An Interview with A. Philip Brown II, part 1 — Author of "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" with Bryan W. Smith

When did you first develop a passion for reading Hebrew? What about your passion for Greek?

I don't view myself as a Greek scholar first and foremost. However, I have had more opportunity to teach NT Greek than to teach Hebrew. I paid my way through graduate school by teaching first and second year Greek at Bob Jones University.

I have wanted to read Hebrew for as long as I can remember. My father has an Old Testament Ph.D. and taught biblical Hebrew at Bob Jones University and then at Hobe Sound Bible College where I completed my undergraduate degree. In the seventh and ninth grades I studied modern Hebrew under, now, Dr. Lavonne Stiffler, along with my father.

My passion for reading Hebrew increased during my graduate studies. I remember observing that many of my classmates in the first year of Hebrew, quickly abandoned their Hebrew and made no effort to retain a working knowledge of the language. The primary reason appeared to be because it was so difficult. I thought surely there's some way to help people retain their Hebrew and not lose the skills in which they have invested so much time and labor.

I took eight semesters of graduate Hebrew as part of my OT PhD. However, Hebrew was not the focus of my degree. OT Interpretation was.

Can you describe the process of glossing and editing that you and Dr. Smith went through with the Hebrew text?

Michael Bushell of BibleWorks helped me tremendously by providing a text file with all the lemmas in the Hebrew OT identified by book, chapter, verse, word position, and lemma position. I developed a flat-file database with his text file. From an Access database I would generate an Excel spreadsheet that listed every word occurring under a hundred times in a given book.

I would work through that spreadsheet in BibleWorks verse by verse looking up each word in BDB and HALOT. I wrote a number of macros that allowed me to write the same gloss to the database anytime HALOT offered only one gloss for every occurrence of a lemma. I would then copy and paste the glosses from Excel back into the database and spellcheck the glosses to avoid as many typos as possible. During the summers I was working on this project, I made it my goal to gloss between 500 to 1000 words a week.

Once a book was glossed, I would typeset it in MS Word, print it off, and start reading the text checking each word that was glossed as I encountered it. This gave the glosses a reality check – do BDB/HALOT’s glosses make sense in the context? Frankly, I was surprised at the infelicity of HALOT’s glosses on multiple occassions, which is why I noted in the Introduction that long-time users of Holladay and BDB should expect to be surprised by HALOT’s glosses at times.