Reading Biblical Hebrew Online: A Guide

Here are some pointers:

(1)             Say you want to practice and improve your biblical Hebrew. An excellent point of departure: The Westminster Leningrad Codex. Strip a passage of its verse numbers, vowels and cantillation marks, and sight-read it. Compare your pronunciation with that of an excellent reader, Avraham Shmuelof, available here thanks to Gary Martin of the Academy of Ancient Languages; and here, at the Mechon Mamre site.

(2)             Say you can’t figure out a word, how to parse it, or what it means. Perhaps you are puzzling over the beginning of Hosea 4:6:

נדמו עמי מבלי הדעת

The lexicon function of this site is chock full of false and misleading information, but still, if you use it in conjunction with KJV, parsing and a contextually appropriate gloss will usually be at hand if your knowledge of Hebrew grammar is not completely insufficient. There, in the lexicon function, you will discover that נדמו is from damah and that KJV translates “are destroyed.” By clicking on that gloss at the top of the lexicon function, you can recover the corresponding Strong’s number: 1820. Plug that in here, and you will be given, among other things, the relevant entry in an English translation of Gesenius’s Lexicon in the public domain. Better yet, look up דמה in a dead-tree dictionary of your choice on your shelf. Alternatively, you can plug damah in here (set at “Hebrew word”) for a bird’s eye view of the verb’s semantic range. But there are three verbs דמה in ancient Hebrew, and דמה in Hosea 4:6 was understood by some of the ancient versions, for example Aquila and Theodotion, to mean ‘were silent.’ If you are working through Hosea, you must also equip yourself with a very good commentary – to begin with, that of A. A. Macintosh (ICC; 1997).

In short, online resources, at least for now, can only get you so far.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

John - do you know of an online resource that deals with the verb forms? I would like to see usage patterns like a list of - verb, binyan, person, mood, voice, and maybe even subject and object(s) - I can get most of it 1 word at a time from BLB - but not in a list. I can get the words from my database but not the binyanim. Phooey! I am thinking of doing some exercises on verb usage and conjugation in the psalms. I think I will have to use brute force.

[David Ker]

Thanks for this idea. I'm still gunning for this although I got thrown for a loop when the transliterations in my Psalter didn't match the guy reading on the ancient languages site.

[Bob MacDonald]

John - I just had a note from the developers at the Blue letter Bible - they are actively working on improvements - particularly analysis by binyanim.

[JohnFH]

David,

I hope you've sorted that out. The Hebrew Hub by J. Ted Blakeley under "Tools" on the right sidebar may be more helpful at the beginning.

Bob,

Blueletter could use a makeover in a lot of way

[Bob MacDonald]

Let's see what they come up with - I have certainly found it a good resource these past 10 or more years. (But I am not very demanding :) At least they are now supporting unicode instead of those funny little gifs

[Meg]

Fr. Avraham's enunciation is wonderful, but I know people will recognize my accent as his! Who else holds the double letters for that extra second, or pronounces the ayin in רְבִיעִי?

My prof suggested that I start training my ear and practise reading aloud over the Christmas break, using Fr. Avraham as my standard. I can tell that my own resh has already become more a tongue-flap than the parisian throaty "r" I was hanging onto from my French studies.

Reading without vowels or accents though? Wow!

[JohnFH]

Meg,

That reminds me of how I learned to speak Italian fluently. I lived in Rome at a pensione near the Stazione Termini. I had two roommates. They were learning Italian, too, but they had an advantage. They were native tongue Spanish (one from Argentina, the other from Peru). We had a blast together. But of course, I spoke Italian with an Argentinian-Peruvian twang for quite a while.

It is better to read ancient Hebrew without vowels, once you get the correct pronunciation down - by aural imitation. You will quickly discover that you know more Hebrew than you thought you did.

Happy New Year!