A Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible

A while back in February 2008, I posted on the Reader's Hebrew Bible, and offered some sample pages for your review (click here). Now, I've just received free in the mail from Zondervan a beautiful leather-bound copy of the complete Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible, treating the two Testaments of the Christian Bible. It really is a beautiful fine-grained black European leather volume with a neat design that should help people keep their Hebrew and Greek fresh, and get in the habit of reading Scripture without having to look so much up in a dictionary. All Hebrew words in the text occurring less than 100 times are footnoted with context-specific glosses. Proper nouns occuring less than 100 times are in gray. In the NT, all Greek words occurring less than 30 times are defined in the notes. There are lexicons included in the volume listing the Hebrew words occurring more than 100 times and the Greek words occurring more than 30 times. I plan to recommend the volume to students who have had a year of biblical language and want to keep it fresh and practice reading over the summer, or after graduation. The authors of the volume offer encouragement, anecdotes, and instructions about this in the preface material.

The Hebrew text is essentially what you would find in BHS, with the accents in place and the poetry laid out properly. All that is missing is the text-critical apparatus and the spaces between poetic cola that the BHS editors inserted. The Greek text used bears mentioning, as it is a somewhat different ecclectic text than most will be used to. The volume uses the reconstructed Greek text that lies behind Today's New International Version (but, there are footnotes showing how this text differs from time to time from the UBS-4 text).