29 July 2022 - 22 October 2023 biblical-homepage
Below is a collection of short bits and pieces on various topics arranged alphabetically. Right now (July 2022), this material is being pulled from the index-topical-hb to help clean it up and make it a better index.
If a Hebrew noun is not in the construct state, it is said to be in the absolute state. The absolute is the default state of a noun.
A nifty site where academics upload papers, with a fair bit of stuff related to biblical studies. You can find it at academia.edu.
See John Hobbins.
Treating something as having humanlike qualities. Anthropomorphic depictions of mountains and trees can be found in Isaiah 55:12 (KJV) — the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap (their) hands. Anthropomorphic depictions of God can be found all over the place in the Hebrew Bible. See here.
The Bible mentions “Ararat” four times. The first and more famous reference is in Genesis 8:4, where the ark lands upon “the Ararat mountains.” A less well-known mention is a prophecy about a battle, where in Jeremiah 51:27, the prophet mentions “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz.” And in 2 Kings 19:37 (same as Isaiah 37:38), two sons of Sennacherib kill their father and then flee to the “land of Ararat.” The Hebrew word now pronounced Ararat is spelled ˀrrṭ in the pre-vowel Hebrew text, and is equivalent to the term Urartu.
A grammatical term. In English, the article is the. In Hebrew it is ha-, or sometimes simply the vowel sound a. Wikipedia article here.
Having to do with the pronunciations or traditions found among Jewish populations from Germany and Eastern Europe. I myself use a basically Sephardi/Israeli pronunciation of Hebrew on this website.
A man who, in 1753, came up with a version of the Documentary Hypothesis for Genesis. Wikipedia page here.
Another term for what Americans like myself tend to call the King James Version.
singular of binyanim.
For a brief introduction to the binyanim (the singular is binyan__) see here.
"There is no mention of Bozrah in the historical writings, but it was clearly an important place, and its identification with the modern Buṣeirah some 35 kilometres south-east of the Dead Sea is generally agreed upon." -- BARTLETT, J.R. THE EDOMITE KING-LIST OF GENESIS XXXVI. 31–39 AND 1 CHRON. I. 43–50. Oxford University Press; Oxford University Press (OUP) (ISSN 0022-5185), The Journal of Theological Studies, #2, XVI, pages 301-314, 1965. p. 306.
See olah.
See some helpful links from Bible Ref Shelf.
A contemporary version of the Bible produced by a committee drawn from several mainline Protestant denominations. I don’t know much about it, but based on the denominations involved it is likely to be accepting of mainstream biblical scholarship (as opposed to traditionalist scholarship). You can find it online here.
See here.
What happens when a scholar sees a spot in a text where he thinks something has been altered, and proposes a possible earlier reading even though there is no existing manuscript that contains the proposed reading. Conjectural emendation is an often controversial practice. It is difficult, almost by definition, to demonstrate conclusively whether a proposed conjectural emendation is on the right track. Wikipedia page
cubit. An ancient unit of length, both in the Bible and in surrounding cultures. The most common figure given for the biblical cubit is 17 or 18 inches, the distance from an elbow to fingertips. However, there were more than one cubit measure in use in the Bible — a longer cubit of 20 or 21 inches, and I’ve even heard suggestions a little longer than that. It is not always obvious which “cubit” a passage refers to.
In terms of Hebrew spelling, there are many words which could be spelled two ways, depending on the use of matres lectionis. One such mater is the letter w when used for an o or u vowel. Thus, Sheol spelled ‘defectively’ is šʾl. The plene (full) spelling is šʾwl. The choice as to which spelling to use in this case does not effect the meaning or pronunciation of the word: it is a matter of orthography.
A figure in Greek mythology who is similar the biblical Noah. See here.
A worthwhile online and print book which can be found online here.
In Hebrew, that’s ʾet. For an explanation, see here.
In English, we have singular and plural forms: day versus days. In Hebrew, there is also a dual: yom (day), yomayim (two days), yamim (days). Gesenius explains the dual here.
