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 Location:  Home » Hebrews » Old Testament » A Reader's Hebrew BibleAugust 29, 2008  


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A Reader's Hebrew Bible
A Reader's Hebrew Bible
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Creators: A. Philip Brown Ii, Bryan W. Smith
Publisher: Zondervan
Category: Book

List Price: $49.99
Buy New: $25.00
You Save: $24.99 (50%)
Buy New/Used from $24.99

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars(21 reviews)
Sales Rank: 9521

Languages: Hebrew (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Leather Bound
Edition: Bilingual
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1680
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 9.9 x 7.2 x 2.1

ISBN: 0310269741
Dewey Decimal Number: 296
EAN: 9780310269748
ASIN: 0310269741

Publication Date: March 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 21
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5 out of 5 stars Excellent!!!   June 15, 2008
  0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Just a beautiful Hebrew Bible for general reading! I'm frankly not sure how they could make it any better. If you are learning Hebrew, be sure to get this one. It will aid your general reading!


5 out of 5 stars Excellent Hebrew Bible   June 8, 2008
  1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I really like this hebrew OT - the type is clear, the footnotes complete and the binding good. I recommend this for pastors who want to keep up on Hebrew and advance in this Biblical language.

Pastor Wayne Steury
Church of the Nazarene



5 out of 5 stars Hebrew Bible Review   June 2, 2008
  2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is a most excellent resource for Hebrew scholars. It not only gives you the Hebrew text but it gives you clear references as to the varying meaning of the words in the text when there is differening opinions. A good resource for a Hebrew scholar. A must buy.


5 out of 5 stars My 2nd semester Hebrew classmates agree - 5 stars!   May 29, 2008
  2 out of 2 found this review helpful

My hermeneutics prof. recommended the Greek Readers' Bible so I thought I would see if there was a Hebrew version. I ordered it on that basis and was extremely pleased. After struggling with the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, I found the font to be much easier to read. Also, the addition of word translations (if word occurs less than 100 times) meant I wasn't going back and forth to Hebrew dictionary - made translation so much more enjoyable I found myself wanting to read beyond assigned passages! Perhaps more advanced students might find it lacking in scholarly references, but 2nd semester students agree - Reader's makes reading Hebrew fun!


4 out of 5 stars A Good Resource with Some Quirks   May 19, 2008
  4 out of 7 found this review helpful

"A Reader's Hebrew Bible" is the sort of book that can provoke strong reactions, both positive and negative. While some will condemn it as a crutch that will hinder learning, many others will find it a useful tool for rapid reading. I have in mind developing students or students whose skills are on the mend.

Consider the mechanics of rapid reading practice (or as I like to term it: "rehearsing text"). You need a Hebrew text, a vocabulary resource, and (usually) an English translation to check yourself. You can actually construct such a tool through the magic of word processors and text exporting, but even at best it's a painfully slow process. An alternative is to figure out a way to incorporate either Armstrong, Busby, and Carr's "Reader's Lexicon" or Owen's "Analytical Key" into your technique, but you're still left with juggling three books just to practice your rapid reading, which is rapidly becoming less rapid. (Some of my peers use software programs such as BibleWorks to get around this issue, but I can't stand that much computer screen time.) This is where "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" really shines; two of those books have been compressed into one.

This is not to say that the format of "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" is perfect. The vocabulary notes are lumped at the bottom of the page rather than arranged in columns, so one has to search to find the gloss for a particular term. The reason for this arrangement is, of course, size; the physical size of "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" is already bigger than 6x9 inches at about 1.75 inches think. I would ideally like a format for the notes that is more easily consulted, but then I also prefer to do my weightlifting at the gym and not while I lug around my book bag.

Quick Pros:
(1) Ready made tool containing words of frequency 100x or less. Sources of glosses are accepted standard lexicons (usually BDB and HALOT).
(2) Personal names are indicated through gray font.
(3) Readable size of text.
(4) Use of text that you will likely see (virtually same as BHS, and the font is similar to BHS).
(5) Nice price point.

Quick Cons:
(1) The physical book is created for a confessional setting (tan faux leather cover, silver edged pages). I'm not sure who made that choice (I suspect it's the publisher), and I don't know what to make of that since it's hard to imagine someone bringing this book to a church or other religious service to follow along when Bible is read.
(2) The execution of the binding is suspect in one way--the boards under the "Italian Duo-Tone" are quite light and take a crease quite readily. Otherwise, it's o.k. (the binding is Smyth sewn and the paper isn't excessively thin; one can see some printing from the other side of the page, but it's not bad).

Personal Gripes:
The authors/editors are unabashedly confessional in their prefaces (with Smith's being the more helpful statement in my estimation; he explains that the process of making the book helped him recover some of his waning Hebrew proficiency). The presence of confessional commitments isn't the issue I'm concerned about in itself. The work of the editors is really the creation and verification of vocabulary notes. I would like to see a commitment on the editors' part to keeping their work accessible to all readers of the Hebrew Bible rather than implicitly driving away those who don't share their commitments. This book could help a lot of people, and it's likely not going to reach those people because teachers in non-confessional (or differently-confessional) environments will bypass the book because of the editors' stated commitments and the physical appearance of the book.



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