I have studied Hebrew for about a year now after completing Calvin Seminary’s great online course, but one difficulty remains with my Hebrew-reading: vocabulary. There is almost absolutely no vocabulary crossover between Hebrew and English, so all vocabulary needs to be memorized. Many words appear a great multitude of times, making the effort needed to memorize them worthwhile. However, a substantial amount of the Tanach uses words that appear but a handful of times; these words are much more difficult to learn, and the unknown words need to be looked up either in a dictionary or by their rendering in a translation, neither of which is quick or ideal.

To attempt to solve this problem, A Reader’s Hebrew Bible was concieved. For words that appear less than 100 times, a definition is footnoted. Also, proper names that appear but few times are printed in gray so that they are not mistakenly interpreted as words. This volume struck me as a brilliant idea, and I bought one as soon as I could.

And it works just as I expected it to - vocab is mostly no longer an issue when reading it. However, many of the words appearing more than 100 times I never learned, and now feel a greater need to do so. Now also, I can see how helpless I am without an English translation in figuring out the grammar, as I have been depending too much on it.

This volume should help me bring my Hebrew level, in the short-term, to the point to which I do not need a translation to read the text. I also hope I will pick up some vocab from the footnotes so that I eventually will not need helps to read the text.

Unfortunately, there are a few cases I have noted where further editing needs doing. The first page of Esther suffers from a misalignment of the footnotes with the text. Curiously, Appendix A (a lexicon of the words appearing more than 100 times), has the entries sorted front-to-back in regards to the first letter, but has the entries underneath running the other direction. The typesetter, Philip Brown, has a list of errata on his blog.

However, these do not detract from the usefulness of the volume in the slightest. Thanks to Philip Brown and Bryan Smith for compiling this useful resource!