Tools: A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament

I have blogged previously just a little bit about the A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, and also made some negative comments about the use of interlinears, especially for Greek or Hebrew students.

I recommend this lexicon for use in reading rapidly in order to encounter a large body of text in Biblical Hebrew. It does have a small portion of the problems of an interlinear. It presents you with a gloss that is likely appropriate, according to the authors, for the passage in question. It’s easy to bypass the context in that case, and just accept their gloss as it is. That is something you should avoid.

I used this in doing some reading in Isaiah today myself. It has been a couple of years since I last used it. It is very convenient, because it does not include those words used 50 or more times in the Hebrew Bible, and then lists all other vocabulary items by verse. I found that the selected gloss was a good starting point. I’m not going to be making a habit of it, however, because generally if I find a word that I don’t know I want more information than that before I go on. But I can read text in this fashion if I want to.

I’m spoiled a bit by Logos, because there I can have my keylink hooked up to HALOT, and thus get a much more substantial rundown on any particular word. In addition, I have the invaluable lemma report which allows me to see how that word is used throughout the Hebrew scriptures. But in the absence of such tools, fast reading could be facilitated by use of the Reader’s Lexicon.

Some people question the value of such reading. Here’s why I recommend it as part, not all, of your reading in Biblical languages. There are at least two levels of “knowing” a vocabulary item from a language other than your native one. First, you may know a gloss, or a set of glosses that might be applied based on context. This is what is provided by normal vocabulary memorization, provided you memorize alternate options. You will build that type of vocabulary best by taking time to carefully study each word. The second is when you come to feel the range of a word’s meaning in it’s own language, because you have seen or heard it many times in many contexts, and you can select the range of meaning for the current context almost automatically.

When you deal with translation and exegesis, both are useful. You will only develop the second by reading large quantities of text or hearing large amounts of the language spoken. With a dead language, hearing is difficult, and you must substitute reading. Then when you encounter a word, you will remember having seen it in many contexts. This is one of the major values of rapid reading.

But there