DailyHebrew.com

The Miqra’ Group has a two-year plan for reading the entire Hebrew Bible. (HT: Charles)

LiveScience posted a short Q&A with Gonzalo Rubio about working in dead languages. In response to a question about what it is like to study a dead langauge, Rubio said, “In many regards, we are resuscitating a dead civilization through the understanding of its dead languages.” He continued:

When one studies an economic document from ancient Mesopotamia, there are names of individuals entering a contract or making a purchase, normally in front of a number of named witnesses: These are all people who lived three or four thousand years ago, people whose names were forgotten and buried in the sand until modern scholars brought them back to a modicum of life in their articles and books. When an assyriologist holds a tablet inscribed with cuneiform characters, be it in Sumerian or in Akkadian, there is a chance that she or he may be the first person to read that text again after millennia of oblivion. Even if one is not the epigrapher who first looks at the tablets found at an archaeological site, even as a scholar reading texts at a museum, there is an overwhelming feeling of discovery and recovery, the excitement of bringing a civilization back to life by understanding it, text by text, tablet by tablet.

Finally, Pete Bekins has continued his helpful series of article/book summaries with a brief discussion of Blau’s Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew. Pete’s assessment of the book is spot on. I agree that it is good to have this title finally published in English, but it exposes the unfortunate state of affairs in the study of Biblical Hebrew phonology and morphology.

40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible by Robert Plummer. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010. $17.99 (Amazon $12.23; Google Book Preview).

עֲשׂ֨וֹת סְפָרִ֤ים הַרְבֵּה֙ אֵ֣ין קֵ֔ץ

"There is no end to the making of many books"

-Qoheleth 12:12

This quotation is used regularly to lament the multiplicity of books made available by publishers and the poor quality of such books—this title, however, stands in contrast to the negative connotations of this dictum.

The purpose of the book is presented in the first paragraph of the Introduction: "[T]his book will serve as a textbook for an introductory Bible course at a college or seminary, but I endeavored to write so that the book will be beneficial to any curious Christian."  Further Plummer states: "My goal was to be accessible without being simplistic and scholarly without being pedantic, while always keeping an eye to practical questions and real-life application."  This is indeed a noble goal, and one which the author attained; his pastoral hand is seen in several sections particularly when providing answers to more difficult or controversial questions (see pp. 44-45 "Recommendations for Dealing with Difficult Texts").

The intended audiences are undergraduate and seminary students, but the book would be accessible by the lay-person or biblical novice.  With the exception of a few places, the jargon of biblical studies is either well-defined or excluded completely, which is a pleasant discovery for those of us who are not native Latin speakers or have lost our pocket German dictionaries.

Plummer outlines clearly his presuppositions of interpretation in the first few chapters: he understands the biblical text as "uniquely inspired and authoritative" (p. 17), follows a traditional evangelical Protestant model of the text and canon of the Bible (ch. 2-3, 6), and presents a concise understanding of inerrancy (ch. 4) with an apt warning: "Don't demand that the ancient writers conform to your expected standards" (p. 45).  An overview of the biblical manuscript evidence, both Old and New Testaments, is found in chapter 5, and chapter 6 provides a fair evaluation of different English translations contrasting the positive and negatives of translation methods in general.

One of the greatest strengths of this work is the 40 Questions about… format in which each chapter is centered on a question with short concise answers consisting of 5-12 typed pages, several reflection questions, and a selected bibliography.  According to the verso of the first leaf of the book, five titles are forthcoming in the series edited by Benjamin Merkle, bringing the total for the series to seven (including the previously published 40 Questions about Elders and Deacons [2007], authored by the series editor).

The dialectic-type argumentation structure is presented not piece-meal, but aptly organized with parts and sections each building upon one another toward the goal of leading the reader step-by-step to a clear model of biblical interpretation.  The four parts are grouped according to broad topics—"Getting Started: Text, Canon, and Translation", "Approaching the Bible Generally", "Approaching Specific Texts", and lastly "Issues in Recent Discussion" which is probably more in depth than the average reader will need, but provides an excellent starting point for further research and understanding popular and scholarly trends in contemporary biblical hermeneutics.  For the reader who is looking for answers to specific questions, the format also allows for movement between the parts with each chapter able to stand on its own (references to other chapters are kept at a minimum and do not distract from the prose).

Though Plummer is a New Testament professor, he does not feel limited to his specialty, but does well in providing both examples and solutions from the Hebrew as well as the Greek portions of the Bible. This practice, however, opens up criticism at points about some details suffering from the fact that mastery of both Old and New Testament studies (not to mention the secondary and tertiary fields of study) is impossible for any one individual; I do not wish to present a catalogue of typos or errors, but a few examples may be noted:

·         Chapter 2 "Chapter Divisions", even though the convention of delimiting chapters by number is decidedly modern, the oldest biblical manuscripts (those found near Qumran) show divisions similar, though not exactly corresponding, to the Masoretic open and closed paragraphs (marked by פתוחא and סתומא) demonstrating an ancient tradition of separating sense units.

·         Chapter 5 "The Old Testament", the Essenes Hypothesis is supported uncritically as the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, despite scholarly debate about the origin of these documents.

·         Chapter 6 "Old Testament Canon", Plummer states: "It seems clear that by the time of Jesus, most Jews were in agreement as to their own canon"; however, one finds debates in the first century Tannaitic literature (see particularly Yadayim, chapter 3) about the canonical status of at least two books—Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.

·         Chapter 9, an initial section before "The Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament" on The Use of the Old Testament in the Old Testament may be warranted. Examples of this may be Isaiah 2 and Micah 4, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22, Isaiah 36-39 and 2 Kings 18-20 (cf. 2 Chronicles 32), and for that matter Samuel/Kings and Chronicles.

