her review it seems that the only thing really new about this grammar is Hackett’s terminology of the so-called waw-consecutive/conversive, etc. as the “consecutive preterite.”  This is a good descriptive term but does it really justify an entirely new grammar?  It doesn’t seem to me that she is doing anything pedagogically new with this book.

I think the time may have come to place a moratorium on the publication of new biblical Hebrew grammars unless they do something that present grammars do not do, that is, unless they teach people better.  I think there are a couple grammars in the works that will do this but they are extreme departures from the standard deductive fare.

What do you think?