Review: A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible

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[singgreekandhebrew]

Yes sir, rebinding with real leather is the way to go. Mine is a beautiful tan cowhide and it is my “go to church” Bible.

[JeffChavez]

Wow. Thanks for this brother. I am glad that this is now available.

I hope it has a wider margin.

[bdenckla]

As one might expect, the Hebrew section of the Zondervan reader is not what would be considered a reader's edition from a Jewish perspective. As I said, this is not unexpected. But both Christians and Jews should be aware of what they are missing in their respective readers. I'd love to see a "best of both worlds" reader but AFAIK none exists. Since this is a Christian reader, I will just mention some things that are missing, that would be present in Jewish readers, that might nonetheless be of interest to Christians. The main things that are missing are modern aids to pronunciation. These include (a) qamats qatan (b) sheva distinctions (c) stress helper accents. It may seem weird that I include anything about accents in my list of things that might be of interest to Christians. But any Christian interested in pronouncing the text might be interested in where the stress falls even if they are not interested in the grammatical or musical role of accents.

It is expensive to produce (or presumably to license) a Jewish-style reader's edition of the Hebrew Bible, so, understandably, all Christian publishers of which I am aware just do what Zondervan did: they grab the free WLC (Westminster Leningrad Codex) off the Internet, strip off its notes, and use that. An unfortunate side-effect of that money-saving strategy is that they not only lack the pronunciation features I mention above, they also get hundreds of anomalies specific to the Leningrad Codex that way. These can be distracting to the reader. To my mind, they've taken a non-reader-friendly academic text (BHS) full of distracting anomalies and made it even more reader-unfriendly by removing the notations of those anomalies that BHS and/or WLC have. For a reader's edition, better to just smooth out those anomalies in the first place, but to leave them un-noted is, in my opinion, even more reader-unfriendly.

[TheJesusNerd]

I have the leather one and hardback one. What do you think of the Hendrickson one?

[theoglossa]

3:34 Brother, should it be words that appear more than 30 times as shown before you turn the page? Thanks for the review!