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November 20, 2007

The Big Biblical Hebrew Problem

On a couple of occasions during the Society of Biblical Literature meeting I was involved in discussions of technology improvements with regard to integrating Hebrew or Greek words and phrases into our otherwise English manuscripts. The older more mature of us remembered doing it by hand. If you wanted a Hebrew word in paper, we simply left enough space to write the word in by hand. And then came the IBM Selectric with its golf ball size elements. There were different elements for different font types and styles. While Hebrew, Greek and other elements were available for the IBM Selectric, no model would could type left to write and right to left until about 1977. So you could change to a Hebrew font as you typed along but you had to type the Hebrew backwards. The other problem was that these typewriters were very expensive. Of course, the typesetters could handle Hebrew, Greek and almost everything else you threw at them.

All of this was a pain in the tocus, particularly if you wanted to type longer passages of Hebrew. So, while in Israel in 1970, I bought the small, already well-used, portable Hebrew typewriter pictured below.

The problem with it was getting the text properly aligned as one moved one's manuscript from the English typewriter to the Hebrew typewriter and back. This sometimes caused involuntary swearing.

It hasn't been out of its case for many years, so I was more than a little surprised that the ribbon isn't completely dry. But as you can see, the ribbon isn't all that good either. The actual font size is Pica or 12 point. There was no way, other than by hand, to point the Hebrew text. This typewriter was designed for Modern Hebrew after all. It types right to left as its only mode of operation.

Our problems today are much different. Our biggest problems are, in general, not the lack of electronic fonts. Most of the belly aching today is about keyboard layout for the various language fonts. And all the better Hebrew fonts support vowel (and other) pointing. To those post computer Hebrew scholars I must say that this is a very high-class problem.

But some scholars still need to do it by hand. Here is a page from Labat's Akkadian sign list.

While even something like this is theoretically possible with electronic fonts, we're not quite there as yet! If you're wondering, the "A" is for Assyrian and the "B" is for Babylonian. The columns reflect the evolution of the signs with their most common variants. Each page wide horizontal section represents a single sign. This page describes 5 of the about 600 signs. The opposing page, not represented in the image, gives the various phonetic values and other uses of these signs. For example, the first sign is DA. We are told that it stands for the syllable da but is sometimes to be pronounced somewhat differently. We are also told that it can serve as an ideogram for several different things including, with appropriate determinative and in the appropriate dialect, "(writing) board." In that special case, it is to be pronounced le'u. (You have to love the cuneiform writing system.) The opposing pages are also handwritten.

Posted by Duane Smith at November 20, 2007 4:44 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Posted by: Glen Gordon at November 23, 2007 9:19 AM

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