Hebrew

You might think citing a grammar according to the “SBL Handbook of Style” would be straightforward. It is, but there are several special cases to account for.

Daily Gleanings about the (non-)use of linguistics in biblical studies, particularly in Hebrew lexicography.

Daily Gleanings about how to get the 21-volume “Assyrian Dictionary” via open access from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.

Daily Gleaings about how to access BDB openly online.

Under the heading of “keeping your Greek and Hebrew skills sharp,” Mark Ward has some helpful advice about creating a serial biblical text in Logos Bible Software. For instance, if you create a series between BHS and NA28 and you have BHS open, you can type a New Testament passage in the go box and run straight there. Logos will treat the two resources as combined.

The volume has been available for quite some time, but in yesterday’s mail arrived Jeffrey Tigay’s Deutronomy (The JPS Torah Commentary, 1996). According to the publisher,

The JPS Torah Commentary series guides readers through the words and ideas of the Torah. Each volume is the work of a scholar who stands at the pinnacle of his field.

Every page contains the complete traditional Hebrew text, with cantillation notes, the JPS translation of the Holy Scriptures, aliyot breaks, Masoretic notes, and commentary by a distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar, integrating classical and modern sources.

Each volume also contains supplementary essays that elaborate upon key words and themes, a glossary of commentators and sources, extensive bibliographic notes, and maps.

The University of Chicago is making the new Festschrift for John Huehnergard available for free in PDF format (HT: Charles Jones).

Fred Putnam’s New Grammar of Biblical Hebrew is now out ( affiliate disclosure). According to the publisher,

This is a Hebrew grammar with a difference, being the first truly discourse-based grammar. Its goal is for students to understand Biblical Hebrew as a language, seeing its forms and conjugations as a coherent linguistic system, appreciating why and how the text means what it says—rather than learning Hebrew as a set of random rules and apparently arbitrary meanings.

Thirty-one lessons equip learners for reading the biblical text in Hebrew. They include sections on biblical narrative, poetry, and the Masora—as well as of the text of the Hebrew Bible, lexica, and concordances. The examples and exercises are all taken directly from the biblical text, so that students can check their work against any relatively literal version of the Bible. The vocabulary lists include all of the words that occur fifty times or more in the Hebrew Bible.

Special also to this Grammar are the ‘enrichments’: brief sections at the end of each chapter encouraging students to apply their grammatical knowledge to specific questions, issues, or passages in the biblical text. Appendices include a Vocabulary of all Hebrew words and proper names that occur fifty times or more, and a Glossary and index of technical terms—as well as complete nominal, pronominal, and verbal paradigms, and an annotated bibliography.

The learner-friendly design of this Grammar has been endorsed by faculty and by students who have used pre-publication versions to teach themselves Biblical Hebrew, both individually, in classes, and in informal groups.

This week in the biblioblogosphere:

• Mark Goodacre finds and makes available a PDF version of Wilhelm Wrede’s Paul.
• Daniel and Tonya draw attention to Alex Andrason’s recent article on the use of yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew (via Uri Hurwitz) and Randall Buth’s response to the article.
• Via Ekaterini Tsalampouni, Holger Szesnat mentions the availability of the new Journal of Ancient Judaism.
• Christian Askeland notes the availability of a stable, Unicode-compliant Coptic font.
• At BioLogos, Peter Enns interviews N. T. Wright about Jesus’ humanity.
• Kirk Lowery ponders current developments in the peer review process for scholarly publications.
• Scot McKnight prepares his readers for a change of blogging address.
• Larry Hurtado uploads an essay on Martin Hengel’s impact on English-speaking, New Testament scholarship.
• Charles Halton considers cartographic hermeneutics and some of their implications for readers of biblical texts.

Sunday, National Geographic reported that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had successfully tested a computer system that, by itself, deciphered a substantial amount of Ugaritic “in a matter of hours” ( MIT press release). This system is based on a statistical model developed by Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay of MIT and Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California. According to MIT,