Viewing a Hebrew Text

To see Genesis 1:1-7 fill out the text selection dialog thus:

(For information about the “Show link icons” checkbox, see the article “Link icons”.)

Then click the Display button. This will show you Genesis 1:1-7 in Hebrew:

The small icon to the right of the first verse is a link to the same text at the SHEBANQ website.

Viewing Hebrew Grammar Information

There are different ways to display grammar information:

• Hovering the mouse over a word or sentence part. (This is not available on tablets or smartphones.)
• Clicking a word or sentence part.
• Using the “MyView” selector.

On a computer, you can use your mouse to point to a word in the text (known as letting your mouse “hover” over a word). You will then see a so-called grammar information box. to the right of the text:

In the grammar information box you will see detailed information about the word your mouse points to. When you move the mouse, the grammar information box disappears. Also, the grammar information box may be too tall to fit on your computer screen. You may find this inconvenient, so instead you can use the following method:

On a computer, table, or smartphone, you can click or tap on a word. In that case, a dialog box will appear containing the grammar information box. (You can click the × at the top of the dialog box or the Close button at the bottom of the box to close the dialog. Alternatively, press the “Esc” key on your keyboard.)

A third way to display grammar information is to use the “MyView” selector as described in the following section.

The “MyView” Selector

Above the Hebrew text you see an “eye” labelled “MyView”: . If you click the eye icon, the system will show the so-called grammar selection box. At the same time the eye icon turns into a × icon. The grammar selection box looks like this:

The Hebrew grammar selection box contains four buttons, identifying the four levels of the grammar hierarchy used by the Hebrew text: The text contains sentences, which contain clauses, which contain phrases, which contain words. You can click on each of these to display relevant grammar information.

If, for example, you click the Word button and then the Lexeme button, the grammar selection box looks like this:

If you now click the Part of speech button, the Hebrew text changes to look as in the figure below, where you can see the part of speech of each word of the text.

You can add additional information by clicking the relevant buttons in the grammar selection box.

You can use the Clear grammar button to remove all the selected grammar information, and you can use the × icon to hide the grammar selection box.

The grammar selection box also allows you to see borders between phrases, clauses, or sentences, as well as grammatical information about each of these. If, for example, you click Clause, and then select Show border, you will see the borders of each clause.

By pointing your mouse to the word “Clause” on the border of a particular Clause (or, alternatively, clicking the word “Clause”), a grammar information box for the particular clause will be shown:

Sometimes clauses (or other parts of a sentence) can contain other clauses inside them. An example of this is seen in Genesis 1:7:

Here, you can see how the clause וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֨יִם֙ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם is split in two and contains the clause אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ inside it. The split clause is marked by its missing left and right borders.

In the grammar selection box, under Word and Lexeme you can enter a “Word frequency color limit”. Setting this value to, for example, 50, means that the 50 most common Hebrew or Aramaic words in the Old Testament will be displayed in black, whereas rarer words will be displayed in blue:

If you are learning Hebrew, you may find this feature useful when deciding if a word is worth memorizing. When determining how common words are, different morphological forms of the same word are counted as one.

In most cases, the information you find in the grammar information box will be the same as what is shown between the lines using the “MyView” selector; but for glosses this is not the case. For example, in the grammar information box shown in one of the figures above you can see that the lexeme היה is translated into English as “be, happen, become, occur”. But if you open the “MyView” selector and choose Word and Glosses and English, only the first gloss, “be”, will be shown between the lines of Hebrew text.

Viewing a Transliterated Hebrew text

You can choose to view a Hebrew text in Latin letters rather Hebrew letters. You do this by specifying the corpus “Hebrew (ETCBC4, Transliterated, OT)” in the text selection dialog. The first two verses of Genesis 1 will look like this:

You will notice that this text uses a number of variations of Latin letters plus the special characters ʔ (not to be confused with a question mark) and ʕ. These two characters correspond to the Hebrew characters א and ע, respectively.