As a school child, I hated dikduk – biblical grammar. I remember the head-scratcher Ms. Korach taught us about personal ...

Prof. Yehoshua Blau, giant of Semitic languages, dies at 101 Israel Prize-winning scholar of biblical Hebrew grammar and Judeo-Arabic fled the Nazis in 1938 to settle in pre-state Israel, where he ...

J. M. Allegro has convincingly shown that the archaic Hebrew relative pronoun ‮זֶה‬ can function as a genitive marker in a common Semitic pattern Noun Pronoun Noun (cf. Aramaic baytā dī-malkā). So far ...

The traditional rendering “grace” for חֵן is controversial. Frame semantics, a theory originating in cognitive linguistics, anticipates that prototypical situations are evoked in language users’ minds ...

Aviya Kushner knew the Bible in its original Hebrew by heart, but when she took a graduate course on the Old Testament, the author didn’t recognize the text she had grown up with. The experience ...

Medieval Muslim scholars were the first to use the: “’Ahl Alkitab — the People of the Book” in referring to Jewish people. The name recognizes that we Jews have a very special relationship with ...

Aviya Kushner tells us in her “The Grammar of God,” an interesting and informative book, that readers of the Hebrew Bible who do not know Hebrew and read only a translation will generally not know ...

Robert Alter has accomplished the monumental feat, 22 years in the making, of single-handedly translating the Hebrew Bible into English. Since he began, Alter’s translation has been published in ...