In the Bible, Edom is usually the ethnonym for a people dwelling south of Judah. Its inhabitants are called Edomites, and their ancestor is said to be Esau, also known as Edom.
A character in Genesis, traditionally considered the ancestor of the Edomites.
A term used for a conservative movement within Protestantism, especially American Protestantism, though there are self-identified evangelicals throughout the world. With all due respect to Catholics and some other Christians who consider themselves “evangelical” in certain senses of the word, I will usually use the term evangelical to indicate the evangelical movement of conservative Protestants. For more on the origins of evangelicals, see fundamentalist. (Originally the movement know called evangelical had its origins in what was then called fundamentalism, though the word fundamentalist has since become pejorative. On this website, I will use fundamentalist mostly to describe the people who called or call themselves fundamentalist.)
A Latin phrase meaning ‘from nothing.’ Creation ex nihilo would refer to the creation of something from nothing, without the use of pre-existing elements. Traditional Christians and Jews believe in creation ex nihilo, and many modern scholars doubt that Genesis 1:1 speaks of creation ex nihilo. Note that these positions are not necessarily incompatible. One can believe that Genesis 1 does not explicitly teach creation ex nihilo which still believing that such a creation occurred, for which see here.
A consonant is geminated when its pronunciation is doubled. So, for example, take the Hebrew word šmym, sky, pronounced shamayim. When you add the article h-, it becomes h__šmym, the sky, pronounced hash-shamayim. Gemination is indicated in Hebrew by a dagesh.
For a look at how gender works in Hebrew, see John Hobbins, here.
In modern American culture, heaven is a word used for where good people (or saved people) go when they die. In the King James Version, heaven or heavens is often used to translate the Hebrew word šmym. This is unfortunate, because in the Hebrew Bible nobody goes to šmym at death. The word šmym means sky, as in where the stars are or where God lives, but not, where you go when you die. In Genesis, the šmym is a solid dome which holds back the waters above.
In some English translations of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, you will find the word hell, a mistranslation of the biblical Hebrew concept of Sheol. Sheol differs from the idea of hell in that Sheol is considered the destination of the dead, good and bad, and not a particular punishment for evil people. See the Wikipedia page for Sheol.
A multilingual edition of the Bible, now surviving only in fragments, produced by Origen in the third century CE. It is important in part for the hexaplaric recension of the Septuagint, which is one of the variants within the broader Septuagint tradition. See its Wikipedia page.
Author of Ancient Hebrew Poetry, a super-nifty but now static blog.
Hoffman, Joel. Author of multiple books, PhD in cognitive linguistics, very interested in the process and theory of translation. I cite him quite a bit. His website is here.
A dictionary or encyclopedia of biblical topics, produced originally by Holman Bible Publishers, which due to a name change and merger of some sort is now B&H Publishing Group, an arm of LifeWay Christian Resources, which is in turn an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. You can find it online here. As a result of its affiliations, it is more religiously conservative than the scholarly mainstream, but it is less conservative than SBC leader Albert Mohler.
The International Critical Commentary series. You can find links to many of the commentaries in this series at my old commentary page.
A useful, although dated and fundamentalist, Encyclopedia on a great many biblical topics. Its first editor was James Orr, one of the writers of The Fundamentals (from which we get fundamentalism). He died in 1913, and it was finished and finally published in 1939. Read it online here.
See John Hobbins, here.
A biblical scholar. See his academia.edu page here.
People say that he, a professor at the University of Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, created the chapter divisions in the Bible in the early 13th century. They were so handy that they became standard not just for Christians, but even for Jews.
A figure in Hindu mythology who is a little like Noah, and a little like Adam. See here.
NETS. The New English Translation of the Septuagint, which is the best thing of its kind out there. It is, helpfully, available online.
The Bible records several sorts of offerings, including the olah offering, made by Noah in Genesis 8:20 and described in detail in Leviticus 1. In regular offerings, the food offered was metaphorically “shared” with God, and literally shared with the priests. But with the olah offering, the entire sacrifice was consumed by fire, and ascended (the basis of the Hebrew etymology for olah is the verb “to ascend”) to heaven. The olah is typically called a “burnt offering” in English.
