This post, dear reader, addresses those of you who use the iTanakh web index and find the search function useful. It costs me $249 per year (payable in one lump sum each May 15 or so) to keep a search feature on iTanakh—and this year, I don’t have it. So here’s the deal: if you think a search feature is worth having on iTanakh and you find it useful, please contribute a little funding to the cause by sending in a donation via PayPal. If you want to do this, please use the PayPal Donate button on the iTanakh site itself. When I receive enough donations that I can afford to renew the search service, I’ll do so right away. Otherwise, the search feature will go dormant on iTanakh until such time as I can either afford to pay the bill or find a new way to run searches. No other aspect of iTanakh will be affected by this.

What I really want is to convert the entire site to a PHP/SQL database. But I don’t have the know-how to do that just now, and I don’t really have time to learn at this juncture.

For some time, I’ve contented myself largely with consonantal Hebrew only here on Higgaion. I kept seeing goofy spacing when I would try to use nikud; the vowel points would show up between the letters instead of beneath, above, or within the letters as appropriate. However, I think I just may have learned a solution. Unfortunately, I cannot remember were I read this or from whom I learned it, though it wasn’t that long ago. I think it was on some discussion board or other. If you’re viewing Higgaion using a Macintosh, do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed עִבְרִית?

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

It’s all done with the magic of style sheets, and the solution assumes that you have access thereto. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on your own server, the style sheet is probably in the folder with your theme, and is probably named style.css or styles.css. Specific locations and names can vary. The solution remains the same. Once you have found your style sheet and opened it in an appropriate editor (use whatever editor you would use to edit raw HTML), add something like this to your style sheet:

.hebrew {
     font-family:"New Peninim MT",serif;
     font-size:1.5em;
     text-align:right;
}

You will probably want to fiddle around with the font-size. If your Hebrew looks too small compared to your English, try making the Hebrew font size about 150–175% of your English font size. For reference, I have my English font size set to .85em.

Now you can style any HTML object to display Hebrew more nicely. My quotation from Genesis 1:1 above just applies the “hebrew” style to a blockquote object, as follows:

<blockquote class="hebrew">בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃</blockquote>

You can apply the class to almost any HTML container: p, blockquote, td, and so forth. For inline Hebrew, apply the class to a span, as in the following example:

… do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed <span class="hebrew">עִבְרִית</span>?

If you don’t want to manipulate the size of your Hebrew text relative to the size of your English (or German, or French, or whatever else your main text is), you can simply add “New Peninim MT” and/or “Lucida Grande” to the font-family attribute of your body class. However, if you do this, ensure that something else sits in the first position. In my case, that would be Charis SIL (although I just looked at the site in Windows XP—something I never do—and Charis SIL seems ugly in Firefox for WinXP):

body {
     put your other body stuff here, plus …
     font-family: "Charis SIL","Georgia","New Peninim MT",serif;
}

My font definitions follow my own preference for a serif-style Hebrew font, using a specific font name for the Mac side and relying on browser interpretation on the Windows side. If you prefer a sans-serif font, just replace “New Peninim MT” with “Lucida Sans Unicode” (preserve the quotation marks) and add “sans-” (no quotation marks) in front of “serif” in the definition of the .hebrew class.

If Hebrew is working fine for you as it is, never mind! But these tweaks seem to display Hebrew well in Higgaion both on Mac (which I really care about) and Windows (whose users I don’t wish to alienate). Perhaps you’ll get some mileage from these style definitions as well.

If any of you should ever decide to show my YouTube videos to a college class or church class, or if you assign them as homework (as I do), please let me know. Such information will help me when it comes time to report on my use of the grant funds that enable me to create the videos. Thanks a million!

My Religion 101 class will study selected psalms on Tuesday. To help lay a foundation for our in-class activities, I created the following videos, two of which I uploaded just a couple of hours ago:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry
• Poetic Structures in the Psalms
• Sorting Through the Psalms

Enjoy!

Some time ago, I shared with you a slide that I used in my Hebrew 330 class to visually show students the usage of various Biblical Hebrew prepositions.

Subsequent to correspondence with Karyn Traphagen, I had intended to make the slide available in various formats, but then I dropped the ball … until now. (Be sure to read those last two words in your best Simcha Jacobovici voice.) For your convenience, should you find the slide helpful, you may download it in any of several formats:

• JPEG
• PNG
• PDF
• Keynote (zipped)

Since returning from the 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’ve uploaded three new YouTube videos. One relates to my Religion 101 class:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

I will soon (today, if all goes well) supplement that one with additional videos on poetic structures in the psalms and form criticism of the Psalter. Two other videos, which I created in response to an e-mail from another teacher of Biblical Hebrew (whom I met through the Cohelet project), introduce students to typing in Hebrew on a Macintosh:

• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 1 — This video shows viewers how to activate and access Hebrew keyboards on the Mac, and how to use the Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer.
• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 2 — This video discusses font selections as well as some of the challenges with selecting and editing right-to-left text on the Mac.

I’ve also expanded the Cohelet and Semantic Biblical Hebrew offerings on iFlipr:

• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.1
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.2
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.3
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5 (Cumulative)
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Movement
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Prepositions
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Senses

Please let me know of any typos you find in the decks, and please send suggestions for additions (especially ways to expand the movement and senses decks without getting into obscure or difficult-to-illustrate terms).

This post could also be called “hanging myself out to dry,” I suppose, since I am very much a n00b at using communicative pedagogy to teach Biblical Hebrew. Nonetheless, in the interests of advancing the conversation about the use of those methods, I have posted two videos from my Elementary Biblical Hebrew class on November 13, 2009:

• Giving a Quiz. In this video, you’ll see me greeting my class and handing out a quiz on body parts. (For those of you who speak Modern Hebrew, what word would you use for a “box” on a form?)
• What’s This For? In this video, you’ll see me teaching my class how to use למה־זה to ask “What’s this for?” and how to answer using appropriate infinitive constructs.

To save you the trouble of pointing out all my mistakes, I’ve already included annotations to call them out. Most of them relate to gender agreement. Constructive criticism is always helpful, but be kind; many of you could probably teach this way better than I can right now, but I’m committed to seeing it through for at least this academic year and I’m sure I’ll be much more comfortable with it by the end of spring.

I’ve posted two new videos at YouTube since my last update here. The links here will take you to YouTube. “Israel and Assyria” is also available in Pepperdine University’s iTunes U catalog; the Isaiah video should be up in iTunes U sometime Monday.

• Israel and Assyria, 900–600 BCE
• One, Two, or Three Isaiahs?

Enjoy!

Over the last couple of days, I’ve made a few updates to the Semantic Biblical Hebrew flash cards:

• In the Faces and Body Parts decks, the question asked now matches the body part name in gender, instead of the question always being a generic מה־זה.
• I added five cards to the Body Parts deck:
• כף
• אצבע
• אצבעות
• בהן יד
• בטן
• I fixed a problem in which the Hebrew entries sometimes included square boxes on Windows systems.

I think these changes make the decks more useful, and I hope you agree!

My latest public iFlipr deck is now up: “Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Numbers 1–10.” This is the third in the Semantic Biblical Hebrew series. I have always found Hebrew numbers a little bit difficult because שלש through עשׂר don’t agree in gender with the noun they modify. I hope that many students of Biblical Hebrew can find this deck useful.