Opening the Old Testament – By Katharine Dell

Abstract

A Reader's Hebrew Bible, A. Philip Brown II and Bryan W. Smith, Zondervan, 2008 (ISBN 978-03102-6974-8), xxviii + 1652 pp., $49.99 A Reader's Hebrew Bible (RHB) is a complete text of the Hebrew and Aramaic Bible using the Leningrad Codex minus the critical apparatus. RHB admirably fulfills its purpose to facilitate the regular reading of the Hebrew Bible. The most important and helpful feature is footnoted definitions. This saves time and effort in reading the Hebrew Scripture by eliminating the time-consuming and onerous task of looking up definitions. The authors do more than list definitions of all Hebrew words occurring one hundred times or less and twenty-five or less for Aramaic words; they give context-specific, binyan-specific glosses rather than listing general definitions. Definitions the authors use are from The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon o f the Old Testament and the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, giving the reader an access to two standard lexical sources. They also include definitions from alternative lexical sources when the authors think the glosses offered by the two lexicons are inadequate or of sufficient uncertainty. This allows the reader to view the range of meaning for a Hebrew word in question and to choose a word from several options. Additionally, a glossary of words occurring more than one hundred times is included at the end of the volume.There are other features that will help the user to read the text more quickly. One of the more frustrating parts in reading the Hebrew Bible, especially for a beginning student, is when one encounters Hebrew names. A student spends enormous amount of time and energy, trying to figure out what a word is, and learns in the end that the word in question was a name rather than an unusual verbal form. All Hebrew names that occur less than one hundred times are shaded in the text for an easy recognition, although they may be mistaken for a poor printing quality to those who skip the authors' introduction and are unaware of this feature. The authors note both Ketib and Qere readings in the text and place vowels with the Qere reading, eliminating the need to