In 1753 and 1754 the Paris booksellers Antoine-Claude Briasson and Laurent Durand issued four large folio volumes containing the whole Hebrew Bible, a new Latin translation, and the Greek books that the…
In the Badische Landesbibliothek at Karlsruhe there is a Hebrew manuscript of the Prophets that has been known since the nineteenth century as the Codex Reuchlinianus, after the German humanist Johann Reuchlin,…
The printed Hebrew Bible carries a dense system of small signs placed beneath, within and above its letters. These signs, which record the vowels and the musical accents of the text, are…
For any reader transitioning from the extensive narrative prose of Genesis or Kings to the opening folios of the Psalter in a classical Tiberian Masoretic codex, the graphic landscape of the Hebrew…
In the second-century days of Rabbi Yosi and his colleagues, so the Babylonian Talmud tells us, the sages of Yavneh wished to put the Book of Ecclesiastes into the canon and to…
Every printed Hebrew Bible uses the Tiberian vowel points: dots and dashes set mostly beneath the letters, worked out by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the early Middle Ages. For several centuries…
When Leah’s maid Zilpah bears Jacob a son, Leah names him Gad. The Hebrew text of Genesis 30:11 records her words in a way that puzzles every new reader of a Hebrew…
The Aleppo Codex, in Hebrew Keter Aram Tsova, the Crown of Aleppo, was written, or more accurately completed, in the closing decades of the tenth century CE. The traditional scholarly window places…
The text of the Hebrew Bible, as it now sits between the covers of a printed Mikraot Gedolot or a single-volume Hebrew Tanakh, looks deceptively clean. Page after page of square Aramaic…
While a Modern Hebrew speaker can pick up a Isaiah scroll and decode a shocking amount of it, a feat an English speaker trying to read Beowulf could only dream of, they…
The trilateral (or triconsonantal) root system is the defining morphological feature of Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac, Geʿez/Amharic/Ethiopian Semitic, and their ancient relatives like Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Phoenician). It is a classic…
Arabic and Hebrew, two vibrant languages of the Middle East, stand as close relatives within the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Emerging from a common Proto-Semitic ancestor thousands of years…
The Hebrew Bible, as we encounter it today in printed editions, features a text rich with tiny dots, dashes, and marks surrounding the ancient letters. These are the niqqud (נִקּוּד, “pointing” or…
Cantillation, known in Hebrew as ta’amim (tastes or reasons) or in Yiddish as trop, refers to the traditional melodic chanting of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish liturgy. These systems use a set…
