A Tool for Syntax, A Tool for Exegetical Theology
Being able to do syntactical searches in the Hebrew Bible is a tremendous boon to scholarship in the biblical Hebrew language. Scholars are no longer bound to word-level searches that requires dozens and even hundreds of hours of hand-sifting to discern precise word or phrase relationships within results for single word searches. To some this is an end in itself, and that’s understandable. But it’s more than that.
You may not think of it at first, but being able to do something as simple as precisely finding the subject of clauses is a quantum leap for those whose research revolves around questions concerning the acts of God or the exegetical basis for certain theological concepts.
To illustrate, I’ve created a search for צדקה (”righteousness”) as the subject of a clause. This abstract noun occurs frequently in the Hebrew Bible, and knowing what righteousness “does” in the Hebrew Bible is useful fodder for doing exegetical theology. The search appears below, but can be downloaded here. If you have Libronix, put the search in My Documents>Libronix DLS>SyntaxQueries and run it for yourself.
The Andersen-Forbes database has צדקה as the subject of a clause 33 times. Here are some of the results in Proverbs:
MSH @ May 14, 2008
I have an embarrassingly simple question: from whence can I download hebrew and greek fontsets for IE7? I googled such and found what appeared to be a good source only to arrive at the links DOA….
I’m no font expert, but I think you’ll be fine if you download the Unicode fonts on the Logos website:
http://www.logos.com/shibboleth
Hebrew is SBL Hebrew; Greek fonts are Gentium and New Athena (these are what we use in the office).