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.

I’d had this done at one point, but then a subsequent software update disrupted that connection, and I’d been looking for a good way to reestablish the connection. Using Mark’s principles, I’ve now got serial relationships established among BHS, LXX (based on the current German Bible Society version of Rahlfs), and NA28 texts. The combination allows movement from any one of the texts to any other. For texts occurring in more than one of the resources (BHS, LXX), it looks like Logos may follow the priority system established via the library.

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.

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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.

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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,

Snyder and Barzilay don’t suppose that a system like the one they designed with Knight would ever replace human decipherers. “But it is a powerful tool that can aid the human decipherment process,” Barzilay says. Moreover, a variation of it could also help expand the versatility of translation software. Many online translators rely on the analysis of parallel texts to determine word correspondences: They might, for instance, go through the collected works of Voltaire, Balzac, Proust and a host of other writers, in both English and French, looking for consistent mappings between words. “That’s the way statistical translation systems have worked for the last 25 years,” Knight says.

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