Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Chris:

IMHO students undergoing instruction in Hebrew are precisely those I think 
would be least well served by such a volume.

I was already instructed back in my day not to use an analytical lexicon, but 
after class I used it until pages started falling out and scattering to the 
four winds, after which I consigned what remained to the recycle bin. It was 
very good practice for me to look at the text and try to understand it while 
trying to avoid the hassle of leafing through the dictionary, but still 
having it as a backup to correct myself. (That analytical lexicon listed all 
words under their traditionally understood roots. Trying to recognize which 
root a word stemmed from (to avoid leafing through the dictionary twice for 
each lookup) became an excellent education.)

The purpose of Hebrew class is to get a feel for the language, not just to 
regurgitate someone's translation, which is about all one can do with short 
glosses on the page. Why not then have an interlinier? I think that just 
clicking on a word and having BDB or KB pop up is almost too simple, but I 
think even those would give a better feel for the language than just a short 
gloss on the page.

I think those who would be best served by such a volume would be those who 
don't really want to learn the language, but need a certain familiarity with 
the language for theological reasons. Those who want to go beyond a mere 
theological reading of the text but actually have some familiarity with the 
language would be better served by software packages, such as Accordance. In 
this day with software tools available, I think there would be a very small 
market for the paper book you propose.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>

> 
> On 1/18/05 8:38 AM, "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org> wrote:
> > This seems like a strange philosophy, Chris. Do you have a philosophical
> > problem with all labour and time saving devices? Do you do all your
> > washing by hand? Do you walk everywhere? Just as cars and washing
> > machines save time and effort, so does having dictionary glosses on the
> > same page rather in a separate book. I could agree that it doesn't help
> > students to save them making real effort to learn the language, but is
> > it really the best use of their language learning time to spend much of
> > it leafing through dictionaries for the right entry?
> 
> Well, first of all I should probably say that I was thinking in terms of
> students actually undergoing Hebrew instruction -- as in, having flashbacks
> to how overly reliant I and some of my friends became on
> Armstrong-Busby-Carr.
> 
> Second, I probably didn't read well enough Philip's original statement about
> his intended audience:
> >>> It will be paper. I’m not targeting in-class students so much 
> >>> as those who
> >>> have completed a year or more of Hebrew and want to read their 
> >>> OT regularly,
> >>> but are unwilling to take the time to look up all the words 
> >>> they don’t know.
> >>> That targeted audience is, even at a conservative estimate, easily 60% 
> >>> of
> >>> all students who take 1 or more years of Hebrew.
> 
> Third, for the question
> > I could agree that it doesn't help
> > students to save them making real effort to learn the language, but is
> > it really the best use of their language learning time to spend much of
> > it leafing through dictionaries for the right entry?
> 
> [Warning: The following paragraph contains Unicode.]
> 
> I could probably argue that either way, but let me just expose a little bit
> of my reasoning as to why the answer might be "yes." Or, at least, if the
> tool in question simply gives brief glosses as does Armstrong-Busby-Carr or
> Accordance. Dictionaries like BDB and KB give far more information than mere
> translation-equivalents. Used properly, dictionaries give readers a sense of
> the entire semantic range of a particular word, something that short glosses
> often can't do. If done well, they also give readers a sense of how the
> semantic properties of a word might vary with syntax, e.g., a dictionary
> will more likely distinguish between "root XXX followed by ב" and "root XXX
> followed by ל" than is a simple gloss. Often, dictionaries will provide
> compressed information about the evidence for why a word is believed to have
> certain translation-equivalents.
> 
> Once again, though, please note that my comments/perspectives are probably
> not exactly on target with the intended audience that Philip has described.
> I was thinking in terms of students enrolled in Hebrew classes, which misses
> Philip's point.
> 
> > My problem with this work is that I see little market for it as a large
> > bulk of paper when it can be done more efficiently and cheaply with
> > already existing computer tools.
> 
> I quite agree with that statement. I cannot claim to know all the BH words
> that occur <50x in the Tanakh, but if I wanted a quick gloss and didn't have
> my KB handy, I'd pull out my PDA or open my laptop.
> 
> Chris
> 
> --
> R. Christopher Heard
> Assistant Professor of Religion
> Armstrong Fellow in Religion
> Pepperdine University
> http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
> http://www.iTanakh.org
> http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info
-- 
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