BIBHEB 103                          Spring 2023                                       

Final Commentary Directions

Instead of a final exam, students will complete an edition of a Hebrew text.  The edition should be handed in on Canvas by 5 pm, June 7, 2023.

Choosing a text

Choose a text about 12 verses long from the Hebrew Bible.  Please do not choose a text that we have done together this semester or that you have done in class during a previous semester.

Formatting the edition

Please type your edition with one inch margins, page numbers, and a header which includes your name and the text which you are studying.  I am not really concerned about line-spacing.  A single-spaced or 1.15-spaced typewritten manuscript with or without spaces between paragraphs will be fine.  I am also not concerned about page count, although I would prefer you to keep your edition under twenty pages in length.

Bibliography and citations

Please include a bibliography page listing all of the sources that you use.  Whether you use MLA, CMS, or SBL bibliographic style, please be consistent. 

If you are not able to find information which should be in the bibliographic entry, put brackets [] in the spot where that piece of information should go and specify what is missing: [publisher information not found].

Please cite information that did not originate with you or in your class notes using an author-date-page format: (Miller 1990: 47).  You may put your citations in the text or in footnotes.  Please do not use endnotes.

Contents of the edition

An edition of a text includes a translation and commentary.  The commentary can cover a great variety of different topics.

Required contents –

1) Your translation of your text.

2) Line-by-line commentary on the text which includes

- Text background (see below)

- Identification of all characters and places mentioned

- Parsing of all verbs (root, binyan, verb form)

- Comments on any interesting grammar

- Remarks on any unusual nouns (see below)

- 1-2 word studies (see below)

3) Discussion including

- Why you think the original writers of this text created it

- What response you think they wanted from their ancient audience

Optional contents (Graduate students should include at least one of these)                      

- Text-critical commentary on the text (see below)

- Source-critical commentary on the text

- Opinions of commentators on the message of the text and your evaluation of their opinions

- Textual, iconographic, and/or archaeological evidence with a bearing on this text

- Comments on the structure of the text

Further Explanations

• Text background – When and where is this text set? (Yes, I am looking for a B.C. approximate date.) What book of the Bible is it in? What important developments happened just before and just after this? What kind of text is it? (oracle, genealogy, love poem, hero tale, historical summary…)

• Remarks on unusual nouns – When you look up a noun in Holladay or HALOT, you sometimes find the symbol † in the entry. This symbol means that all of the examples of this word in the Hebrew Bible are listed in the dictionary entry.  This is a rare noun.  If you have one of these nouns in your text, ask yourself how we know what this rare word means.  Are there other more common words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) with the same three-consonant root? Are there cognates in other languages with helpful meanings? (Check HALOT for cognates.)

• Word studies – There is a lot of rich information in the Hebrew Bible if you know how to find it. One way to see it is to do word studies.  Pick one or two nouns or verbs that are important to the meaning of your text. Use concordances (such as James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible in English, Abraham Even Shoshan’s New Concordance of the Old Testament in Hebrew) to find all the other places in the Hebrew Bible in which that noun or verb occurs.  Consider some of the following questions: what is the basic range of meaning of the word? How does the author of the book in which your text is prefer to use the word? What other books of the Bible use the word the same way? Why might there be differences in the ways authors use your word? (differences in genre, historical period, etc. may cause authors to use words with different meanings.) What synonyms and related words are there in the Hebrew Bible? (Strong’s concordance is especially helpful for this.  Think of English synonyms and see if they lead to different Hebrew words.) Can you guess why the author of your text chose the word he did rather than one of the synonyms? Are there cognates for your word in other languages? If you chose a verb, what binyanim do the biblical authors use and who uses them? (Does an early author always use a verb in hiph’il, while a later author always uses in in pi’el, for example?)  In poetry, does your noun or verb frequently occur in parallel with another specific noun or verb (the way gold and silver often appear in parallel)?
• Text-critical commentary – There is a limit to how much text criticism you can do without knowing text-critical languages like Greek, Latin, and Syriac. However, you can still do a quick check against the Greek using Sir Lancelot Brenton’s English translation of the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament), which is based on the Codex Vaticanus.  Various versions are available free online. Are there obvious differences between your translation of the Hebrew and Brenton’s translation of the Greek?  Are things missing, added, or in a different order?