The Comprehensive Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic Glossary

The Comprehensive Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic Glossary is a concise dictionary/lexicon/glossary for Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic. The Hebrew is displayed beautifully on the Kindle. It contains glosses for every lexeme (word) in Biblical Hebrew (over 8000) and Biblical Aramaic (over 700). It integrates lexicographic research from BDB (The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament), HALOT (The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament by Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner), DCH (The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, edited by David J. A. Clines), and other sources to present the best of contemporary scholarship, easily surpassing 19th century glosses such as those of Strong's Hebrew Dictionary, usually bound with Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Here are some of its characteristics:

- It integrates contemporary definitions with traditional interpretations.
- It lists definitions in order of descending frequency.
- It aligns proper names with the spelling of most current English Bible translations.
- It updates archaic meanings to modern norms of language.
- It provides glosses for precisely the verbal stems that appear in the Bible.
- It provides separate glosses for all homonyms.

Navigating the glossary

First, there is a fully interactive Table of Contents. Clicking on a link for a letter of the alphabet provides you with another hyperlinked list of two-letter combinations beginning the word. The words are arranged in alphabetical order by lexical form, not by root.

Second, when you are reading, clicking the 5-way controller to the right will advance you to the hyperlinked list for the next letter of the alphabet. Clicking the 5-way controller to the left behaves similarly.

Third, you can navigate directly to a particular glossary entry by clicking on Index in the menu and typing in a prefix ("h " for Hebrew, "a " for Aramaic) followed by the consonants of the lexeme (word) in transliteration. The transliteration scheme is in the book's preface. For example, to find the Hebrew word ben, "son," type "h bn". This option is not available on first generation Kindles and might not be available on Kindle applications.

Limitations

Due to platform limitations with regard to Hebrew, the Hebrew/Aramaic text cannot be resized. It is presented in a size similar to that of the larger of the two popular sizes for print editions of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). It is optimized for use on the Kindle device in portrait mode; lines might be shorter than ideal on the DX and some Kindle applications. The Hebrew text cannot be searched.

Author

Humphrey H. Hardy II is an advanced PhD candidate in Northwest Semitic Philology in the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department. Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic Languages.

Publisher

Miklal Software Solutions, Inc. provides software solutions for biblical studies, Semitics, and digital humanities.