Tools for Studying The Hebrew Bible

This site aims to teach students how to use a set of specialized tools for the study of the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible (henceforth, the Bible). These are different from the tools used for modern Hebrew because the languages are substantially different, and because the study of ancient texts, written in "dead" or "literary" languages, such as BH (biblical Hebrew), is fundamentally different from the study of modern languages. The types of tools presented here include:

  1. Scholarly Editions of the Hebrew Bible

  2. Lexica

  3. Grammars

  4. Concordances: Electronic and Paper

  5. Other Research Tools

I have also included some helpful exercises designed to help students learn how to use the major scholarly tools, as well as some other tools that the beginning and intermediate student of biblical Hebrew may find useful; you can navigate among these by using the toolbar on the left.

If you are on a mobile device or you do not see the table of contents on the left of this screen, touch/click the 3 horizontal lines at the top left of this page to navigate to other pages.

Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University, and Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies emeritus at Brandeis University. His research centers on several areas: the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as "literary" texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 1995; The Book of Judges, 2002), and gender and the Bible. He co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001, revised 2010), co-authored The Bible and the Believer (2012; paperback 2015), wrote Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew (2002) and co-edited The Jewish Study Bible (2004; second edition 2014), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. How to Read the Bible was published by the Jewish Publication Society in fall 2005, and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible by Oxford University Press in 2007. His articles may be found at https://duke.academia.edu/MarcBrettler.

Helpful Links

Bible Odyssey ⎥ Accordance ⎥ Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library ⎥ Aleppo Codex ⎥ Eisenbrauns

I would like to thank Mr. Jamie Bryson from Brandeis University for his substantial help with this site.

For corrections or suggestions, please email jbryson@brandeis.edu or marc.brettler@duke.edu.