See the Wikipedia page here.
See qal.
For an explanation of Hebrew participles, see here.
A translation of the Bible into Syriac. Important as a textual witness to early forms of the Hebrew Bible, but not as important as the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sometimes it is simply referred to as “the Syriac.” See its Wikipedia page.
One of the biblical Hebrew binyanim. You will also sometimes see it referred to as piʿel or even piʕel.
In terms of Hebrew spelling, there are many words which could be spelled two ways, depending on the use of matres lectionis. One such mater is the letter w when used for an o or u vowel. Thus, Sheol spelled ‘defectively’ is šʾl. The plene (full) spelling is šʾwl. The choice as to which spelling to use in this case does not effect the meaning or pronunciation of the word: it is a matter of orthography.
Depending on situation, we all modulate our speech or writing in a variety of ways, regulating our vocabulary, grammar, and perhaps accents according to a variety of factors. One does not speak in the same register to a judge during a trial as one might use with friends at a baseball game.
In the field of biblical translation, every translation reflects the judgments of its translators and editors as to what register might be appropriate for a given passage. In today's culture, for example, the KJV comes off as incredibly formal and archaic, while the NKJV and ESV are more contemporary but still in a relatively 'high' register. The NIV is a bit 'lower' than these two, but still 'higher' than the NLT or CEV.
I myself tend to have a certain amount of suspicion toward attempts to make the Bible in English excessively 'easy'. Though formality can certainly be taken to extremes, it seems to me that if one translates, say, Paul in a way that sounds simple, one is no longer adequately translating Paul -- Paul's writings aren't simple, and if you're reading something simple, you're not quite reading Paul anymore. You're reading someone's simplification of Paul.
The same thing applies to the Hebrew Bible. While sometimes people will insist that the Bible is written in ordinary, everyday language -- and this is to some extent true -- I think it's clear that most of the Hebrew Bible is in a distinctly formal, literary register.
J. M. Powis Smith, in his preface to The Old Testament: An American Translation (1931 edition) put it as follows (p. xv):
The translator to do his best work must be in sympathy with his subject matter and be able to put himself into mental and spiritual contact with its authors. From this side of his work the demand made is a very heavy one. On the other hand, a translation should read well. It should be in a vocabulary and style appropriate to the thought which it is designed to express. If the original be dignified, impressive, and eloquent, those qualities must not be lacking in the translation; if it be trivial, commonplace, and prosaic, the translation must take on the same character. The content of the Old Testament is, with little exception, upon a high literary plane. The language of the translation, therefore, cannot be allowed to fall to the level of the street.
Michael Marlowe, writing in 2012, produced a fascinating essay, long but worth reading, "Against the Theory of 'Dynamic Equivalence'", which opines at much greater length on these sorts of topics, which see here. An even more substantial meditation on similar topics can be found in Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative and The Art of Biblical Poetry.
Society of Biblical Literature. This is the big society for biblical scholars (at least in the US). Among other things, they have a really nifty series of monographs available online.
An expression in Psalms, of unknown meaning. See here.
The netherworld, where the dead go. Sheol in the Hebrew Bible is the general destination of the dead, good or bad, so it does not correspond to the Christian idea of heaven or hell (or purgatory, for that matter). Wikipedia has an article on it here.
See Peshitta.
A few years ago, I toyed around briefly with a project of translating individual chapters of the Hebrew Bible. I've got a new project, with a different plan of attack, that I'm working on now. The old project lives here.
A Christian theological idea about the nature of God. Trinitarian ideas are not found in the Hebrew Bible, and reading them into the Old Testament is anachronistic.
is briefly mentioned towards the end of this post.
Jerome’s translation of the Bible in the Latin. Wikipedia page.
A verbal form, which looks like w + the prefix conjugation, and is used most often in narrating past events. For an explanation of how this works, see this handy little explainer by the ESV’s own Bill Mounce.
Known for his version of the Documentary Hypothesis. Wikipedia page.
See Ziusudra.