Peer-Reviewed Articles • Hebrew Language Resources 33

Hebrew Concordances

Although computer tools have revolutionized the study of Hebrew grammar and semantics, there is still a place for hard copies of concordances. Pride of place amongst concordances goes to Even-Shoshan’s New Concordance, published by Baker.75 Unfortunately, the Baker edition is now out of print, though the concordance is still available through Israeli publishers. The Baker edition has two advantages over the Israeli printings. First, the verse references have been translated into English references, while the Israeli printings use Hebrew book names as well as Hebrew letters for the chapter numbers. Second, John Sailhamer provided an excellent insert for the Baker edition that both describes how to use Even-Shoshan’s concordance and provides some principles for good word studies.76

Another standard concordance for the study of Hebrew is Mandelkern’s concordance, which is also out of print.77 This concordance stands out by being both more thorough in its citations and organized by root like BDB, making it easier to find all the forms of a given root.

Both Even-Shoshan and Mandelkern provide a level of accuracy and syntactical information that has not yet been matched by computer programs and databases.

Databases and Tools for Biblical Hebrew

Increasingly scholars are using digital tools to aid their work with Hebrew, and the major Bible software products improve with each release. Logos and Accordance are frequently used tools with benefits for the student of biblical Hebrew, and the now-defunct Bibleworks continues to have value.78 Logos provides a research-library quantity of tools and secondary texts for Biblical studies. Many of their resources should only be used with caution, however, or not at all. For example, Logos provides a pricey Ugaritic library add-on. None of the texts in this library provide up-to-date resources for the study of Ugaritic. Many of them are by Dahood, whose work was considered to be on the fringe even as it was being produced and has not stood up under the pressure of subsequent research. Likewise, Gordon’s Handbook for Ugaritic was a great service when it was first written but has since been surpassed by the works of Pardee and Tropper.79 In addition, resources in other modern languages are thin or non-existent, while others are products of poor scholarship. In earlier releases, Logos lagged behind other programs in the ability to search Hebrew. The last few releases have shown great strides in improving primary language resources.

Accordance has emerged as a strong alternative to Bibleworks, which has in the past been the preferred tool of Biblical scholars, though Bibleworks is no longer being updated or supported. The most recent releases of Accordance have more resources than the last releases of BibleWorks, and historically Accordance has done a better job of curating its collection. It also excels at providing powerful search capabilities for the primary languages and sources. The biggest disadvantage of Accordance is its higher price. Logos and Accordance both run on both Windows and MacOS, though Accordance runs best on MacOS and Logos runs about the same on both Windows and MacOS, though it is slower than Accordance.

There are also several open source resources for the study of the Hebrew Bible, of which the most sophisticated is SHEBANQ.80 Built on a special database, Emdros, which uses MQL as its query language, SHEBANQ provides several significant advantages over XML, one being that SHEBANQ data can use

75 Avraham Even-Shoshan, A New Concordance of the Bible: Thesaurus of the Language of the Bible, Hebrew and Aramaic Roots, Words, Proper Names, Phrases and Synonyms (Jerusalem: “Kiryat Sefer” Publishing House, 1993)

76 John H Sailhamer, Introduction to a New Concordance of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989).

77 Solomon Mandelkern, Veteris Testamenti Concordantiae Hebraicae Atque Chaldaicae ([s.l.]: Margolin, 1925).

78 BibleWorks as a company closed in June 2018, but the company did hope to continue providing some security updates. See the announcement here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180602183155/https://www.bibleworks.com/news/nr20180601ec.html.

79 See the above section on Ugaritic.

80 https://shebanq.ancient-data.org/.