·         Several places the bibliographic data could be expanded, noticeably absent but helpful would be E. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 1994 (ch. 2), E. Brotzman, Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction, Baker, 1993 (ch. 5), and A. Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism, Eerdmans, 2007 (ch. 29).

At bottom, Plummer provides an excellent, readable book with clear evangelical Christian leanings written for the non-specialist interested in a thorough grounding in biblical interpretation.  He brings together expansive material found previously only in multiple locations into one place with clear, concise prose and an excellent format.  40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible will certainly be found on my future Biblical Hermeneutics syllabuses.

H.H. Hardy II

The University of Chicago

Previous DH.com review: A Reader's Hebrew Bible

John Hobbins provides an astute post concerning the connection between reading the texts about God/the gods and belief in God.  (It would be interesting, at least from a personal standpoint, to have several individuals listed in the post discuss how have their studies in the Semitic texts affected their faith.  I am reminded of a fairly recent article in BAR in which Bill Dever et al responded to a similar question.)

Several articles discussing the Hebrew language, both modern and ancient, have surfaced in the last day or two.  Each is worth a few moments to read: a review of Resurrecting Hebrew (HT: Charles Halton) and two digests of articles at בלשנות by J. Blau and S. Lieberman.

A Reader’s Hebrew Bible, Philip Brown & Bryan Smith, eds. Grand Rapids, Zondervan: 2008. 1652 pp.

The popularity of A Reader’s Greek New Testament—now in a second edition—led the Zondervan Publishing Company to commission a Hebrew Bible version with a similar concept. 

A Reader’s Hebrew Bible [RHB] provides both the Hebrew text and a vocabulary aid on the same page to facilitate reading without the need to dust off your lexicon.  The text is the Westminster Leningrad Codex version 4.4 which, in the words of the editors, is “virtually identical” (p. xi) to BHS.  An appendix outlines the 27 differences between the texts: most concern variant Qere readings or minor divergences in vocalic and non-vocalic pointing (e.g. In the Qere of Genesis 14:2, BHS contains the plene form צבויים, whereas it is defective, צבוים, in RHB), but canticle differences are not indicated. 

The vocabulary aide provides lemma glosses in footnotes from HALOT and BDB for all words, excluding proper nouns, that occur a hundred times or less in the Hebrew portions of the text and 25 times or less in the Aramaic.  Each lemma/footnote is numbered consecutively through the entire chapter regardless of page breaks.  An appendix provides a comprehensive listing of all Hebrew words more frequent than the century mark; the most frequent Aramaic words are conspicuously absent, however.  Also, proper names, but not the abutting particles or suffixes, occurring a hundred times or less are printed in a lighter typeface.  Lexemes are listed according to homograph number with non-verbs vocalized in the absolute form and verbs listed by the consonantal root with the appropriate verbal stem (final weak consonantal roots are listed as final he roots).  Moreover, the glosses are contextually defined—each gloss follows its corresponding lexigraphic entry in the lexica. 

No masorah is included, and Kethiv/Qere readings are listed one after another within the text marked with a superscript K or Q.  Similar to BHS open and closed paragraphs designate poetry and prose; verses are not, however, divided into sense units as one frequently finds in the Psalms of BHS, except where a poetic stitch occurs within a narrative frame.  The LXX tradition of multipart books, that is, separating Samuel, Kings and Chronicles into two parts, is not followed; the chapter numbers are preserved, but only one heading is used per book.

The physical construction of RHB appears to be superb: the cover is solid and stylish tan leather, and binding is sewn, not glued.  The pages are thicker than the average English Bible but still suffer “visual bleeding” from the verso.  The font is comparable to the large version of BHS in size, style and readability.

The system of marking the causative stem in the Aramaic portions is puzzling, however.  Three overlapping categories (afel, hafel and afel or hafel) are distinguished in the introduction (p. xxviii); however the application of the terms is rather confusing.  Whereas one would imagine that if the differentiation of the first two were based on the presence or absence of the he prefix, the third category would then be obsolete.  An examination of the usages brings even more confusion: in Ezra 6:5, יהתיכון and תחת are both designated as (H)AF;  however, the participle מצלחין of 6:14 is designated as HAF.  In spite of the inherent difficulties in defining this stem in Aramaic, such confusion would be avoided if a more general designation or category was employed (such as C for Causative).

Additional remarks could be made with regard to individual lexical items, but in general the editors provide a broad case of definitions erring on the conservative side (in 20 cases no gloss is provided as none is found in the lexica).

Other features provide an intuitive reading experience.  The use of grayscale for proper nouns which is, at first, distracting, or even confusing to one who may fail to peruse the “Quick User’s Guide,” in time becomes a fundamental reading aide.  Also, in a text chalk full of indexing systems and cross-references, the editors’ use of footnote, verse and chapter numbers are naturally distinguishable, wherein footnotes numbers follow the word, verse numbers proceed, and chapters are encased within concentric square boxes.

Finally, this reviewer would like to see a few additional features and updates with future editions: the addition of an Aramaic appendix of frequent words, the implementation of BHQ textual updates and the indication of noun gender with each gloss.

With any volume of this size one encounters minor typographical errors, RHB is no exception.  Two noticeable peccadilloes include:

p. xxi – The Hebrew letter he is mistakenly written “hey”.

p. 1222 – The end of the first verse of chapter 109 a stray raw data entry “F29:” is preserved.

Despite minor flaws, RHB will become a favorite tool of all students of the Hebrew Bible from second-year learners to seasoned veterans.

H. H. Hardy II

The University of Chicago